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?
