Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

by Barbara A. Holmes

Moreover, the legacy of racism is so subtle and so pervasive that even in seminaries, church historians seldom mention the African origins of famous church leaders.

I have seen maps that locate Tertullian and Augustine in the northern section of Africa in such a way that the majority of the page is assigned to the sea.

Religions were layered one upon another, and then they were tested for their efficaciousness. Throughout African history, indigenous beliefs coexisted with Islam and Christianity. If a certain emphasis developed, it was because a particular faith system seemed to improve the lives of the people.

This racial bifurcation of perceived Christian origins creates reluctance on the part of African Americans to claim John Calvin, Luther, and John Wesley as mentors in the faith, while members of the dominant culture are unwilling to acknowledge their connection to African church fathers and mothers, Augustine, Tertullian, and Saint Mary of Egypt.

At this point in the discussion an important question arises. If there is a “disconnect” between the African origins of the early church and the historical black church, then what model of Christianity is being followed?

The legacy of Christianity does not begin on the plantation: it starts with the beginning of the Christian story, continues through Pentecost and the Roman Church, then spreads throughout the world. When this history is reclaimed, contemplation can be seen as an integral aspect of Africana faith and practice.

But how are congregations to plumb the depths of God’s will through these infested denominational hierarchies? I am suggesting that inculturation is not enough; rather, experiential returns must be included in the process.

Although European mystics and contemplatives often lived in community, they tended to focus on the individual experience of encountering the divine presence. African American contemplatives turned the “inward journey” into a communal experience.

If the model for contemplation is Eurocentric, then the religious experiences of indigenous people and their progeny will never fit the mold. But if contemplation is an accessible and vibrant response to life and to a God who unleashes life toward its most diverse potentials, then practices that turn the human spirit inward may or may not be solitary or silent. Instead, contemplation becomes an attentiveness of spirit that shifts the seeker from an ordinary reality to the basileia of God.

Historically, Africana communities did not value the “self-made world” of radical individualism.

Those who study contemplation have assumed that the difference between European and Africana approaches to contemplation is the presence or lack of silence.

Always the practices point beyond the visible to the invisible. Life is received as a gift and passed on as a legacy.

Life is one. It is handed down from parents to children. . . . People know where their lives come from and that they are part of a stream of life that has always flowed through their family. The individual is nothing but the recipient of life, and has the duty to pass it on. What is important is not the individual, but the collective—the family, the clan, the whole people.[1]

The most ironic turn of events in the twenty-first century is the discovery that all human beings are Africans. Archaeologists tell us that we are all the children of an African “Eve,” the first human female.

According to Raboteau, “ancient Christianity is not, as many think, a European religion. Christian communities were well established in Africa by the third and fourth centuries.”[3]

“African spirituality does not dichotomize body and Spirit, but views the human being as embodied spirit and inspirited body, so that the whole person—body and spirit—is involved in the worship of God.”[5]

This is the crux of the issue: contemplation in many African communities presumes the transcendence of actual physical realities, yet like everything else in the culture, it is grounded theologically and philosophically in soil, sun, life, and death.

“In forgetting God we have forgotten ourselves. Remembering God is the beginning of remembering ourselves.”[17]

The word sufi is said to be either Persian for the word pure or Arabic for the word wool. Historically, adherents were known for their simple wool garments.[19] Sufism traces its origins to the prophet Muhammad and subsequent spiritual leaders, including the prophet’s son-in-law Hazrati Ali.[20]

Although Sufi scholars recognize the role that theological discourse plays in the interrogation of exterior and interior manifestations of the sacred, they prefer God’s ongoing revelation through experience.

In Africa, Sufism emphasizes right relationships with nature, the living, and the dead. It presumes that the spiritual practices “transform an individual by imbuing him or her with new powers which give direct access to the hidden world. Such persons can ‘see’ what others cannot see.”[28]

Rites of passage as identified by Arnold van Gennep are “the transitional rituals accompanying changes of place, state, social position and age in a culture.”[32] They demarcate life stages and teach young men and women the secrets of adulthood.

In African societies, each life is an occasion that celebrates the return of an ancestor in the newborn child.

“Bible, Qur’an, and Drum have the same vocation; these are fundamental sacred ‘books’ venerated by their respective peoples. They are monuments of the human spirit because they are timeless.”[47]

I began this chapter with the phrase “Africa, my Africa” and end it with the question that the poet Countee Cullen posed: What is Africa to me?[60] My answer to this question is that Africa is a wellspring of contemplative practices—spiritual quests that benefit the community as well as the individual.

