"Joshua Commanded the Children to Shout"

“On the seventh day, beginning at daybreak, they marched around the city seven times in the same manner; on that day only did they march around the city seven times. The seventh time around, the priests blew the horns and Joshua said to the people, “Now shout, for the LORD has given you the city. “ Joshua 6:15-16

Continuing from the previous entry, we shall contemplate, once again, the reality of “Sankofa” as it describes one aspect of the performance of Africana culture.  Presented here are two very different images of the Sankofa Bird, which is always used to embody the principle of "return and get it" – the symbol of the importance of learning from the past, and bringing what has been learned into the present.

The first illustration, is a wood carving of the bird, reaching into its back to bring forth the nourishing egg of knowledge. The positioning of the carving replicates the Kongo Cosmogram, first mentioned in the Sankofa Muse entry, “Little David, Play on Your Harp” (May 16, 2014). That circle “describes” – simultaneously -- the movement of the sun from east to north to west to south; and the stages of life: birth, adulthood, elder status, and status of the “living dead” or ancestors.  What might not be considered of significance is that the movement of the cosmogram is counter-clockwise. The tension in that movement is found in many other performances of Africana culture.  Worth noting here is that this push, this resistant struggle, against our western cultural norm of linear progress is also found in one of the foundational repositories of African American religion: the ring shout.  The dancers move counter-clockwise; beginning slowly and, over time, dramatically increasing the tempo of the singing, dancing and percussive accompaniment.  Until they are possessed by spirits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8DyJpDMs50

The multi-colored depiction of the Sankofa Bird, shown here, 
presents a shape that establishes a clockwise rhythm. This reversal of the traditional flow of energy has implications that deserve attention. One of the persistent worries nagging my soul at what I see happening in our communities, our country, our world is that those of us who have “moved around our circle of life” and have, chronologically at least, achieved the status of elder, all too often have earned the judgment that we have failed to hand on the vital lessons of our past to our young people who stand at the intersecting axis of the Cosmogram -- where they must make decisions about how they will act, for the benefit of the “beautyful [sic] ones yet unborn” and in keeping with the traditions that have guided the community for untold generations. What distresses my soul is the mounting evidence that some who should be teaching this have made, perhaps, too many concessions to the larger world in which we negotiate our survival; and have either not learned the lessons from our own elders and ancestors, or some of us have decided that much of our past can be worn as decorations and can be ignored as keys to unlock the power of our own history. Have we become existentialists in our intellect, believing that there is little in our past that needs to be protected? Coming into the field of Black Studies when I did, I learned that we who choose to study the struggle that marked the old ones -- and that marks us still – do indeed have a useable past and we have an obligation to be agents of Sankofa: bringing forth that which is necessary for today.

As must be evident to anyone who has spent any time reading these entries, or reading any other of my writings, or anyone who is even minimally familiar with my professional focus on Africana religion and culture, Black Sacred Songs (“The Negro Spirituals”) are, for me, sacramental texts. The songs carry within them “the power to make things happen” (as one of my great influences, Robert F. Thompson, defines the concept of àshe). The struggle against the power of enslavement, oppression, abuse and degradation that was waged by those who chose to survive the disruption and dislocation that was the Transatlantic Slave Trade – the lessons learned from that struggle are the foundations of what we should be teaching under any form of Black/African American/Africana Studies.  But in order to know that we have a past worth retrieving, we must first humble ourselves sufficiently to recommit ourselves to knowing that “the struggle continues.”  The lives we live must be praise-songs to our elders and ancestors.

The songs and stories of the ancestors carry messages that have been found useful, over and over. But what has happened in the last half-century, to turn these coded strategies of defining ourselves against the systemic effort to suffocate our souls, to turn these vessels of redemption and liberation into decorations.  Reversing the rhythm of the dance has far-reaching consequences.  No time will be spent on restating the challenge that can be found in another entry of the Sankofa Muse that deals with the embarrassing and demeaning misuse of one of the great claims of peoplehood and covenant – “Come By Here” (December 31, 2013).

What forces this meditation on Yoruba power and Catholic grace, are the murmurings of some of the culture’s elders who see nothing of our tradition in the Black Lives Matter movement that has been gaining in “wisdom and in grace” (as was said of the child Jesus when he had to teach the teachers in the Temple; Luke 2:46-50). A disquieting example of this phenomenon of chastising our young ones when we should be moving among them, bestowing blessings and nourishment for the tasks ahead of them is found in a column published by the Washington Post, on August 24, 2015 by Reverend Barbara Reynolds.  http://wapo.st/1JORYD   Rev. Reynolds sees little that is redemptive or culturally consistent in the actions of the Black Lives Matter participants.  Establishing her status as an elder in the “Civil Rights Movement,” she scolds the BLM generation as being ignorant of their past, contemptuous of those who would lead them and guide them, and unmindful of how they present themselves in public.

