In March 1943, having narrowly escaped Europe three years earlier, Abraham Joshua Heschel published “The Meaning of This War,” his first essay in an American publication. The essay shows, quite remarkably, his full command of literary English. It also shows, as biographer Edward Kaplan remarks, that Heschel “had found his militant voice.”Footnote 44 “Emblazoned over the gates of the world in which we live,” the essay begins, “is the escutcheon of the demons. The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. There have never been so much guilt and distress, agony and terror. At no time has the earth been so soaked with blood.”Footnote 45 Heschel's extraordinary life's witness, his whole body of work, traverses precisely this anthropological and theological knife's edge: The mark of Cain in the face of man has come to overshadow the likeness of God. Where is God? Or better, Who is God? in relation to the rapacious misuse and idolatrous distortion of human freedom? Or simply, Is God?
In preparing to write this article, I have been newly haunted by Heschel's writings, his witness, his face set against the crematoria of Auschwitz. At the risk of drawing a direct line between the horrors of Nazism and four centuries of white supremacy in America—one could make the case, pace Heschel, that there was a time when the earth has been so soaked with blood, right under our noses, in the antebellum South—have we not also been horrified in recent years by “the mark of Cain” in the face of our fellow human beings? Derek Chauvin, his knee on the neck of George Floyd; three officers atop Eric Garner, face down on the pavement, a forearm pressed against his throat; the contorted faces of torch-bearing whites in Charlottesville, shouting, “We will not be replaced!” and state trooper Brian Encinia, wrestling Sandra Bland from the driver's seat while threatening to light her up. Such images, burned into our consciousness by cell-phone video, body- and dashcam footage, seem to have awakened the once-reticent, now “militant” voices of many white Americans, as if eager to separate themselves from the mark of Cain on full display in Minneapolis, Staten Island, Charlottesville, and Waller County, Texas.
It needs to be said that for many African Americans and other people of color in the United States, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Elijah McClain, and Breonna Taylor, among an obscene litany of others, is hardly “news” at all, except perhaps to fan some dying spark in the souls of their white neighbors. Yet I think it is also true that for many Blacks and for white allies committed to the work of racial justice, the Floyd video broke something of the spine in the camel's back that has kept the work of justice moving forward, if wearily, in the direction of hope. To gaze into Derek Chauvin's face for eight minutes and forty-six seconds as George Floyd desperately gasps for breath, cries out for his mother, and finally grows silent is to wonder indeed whether our society has not become the playground of demons and bullies, our likeness to God forever eclipsed. If Heschel's own witness is to be emulated, an argument I will make here, the crucial thing for the person of faith is not to turn away from the confrontation with ourselves, our society, or indeed, our God, in “the abyss, where one might be annihilated.”Footnote 46
Heschel's model, of course, for the sacredness of human life was the Hebrew Bible, not biology, nor psychology, nor secular humanism, frameworks more or less detached from reference to the divine.Footnote 47 As Kaplan's work brilliantly details, Heschel witnesses to a far-reaching “sacred humanism,” a “revolution” in theological insight and method that responded to the catastrophe of the Shoah with a faithfulness in God and in human beings that is breathtaking. In other words, the “militant” Heschel who cried out against human depravity is the same Heschel who insisted on the enduring image of God in humanity. The bridge between these two poles in Heschel's phenomenology of faith is prayer, “piety,” the prophetic experience, the community who dares to place itself under the eyes of God, and thus dares to feel, in the marrow of the bones, the weight of responsibility for the world we are creating. The person or community with a feel for God “is not aiming to penetrate into the sacred,” says Heschel. Rather, she is striving to be “penetrated and actuated by the sacred, eager to yield to its force.”Footnote 48 For Heschel, “history forms a vehicle for God's actions in the world. The Jewish question is a question of God to us.”Footnote 49
Heschel's Enduring Witness to the Question of God
In this article, with Heschel's life and writings as the framework, I would like to explore my experience of teaching “Black Literature and Faith,” an undergraduate freshman seminar I have taught for the last decade. What Heschel calls the “ineffable,” what he describes as “the fullness of [our] powerlessness” when we abandon ourselves in prayer, is the kind of music one hears resounding in the classics of African American literature—a prophetic sensibility that leaps from the pages of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Howard Thurman, and many others. The class is framed as “Black Literature and Faith” because I am convinced that any serious antiracism curriculum or efforts to nurture the yearning for social justice in our students will lack a crucial animating force if it remains silent on the question of God or the dynamics of faith in the believing community. My evidence for this claim comes from the substance of Black literature itself, as noted previously, and no less, from the transcendent pull this material exerts on me and my students as we engage it together in the classroom.