Lamine Kebe uses the phrase “bitter waters” to describe not just the ocean but also the trauma of the transatlantic passages of Africans into the Americas.[2]

In his book Terror and Triumph, Anthony Pinn discusses the Middle Passage as the horrific transition from personhood to property and nonidentity.

Slavery does not represent ordinary suffering. It is one of many unique situations that far exceed the limits of human imagination and assessment.

Ultimately, our objective tools for analyzing and interpreting pain will always fail us because there is an aspect of suffering that is not within our rational reach. Pain is a parallel universe that sends shockwaves breaking over our consciousness, daring us to succumb.

As Eric Cassell puts it, “suffering arises with the ‘loss of the ability to pursue purpose.’ Thus in suffering we face the loss of our own personal universe. In order to claim some hold on that universe, the suffering need to articulate the fears, hopes and concerns that they have.”[11]

The only sound that would carry Africans over the bitter waters was the moan. Moans flowed through each wracked body and drew each soul toward the center of contemplation.

However, contemplation can also be a displacement of the ordinary, a paradigm shift that becomes a temporary refuge when human suffering reaches the extent of spiritual and psychic dissolution.

Most of the captured Africans were in shock. The shift from participation in a highly articulate African culture to confinement in cargo ships was stunning in its abruptness.

Olly Wilson interprets a well-known West African aphorism, “The Gods will not descend without song,”[20] to mean that music is critical to African cosmologies.

The contemplative moment, whether introspective or charismatic, becomes the expectant waiting for the return to sanity and reason and the spiritual demand for a divine response to the question “Why?”

External responses to unthinkable acts of radical evil, no matter how reasonable, eventually veer toward the demonic. It is inevitable that we become what we hate and replicate what we try to stamp out. There is no response, other than radical love, that is up to the task of healing transgenerational wounds. The healing begins within.

In Holy Scripture, dance is celebratory worship, an expression of freedom from political and secular oppression, a confirmation of communal resolve.

“One of the distinctive features of American black slaves’ secret religion was the ring shout, probably adapted from African memories. A singer—whoever felt so moved—would step forth from the circle of worshipers. By chanting, dancing and clapping, the community provided a bass beat upon which the singer would create his or her own distinctive musical text.”[40]

Slavery is a crisis of such extraordinary proportions that unless equally extraordinary measures are taken, the result will always be the destruction of humanness.

I am suggesting that these Africana worship experiences are contemplative because they create an atmosphere for communal listening and responsiveness to the manifestations of God, they impact the ethos and value system of a community, and they heal infected social and psychic wounds.

The mediation of the holy through familiar Africana rites and rituals infuses the sacred into every aspect of everyday life and helps to inform the ethos and values of the community. A good example is found in the African understanding of good and evil. In African societies, it is not unusual for good and evil to be considered equally powerful alternating influences that remain in dialectical tension.

God’s acts in Genesis that separated and alternated darkness and light are not interpreted to mean that dark = evil and light = good. Rather, it is presumed that all things have their oppositional forces, which are without value assignments. They just are. The human task is to flourish in this environment.

“African Americans who gather within the shelter of the black church on Sunday mornings are still far from being free—but the fact that they come to church also means that they are not yet defeated. All come from their various states of oppression with one central question: ‘Is there any word from the Lord?’ (Jeremiah 37:17).”[1]

Within the safety of the black church, class distinctions broke down but gender and sexual identity discrimination did not. Although the black church still struggles with its learned oppressions of women and the LGBTQIA community, it is clear that inclusion is not just a racial issue.

The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and known together into a living whole, in which we are more and more able to transcend the limitations of our external self.”[3]

[The people believe] that the Spirit of Jesus is coming to visit them in the worship service each time two or three are gathered in his name and to bestow upon them a new vision of their future humanity.

I do not know exactly what the difference was, but I know that I was experiencing a mystical encounter in my own context, beginning with a sense of peace that transcended all situations, a clarity about life that some would deem to be an unveiled perception of “truth,” a new vision of a transformed world, and joy unspeakable.

Always there was a shared sense of transformation. There was also a sense of awe and expectation. Congregants in that storefront church expected God to do something. Commenting on the differences between “high” and “low” church expectations,[7] Annie Dillard writes, “In the high churches they saunter through liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be . . . genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.”[8]

Although there are only a few references to dance in the New Testament, some scholars suggest that the words rejoice and dance are the same in Aramaic, the language Jesus and the disciples spoke.

“An essential feature of Protestant Christianity . . . was the idea that one had to experience conversion to become a full member of the church. Events of great emotional and psychological power, conversions brought about a reorientation of the convert’s life.”[16]