Finding Hope for Our Hurts from African American Spirituals: Black Church History

A Word from Bob 

I’ve developed today’s post from my book Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care. For a free copy of the entire book in PDF format, click here. In Chapter 7 of Beyond the Suffering, we learn about the slave spirituals in A Sorrowful Joy: Everybody’s Hearts in Tune. 

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.

            Brother, keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,

            Keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,

            Keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,

            For this world almost done.

            So keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,

            This world almost done.

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.

Heaven Invading Earth 

In I Want to Go Home, the final reward of patience is proclaimed as plaintively.

            There’s no rain to wet you, O, yes, I want to go home.

            There’s no sun to burn you, O, yes, I want to go home;

            O, push along, believers, O, yes, I want to go home.

            There’s no hard trials, O, yes, I want to go home.

            There’s no whips-a-crackin’, O, yes, I want to go home.

            My brother on the wayside, O, yes, I want to go home.

            O, push along, my brother, O, yes, I want to go home.

            Where there’s no stormy weather, O, yes, I want to go home.

            There’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 learn about heaven invading earth.

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.

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. Unlike that, enslaved African Americans continued the biblical lament tradition of mingling hurt and hope.

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.

The 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. 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 

1. What happens when you share your hurt and your friend focuses only on hurting? What happens when you share your hurt and your friend focuses only on hoping?

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