To put my indebtedness to Heschel as lodestar for a spiritual and theocentric dimension of teaching for racial justice in historical context, it is important to remember that Heschel's education as a young Jewish prodigy took place at the University of Berlin in the 1930s.Footnote 50 Think about that for a moment. As the son of a prominent Polish Hasidic rabbi, not only did Heschel have to contend with a German culture dangerously hostile to “his kind,” he also found himself navigating an intellectual milieu where the idea of “God,” as he wrote many years later, was granted “the status of being a logical possibility” by his professors, but for them “to assume that He had existence would have been a crime against epistemology.”Footnote 51 In his bold rebuttal of a paper on “Science and Religion” by Albert Einstein, just after his escape from Europe, Heschel warned his Jewish readers—many of whom had embraced the secular epistemologies taken for granted even in many Jewish seminaries—that the supposedly morally neutral methods of science “cannot be prevented from creating poisonous gas or dive-bombers; and rationalism is powerless once ‘the magnificent blond beast’ . . . takes arms in order to subjugate inferior races.”Footnote 52
We are back to Derek Chauvin and a white supremacist culture that could logically and without qualms accommodate itself to those horrifying eight minutes and forty-six seconds. What characterizes the “magnificent blond beast” in the classics of African American literature is not just blood-chilling cruelty and indifference to the humanity of Black people; it is the naked pride, hubris, and self-referential idolatry of white Christian culture.Footnote 53 In short, one of the first lessons my students must contend with is the bald hypocrisy of white Christians, drunk with the impunity of state- and often ecclesially sanctioned power.Footnote 54 What emerges in writers like Douglass and so many others, by contrast, is not an abstract idea or theological conception of God that unmasks white hypocrisy and galvanizes resistance in the oppressed; rather, it is a feel for God, a sense for transcendence and grace breaking through the hellscape of anti-Black racism that galvanizes resistance and stirs something like hope—if not hope for this side of death, then a cry for freedom on the other.Footnote 55 My aim in exploring Black literature through the lens of faith is not to confirm a predetermined conceptual account of God; rather, it is to learn from and wonder with human beings who undergo a life-and-death feeling for God's presence and God's absence, God's fidelity and God's promises, in the crucible of the struggle itself.
To be clear, Heschel did not blame science, nor secularization, nor religion as such, for the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century. His target, as Kaplan notes, was “the failures of institutional religion: the trivialization of belief in God and a diminished moral courage.”Footnote 56 Heschel was convinced that to relegate religious insight to the margins of public life—or worse, to subjugate the prophetic inheritance of Judaism and Christianity to the power of the state and its symbols of civil religion—is to cut moral reasoning off at the neck. (Thus, the dying words of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Elijah McClain: “I can't breathe.”) “True, God is hiding His face in our time,” Heschel wrote in 1954, “but He is hiding because we are evading Him.”Footnote 57 By contrast, the consciousness that we are living “under His eyes,” that we human beings are the imago Dei in the world, imposes on the individual and community of authentic religious faith an ethical mandate of concern for the most vulnerable. God's pathos is at once judgment and vocation for the person with a feeling for God, for the community that subjects itself to the “mood of reverence”Footnote 58 that encompasses all things. “Let Fascism not serve as an alibi for our conscience. We have failed to fight for right, for justice, for goodness; as a result we fight against wrong, against injustice, against evil.”Footnote 59 Heschel concluded his 1943 essay on the war by reminding his Jewish readers that they were “either slaves of evil or ministers of the sacred.”Footnote 60
In sum, the question of whether we can speak credibly of an experiential knowledge of God's love, God's mercy, God's fidelity, God's justice becomes central in Jewish literature of oppression after Auschwitz. Many concluded, no, we cannot. The same theological questioning pulses from the depths of African American literature across four hundred blood-stained years, from the Middle Passage to the present. To explore Black literature through the lens of faith is to inhabit the irreducible tension between the mark of Cain, which asks, “Am I my brother's keeper?”, and the imago Dei that constitutes human freedom. The theodicy question we put to God is inseparable from the anthropodicy question God puts to Cain; “What have you done? Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground!” (Gen 4:1–16).
In what follows, I limit myself to a handful of passages from a broad sweep of material covered in four units that structure the course “Black Literature and Faith.”Footnote 61 More or less mirroring a method of lectio divina and contemplative listening that I seek to create in the classroom, the discussion is framed around themes that converge on what I will finally call a covenantal spirituality of wonder, resistance, and hope, a sensibility that shares much with Heschel's account of the human journey in partnership with, and under the eyes of, God.