In only one quotation that will be used here, Reynolds says, “The baby boomers who drove the success of the civil rights movement want to get behind Black Lives Matter, but the group’s confrontational and divisive tactics make it difficul.  In the 1960s, activists confronted white mobs and police with dignity and decorum, sometimes dressing in church clothes and kneeling in prayer during protests to make a clear distinction between who was evil and who was good….But at protests today, it is difficult to distinguish legitimate activists from the mob actors who burn and loot.”

Just as Rev. Reynolds was publishing these reflections, we were commemorating the 10^th anniversary of the destruction of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As far too many people have proved, it was not the hurricane that destroyed that city, but the aftermath, when the levees failed even the minimum requirements. And the levees failed in communities where time and again, political leaders confirmed the people’s understanding: Black lives don’t matter. We are commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till (August 28, 1955).  Till, whose death galvanized the generation to which Reynolds and I both belong, was horrific proof that nothing the present generation faces is new. 

As I was wrestling with my disappointment with this scolding from Reynolds, demanding decorum and church attire, I flashed on something else from the 1960s “freedom movement” that I doubt Rev. Reynolds would claim as part of her standard of resistance.  On June 28, 1969, in Greenwich Village, New York City, after yet another demeaning and dehumanizing (and “legal”) raid on a social establishment catering to a gay and lesbian clientele, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn finally said, “Enough is enough. Our lives matter.”  And when (as the reports note) “three drag queens and a lesbian” were arrested, a crowd of over 600 people responded with frustration, fearlessness and focus. “The Stonewall Riots” are still celebrated every year as an example of how change actually takes place in our society.

Every so-called “riot” in the United States in the 1960’s was part of the “civil rights” movement --- and those eruptions of frustration and rage were anything but civil. But each and every one of them whirled, shouted, flung decorum to the winds and said, “Here, in this cesspool to which we are relegated, we know that our lives matter. And to prove it we are willing to lose our lives. But attention will be paid.” An aside (of sorts): did the Black Panthers dress for Sunday school?  Did the young contemporaries of Barbara Reynolds who walked all over the South dressed in jeans and boots and wrinkled shirts get lectured because they were not in business attire?

Reading and reflecting on how a cohort of Black Elders chastise our young, I could not help but also “read” the great song of liberation, “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.”  The originators and curators of that song radically revised the biblical account. The problematic thrust of the original narrative – the story of an invading crowd of migrants and refugees convinced that they had a God-given right to appropriate the land of others – becomes a holy remembering of how the history of an oppressed people – any oppressed people – can provide a strategy for confronting whatever oppression looms in our present circumstance.  The singers of this song choreograph resistance through thoroughly African rituals.  Moving counter-clockwise – the song is a Ring Shout – the singers become the historical Israelites. But they are not claiming the territory of others; they are unleashing the power to make their own sense of the godhead within manifest in the world.

Dangerously other, problematic in their silence – except for the horns sounded by the priests, the “children” circled the walled city of Jericho, day after day, for six days. And, then, Oh, Glory! On the seventh day, they marched around the city seven times, while the “lamb/ram/sheep horns” were sounded. And then following the injunction of the God they were discovering, “Joshua commanded the children to shout.  And the walls come tumbling down.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYSX8RxkbgM

Even if Black Lives Matter participants don’t claim the song – and since they most likely were never taught the power inherent in the performance of the song, why would they make it theirs? – they are nevertheless reaching far back into their past and disrupting the order maintained by the privileged. They are teaching their elders how to remember their own past with much more complexity. And they are restless to claim the crossroads.

The Sankofa bird, much like the dove that descended upon Jesus at the Jordan, brings the power to make things happen to the young ones.

We professors of Africana Studies far too often avoid dwelling on the uncomfortable legacy that is locked away in these songs and stories. It is not that we are “unchurched,” or that the songs are far too simple to withstand the intricacies and sophistication of our theoretical gaze. Rather, even more simply, do we only teach that which we understand; not that which makes us personally uncomfortable.  But at this time, more than any time of our recent history, we need to return and fetch the power to transform this desert. And we also need to see that the children may have learned it anyway, because our culture can never be hermetically sealed away. The more we talk to each other, the more we have a responsibility to find silence within ourselves and let the voices of history possess us.

We who think that we have now gained some measure of stability and respectability are charged to renew our mission to educate our children with the “true truth” and to give the greatest gift imaginable: our trust that they are exactly where they ought to be on the circle that defines our people.

