Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

by Barbara A. Holmes

Nevertheless, there is a timelessness at the center of black church practices that exceeds its history and deserves further exploration. I am speaking of a shared religious imagination that manifests as the communal intent to sustain one another and journey together toward joy despite oppressive conditions.

We respond to a deeply interdependent and responsive universe through shared experiences. This means that despite signs of postmodern fragmentation and the rise of radical individualism, we cannot carve out shared destinies in isolation.

I am contending that communal contemplation is richer than the immediacy of personal experience because the experience, the story, the event is subjected to the gaze of both the individual and the community. In Africana and other indigenous cultures, this unique orientation toward the sacred elements of life begins at a very young age. Children soon learn that when events surprise, frighten, or mystify them, they can face the unknown with a discerning community.

Today, worship services move at such a pace that often there seems to be no space or time for the congregation to unify in spirit. In times past, the old folks would tarry, pray, and rest in the presence of one another until the lover of their souls joined them.

Although there are many other religious traditions that value and teach contemplation, moving to one of these traditions is not an option for me. For some of us, church and culture are so intertwined in black church worship services that to leave one is to be cut off from significant aspects of the other.

At most black church services across denominational lines, music is of professional quality, choirs are uplifting and skilled, preachers are articulate and well-trained. Yet, the sense of centered belonging in a community that provides spiritual sustenance and intergenerational continuity has become drastically attenuated. I am suggesting that this sense of “centered belonging” can be located in the contemplative spiritual legacy of Africana people.

In days gone by, overtly contemplative events were not unusual in black church congregations, who gathered for the specific purpose of evoking the presence of the Holy Spirit.

At this point, it would be helpful to explain my usage of certain terms. I use the term African American to refer to the African diaspora community in the United States and the term Africana to denote Africans in various global contexts. The phrase black church is used in theological circles to describe many different aspects of Africana worship life; however, I am specifically referring to a dynamic religious entity forged in oppression and sustained by practices that were often covert and intuitive.

The black church has an actual and a meta-actual form. It inhabits the imagination of its people in ways that far exceed its reach. Although it is no longer a truly invisible institution, it will always be invisible to some extent because it embodies a spiritual idea.

The response of the black church has been to raise the entertainment quotient and streamline. Survival depends on the ability to keep the people attending and giving so that increasing budget demands can be met. Bible studies are less frequent than conferences led by star preachers, and worship music must compete with the professionalism of the music industry.

don’t let them know about your church music because they’ll turn it into dance music or look at it like “folk music,” and miss the point that it’s the music of suffering people that lifted them from earth to heaven. It’s not merely an art form.[4]

A common assumption is that Africans in the Americas adopted Christianity in “childlike” and “simple” ways. This myth is perpetuated when studies oversimplify black church congregational worship practices or characterize them in very broad categories.

In the midst of a racially ambivalent culture, my parents developed a unique survival training that sustained their children. They insisted that we develop interior as well as exterior connections to the Divine. They accomplished this by alternating cycles of contemplation and play into every day.

My sojourns on the front porch taught me that meaningful spirituality required my full attention, that there might be times when mystery would descend and embrace me as an intoxicating surprise. However, during “ordinary” times, the attention of mind and body was a choice I could make.

Can you meditate when you leave the only land you have ever owned under duress? For that matter, in our own era, what use is contemplation to a community besieged by drugs, violence, and materialism? When survival is the goal, can contemplative practices help? These are issues that are still to be resolved.

“African spirituality is based on the assumption that life is influenced by relationships between human beings and the visible and invisible forces.”[10] The emphasis on life as a continuum reminded each family member of their connection to those who preceded them and those who will follow.

The lesson was that life was not to be lived as a truncated interlude without meaning. In the midst of a noisy secular life space, we were to know without question that the sacred far exceeded ordered Sunday worship services.

Whatever we were living through seemed to have its roots in “this too shall pass.” Although our lives were grounded in the context of social and political realities, we knew that God was also present. Sometimes the indwelling was ritually invoked through liturgy and worship, and at other times the mystery arose in the midst of ordinary activities. We learned to embrace a spectrum of contemplative experiences in the most unexpected places.

In the black community, talking about the black church is rather like talking about your mother. You can do it, but folk wisdom protocols insist that it must be done carefully and with respect.

My concern is that the worship style of the black church is being homogenized into a blended ahistorical weekly event that bears no traces of its complex and diverse Africana origins.

Theologies are not confined to designated sacred spaces; they also emerge in the mundane and in the midst of crisis.

History has taught us that oppression is cyclical and overcoming is situational and often temporary. Every gain is seeded with just enough destruction, personal and communal, to deflate and nullify the sense of accomplishment.

