2022 LIBERATION LECTIONARY - Black Heritage Month

Beyond Black History

“We have chosen each other, and the edge of each others battles. The war is the same. If we lose, someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet. If we win there is no telling. We seek beyond history for a new and more possible meeting.”

-Audre Lorde

Reflection –  A Rhetoric of Repair

Part of our commitment to a Black Theology of Liberation is to celebrate the saints whose work, and wisdom are among the treasures of darkness that scripture describes. Two of those treasures share a birthday, which we hold as a Saints Day. Toni Morrison was born February 18th 1931, Audre Lorde was born February 18 1934.

Both of these Black mothers, poets, meditators, authors and originators have given us a rich connection between memory and imagination. They have mingled Black liberation history with prophetic glimpses of the Afro future. In our reflection this week, we honor their sacred words. 

Audre Lorde maps a route to connect history with love, and family dynamics to global mutuality.

Toni Morrison sits with beloved ghosts to paint a picture of a path that her memories travel, to frame and nourish inner life.

The future is planted in the past. It’s an heirloom seed that changes with the shifting structure of the soil. But it is the same earth which bears them both. No people would be present without ancestors. Everyone who freedom-dreams is summoning both ancient memory and budding foresight. 

Notice the way God’s word and God’s identity reveal that this connecting concept has its roots in divinity. 

“As I looked, thrones were set in place,and the Ancient of Days took the seat. With clothing that was as white as snow;  and hair of his head was like wool. The throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze….

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” From Daniel 7

The Ancient of Days in Daniel’s prophecy is also centered on power: the dispossession of it in the current state of things, and the promise that power would be held with care in a place we can trust.. In the inclusive kingdom that is to come, all peoples and languages are free to live as they are. No superiority of language, no colonizer’s culture. Authority’s destiny includes a happy marriage to affection. Power without love makes a meaningless map. But when authority is grounded and guided by affection, injustice is impossible, because the purpose of all power is no longer subjugation, but repair. And this might be the brightest brilliance brought to us by the saints we celebrate today.

For the long and stony road we trod, and all the bitterness endured by Blackness in history, Saint Audre and Saint Toni present a rhetoric of repair that is ready for us to bask in now, even as we wait for healing to be realized fully. 

From Mama Toni, the enduring presence of the past.

“I can’t tell you how I felt when my father died, and I can’t tell you how I felt reading to my grandmother as she turned over and over in her bed (because she was dying and she was not comfortable), but i could try to reconstruct the world that she lived in. And I have suspected, more often than not, that I know more than she did, and that I know more than my grandfather and my great-grandmother did, but I also know that I’m no wiser than they were. And whenever I have tried earnestly to diminish their vision and prove to myself that I know more, and when I have tried to speculate on their interior life, and match it up with my own, I have been overwhelmed every time by the richness of theirs compared to my own.

Like Fredrick Douglas talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are my access to me, they are my entrance to my own interior life. Which is why the images that float around them - the remains, so to speak, at the archeological site - surface first and they surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written, and to the revelation of a kind of truth.”

From Mama Audre, a mapless map.

we cannot alter history - by ignoring it - nor the contradictions - who we are…

I” am writing these words as a route map - an artifact for survival. A chronicle of buried treasure, a mourning - for this place we are about to be leaving a rudder for my children - your children -  our lovers. our hopes braided from the dull wharves of Thompkinsville to Zimbabwe, Chad, Azania. What walls are you covering now with your visions of revolution - the precise needs of our mother earth, the cost of false bread, and have you learned to nourish your sisters at last as well as to treasure them? 

History is not kind to us. We restrict it with living past memory forward, into desire into the panic articulation of want without having, or even the promise of getting. And I dream of our coming together, encircled. Driven not only by love but by lust for a working tomorrow. The flights of this journey mapless, uncertain, and necessary as water.”

Music – Black Heritage Month Playlist

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Daily Readings - Psalm 139

Sunday: Psalm 139:1-3 O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. You search out my path and my lying down, and you are familiar with all my ways.
Monday: Psalm 139:4-6 Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. You hem me in, behind me and ahead of me, you lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Tuesday: Psalm 139:7-8 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I hide from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths of the earth, you are there.
Wednesday: Psalm 139:9-12 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Thursday: Psalm 139:13-16 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.
Friday: Psalm 139:17-20 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you. O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil!
Saturday: Psalm 139:21-24I rage against those who rage at you, O Lord! And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I have a righteous disdain for them; I count them my enemies. Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts. See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Meditation & Prayer

Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chastening rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died.

In the times where we feel oppression is all around us, we will continue to lift every voice to the author of all music, in song, in supplication, and in sorrow.

Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our ancestors sighed?

Dear Lord, we are people of heavy hearts and weary feet. We need your steady beat to march on,  to keep moving towards our future with the fervor of the ancestors. Let their every sigh and sadness become our reason.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered.  We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered. 

O God our Mother, who gives us life-breath, and gives ear to the brother-spilled blood that cries out from the ground. Here our lament. 

How long until our freedom journeys make no acquaintance with suffering? How long, O Lord, before you cut down our enemies and separate us from our burdens - as far as the east is from the west?  Though our ancestors' tears have been the water that makes us grow into the mighty, unmovable, we still strive to make their need to weep not so. In your mercy, bring us over to Zion’s city by some other way. 

Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last, Where the [bright] gleam of our [black] star is cast!

On the other side of this bitterness and strife, We will meet the eternal reality of everlasting life. How beautiful is the feast you prepare for us, O God,  Such that the end to all of our wandering is an endless welcome into abundance and rest. Let this be our shining star, let this be our guide to a gleaming future, no matter how far off it seems.

“Lord lift us up and let us stand,  by faith, in a future freedom’s land. No brighter place than we have found, Lord plant our feet on solid ground.”

- Ashé