"Hold on, Hold on"

“You can’t plow straight if you keep looking back.” What this Spiritual says in this line is true, and at the same time deceptively problematic. If we do not look back, we cannot know how we got our hands on the plow, in the first place. The path through this seeming dilemma is the oldest strategy of Africana culture. You carry the past within you. Don’t look back. Look within. This is also the meaning of the Eucharistic Liturgy of the Catholic traditions: “When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death…until you come in Glory.”  It is also the essential ritual question of every Passover observance:  “Why is this night different from all other nights?” “This is the night when the Lord God brought us out of the land of bondage…”

Because we enact our defining moment, over and over and over. And we are renewed and made stronger for the next part of the wilderness wherein we find ourselves journeying. In a late-night conversation filled with anger and anguish and desperation, one of Faulkner’s heroes says, “It is not past…” The crumbling of that white hero’s sense of privilege led him to that anguished cry. But the bone-marrow deep understanding of how we carry our “infinite past” (to use Toni Morrison’s description) as a gift and not as burden is what makes those who accept our African-American roots capable of miracles of survival every day.

Now we stop for a moment in this “journey from can’t to can” (Mari Evans), and we shudder with exhaustion as we do look back, at an entire year (August 9, 2014) since Michael Brown was shot on a street in Ferguson, Missouri, by then-police officer Darren Wilson.  Exhaustion. Weariness. Undigested sorrow. Wonderment and worry. More and more young (and not as young) women and men have bled in streets and jail cells, on porches, in cars. And the death of some have been recorded; while the deaths of others have been subjected to the predictable, convoluted and twisted narrative of “inconclusive proof of wrong-doing” – on the part of the one wielding the instrument of death. The cry of the soul is “Why? And how long? And, where are you, Delivering God?”

Keep our hands on the plow? Why?

What do we plant? And what do we hope to harvest?

Will there be any following behind on this path, to be the harvesting promise of our dreams?

And then I hear the singing: “I know my wings are gonna fit me well/ I tried them on at the gates of Hell.”

So. We crawl and moan and mourn. And then we breathe the air sent to us by our ancestors. And the twisted limbs and wounded hearts and crippled hands push at the wall and we begin to lift up our eyes.

And what do we see?

The children marching, and chanting and clicking and typing and recording and becoming the flesh-and-blood drums and grapevine of this space and time. For them the prayer services and the “peaceful protests” and the marches were angry, focused and unrelenting. More than at almost any time in our American story of racial oppression and cultural domination, the collective power to define the terms shifted; plucked from the lips of the predictable purveyors of power, the words that mattered flew from the mouths of the children.

For as long as there have been photographs, there have been records of lynchings and riots and other acts of domestic terrorism. Justified by the laws that protected the inheritors of power, those who murderously rushed into the streets of East St. Louis and Springfield, and Atlanta and Detroit and Tulsa in the early days of the 20^th century and who continue on today, cloaked and disguised in costumes of respectability, have now been confronted across the generations by the children who hold up their cameras and telephones and demand that the contemporary patrollers and vigilantes and ad hoc militia be seen for what they are and have always been.

Bob Moses, the quiet, determined, grace-filled sojourner for justice, once said that United States history was written by the children and young adults who were known as “runaways.” One of the enduring themes of the documents called “slave narratives” is that once the writer/subject learned to read and write, a strategy for self-liberation was quickly formed. These actual “liberation narratives” were published to speed the process of liberation of the thousands of others, left behind the veil.  Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and so many others could not rest until every effort and every possible resource was put into the freeing of this nation.  No one could be a better face for this than Harriet Tubman. Her return journeys to bring more and more from the wilderness to the oases of freedom were followed by her service as a true “soldier of the Cross” as she actively fought in the Civil War.

Yes.

That “Moses of her people” and the Moses of Mississippi in the 1960’s put themselves into the middle of the host of those who began to wade in the very troubled water. What Robert Hayden said of Tubman, we hear in the full-throated cry of our young today:  “Rises from their anguish and their power….Mean mean mean to be free.” (Hayden, “Runagate Runagate”)

In the valley, where there is darkness, on the mountain top where there is fire and smoke; in the intersections of Ferguson, Cleveland, Cincinnati, or Baltimore, where there are all of those conditions – there are our children. So on the exact year-anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the blessing and charge has to be invoked by all of us who have been in the storm so long:  we must do more than weep and worry. We must see in the young of this moment, the reincarnation of those who wrestled control of slave ships; of those who slipped through brambles and water and wilderness; of those who returned to be a Joshua of their moment. And we must see -- and tell them -- that they are the light shining in this darkness. Fighting every battle on their behalf we must demand that their lives be seen as the most precious “bread from heaven” ever given to a wandering, desert people. We fight to protect them. We struggle to understand them. We gift them with our protection if possible, and with our gratitude in every possible circumstance. They have been raised up as answers to our prayers.

The most wonderful of poets, Gwendolyn Brooks said this:

“In the precincts of a nightmare all contrary

wild thick scenery subdue.” (To Disembark, “Another Preachment to Blacks", p. 60)

And she also said this, and we all bear witness:

"It is lonesome, yes. For we are the last of the loud.

Nevertheless, live

Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.“ (“The Second Sermon on the Warpland”)

So, precious gifts, one and all, hold on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvLZjofEXA&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=21

"Choose Your Seat and Sit Down..."