Seeds of Wonder: The Feeling for God
In the opening pages of his Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, Frederick Douglass details the faintest memories of his mother coming to hold him in the middle of the night when he was a very small child. Separated from Douglass when he was an infant and sold to a plantation twelve miles away, his mother risked the penalty of a severe whipping for “not being in the field at sunrise.” Still, by foot, and under the cover of darkness, she came.
I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it, her hardships and suffering.Footnote 62
Just seven years old when his mother grew gravely ill, Douglass was forbidden to visit her, and “received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Nevertheless, the memory of those nocturnal visits remained burned into his consciousness, his mother's love, it seems, imprinted on his very flesh.
When I teach “Black Literature and Faith,” we begin on the first day of class by reading aloud together these first few pages of the text, slowly, taking turns around the circle. I encourage students to take their time, to feel their way through the text, so that we might hear something of its music together. Gathering student responses to the text, I try to surface themes that will accompany us for the remainder of the semester. The dim memory of his mother's embrace, the boy's yearning to know the date of his birthday, the identity of his father: from between the lines we begin to surface beautiful questions of identity (Who am I?) and belonging (To whom do I belong?), themes that potentially resonate across the centuries in a new community of co-learners, to the degree we allow Douglass’ voice to reverberate in us.
In hints and gestures, I hope to plant the seeds of the realization, initially more felt than spoken, that there is a music in Douglass’ writing that can resonate in the heart even in the twenty-first century. When I introduce the spirituals on the second or third day of class, students often will notice the longing for the mother expressed in so many of the sorrow songs—Sometimes I feel like a motherless child / a long way from home—a yearning not too difficult to recognize, not least for freshmen in college. To borrow from German theologian Johann Baptist Metz, Douglass’ rational faculty, the towering intellect that so awed his contemporaries, including Lincoln, is foremost an anamnestic reason, a reason that remembers.Footnote 63 Flesh memory moves in two directions, from giver to receiver and back again, crossing bounds of time and eternity. In the case of his mother—her name, he wants us to know, is Harriet Bailey, a woman otherwise “disappeared” from the history books—the flame of her dignity and courage burns in Douglass’ writing, and stirs the empathic heart in a new generation of readers.
If Metz sums up the mystery of such remembrance with phrases like “dangerous memory,” if Catholic theology calls it a sense of “real presence,” like the Eucharist, a kind of epiphanic calling forth, Heschel similarly locates Jewish identity in contact with the revelatory texture of millennia past. “Jewish faith is recollection of that which occurred to our ancestors.”Footnote 64 Revelation, in other words, is ongoing. The question for people of faith, a question implicitly stirred in white Christians and Catholics by reading Douglass, Holocaust literature, or any literature of oppression, becomes this: Whose dead do we permit to haunt our theological imaginations? Which cloud of witnesses do we allow to inform and shape our liturgical-anamnestic consciousness? Whose unreconciled dreams for life and love, dignity and freedom, are caught up most fervently in the pathos of God?Footnote 65 As one of Heschel's earliest reviewers put it, “Jews must remember that Judaism is a God-centered religion of crisis.”Footnote 66
When sacred remembrance is placed in the steadied hands of a masterful writer, it moves the reader almost forcibly out of the head and into the deeper regions of the heart. By “deeper” I mean less subject to rationalization, theological subjugation, or other strategies of ideological control. Nowhere is Douglass’ mastery of the written word steadier or more searing for me than in his account of the brutality of existence for enslaved women, as in the first time he was forced to watch his own Aunt Hester, “a woman of noble form and of graceful proportions,” fall under the lash of Mr. Plummer, a “cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding.” “I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me.” And though he was but “quite a child” at the time, Douglass continues, “I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. … It was the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle.”Footnote 67
Arriving just five pages into the Narrative, when such a scene is read aloud in class, one can almost feel a collective shudder. What before might have been an abstract idea of the horrors of slavery—“Oh yes, we learned all about it in high school”—begins to transform into a wholesale reorientation of American “history” from the entrails out, suggesting, in the words of David Tracy, that “something else might be the case.”Footnote 68 When asked to describe the emotional tenor of the author's prose, students often observe that Douglass’ voice, relative to the brutality being described, is sober, measured, restrained. The effect of such restraint is to render those passages of more explicit emotionality and spiritual self-disclosure all the more arresting.
