The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity
Day Twenty-Seven: Songs of the Soil and the Soul
Day Twenty-Seven: Songs of the Soil and the Soul[1]
Slave spirituals about feeling godforsaken emphasize the impossibility, this side of heaven, of quickly and finally resolving all hurt. When honestly sharing their lamentation over the absence of the felt presence of God, enslaved African Americans followed the Psalmists. Most Christians are shocked to learn that, numerically, there are more Psalms of complaint and lament than there are Psalms of thanksgiving and praise. The writers of the spirituals would not have been surprised. They understood and practiced the historic Christian art of sacred discontent.
Their laments included honest complaints about their external world of “Level One Suffering”—what was happening around and to them. Their laments also involved candid complaints about their internal world of “Level Two Suffering”—what was happening in them, in their souls and minds as they reflected on their outer suffering.
William McClain’s terminology of songs of the soil and the soul best captures our concept of external and internal suffering.
“A very real part of the worship of Black people is the songs of Zion. Singing is as close to worship as breathing is to life. These songs of the soul and of the soil have helped to bring a people through the torture chambers of the last three centuries.”
Level I Suffering
As McClain continues, he speaks about the soil of external suffering and the soul of weary hearts.
“These spirituals reveal the rich culture and the ineffable beauty and creativity of the Black soul and intimate the uniqueness of the Black religious tradition. These spirituals speak of life and death, suffering and sorrow, love and judgment, grace and hope, justice and mercy. They are the songs of an unhappy people, a people weary at heart, a discontent people, and yet they are the most beautiful expression of human experience and faith this side of the seas.”
In fact, it was the soil of suffering souls that birthed the spirituals.
“Many of these spirituals were influenced by the surrounding conditions in which the slaves lived. These conditions were negative and degrading, to say the least; yet, miraculously, a body of approximately six thousand independent spirituals exists today—melodies that were, for the most part, handed down from generation to generation. . . . The Negro spirituals, as originated in America, tell of exile and trouble, of strife and hiding; they grope toward some unseen power and sigh for rest in the end.”
Clearly, the spirituals highlight longsuffering faith in a wearisome world.
“These songs of the soul and of the soil have enriched American music and the music of the world. . . . They are the articulate message of an oppressed people. They are the music of a captive people who used this artful expression to embrace the virtues of Christianity: patience, love, freedom, faith, and hope.”
Level II Suffering
Enslaved African Americans clearly understood and addressed the inner mental turmoil caused when a good God allows evil and suffering. Recognition and expression of this reality of the trial of faith kept them from wondering if anyone else ever struggled in similar ways.
Throughout biblical and church history, level two soul suffering often expressed itself in the haunting refrain of “How long, O, Lord” (compare Psalm 13). Enslaved African Americans continued this lament tradition.
My father, how long,
My father, how long,
My father, how long,
Poor sinner suffer here.
And it won’t be long,
Poor sinner suffer here.
We’ll soon be free.
De Lord will call us home.
We’ll walk de golden streets.
Of de New Jerusalem.
Notice the mixture and blending of endurance and assurance, another common historic practice modeled by believing slaves.
Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses
1. Which do you tend to focus on more: songs of the soil (external suffering) or songs of the soul (internal suffering)? Why do you suppose that is?
2. How could you better highlight both external suffering and internal suffering?
[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.
The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity
Day Twenty-Six: Joyful Sorrow
[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. Day Twenty-Six: Joyful Sorrow[1]
Enslaved African Americans blended sustaining and healing because they first holistically experienced sorrow and joy. The following well-known slave spiritual illustrates this truth.
Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Nobody knows like Jesus,
Nobody knows the trouble I see,
Glory hallelujah!
A slave who was initially puzzled by the tone of joyful sadness that echoed and re-echoed in spirituals eloquently explains the paradox.
“The old meeting house caught on fire. The spirit was there. Every heart was beating in unison as we turned our minds to God to tell him of our sorrows here below. God saw our need and came to us. I used to wonder what made people shout, but now I don’t. There is a joy on the inside, and it wells up so strong that we can’t keep still. It is fire in the bones. Any time that fire touches a man, he will jump.”
African American Christians understood that life is lived in the minor key. They knew that they could not avoid or evade suffering.
Frederick Douglass recalls that the spirituals reveal “at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.” As the slaves reflected on the human condition, they did not demand answers. However they did insist upon candor about suffering and courageous affirmations of joy. The combination often led to a jarring contrast when they juxtaposed earthly suffering and heavenly hope.
An eloquent image of life’s alteration between ups and downs, sorrow and joy, occurs in one of the lesser known verses of Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had.
One morning I was a-walking down,
Saw some berries a-hanging down,
I pick de berry and I suck de juice,
Just as sweet as de honey in de comb.
Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down,
Sometimes I’m almost on de groun’.
Wild, Sad Strains
Lucy McKim Garrison sent a letter to the November 8, 1862, edition of Dwight’s Journal of Music that powerfully displays this melding of agony and joy found in the spirituals.
“The wild, sad strains tell, as the sufferers themselves never could, of crushed hopes, keen sorrow, and a dull daily misery which covered them as hopelessly as the fog from the rice-swamps. On the other hand, the words breathe a trusting faith in rest in the future—in ‘Canaan’s fair and happy land,’ to which their eyes seem constantly turned.”
Today’s comforters can imitate the model set by enslaved African Americans who knew how to mingle the many moods of faith, who knew how to sing with “tones loud, long, and deep,” and who “breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.” Today’s comforters can replicate the soul-stirring honesty of the Psalmists of old who knew how to write psalms of complaint and of celebration, of lament and of longing, who knew how to pour out their souls fully to God.
Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses
1. How well are you able to mingle suffering and joy?
2. Are you able to celebrate God’s goodness even while experiencing life’s “badness”?
The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating 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.
The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity
Day Twenty-Four: Slave Spirituals
Day Twenty-Four: Slave Spirituals[1]
The fascinating history of the slave spirituals are intertwined with the equally captivating narrative of the Invisible Institution. It was at these secret meetings in the brush arbors and tiny log cabins that the spirituals were not only sung, but composed in community.
Too often we see the spirituals simply as words and notes on a printed page. We forget that they emerged as communal songs which were heard, felt, sung, shouted, and often danced with handclapping, foot-stamping, head-shaking meaning.
The Fuel of the Invisible Institution
These songs—variously called slave spirituals, Negro spirituals, jubilees, folk songs, shout songs, sorrow songs, slave songs, slave melodies, minstrel songs, and religious songs—are most commonly known as slave spirituals because of the deep religious feelings they express. Singing was integral to reinforcing a sense of community in the Invisible Institution and nourishing soul-healing relationships with God and one another. The spirituals were the fuel of the invisible institution.
Gushing Up From the Heart: Improvisational Communal Empathy
To appreciate the meaning, message, and mutual ministry of the slave spirituals, it is essential that we understand how and why they were composed. Carey Davenport, a retired black Methodist minister from Texas, had been born enslaved in 1855. He vividly depicts the spontaneous nature of slave spirituals.
“Sometimes the culled folks go down in dugouts and hollows and hold they own service and they used to sing songs what come a-gushing up from the heart.”
These were not polished, practiced anthems designed to entertain. They were personal, powerful psalms designed to sustain. “Songs were not carefully composed and copyrighted as they are today; they were ‘raised’ by anyone who had a song in their hearts.”
Slave spirituals were shared songs composed on the spot to empathize with and encourage real people in real trouble. Anderson Edwards, a slave preacher, remembers,
“We didn’t have no song books and the Lord done give us our songs and when we sing them at night it jus’ whispering so nobody hear us.”
Soul Care-Giving at Its Best
The creation of individual slave spirituals poignantly portrays soul care-giving at its best. When James McKim asked a slave the origin of a particular spiritual, the slave explained,
“I’ll tell you; it’s dis way. My master call me up and ordered me a short peck of corn and a hundred lash. My friends see it and is sorry for me. When dey come to de praise meeting dat night dey sing about it. Some’s very good singers and know how; and dey work it in, work it in, you know; till dey get it right; and dat’s de way.” Spirituals were born from slaves observing and empathizing with the suffering of their fellow slaves as a way of demonstrating identification and solidarity with the wronged slave.
In the very structure of the spirituals, we see articulated the idea of communal support. Frequently the spirituals mentioned individual members present, either by name—“Sister Tilda, Brother Tony,”—or by description—“the stranger over there in the corner.” This co-creation included everyone in the experience of mutual exhortation and communal support.
Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses
1. How would your soul care and spiritual direction ministry change if you shifted from a focus on practicing skills to a focus on “gushing up from the heart” (improvisational empathy, staying in the moment, being present, immediacy)?
2. What does it look like for you to lay aside self to be simultaneously present with your friend and with God, hearing God’s voice and reflecting God’s words, God’s Word?
[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.
The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
Celebrating the Legacy of African American Christianity
Day Twenty-Three: Praising the Lord
Day Twenty-Three: Praising the Lord[1]
When sharing the Word, African American believers heard from the Lord through one another. In praising the Lord, they spoke to the Lord with one another.
Praying, singing, and shouting, were not items on their “to do” list, nor were they lines on an “Order of Worship” in a church bulletin. They were opportunities to encounter God together. As with sharing the Word, praising the Lord provided the occasion for everyone to participate in the life of the congregation at a significant level of personal and communal involvement.