A Triptych for New Priests

For forty-five years, with a few years quiet, there has been an ordination poem written by me and gifted to some friend and brother of mine, in the Society of Jesus. In addition, for even more years, I have been writing poems for other “in-house” occasions,” usually when a fellow Jesuit pronounces vows within our community. After two years of living in the community a man will pronounce vows of poverty, chastity and obedience – and then spend many years subsequently wondering at that mysterious impulse of commitment.  Ordination follows for those who choose to elaborate their identity in the exercise of that service to the people of God and to the Church.  After some more years of discovering mysterious sources of strength and power and humility and grace within one’s self, all the men who are already “vowed religious” then spend an intense period of reflection on all they have seen, heard and done; and then recommit themselves to service as members of “the least Society.” That renewal of promises is called “final vows.”

At each of those stages of growth and renewal I have written a poem, now and then. My reasons will always remain my own. It is a prompting of the soul that tells me, “I think you ought to do a poem.”  If one appears, then all is well. If one does not appear, then all is still well; but my impulse to gift remains simmering within me.

This year, 2015, is unusual in that three of the eight men who were ordained, in the Midwest, in June, to the priesthood of the Church as members of the Society of Jesus are men with whom I have grown close. Each of them has been a cause of great joy for me as they have been transparent in sharing with me their dreams, hopes, concerns and faith. As each of them has grown “in wisdom and in grace,” from the time we first met “in the Temple,” I have felt my own hope in this community restored and nourished. Oh, within their generation there are others, many others, in fact, who open up a circle of welcome for me when I return to community gatherings. With them all I feel no need to pay an exorbitant “price of the ticket (in the words of James Baldwin)” in order to be of value, to be of service, to be taken seriously. And to be blessed with the energy of the young men who are restless to bring their fire and passion and to the kingdom journey that I have been walking for more than fifty years.  

So I saw these poems as three moments of discovery for three of the disciples of Jesus as they tumbled into the unknown, each time He called them to do impossible things.  I saw those discovery moments as focused of loaves and fishes. A blessed meal. I heard a story, a prayer, a hunger from each of the men who asked for a poem -- even when they did not know they were asking.

And that is the gift. Always.

                                 *     *     *     *     *     *

The Always Time

For Christopher, Adam and Lukas

I.

Now I know how

                               it was

always

                bread

                             and silence

And him waiting for us to see

I knew that in that desolate place

the thorns and thickets would be mild

                                                               against

the crowd grown restive and suspicious

Silence

              Then

         

                              Feed them

And the hours and hours and hours

we worked ashamed

                                 and I was frightened

to hold loaf after loaf

                                    and the crumbs

of my certainty grew less and less

And silence

                     which was always

his blessing and his call

                                         Feed them

Now I know how

II.

Meant to overhear

                                 the sword

stuck into my brother’s heart   we waited

at the fire

                   Do you love me?

Then why do you sleep

                                        grow anxious

pull the shadows over you

and weep

                     Where have I run

from you    how have I grown

deaf

           did not the widow’s howl

shatter your doubt

                                 a son

for the mother   watching death  is

little enough gift

                              But for the world

that will eat you like this bread

                                                

                                                     You

must hear it again  and again  and speak

when you are altogether choked with fear

Do you (and I knew he claimed

us all)

             love (and I knew he claimed

us all)

             me

                    (and he knew us all to be

hungry to be claimed)

                                      forever

Feed them

III.

I will

           breathe again

                                     soon

When and if ever the fire dancing

shadows steady themselves

                                              or my

eyes are shocked dry

                                     at last

to see beyond the wall we have

made of each other’s bodies

                                               no shame

in that

             clinging  embracing  holding warmth

against the clamor of swords and knives

He asked for bread

                                 and fish

                                                 and kissed us

each of us

all of us

                and finally

                                   me

                                               It is enough

to feed upon the fire

                                     And finally

let my breath sing

                               away the darkness

At last

               I do not need the hunger

It is time

                 It is now

                                  the always time    

                                                            --Luke

____________________________

27 May 2015/13 June 2015

"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child..."

Charleston, South Carolina.

Too many people have said almost all there is to be said.  Any meditation on the spirituality of Black people in the United States of America must contemplate the scene (as St. Ignatius would advise in the Spiritual Exercises). And what do we see? Mothers and sons; sisters and brothers; preachers and teachers and community elders gather in a circle, making where they sit truly sacred space.  The intuition vibrated in the circle when the grotesquely twisted soul imprisoned in the young white man announced itself to them.

They made room for him. And they composed themselves and shared their faith. This was not a preternaturally wise young boy losing himself in the Temple long ago. This was not a sojourner returned from the wilderness to share the vision that would benefit the people. This was the fire that came to destroy the earth.

Never sent by God.

But the light shone in the darkness. We can see it.  The dead eyes that stare at us in every picture he took of himself was a true “black hole” of the universe sucking in all matter, all light. But this darkness could not quench that light.

It was as much an eternal flame as any ever lit upon this soil.