The church is a living organism. It ebbs and flows with the pulse of congregational life and tends to reflect local cultural and spiritual realities. Essentially, churches grow at the direction of the Holy Spirit, being attentive to the needs and calling of the community of faith.

Contemplation seems to offer one possibility. As Grimes notes, contemplation invites us to enter into “beingness,” into a space where listening, repose, and receptivity predominate.

M. Basil Pennington describes meditatio as the repetition of sacred words and phrases.[2] This repetition invites the soul and spirit into a deeper union with God.

The holiness that Jesus describes has less to do with pious character traits and more to do with the hosting of God’s abiding presence. It is not effort but invitation that opens the human spirit to the possibility that God may sojourn with us.

Receptivity is not a cognitive exercise but rather the involvement of intellect and senses in a spiritual reunion and oneness with God.

As I see it, the human task is threefold. First, the human spirit must connect to the Eternal by turning toward God’s immanence and ineffability with yearning. Second, each person must explore the inner reality of his or her humanity, facing unmet potential and catastrophic failure with unmitigated honesty and grace. Finally, each one of us must face the unlovable neighbor, the enemy outside of our embrace, and the shadow skulking in the recesses of our own hearts.

It is not an escape from the din of daily life; rather, it requires full entry into the fray but on different terms.

Moltmann describes the shekinah’s activities by saying that “even in our most frightful errors, it accompanies us with its great yearning for God, its homesickness to be one with God.”[7]

I have divided the contemplative experience into three accessible categories: entry, engagement, and effect.

Entry denotes a shift from the everyday world to the liminal space that worship creates. As Keating notes, contemplative practices facilitate a transition from the everyday world to an intoxicating altered reality.

The portal opens when word, song, or movement melds with the internal knowing and recognition of those who participate.

Engagement refers to the willingness to involve body and spirit in the encounter with the Holy.

Effect is often specific to the participating person or community. Those caught up in this intimacy with God explain that the experience expands their knowledge, awakens a palpable and actionable love, and is either a profoundly restorative resting in divine presence or a “fire shut up in the bones” that inspires action.

Shannon introduces the possibility that darkness may be the blessed dimming of ego-driven striving, a destination and condition of safety and repose.

The test of effective worship is not the fervor in the songs or the trance and dance; it is in the “fruit” or evidence in the lives of those who enter into joy unspeakable.

During the first century, Paul refers to the knowledge of God as an understanding that exceeds rational and objective thought. This knowledge can be experienced as presence.

Theological contemplation usually assumes the tangible reality of God’s love, our shortcomings, and the inexplicable possibility of reunion. Accordingly, relationship is a primary goal of Christian life.

As most historians note, the end of public persecution marked the shift in Christian status from a beleaguered sect to the state religion of Rome.

When Christianity began, it was small and intense, communal and set apart, until it found favor with the state. Those adherents who witnessed Rome’s public affirmation of Christianity in the fourth century realized that the contemplative aspects of the faith could not be nurtured under the largesse of the state.

After Christianity became a state religion, the freedom that women found in Spirit-led Christian sects was foreclosed by an increasingly hierarchical religious structure.

If the desert is a place of renewal, transformation, and freedom, and if the heat and isolation served as a nurturing incubator for nascent monastic movements, one wonders if a desert experience is necessary to reclaim this legacy.

Perhaps contemplative spaces can be found wherever people skirt the margins of inclusion. Perhaps those whom we value least have the most to teach.

Laura Swan sums up these virtues in the word apatheia, defined as “a mature mindfulness, a grounded sensitivity, and a keen attention to one’s inner world as well as to the world in which one has journeyed.”[16]

In the effort to return power to the people, European Protestant reforms attempted to translate the mystical elements of contemplative life into issues of character, virtue, and a stalwart work ethic.

When prayer became a public ritual rather than an intentional personal and communal practice, connections to historical contemplative practices gradually lost their power.

Most Protestants of European descent distanced themselves from contemplative practices as they distanced themselves from the Roman Catholic Church.

Roman Catholic Church historian Waldo Knickerbocker suggests that the erosion of contemplation in Protestantism has a variety of causes, including the rise of nominalism in the late medieval period with its emphasis on an epistemology that has reason as its primary component, and the intense focus on the “particular” (individual) rather than the “universal” (community).[20] Knickerbocker proposes an interesting route toward the restoration of Protestant contemplative practices. He suggests reflection on theological and embodied meanings of the Trinity.

Because people of color embodied difference, they wanted to “normalize” all other aspects of their lives. The intent was to mirror the dominant culture and their public and private proclivities so as to bolster the presumption of humanness. Since humanness and whiteness were deemed to be synonymous, Africans in the Americas avoided public ritual divergence.