Two or three sessions in, we arrive at what may be the most famous passage from the Narrative, a scene that fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison singles out in his preface as “the most thrilling one of them all,” in a text that contains “many passages of great eloquence and power.”Footnote 69 It comes just after Douglass has described the cruelty of Mr. Covey, his master for one year beginning in January 1833, including the repeated rape of a slave named Caroline, whom Mr. Covey had bought, “as he said, for a breeder”—all the while thinking himself “a sincere worshiper of the most high God.”Footnote 70 One Sunday morning, Douglass stands “in beast-like stupor” on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, “whose broad bosom was ever white with sails from every quarter of the habitable globe.” He was fifteen. The passage merits quoting at length.
Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer's Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:
“You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll. Go on, go on. O that I could also go! Could I but swim! If I could fly! O, why was I born a man, of whom to make a brute! The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me be free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it. Get caught, or get clear, I'll try it. I had as well die with ague as the fever. I have only one life to lose. I had as well be killed running as die standing. Only think of it; one hundred miles straight north, and I am free! Try it? Yes! God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom.”Footnote 71
If it is true that the slaves had a “Bible within the Bible,”Footnote 72 a canon within the canon—biblical narratives that gave consolation and hope and which countered those texts employed by slaveholders to sanction trading them as chattel—then surely the Exodus story topped that list. Through the power of literary empathy, the reader here follows Douglass’ own Exodus narrative, from his passage through the “blood-stained gate” of slavery into his yearning for freedom as an adolescent, manifest in those “beautiful vessels, robed in purest white.” In Heschel's terms, Douglass feels what the Hebrew people felt in their bondage, and, like the prophets, gives voice to the pathos of God—God who shares in the torment of human suffering, and whose Spirit galvanizes our inner yearning for dignity, freedom, and liberation. Revelation is ongoing. God's voice, “Let my people go!” does not cease after the prophets.Footnote 73
In April 1943, German soldiers had begun to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, where Heschel's mother and sister Gittel were trapped among seven hundred thousand Jews in the district where he grew up. In Cincinnati, the home of Hebrew Union College where he had secured a position that saved his life, the young Heschel “was on the verge of collapse. He couldn't sleep; he could hardly speak”; he spent his days “just walking in the Burnett woods across from the college.”Footnote 74 A telegram would inform him that his mother had died of a heart attack when German soldiers stormed their apartment; his sister had been deported to Treblinka, where she was murdered. Remarkably, it was under these paralyzing signs of the “escutcheon of demons” that Heschel introduced his foundational notion of “wonder and awe,” of “radical amazement” in the soul that “initiates a transformation of religious thinking.”Footnote 75
“Wonder is not a state of esthetic enjoyment,” he would write six years later. “Endless wonder is endless tension, a situation in which we are shocked at the inadequacy of our awe, at the weakness of our shock, as well as the state of being asked the ultimate question.”Footnote 76 For Heschel, the present generation was “no different than in biblical times, when the God of pathos had hid the Divine Face and withdrew compassion from the people.” It is “our fate to live in exile, but He has said to those who suffer: ‘I am with them in their oppression.’”Footnote 77 Above all, it was poetry and prayer that Heschel turned to for consolation. Kaplan remarks of Heschel's first published poems, written as a student in Berlin, “The poet must speak for a silent God.”Footnote 78 Douglass’ Narrative reverberates no less with prophetic urgency and spiritual insight. “While penetrating the consciousness of the pious man,” says Heschel, “we may conceive the reality behind it.” Between history and the act of faith stand “immense mountains of absurdity.”Footnote 79
In a seminal essay of 1944 entitled “Faith,” Heschel makes clear his conception of revelation as, in Kaplan's words, a “universally shared sense of the holy, an a priori structure of consciousness.” It was, to be sure, a controversial idea for many of his Jewish contemporaries.
Each of us has at least once in his life experienced the momentous reality of God. … Faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence. Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the Holy of Holies. Our face is lit up for a time with the light behind the veil. Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the Holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.Footnote 80
It is this notion of “faith” as a sensibility born in the depths of human experience, “a force in man, lying deeper than the stratum of reason,”Footnote 81 and which frequently defies empirical-rational cause for fear and despair, that I find so breathtaking in African American literature, as in Douglass’ soliloquy at the banks of the Chesapeake Bay. “It is the spiritual power of the praying man that makes manifest what is dormant in the text.”Footnote 82
As a student and teacher of such literature, it is clear to me that the power of Douglass’ witness, a literary record I would not hesitate to call sacramental, cannot be contained by its historical genesis in the nineteenth century. One of my students, a young woman who had shared with the class her struggles with family trauma and mental illness, wrote a “Letter to Myself” for her final paper. In a poignant nod to Douglass, she concluded, “You are no longer merely looking at the ships. You can set sail and be free just like them.” To be sure, God's voice continues to speak in who our students are, in what they have endured, and in who they yearn to become.