Starting with the men satiated with and sick from the poison of slavery who gathered, began their song and their march across the Stono river in 1739, a long time ago; to the whispering men who sat in a similar dark circle in 1822 with Denmark, an elder of the church, and decided to yank their lives out of the dehumanizing machine of oppression, knowing the consequences, and just as surely knowing the death that attended them if they did not act; to those who bent the trees and met in secret, always singing, “Come by here…hear the cry, the song, the groaning…Come by here.” 

They built, they forged, they plowed and planted and plotted. Always for the freedom defined from the beginning – the freedom that was the first great assault on the darkness and the void, when the first word was uttered: “Let there be light.”

They knew.

And in song and word and gesture and lives integrally lived, they never doubted that death would push itself into whatever refuges they could construct, no matter how brief or long.

For more years than I can feel, I have returned to the book my father sent me for my birthday. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin makes a statement that has caused me to tremble mightily, trying to make sense with his prophetic certainty while holding on to what Resurrection must mean in my life of struggling faith.  In “Down at the Cross,” he says:  

Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.  It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.  One is responsible to life:  It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us."

But there is something beyond that darkness. If there was not, then I would not be reading and talking to and thanking James Baldwin from my first encounter with his words in 1963, with the evening of conversation we shared in 1983, to this day when I am seeking some rock in a very weary land.  Baldwin is light, for me. All of my ancestors; all of the singing and speaking and thinking voices that I collect on paper and in every other medium; all of the children who tell me, clearly and confidently, just how they intend to own this world when it becomes their inheritance: they are light.

And so are the 9 Slaughtered in Charleston, South Carolina, June 17, 2015. Mr. Tywanza Sanders.  Ms. Cynthia Hurd. Ms. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton.  Ms. DePayne Middleton-Doctor. Ms. Myra Thompson.  Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr. Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.  Ms. Ethel Lee Lance.  Ms. Susie Jackson.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM6GVw5bmKE

When they said, “Young man, come and sit with us,” they knew – and on this point no argument is possible – that they were responsible for life. They knew, as surely as any of us can know anything on the level of intuition, that from the beginning of our existence in this place we have earned our death by the lives we have lived.  So their children, and daughters and siblings, and mothers and fathers stood up in the assembly and said, “Young man, you have ruptured our hearts, severed our bonds. You have taken away our loved ones, our heroes. And we forgive you.”

That is the act of complex love that has been just as much a part of our lives and our history as has been the rage that seeks to obliterate whatever is decent, hopeful and redemptive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce8ix4VGR2w

And yet the light endures.  Let us, in this struggle to find rest in the storm that seems to be raging over and over and over, let us pray. As our sisters and brothers in Charleston are teaching us to pray. For ourselves; for strength. For those who are sought out by the wolves of chaos and claimed as “sons and daughters of darkness.” For those who teach hate and violence.

For those who show us how to be more than we could ever dream of being. Light. And as such, inheriting that unfathomable strength, we must say it: This madness, this death must stop. This death must stop. Why else do we pray for strength, except to join together to say: “Death you shall not have dominion. We are children of light.”

"On My Journey Now...Mt. Zion!"

When I was a very young Jesuit (known as a “scholastic”), studying in our humanities program (known then as “the Juniorate”), I still carried the determination to be an historian. Some of my earliest recollections are rooted in stories; just that, stories – told by my paternal grandmother, my father; my mother, very rarely; and all sorts of neighbors and visitors to our home. My grandmother, Laura Brown and her son, my father Floyd, were formal, conscious instructors of history. They told me stories. Mom showed me the pictures she kept in a bag in her bedroom. “This is my sister, Mary, and me.  This is one of our old family friends. This is… and this is… and…” And I drank in the stories. My father provided commentaries on the pictures in the magazines and newspapers he brought home every day, every week. “You see this man? He is Dr. Du Bois. I met him at Wilberforce….He… And this woman, here, I knew in school (Josephine Baker)…And this man (Earl Hines) was playing the piano in Chicago when I met him… And….”

And I drank in the stories and memorized the faces.

What other option could I possibly have had, but to be someone who remembered – or found – the old stories about the old people and saved them up, somewhere in the room of my mind, to share them with the next set of young people “in the family”?

But, then, in the Jesuit juniorate, we had a mandatory U. S. history course, taught by someone who was, in my mind, most charitably, a near-total disaster as a human being. And he wasn’t – in my mind – a very good teacher either. So, in a moment of extreme shortsightedness, I said to myself, “if that is a history professor, then I won’t be one.”  No one ever accused me of infallible judgment. Not in those days, anyway.

Now, fifty years later, I am reflecting on how everything I teach is modeled on the pedagogy so brilliantly employed in bedrooms, living rooms, automobiles; and on front porches. Every class, no matter what the subject matter, is grounded in history. Given the fact that Africana Studies, in all of its substantive embodiments, serves, first of all, as corrective to the perversion of world history, a perversion that has always been a principal strategy for economic and political oppression of so much of the populations of the world; given that, how can any of us not teach history?.