It Takes a Community
Ex-slave Alice Sewell seamlessly intertwines praying, singing, communal ministry, and sustaining empathy in her depiction of the Invisible Institution.
“We used to slip off in the woods in the old slave days on Sunday evening way down in the swamps to sing and pray to our own liking. We prayed for this day of freedom. We come from four and five miles to pray together to God that if we don’t live to see it, to please let our children live to see a better day and be free, so that they can give honest and fair service to de Lord and all mankind everywhere.”
Sewell’s vignette contains precise theology—prayer requests were for God’s glory (“give honest and fair service to de Lord”) and for the good of others (“and all mankind everywhere”). It also speaks of personal commitment—walking five miles for prayer meeting!
Slave Spirituals
The slave spirituals were a communal enterprise. Jonas Bost of Newtown, North Carolina, reminisces about one such song. “I remember one old song we used to sing when we meet down in the woods back of the barn. . . .
Oh, Mother lets go down, lets go down, lets go down, lets go down.
Oh, Mother lets go down, down in the valley to pray.
As I went down in the valley to pray,
Studying about that good ole way,
Who shall wear that starry crown?
Good Lord, show me the way.”
Most significant is his concluding memory.
“Then the other part was just like that except it said ‘Father’ instead of ‘Mother,’ and then ‘Sister’ and then ‘Brother.’”
They mutually cared for one another as an extended family with concern for every member, whether father, mother, sister, or brother.
The Drama of Redemption
The slaves often transformed their sung narrative into a dramatic acted narrative. The community became participants in historic deliverance events such as the children of Israel crossing the Red Sea or Joshua’s army marching around the walls of Jericho.
Their bodies chained in enslavement, their spirits soared like eagles through the Holy Spirit and through the communal spirit of joint worship.
Learning Together from Our Great Cloud of Witnesses
1. Regarding praising the Lord, within your worship context and cultural setting, what might further enhance your corporate glorification of God?
2. What could you learn about worship from the African American legacy?
[1]Excerpted, modified from, and fuoted 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.
African American Spirituals: Telling the Rest of the Story[i]
To appreciate the meaning, message, and mutual ministry of the slave spirituals, it is vital to understand how and why they were composed. Carey Davenport, a retired Black Methodist minister from Texas, had been born enslaved in 1855. He vividly depicts the spontaneous nature of slave spirituals. Sometimes the Colored folks would go down in dugouts and hollows and hold their own service, and they used to sing songs that come a-gushing up from the heart.”
These were not polished, practiced anthems designed to entertain. They were personal, powerful psalms designed to sustain. “Songs were not carefully composed and copyrighted as they are today; they were ‘raised’ by anyone who had a song in their hearts.”
Slave spirituals were shared songs composed on the spot to empathize with and encourage real people in real trouble. Anderson Edwards, a slave preacher, remembers, “We didn’t have any song books and the Lord gave us our songs and when we sang them at night it just whispering so nobody would hear us.”
The creation of individual slave spirituals poignantly portrays care-giving at its best. When James McKim asked a slave the origin of a particular spiritual, the slave explained, “I’ll tell you; it’s this way. My master called me up and ordered me a hundred lashes. My friends saw it and are sorry for me. When they come to the praise meeting that night they sing about it. Some are very good singers and know how; and they work it in, work it in, you know; till they get it right; and that’s the way.” Spirituals were born from slaves observing and empathizing with the suffering of their fellow slaves as a way of demonstrating identification and solidarity with the wronged slave.
Creating and singing spirituals in the middle of their predicament became a means for reciprocal bonding. Slaves wove the words into the fabric of their worship and into the tapestry of their everyday life together. This resulted in communal empathy. The flexible, improvisational structure of the spirituals gave them the capacity to fit an individual slave’s specific experience into the group’s experience. One person’s sorrow or joy became everyone’s through song. Singing the spirituals was therefore both an intensely personal and vividly communal experience in which an individual received consolation for sorrow and gained a heightening of joy because his experience was shared. It was a lasting portrait of the truth that shared sorrow is endurable sorrow.
In the very structure of the spirituals, we see articulated the idea of communal support. Frequently the spirituals mentioned individual members present, either by name—“Sister Tilda, Brother Tony,”—or by description—“the stranger over there in the corner.” This co-creation included everyone in the experience of mutual exhortation and communal support. Drawing from the Bible, Protestant hymns, and sermons, the slaves fashioned spiritual music which expressed their faith in moving, immediate, and dramatic terms.
The spontaneous creation of the spirituals exemplifies what people-helpers call “staying in the moment,” “being present,” and “immediacy.” The African American spirituals demonstrate that caring for people is not so much about skills, but about artful connecting through real and raw relating.
[i]Excerpted with permission of Baker Books from Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction.
The Journey: Forty Days of Promise