Seeds of Resistance: The Feeling for Freedom
Alongside Douglass’ Narrative in the first weeks of the class, I introduce a series of short autobiographical narratives written by Black Catholics in the latter part of the twentieth century. No more than a page or two each, these oral histories of ordinary Catholics provide students a powerful glimpse into the recent record of racism in the Catholic Church, and an often proud, joyful, and inspiring witness to the faithfulness of Black Catholics who fought their whole lives against it.Footnote 83 One of these is Mrs. Joyce Coleman, a parishioner of Saint Agnes Catholic Church in Cincinnati. Again, I cite the passage at length because it never fails to move students, year after year, and provides a touchstone for reflection throughout the course. She writes:
My parents had me baptized Catholic as an infant in Selma, Alabama. My father was tragically killed in 1944, leaving my mother with my infant brother and myself. From the time that I was a small child, I was taught that I am loved with an everlasting love. As a matter of fact, I was brainwashed with love in Catholic schools. The Sisters of St. Joseph taught me that nobody is better than I am. God sees all of us and loves all of us. There is no need to ever be ashamed of who you are, because God does not make mistakes.
Jim Crow had no conscious effect on me in Selma, although he lived all over the place. He would spread his wings and he was mean. There were Colored water fountains, bathrooms, entrances, and schools. Consequently, my mother taught me to take care of everything I needed before leaving home. I was conditioned to avoid humiliating circumstances and to this day, I seldom use public facilities. I built defenses to protect myself. … In the South, I knew my place, so to speak. The facilities and “whatnot” were separate, but it wasn't until I got to Indiana [to attend Catholic high school] that I realized that I lived in a separate society. I was in for the shock of my life. There were only 4 or 5 black children in my freshman class and Father Muldane, the parish priest, treated us like we were dumb … ignorant. I was crushed!
Coming up, my family didn't have the finances for extra activities, so I read. Reading was my escape. I loved Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe so much that I could quote the verses and soliloquies. I can still hear Father Muldane telling me, “Negroes don't understand Shakespeare.” I couldn't believe him! Well, I did understand Shakespeare, Poe, Dickinson and anybody else. I thought, “Do I have to put up with this?” Father Muldane was “Jim Crow” to me. He told me that I was ignorant and called me a nigger. It didn't mean anything to him that I had graduated first in my class in Selma. Consequently, I put in 150 percent effort to excel in school … I got on his last nerve. He wouldn't call on me, and when I earned good grades he accused me of cheating. He gave me a “D” in English. I stayed after class to speak with him. When I told him, “God don't like ugly and He's gonna get you,” he gave me a detention. …
See, the education that I received in elementary school was more than book learning. I knew that I was a child of God and it was difficult for Father Muldane or anybody else to break my spirit. … Yes, there have been times in my life when I wanted to give up, just quit. [But] through it all, I have learned to trust in Jesus. … My life has purpose, and I know that the Lord will get me through.Footnote 84
Joyce Coleman, as I said, makes a strong impression on students. Unpacking the text, we arrive at this question: Whence comes the inner strength and spirit that empowered a teenaged Joyce to look square in the eyes of a man like Father Muldane and tell him that “God don't like ugly”?
It came in part, as the text intimates, from her mother's care and hard-bought wisdom; it came from her tutelage under the Sisters of St. Joseph, teachers in the faith who taught her “more than book learning,” who “brainwashed her with love,” who formed her in the conviction that she was a child of God. From Shakespeare and Poe she could “escape” into a world protected from the Jim Crow south; from her mother and the Sisters of St. Joseph she was graced with a sense of her own dignity that would “inoculate” her, as it were, from the poison of racism she would later encounter in the north, not least from priests and nuns.Footnote 85 Same Catholic Church, two very different realities. How does one “put up with” the inner contradictions that dwell side by side in one's own faith community, much less find the spirit and strength to do so as a child?