Knowing the power of history, I remember, salute, grieve and rejoice in knowing Reverend Cyprian J. Davis, Order of St. Benedict, monk of St. Meinrad’s Archabbey, who died on May 18, 2015. At the age of 84. He has “gone to that Gospel Feast…that Promised Land where all is peace.”

Cyprian Davis. Perhaps one of the most radically situated scholars of 20th century U. S. Catholicism.  Everybody and her cousin will bring up his writing of The History of Black Catholics in the United States, and all praise is proper and due to that accomplishment. But from the day when he decided to become a Catholic because of the soul seduction of the historical account of the Catholic Church, to his final days of preaching teaching editing and writing, Father Cyprian did much more than most to give a shape and texture and nuance to being “authentically black and truly Catholic” (a phrase he had much to do with, as one of the primary contributors to “What We Have Seen and Heard”, the U. S. Black Bishops’ Pastoral Letter of 1984).

As part of the 1978 gathering of Black Catholic theologians at the Motherhouse of the Oblate Sisters of Providence, Father Cyprian presented “Spirituality: The Christian Experience of the Black Experience.” Papers from that proceeding were gathered in Theology: A Portrait in Black.   In the style that is so much his signature, his nine-page, double-columned essay, has 27 footnotes and a bibliography with 26 entries.

The radical intervention he performed with this essay is a corrective every stereotype, every trivialization, and every dismissal of the power of the Black Catholic experience. Not only does he simply and quietly offer this corrective, he does something that most of the scholars subsequent to him, both in African American Studies and in Black Catholic Studies, no longer do. He takes us, the readers, “back to Africa,” and not in a delusional, romantic, obsessive way. No; Father Cyprian finds the sources, quotes them generously; interprets his examples and connects them (albeit in the quietest tone possible) to the presently-lived experiences of Black Catholics in the United States at the end of the 20^th century.

The models he uses for the purpose of instruction and edification are presented in a way that is original and compelling. He says:

There are four Black models of sanctity in Catholic tradition. The fact that they were Black was and is as significant to their history as St. Francis of Assisi’s middle-class background is significant for him.

[Let the Church savor that concentrated challenge for a minute or two. “Black” is capitalized. OK. The people about to be listed are “models” – worthy of emulation. OK.  “In Catholic tradition.” Oh; you mean, Father Cyprian, that these “models” serve as examples to all Catholics?  Just asking…Since you use Francis of Assisi as context for this assertion, I figured you were going for “Catholic means ‘universal’”.]

The four are: St. Moses the Black, St. Benedict the Black, Alfonso the Great, and St. Martin de Porres. Finally, we would look briefly at a fifth person who was not of the Catholic tradition but still exemplified the same characteristics of the others within that tradition, namely Sojourner Truth.

Since this reflection is necessarily brief, there can be only the slightest bow of appreciation and astonishment at the way Father Cyprian sets up as bold an argument as can be imagined, back in the beginning of Black Studies as we were all learning it in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.  His linking of these figures from religion; politics; and politics and religion into an argument that challenges the traditional understandings of each of these exemplars. Moses the Black was one of the great figures of the desert monastic tradition. And several of the “sayings of the Fathers” attributed to him make quite plain that he was singled out for abuse and humiliation because he was black. Father Cyprian uses these incidents to assert that “only conjecture can suggest the possibility that his [Moses the Black’s] humility was more prophetic than accommodating.”

“Only conjecture”, indeed.

At the end of this essay, Father Cyprian says:

The spirituality expressed by five diverse holy men and women is striking similar in many instances. All five practiced a very practical form of charity and service to others….Suffering as a direct result of their black skin color was experienced by all. Suffering becomes an element in the spirituality.

Finally, one final word.  Humility is the favorite virtue that a dominant group wishes to ascribe to saintly representatives of the oppressed. “Humility” insures that the oppressed remember their subordinate position. 

[Editorial clearing of the throat: Do you think Father Cyprian might have known something of the view of radical philosophers such as Fanon or Freire? In the midst of a reflection on humility, he goes for the “rule of the privileged class”? Say, Amen, please.]

This kind of “humility” – a travesty of the virtue – never seems to be attested to by the sources nearest to the saint.  Humility is the result of one’s encounter with God. Only in His presence are we conscious of our nothingness. But for the Christian this is never the whole reality; for it is the Word Incarnate that makes this mortal dust something glorious.

