The Journey: Forty Days of PromiseCelebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity
Day Twenty-Five: Heaven Invading Earth
Day Twenty-Five: Heaven Invading Earth[1]
The slave spirituals illustrate the counseling skill of integrating sustaining and healing, hurt and hope, empathy and encouragement, the earthly story and the heavenly story.
Thomas Higginson, a New England abolitionist, commanded the first freed slave regiment to fight against the Confederacy. He recorded the songs sung around the evening campfires by the First South Carolina Volunteers. Writing about their slave spirituals, Higginson highlights their symmetry.
“The attitude is always the same. . . Nothing but patience for this life,—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination is always implied.”
Higginson then illustrates this interplay between patience and triumph. In This World Almost Done, for instance, we hear patience motivated by future hope.
Brudder, keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,
Keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,
Keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,
For dis world most done.
So keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,
Dis world most done.
In I Want to Go Home, the final reward of patience is proclaimed as plaintively.
Dere’s no rain to wet you, O, yes, I want to go home.
Dere’s no sun to burn you, O, yes, I want to go home;
O, push along, believers, O, yes, I want to go home.
Dere’s no hard trials, O, yes, I want to go home.
Dere’s no whips-a-crackin’, O, yes, I want to go home.
My brudder on de wayside, O, yes, I want to go home.
O, push along, my brudder, O, yes, I want to go home.
Where dere’s no stormy weather, O, yes, I want to go home.
Dere’s no tribulation, O, yes, I want to go home.
Notice the frequent, swift movement back and forth between the earthly story of hurt and the heavenly story of hope. We find no linear quick-fix progress from hurt to hope as if to sing about pain is to eradicate it. Instead, we discover the constant interplay between empathy and encouragement.
Mingling Hurt and Hope
This mixing is explained by the African American Christian worldview that the sacred and the secular are inseparable. Heaven invades earth and the boundary, the window or membrane between the two, is thin. Thus to move back and forth, to see heaven storm earth and earth combat heaven, is a normal aspect of how African American sufferology views life. The spirituals reflect this deeper perspective, a deeper philosophy of life than is common in modern Western thought which has tended to make life too linear and earth and heaven too segregated.
Their holistic view of all reality exposes how we often wrongly separate hurt and hope. We avoid the raw honesty of the Old Testament saints and the African American believers when we make life and counseling too linear, and when we make earth and heaven too separate. We need to better fuse earth’s hurts and heaven’s hope.
As lay care givers, pastors, and professional Christian counselors, we demonstrate this competency when we journey with our spiritual friends, parishioners, and counselees by helping them to see signs of God’s goodness even when life is bad. We join them in their grand adventure praying, like Elisha, that God will open their eyes to see the world charged with the grandeur of God (2 Kings 6:15-17).
Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses
1. Concerning the African American practice of integrating hurting and hoping, What happens when a spiritual friend focuses only on hurting/sustaining? What happens when a spiritual friend focuses only on hoping/healing?
2. How could you apply the integration of hurting and hoping to your spiritual friendships?
[1]Excerpted from, modified from, and quoted from Kellemen and Edwards, Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction. Purchase your copy at 40% off for only $10.00 at www.rpmministries.org.
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