Just prior to the scene in Douglass’ Narrative at the Chesapeake Bay, he confesses that Mr. Covey had “succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit.” Shortly after the scene at the Chesapeake, where he had finally determined, “This very bay shall yet bear me into freedom,” Douglass relates a violent altercation with Mr. Covey that would be “the turning-point in my career as a slave.” The battle lasted hours, and by its end, Mr. Covey had gotten “entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him.” The confrontation, Douglass says, “rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom … and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.”Footnote 86 It seems the experience at the Chesapeake—a revelatory moment of pathos and prayer, as Heschel might say, attuning the boy's spirit to the very pathos of God—had brought the young Douglass to a critical realization of self-regard, and thus a fierce commitment to resist the evils of enslavement. There was no turning back. While the circumstances of Joyce Coleman's confrontation with Father Muldane were far less dramatic, arguably the stakes for her were no less existential. Will I surrender my dignity for the sake of survival and die a thousand small deaths in the process? Or will I stand firm and speak my truth, speak God's truth, to those who would push me down?
If the reader is wont to celebrate Douglass’ triumph over Mr. Covey, the pleasure of it is short lived. Some pages later, Douglass relates in excruciating detail the story of a fellow slave named Demby who escaped the whip of his overseer, a Mr. Gore, whose “savage barbarity was equaled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge.” Demby had plunged himself into a creek, standing to “the depth of his shoulders, refusing to come out.”
Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood.Footnote 87
Again, the collective shudder as we read the scene aloud, silence, and then shared wonder: Whence comes the courage in a poor slave named Demby to refuse to comply at the critical moment of death with the command of a demonic overseer? Dare we say, with Heschel, that “Each of us has at least once in his life experienced the momentous reality of God”; that perhaps Demby had come to know the “holy dimension” of his own existence; that in his act of refusal, it was “almost as though God were thinking” for him? And what of the other slaves watching the horrific scene unfold? Might they have beheld, if just for an instant, Demby's face lit up “with the light behind the veil,” and in that light, a flash of their own sacred dignity? It bears repeating: between history and the act of faith stand “immense mountains of absurdity.”Footnote 88
In the years 1940 to 1943, from the relative safety of Cincinnati, Heschel became increasingly alarmed by the “moral bankruptcy” of established Jewish organizations that were reticent to raise the public alarm about what was happening in Europe. “The facts,” as Kaplan details, “were readily available.” By mid-August 1942, reliable sources were reporting that up to ten thousand Jewish refugees “had been brutally deported in trains to internment camps in unoccupied southern France” and were being sent eastward to an “unknown destination” to their deaths. From Heschel's theocentric perspective, faith in the living God yields a moral imperative to defend all human life as images of the Divine. Twenty years later, a gray-bearded Heschel would march arm in arm with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of ordinary Americans singing freedom songs and united in their commitment to build a more just society. Of marching with King, Heschel famously said, “I felt my legs were praying.”
In a recent article marking the forty-eighth anniversary of Heschel's death, Cornel West sums up the “radical” legacies of Heschel and King—and echoes what I have called a spirituality of resistance in Douglass, Joyce Coleman, Ida B. Wells, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, and so many others—when he asks: “What and how do we remember, who do we revere, and why do we resist? What are the bounds of our sensitivity and empathy? In which narratives of the past and present do we situate, locate, and insert ourselves?”Footnote 89 If it feels to us and our students today that God is “in exile,” as Heschel lamented, “imprisoned even ‘in the temples,’” then what will you and I do to set free the spirit of God from imprisonment, to bring the living God home from exile?Footnote 90
Seeds of Hope: The Feeling for Another Possible Future
Some years ago, I taught a class called “The Black Catholic Experience,” a class inspired, in part, by the memory of Sr. Thea Bowman. My students and I attended Mass together at two different Black Catholic churches in inner-city neighborhoods of Cincinnati, both less than five miles from the Xavier University campus. Some days later, a student wrote in his journal: “I have seen a different side of my faith that I did not know anything about. I have learned about the embarrassment that blacks felt when the Jim Crow laws were in effect. I have heard the music that made me feel some of the same oppression that African Americans in my own Church were feeling.” A female student wrote, “I've learned that you cannot understand a culture by simply reading about it in a textbook—you need to fully immerse yourself, both cognitively and physically, to be a part of it.” Did we alter the structures of racism and segregation in Cincinnati? We did not. But I would never underestimate the impact of those visits on my students’ imaginations, their vision of what is possible. As one wrote, “No matter where you come from or what you look like, you are welcome here. We are part of each other's story.”