And so spoke Father Cyprian Davis, in 1978, as he helped parent into existence the Institute for Black Catholic Studies. Along with Thaddeus Posey and Joseph Nearon and and Thea Bowman and Bede Abram, Cyprian Davis was one of the founding faculty of the Institute; and like them he is also, now, another Saint gone marching in…”

At the end of Taking Down Our Harps: Black Catholics in the United States, which Father Cyprian edited with Diana L. Hayes, he talks about his place in our history and our hearts – even though he seems to be talking about the other contributors to the book.  As he refutes some criticisms levelled at Black Catholics by James Cone and J. DeOtis Roberts, Davis gently serves notice:

The Catholic theologian, Black or white, works within a tradition, a tradition, in fact, which has more of North Africa, Egypt, Syria, and the Mediterranean than the European model that Cone criticizes. It is within this tradition that the authors in [Taking Down Our Harps] have presented their works. In fact, they have done more. They have demonstrated that Catholic theology today must include issues raised by Black theologians. The same writers have shown that American Catholicism can no longer ignore the rich field of Black Catholic history.

Once, during a talk in Louisville, Kentucky, I took the opportunity to critique some preaching that had occurred during an enthusiastic Black Catholic liturgy that took place during an anniversary celebration of the Joint Conference of Black Catholic Clergy (including Black Catholic priests, deacons and brothers), Sisters, and Seminarians.  Needless to say, my critique was clear, pointed and probably just a little “over the top.” Nevertheless it was my own style.  Comparing three different styles of preaching known to the assembly, I mentioned, first, “Fr. Cyprian Davis. Now we all know that when Father Cyprian Davis begins a homily, it will be clear, precise; contain ideas that are fresh and challenging. We know that he will not bounce around or get too dramatic. And it will be a homily, not a revival.  I would call his style of preaching similar to sipping a very fine, rare and expensive brandy. The merest sip and you are warm all over.”  I then added my own style to the comparison…something along the lines of a very good, but not too expensive imported or domestic wine.  The third comparison – and the reason for the critique -- was to a performance that had taken place the night before. I merely said, “And last night what we had was a cheap beer…”

In fairness (and after 15 years, I can be fair), the target for that last remark is as good a preacher as we have in our community of Black Catholic clergy today.  As I said to him, then, better me than Thea Bowman offering a critique. Oh, yes, dear Lord.

Father Cyprian Davis, OSB. One of the finest, most compelling of our elders. A teacher and a preacher and a prophet. You made us alert and warm and grateful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx3MzncLEu0&list=PLbrjbumNvOk2Sd7GI25ZEMsaK858RVNQN&index=13

And it was a journey that was a grace for us all.

We Will Dance When You Sing

We Will Dance When You Sing

-- for the episcopal ordination of Fernand Cheri, OFM

They would send the boy

to the edge of the land

                                       when

one of the old ones smelled a storm

See if a stranger walks in need

and bring them

                               He was the child

who did not doubt

                                 they

had seen his haze-haunted eyes

and knew

                        One new seeking

found the man who walked   pushing

a song far before him

                                      Boy and man stood

still

         unlocking the curved bone

and stone necklace    the man

leaned to the fence

                        You belong

to this

               And his song faded

before clouds blackened the sky –

Later

           one by one   they fingered

his skin   his shirt    his hair

What must we

                         carry

Tell us

what

and how

and where

                     the circle will appear

We will dance

when you sing

                               Sun sparks

the stone

                  and then

they swim in his eyes

                                      home

to where his dream-song

led

23 March 2015
New Orleans

While this poem has its own integrity, one note is offered as background. Decades ago, the first Black Catholic Bishop of the 20th century, the Most Reverend Harold R. Perry, SVD, made a gift of his pectoral cross to then-Father Fernand J. Cheri, III -- with the blessing of "you will need this some day."  

Bishop Perry was the ordaining prelate for my own ordination, May 27, 1972, in East St. Louis, Illinois. Bishop Cheri has been a constant support and collaborator of mine for many years, including his authorial contributions to Sweet, Sweet Spirit: Prayer Services from the Black Catholic Church. This man brings what is useful of our past into the present, in order to help us walk and sing and dance into our future --which is, of course, the foundational meaning of "Sankofa". 

         

“Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning”

Very specifically, this meditation is grounded in a time and place that seems a convergence of desires; frustrations and hesitations; anger and rage; and hope. As the country is drawn into commemorating the 50^th anniversary of the Selma marches, the country is also forced into staring at the children who began marching in August of 2014, declaring with their bodies, their selves, that the death of Michael Brown made the stone before the tomb of silence and submission shatter and turn to dust.

So what does “Spring” possibly mean in a week when the United States Department of Justice declares that former Officer Darren Wilson will not be prosecuted for the murder of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri; and simultaneously declare that Darren Wilson was surrounded by a culture of policing that diminished Black lives and that trivialized and corrupted the very notion that the duty of all police and “public safety” officers is to “protect and serve the citizens of the community.”  The great “Constitutional Project” that Robert P. Moses has focused on for years deals with just who is covered (and not covered) by “We” in “We the People”.  Young people across continents, cultures; across racial, ethnic and gender identities have found solidarity in saying, first, “Black Lives Matter,” and then, inevitably, that “All Lives Matter.”

Not “us” and “them” but “we” – We the People…

And yet.

