When visiting family down south, we go to mass at a Black Catholic church our friends attend. Once after communion, the congregation spontaneously broke into “Wade in the Water”–a Spiritual sung to guide escapees along the Underground Railroad. We were told that song wasn’t sung too frequently, but whenever it was, it was something very special. I felt like I’d been granted privileged access to a sacred ritual deeply ingrained in that community’s experience of God’s presence in their struggles. It was a taste of how tightly the redemptive message of the Gospel and the call for justice in the temporal order are braided together in the history of Black churches in America—something from which the broader Catholic Church can learn.
A charge frequently leveled against Black Lives Matter these days, is that it is some kind of false religion. The critics have at least this right: there is a definite religiosity to the militancy. From kneeling, singing, and antiphonal chanting, to preoccupation with statues and icons, today’s anti-racist advocacy has many hallmarks of religion. I see no reason, however, to take these as grounds for dismissal of the general movement or its aims.
Yes, there is something insidious about moral grandstanding, particularly among white folk merely participating in the rites of protest to share selfies depicting their wokeness.
It goes without saying that any attempt to earn one’s salvation by way of a social cause is doomed from the start. Such are the temptations of true religion too—every group has its gongs and clanging cymbals of various stripes. Who am I to judge whether protestors are looking to boost their woke cred or are sincerely motivated by the desire to effect change and spur others on to action? We will only know who is sincere by their fruits.
Instead of dismissing anti-racist activism as a false religion, we might ask how the Church can do a better job of using the rituals, signs, and songs of true religion to address the deep needs that are being laid bare by the state of public discourse around race. People need to grieve publicly for the lives that have been lost to unjust violence. People need to come to terms with the past and engage in soul searching about the future.
A charge frequently leveled against Black Lives Matter these days, is that it is some kind of false religion. The critics have at least this right: there is a definite religiosity to the militancy.
These aims are achieved in part through civil public discourse (where that is at all possible now) and the political process. Our consciences, our self-understanding, and our perception of the most important truths are formed and refined by the prayers and gestures and Scriptures of the Church. There is liturgical space and precedence for this.
If the prayers of the faithful are not crying out for justice for the oppressed inside church walls, then it is no wonder that people are kneeling and singing out in the streets instead.
We need rituals, songs, and symbols to help us grieve what is wrong with the world, to make sense of the complexity of the messes we find ourselves in, and to understand who and whose we are. Lament for tragedies past and present, cries for justice, and the call to individual and collective repentance have always had a place in the liturgical life of God’s people. A quick read through the Psalms shows us as much, and for a helpful introduction I would look no further than biblical scholar Esau McCaulley’s recent New York Times opinion piece on the Bible and Black Anger.
In Psalm 137, the psalmist expresses a desire for horrific violence against Babylon, the oppressor of Israel. “Psalm 137,” McCaulley says, “is trauma literature, the rage of those who lived. The question isn’t why the Psalmist wrote this. The question is what kind of song would the families of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Eric Garner be tempted to write after watching the video of their deaths?” McCaulley says whatever they would produce would be would be raw and unfiltered.
If the prayers of the faithful are not crying out for justice for the oppressed inside church walls, then it is no wonder that people are kneeling and singing out in the streets instead.
“[M]ore than an expression of rage,” he says, “this psalm is a written record in time. It is a call to remember. This psalm, and the other psalms of rage, require us to remember the trauma that led to their composition.” God’s people need to engage of acts of remembrance, not just of the events in the Scriptures, but of the struggles and sorrows that carry over into the present day, and which unite us to the suffering of the Cross.
For some, bringing lament and admonition about racism into the sanctuary will seem too dangerous.
Won’t we crowd out the message of eternal salvation if we speak and pray and sing about justice in the temporal order in mass? There is much to say about this worry. For one, the Church has rightly made other issues of grave injustice, like abortion, the focus of homilies and prayers and special masses. Sins against the dignity of the human person, insofar as they are an affront to God, can and should be decried in the communal rituals of God’s people.
For another, we are not unprovided with examples of ways in which reverent, orthodox worship can focus on the goodness of God and at the same time make evident the moral truths that are entailed by the Gospel. We need only pay attention to what we are doing, when we do it. Think of the beloved Christmas hymn, “O Holy Night”, the lyrics to which Frenchman Placide Cappeau wrote in the 1840s. John Sullivan Dwight translated them later.
When we sing, “Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother, and in His name all oppression will cease,” whose heart does not swell? We need to have our moral sensibilities shaped like this by the beauty and goodness we encounter in public worship, where all things can be taken up and made whole. We need to invite those people we see in the streets looking for that very thing to join us.
Faith Glavey Pawl teaches philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota
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