If proximity is a precursor to grace, as I have argued elsewhere, then one of the most enduring gifts we can give our students is to accompany them out of the classroom and into unfamiliar communities outside of their comfort zone.Footnote 91 Much in the way of Pope Francis, Sr. Thea emphasized personal encounter as the key to cultivating just and healing relationships across the color line, and so freeing the captive imagination. It is not enough for white folks like me to love Black culture and not to love, befriend, and defend actual Black and brown people. It is not enough to intellectualize the struggle, to project one's “wokeness” into the world via social media, to sing spirituals in class, or even to attend another's church service, and consider oneself sanctified. Yet surely Sr. Thea would also agree that introducing the spirituals in class is not a bad place to start. Some of the best moments I have been blessed to be part of in the classroom have come decidedly not in the wake of a brilliant lecture but on those days that I bring an electric piano into the room, ask students to “circle it up,” and then invite, encourage, and cajole them into singing with me. The grace of proximity can come in many forms, not least in the power of weaving music, poetry, and all manner of the arts into the theology classroom.Footnote 92
Some eleven or so pages into the Narrative, Douglass describes hearing his fellow slaves singing as they made their way between the fields and the farmhouse after nightfall, making “the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.” “Every tone,” he writes, “was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them.”Footnote 93 Note his use of the term “ineffable.” “We sense more than we can say,” says Heschel. Like the psalms and much of the narrative-poetic landscape of the Bible, the spirituals mediate an encounter that “precedes conceptualization, on a level that is responsive, immediate, preconceptual, and presymbolic.”Footnote 94 The same revelatory insight that gave birth to the spirituals can find a home in those today who, surrendering self-consciousness, let go and sing them. The “I” recedes into a dawning sense of “we,” if only for the duration of a song.
If Douglass emphasizes the lament and implicit rage of the spirituals, W. E. B. Du Bois emphasizes their potent embodiment of a “hope against hope,” their vision of another possible future. It is telling that Du Bois structures the whole of his 1903 collection, The Souls of Black Folk, with the sorrow songs, placing the music and text of one spiritual at the head of each chapter. Though “neglected,” “half despised,” and “persistently misunderstood,” the spirituals, says Du Bois, remain “the greatest gift of the Negro people”Footnote 95 to the nation.
Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?Footnote 96
One could ask the same questions of biblical, prophetic faith. Is the hope announced by the prophets justified? Do the psalmist's reassurances of God's presence in the valley of the shadow of death, or the Gospels of Jesus with their promise of resurrection hope, sing true? For people loyal to the God of pathos, insists Heschel, “This is the task, in the darkest night to be certain of the dawn, certain of the power to turn a curse into a blessing, agony into a song.”Footnote 97 It is no wonder—and a marvelous wonder!—that the music of the Black church comprised the soundtrack and unifying force for the civil rights movement.
In December 1939, refugees who had managed to escape the Warsaw ghetto were reporting cruelties of “unbelievable proportions”; a Paris dispatch of January 1940 announced that more than twenty-five hundred Jews had committed suicide; about seventeen thousand Jews and Poles had been executed by order of the German courts; and in the same few months, Heschel learned that his sister Esther had been killed in a bombing raid. “How could a bystander remain sane?” Kaplan wonders. “How could Heschel continue his religious teaching? Could he justify his faith that God cares about humankind?”Footnote 98 Of course, nobody can answer such questions for another person. They can only be answered by way of experience, and each of us may answer differently over the course of a lifetime. But it is no less true that our exposure to the movements of spirit and hope in another person, another community, can awaken in the soul an unexpected wonder and a desire to drink from the same waters of meaning and consolation, joyfulness and hope. Through proximity to the faith of others, “The ineffable has shuddered itself into our soul.”Footnote 99
Perhaps what this means for theology, whether in books or in the classroom, is that the tenor, rhythm, and voice of our manner of teaching—not just what is communicated, but how—matter as much as content. As any battle-worn teacher wrestling over a lesson plan or syllabus knows, it is the shape of the whole experience that renders the content more or less effectively. Perhaps the ideal climate for theological inquiry, not always attainable, to be sure, is to be no longer merely “looking at the ships” with our students, but to “set sail” with them, and to be free.
“Hope,” writes biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, “must be told, in image, in figure, in poem, in vision. It must be told sideways, told as one who dwells with the others in the abyss.”Footnote 100
From Dominion to Accompaniment: A Covenantal Spirituality
“Here my cry, O God the Reader, vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness.”Footnote 101 In the afterword that concludes The Souls of Black Folk, the reader is astonished to discover that Du Bois has been directing his arguments not only to his human readers, but to God, the “divine reader of human hearts.” Thus, the whole of The Souls of Black Folk is revealed on its final page to be a kind of sustained prayer and examination of consciousness from the praying heart of its author. I would say the same of Frederick Douglass’ work, certainly Heschel's, and, I dare say, my own. (The theologian, to adapt Evagrius, is the one whose prayer is true, and who seeks deeply, with others, into the mysteries of God.) I recall the first time I taught “Black Literature and Faith” being more than a little anxious before the first meeting. I knew the material would surface painful realities for students of every background, but I wondered especially about the receptivity of students of color (two-thirds of those enrolled) to me, a white professor whom they had never met. I paused outside the classroom, said a silent prayer, and plunged in. The truth is, I have never stopped praying.