In this second week of March 2015, the Oklahoma University members of a chapter of a long-notorious fraternity [Sigma Alpha Epsilon], are discovered singing, “There’ll never be a nigger SAE…You can hang them from a tree, but they will never sign with me…there’ll never be a nigger SAE.” The fraternity is the largest in the U. S, with over 15, 000 members and was founded before the beginning of the Civil War.  Hearing the chant and the subsequent pseudo-apologies of the first two members of the fraternity to be expelled from Oklahoma University, I am confronting once again the enduring darkness that is the foundation of racism in America.

At the same time as the publicity attending this public display of the camaraderie of some of this country’s future leaders, there were also public displays of yet more gatherings to mourn the deaths of unarmed black men, killed by police. – all within a week of each other. One man, Anthony Hill, in DeKalb County, Georgia was not only unarmed but was also naked – obviously manifesting signs of severe mental disassociation.  Anthony Robinson, the unarmed teenager in Madison, Wisconsin, had been a concern to his family for a long time because of his issues with mental instability and behavioral disorders.  The third man, Naeschylus Vinzant, was shot in the chest, in Aurora, Colorado, while being handcuffed by police.

The apologies of the young men who got caught – and is this not the pattern for apologies in this society? “I am sorry, less for what I did, than for being caught at doing it" – these apologies are cushioned by the protestations, “But I am not a racist.”  [A modest suggestion: before any education professional, from pre-K to graduate school, is allowed to enter a classroom as an instructor, he or she must prove competence in explaining what racism, prejudice and bias are; how they are similar and how they are different.  That simple requirement should be part of the test of any national “core” curriculum.] Yes, young person; you are a racist. But so are the people who raised you, taught you, rewarded you – and supplied you with the liquor you consumed while under the legal age.  The light has captured you and you are discovered.

Besides Sigma Alpha Epsilon, there was another Civil War era “fraternity” formed at the same time; only this other fraternity was not formed in the South and its members did not fight for the Confederate cause. This second fraternity consisted of the men who became brothers as they formed one “colored regiment” after another and joined the fight on the Union side. Because they knew who they were, and what their goal of liberation could cost them, they too sang chants as a way of deepening their band of brotherhood.  One of the great songs they used, the night before a battle, is detailed in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), written by Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the officers of the Massachusetts 54th regiment. 

Using music in the tradition of warriors preparing themselves, these Black men were clear in their understanding that if they did not prevail in battle, they would be slaughtered, since the Confederate Army had that as a policy; taking no “colored soldiers” as prisoners. So when they stood around a fire and sang, “Keep your lamps trimmed and burning,” they did much more than make a seemingly odd appropriation of the New Testament parable of the “Wise and Foolish Virgins.”  They were declaring that, indeed, in the darkest hour before their ultimate confrontation they must (as they sang elsewhere) “hold on the light, the beautiful light.” It was not merely a rhetorical device to exhort each other, "Children don't get weary until your work is done." Indeed.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIfr5ETw9p0

When else do we more need light, but when we must confront the terrifying and terrible darkness that is without and within? And what greater lesson of culture could there be for all who are born, dwell or seek to live in this so-called “land of the free and home of the brave,” than to declare that no one can be free without a journey into the wilderness that is within the heart – the darkness for which so much collective effort is expended to keep shrouded in denial and falsification?  America has never needed a Joseph Conrad to teach itself that Jacob wrestles with the midnight angel at all times and everywhere. The singers of these songs, the freedom singers, have always been with us.

Every electronic device that has been employed to be the light that our young are keeping trimmed and burning is being used to shed light where the darkness of anonymity and denial and the transferring of blame have long ruled in this land. The victim can no longer be easily blamed. We have seen the bleeding, choking victims, splayed on the sidewalk of our cities. The threat of violence can no longer be waved as a flag of defense: not when the sufferers of post-traumatic stress (and what Black person in America is free of that condition?) are naked and stumbling toward their extinction.

The argument of false innocence -- “But I didn’t know” – has the simplest refutation. “If I have to know, you have to know.”  “If I am not exempt, you are not exempt.”  The toxic cloud of racism that corrupts the spirit of all who walk in our land is dark, indeed. But at this very specific moment in my life, I sing, “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” knowing full well that the warrior children, the men and women who have kept their eyes cast down far too long, are now holding up the light.

It is an exorcism long prayed for. Now, “everybody knows the trouble some of us have seen waking and in our nightmares."

Sooner than we may have thought, the burden is being transformed, here and there, more and more into a story that can bring power.

And courage.

Walk together, Children, don’t you get weary. And please, keep your lamps trimmed and burning. 

As Rev. Gary Davis sang a long time ago:  “Don’t get worried, for this world is almost done. Sister (Preacher/Brother) don’t stop praying (shouting); for this old world is almost done.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHayOpWimlM&index=33&list=PL5384FE34170E9995

Even when the light shone in the darkness, and the darkness knew it not, it kept on shining. 

And so it shall be now.