Monthly Archives: October 2018

Communal Contemplation

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Communal Contemplation

Black or Africana church brings communal and embodied contemplative practice to Western Christianity. Barbara Holmes stretches the narrow Eurocentric definition of contemplation beyond solitude and silence:

The African American church developed rituals and practices that nurtured and encouraged congregational encounters with the mysteries of God. Always, the focus was on piercing the veil between secular and spiritual realms through shared experiences. . . .

In Africana traditions, the desert mothers and fathers offer one model of contemplative practice; the songs of Alabama chain gangs at the turn of the century, the rhythmic chants amid cotton rows in Mississippi during slavery, and the murmured hymns of domestic workers offer yet another. Those of us who grew up and worshipped in historically black church congregations wonder how a religious tradition that values bodily spirit possessions and performative vocal entreaties to a personal God can be considered contemplative.

The answer is hidden in plain view and is ensconced in historical presumptions about the boundaries and practices of contemplative worship. 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 [and if all are created in God’s image], 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. . . .

I have not always been able to predict when these abiding times would arise. The places differ significantly and are only connected by my presence in the midst of faithful and expectant people. I have found myself in the midst of a transformative contemplative moment while worshiping with the Turkana in northern Kenya, watching the procession of clergy and locals and hearing the sounds of drums and hymns. Perhaps it was the heat or incongruity of regal African men in Scottish liturgical garb in the middle of the desert that created the sense of spiritual displacement; perhaps not.

I experienced similar moments on a hilltop in Sonora, Nogales, Mexico, as we sojourned with a family in their cardboard and corrugated tin home. Time seemed to stand still as we ate dinner together in the darkened room. Outside, another “temporary” refuge caught fire and burned. There was no way to save the dwelling, so we stood and silently prayed. Similar moments occurred while singing “Amazing Grace” in a Japanese Christian church in Onjuku and while giving birth to my sons surrounded by strangers and loved ones. The times and places are less important than the shared experiences of holy abiding.

 

To experience a taste of communal and vocal contemplative practice, listen to this moving song “Oh, Jesus.” Join your own voice—in moan and ecstatic cry—with this choir from Trinity United Church of Christ. [1]

 

 

[1] “Oh, Jesus,” Sanctuary Choir, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Illinois.

Barbara A. Holmes, Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, second edition (Fortress Press: 2017), xxxiii, 18-19.

 

Center for Action and Contemplation- week 38, 2018

Western Christianity

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September 16 – September 21, 2018

Western Christianity

Summary: Week Thirty-eight


To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter. —Archbishop Rowan Williams (Sunday)

Meditation [was] not a newfangled innovation, let alone the grafting onto Christianity of an Eastern practice, but rather . . . something that had originally been at the very center of Christian practice and had become lost.—Cynthia Bourgeault (Monday)

God is not just with us, not just beside us, not just under us, not just over us, but within us, at the deepest level, and, in our inmost being, a step beyond the true Self. —Thomas Keating (Tuesday)

Sin is primarily living outside of union; it is a state of separation—when the part poses as the Whole. It’s the loss of any inner experience of who you are in God. (Wednesday)

Addiction can be a metaphor for what the biblical tradition called sin. It is quite helpful to see sin, like addiction, as a destructive disease. . . . If sin indeed makes God unhappy, it is because God loves us, desires nothing more than our happiness, and wills the healing of our disease. (Thursday)

The word contemplation must press beyond the constraints of religious expectations to reach the potential for spiritual centering in the midst of danger. . . . During slavery, . . . crisis contemplation became a refuge, a wellspring of discernment in a suddenly disordered life space, and a geo-spiritual anvil for forging a new identity. —Barbara Holmes (Friday)

 

 

The Sound of the Genuine

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Howard Thurman (American Mystic. 1899 -1981)

rom a Commencement speech, Spelman College, 1980

The Sound of the Genuine

There is something in every one of you that waits, listens, for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it was better that you had never been born…

You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existence and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all yourself spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…

There is in you something that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and sometimes there is some much traffic going on in your minds, so many different kinds of signals, so many vast impulses floating through your organism that go back thousands of generations, long before you were even a though in the mind of creation, and you are buffeted by these, and in the midst of all of this you have got to find out what your name is. Who are you? How does the sound of the genuine come through you…

The sound of the genuine is flowing through you. Don’t be deceived and thrown off by all the noises that are part even of your dreams, your ambitions, so that you don’t hear the sound of the genuine in you, because that is the only true guide that you will ever have, and if you don’t have that you don’t have a thing.

You may be famous. You may be whatever the other ideals are which are a part of this generation, but you know you don’t have the foggiest notion of who you are, where you are going, what you want. Cultivate the discipline of listening to the sound of the genuine in yourself.

Now there is something in everybody that waits and listen for the sound of the genuine in other people… I must wait and listen for the sound of the genuine in you. I must wait. For if I cannot hear it, then in my scheme of things, you are not even present. And everybody wants to feel that everybody else knows that she is there.

I want to feel that I am thoroughly and completely understood so that now and then I can take my guard down and look out around me and not feel that I will be destroyed with my defenses down. I want to feel completely vulnerable, completely naked, completely exposed and absolutely secure… that I can run the risk of radical exposure and know that the eye that beholds my vulnerability will not step on me. That I can feel secure in my awareness of the active presence of my own idiom in me.

So as I live my life then, this is what I am trying to fulfill. It doesn’t matter whether I become a doctor, a lawyer, housewife. I’m secure because I hear the sound of the genuine in myself and having learned to listen to that I can become quiet enough, still enough to hear the sound of the genuine in you.

Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear, and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the music