Much as Du Bois suggests that we pass our days in a kind of collective cultural “sleep,” Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin writes of the disruptive power of historical and cultural “fragments,” the reassembling of the “ruins” of a defeated past, to illumine the mind and awaken complacent hearts from their slumber.Footnote 102 Imbibing from Benjamin and seeking to reclaim the “mystical-political” sensibilities of Jewish faith, Metz locates the power of Christianity's central story—the memory of Jesus’ death and Resurrection—in its capacity to break the spell of the ruling consciousness. “The shortest definition of religion,” writes Metz, is “interruption.”Footnote 103 The very same capacity to awaken and interrupt, I have argued here, pulses within the narratives, essays, poems, and sorrow songs that rise from Black experience in America, past and present.
Over and over again, I have observed the disruptive and illuminating power of this material on students of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, an African American literary tradition reflecting a profound sensitivity for what Heschel calls the “tangent of the beyond at the whirling wheel of experience.”Footnote 104 As Rowan Williams observes of poetry, evoking Hopkins, poetry (and here we may add great literature) succeeds when it is “charged” with a kind of presence, with “the radiance, the luminosity, the density, of real things.” It says “that the world is full; the world is not empty,” and in doing so, it “passes the radiance on to another level.”Footnote 105 The poet and NYU scholar Fred Moten offers a strikingly similar observation about reading James Baldwin and how Baldwin trains the reader in a kind of empathy—looking with, not just looking at—that our world desperately needs today.
Baldwin's apocalyptic vision at the end of Down at the Cross is something that can only be staved off by another vision which we, his readers, have to carry out on his behalf. … [Because] I think that it is necessary for us, just as it was for Baldwin, to actually try to figure out … what it would mean to look with the ones that you are also looking at, to be with the ones that your … detached analysis is trained upon; [and especially if you are a public figure] to have empathy for the ones … whose lives you are charged to pay some kind of detached, analytic attention to, in the interest of “helping” them; to recognize that those who you are charged to help, those over whom you have some stewardship, also are the ones who are with you, who belong to you and with you; [and] that the world that you are charged, in some sense, to have dominion over is the world that, in fact, you live in and are a part of. That capacity to be in and with the world and not simply to exercise dominion over the world is so much a part of what has been lacking in our political culture for many, many years and continues to be lacking today.Footnote 106
If we take ourselves as teachers and scholars to have something like the public role that Moten here describes, then his account offers both a direction for what we are teaching (offering students the opportunity to look through the heart of another) and a direction for how we teach, which is to say, our stewardship of the classroom demands that we look with them, that we accompany our students in the experience of encounter, disruption, and illumination.Footnote 107 Perhaps to be “brainwashed with love” in the context of higher education is to come to know oneself as not only being seen and evaluated from the outside, but that one is also being seen, as it were, from the inside; that there are respected adult mentors in my life who I can see desiring to see me, and in their seeing and affirming me, helping me come to know myself by my “real name.”Footnote 108
It remains only to be said that this capacity “to be in and with the world and not simply to exercise dominion over the world” is arguably the central idea of Judaism with respect to God and the heart of Heschel's thought, which is the covenant. “It obligates God, and it obligates man.”Footnote 109 Covenant is less an idea or construct than it is a memory and experience of “God in Search of Man,” as Heschel titles one of his masterworks. Less a noun than a verb, the biblical witness to covenant evokes a God-centered sensibility, a whole-bodied manner of being in relationship in which “the essence of being human” is “being a need of God”Footnote 110; to borrow from Metz, it is a “mysticism of open eyes” and a “suffering unto God”Footnote 111 at the heart of the biblical tradition. If Moten is correct, and if my experience bears out in that of others, then what I may now be justified in calling a covenantal spirituality can also be modeled, and so come to life, in our classrooms. It is a bold claim, I admit, but herein lay the audacity of what Heschel means by faith. “Religion, the end of isolation, begins with a consciousness that something is asked of us.”Footnote 112 God desires, God commands, God needs our participation in the transformation of the world. Theology at its most exciting and most authentic, I believe, is a response to that covenantal call.
