The Forty-Day Journey of Promise

Day Twenty-Seven: Songs of the Soil and of the Soul

Note: Welcome to The Journey, our forty-day blog series from MLK Day through the end of Black History Month. We’re learning life lessons from the legacy of African American Christianity. The series is based upon material from my book Beyond the Suffering. To learn more about Beyond the Suffering, including downloading a free chapter, click here.

Sacred Discontent

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.

Slave spirituals about feeling God-forsaken 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.

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 the New Jerusalem.

Notice the mixture and blending of endurance and assurance, another common historic practice modeled by believing slaves.

Join the Conversation (Post a Comment for a Chance to Receive a Copy of Beyond the Suffering)

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?

The Forty-Day Journey of Promise

Day Twenty-Six: Joyful Sorrow

Note: Welcome to The Journey, our forty-day blog series from MLK Day through the end of Black History Month. We’re learning life lessons from the legacy of African American Christianity. The series is based upon material from my book Beyond the Suffering. To learn more about Beyond the Suffering, including downloading a free chapter, click here.

Life Is Lived in the Minor Key

Enslaved African Americans candidly faced both 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.

Highest Joy and Deepest Sadness

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.

Join the Conversation (Post a Comment for a Chance to Receive a Copy of Beyond the Suffering)

1. How well are you able to mingle suffering and joy?

2. How candidly are you able to celebrate God’s goodness even while experiencing life’s “badness”?

The Forty-Day Journey of Promise

Day Twenty-Five: Heaven Invading Earth

Note: Welcome to The Journey, our forty-day blog series from MLK Day through the end of Black History Month. We’re learning life lessons from the legacy of African American Christianity. The series is based upon material from my book Beyond the Suffering. To learn more about Beyond the Suffering, including downloading a free chapter, click here.

Empathy and Encouragement

The slave spirituals illustrate the importance of blending 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 balance.

“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.

We demonstrate this competency when we journey with our spiritual friends 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).

Join the Conversation (Post a Comment for a Chance to Receive a Copy of Beyond the Suffering)

1. What happens when a spiritual friend focuses only on hurting? What happens when a spiritual friend focuses only on hoping?

2. How could you apply the blending of hurting and hoping to your spiritual friendships?

The Forty-Day Journey of Promise

Day Twenty-Four: Learning Life Lessons from the Slave Spirituals

Note: Welcome to The Journey, our forty-day blog series from MLK Day through the end of Black History Month. We’re learning life lessons from the legacy of African American Christianity. The series is based upon material from my book Beyond the Suffering. To learn more about Beyond the Suffering, including downloading a free chapter, click here.

 The Fuel of the Invisible Institution

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.

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 colored folks went down in dugouts and hollows and held their 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 any song books and the Lord gave us our songs and when we sang them at night it was just whispering so nobody heard 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 this way. My master called me up and ordered me a hundred lashes. My friends see it and is sorry for me. When they come to the praise meeting that night they sing about it. Some’s 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.

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.

Join the Conversation (Post a Comment for a Chance to Receive a Copy of Beyond the Suffering)

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, soul-to-soul relating)?

2. How do these new understandings of the slave spirituals change the stereotyped views that many people have about the spirituals?