The Clearing Gospel — No. 3

“Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” (Audre Lorde)¹

“What has kept me going has been the development of new modes of community. I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle.” (Angela Y. Davis)²

I am a daughter of the church. My first experiences inside a church are shadowy at best because they took place before that age in which memories gain clarity and definition. The churches my family attended throughout my childhood were always overwhelmingly Black. That was in keeping with the rest of my life. I grew up in a world in which white folx loomed large as threats but were generally incidental to daily life. Mostly, they stayed on their side of town and we stayed on ours. In the historically Black middle school, high school, and university I attended, I did have some white teachers. But these few immigrants into our world understood, for the most part, that their power was less firm than if they had not crossed the invisible borders within our city. In short, I grew up Black and proud, anchored in the Black church, and largely outside of a world defined by Whiteness, or so I thought. 

It was not until I entered college and began studying history that I started to ask better questions about the world. I quickly fell into a mentorship with a Marxist intellectual historian and started to grapple with the ubiquitous presence of imperialism in America’s history as well as in her present. I studied everything from traditional Marxist theory to the CIA’s illicit involvement in the overthrow of more than a few democratically elected world leaders who did not adhere to American geopolitical interests. None of it surprised me. My father had raised me with a strong skepticism of America, after all. Yet, almost none of the history I was studying seemed to influence the church world to which I was committed. The Black church I attended did see itself in the lineage of the Civil Rights Movement and took as a part of its mission the empowerment of the Black community in our city. But a larger, coherent critique was absent, at least from the pulpit. When, in my university years, I began attending a predominantly white evangelical church, the theology I encountered was de-historicized and the politics were disconnected from the facts with which I was becoming intimately acquainted. Still, in both cases I put aside my interest in the structures and actions of American imperialism in order to belong to a community of faith formation. I put aside my questions and my intuitions because I loved the church.

The first class I took in Latin American history changed all of that. During my coursework, I learned about Latin American liberation theology. I learned about the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez and encountered the sermons of Archbishop Oscar Romero. I learned too about the vibrant life of Latin American base communities, particularly in Brazil. Here was a church movement bringing together resistance to dictators molded by Western imperialism with a commitment to the way of Jesus that did not demand one forsake their allegiance to the structural flourishing of the least. So, I spent time studying Spanish. I studied abroad in Nicaragua and focused on the Protestant expression of liberation theology in Managua. At the end of the day, though, I struggled to find myself well situated upon that soil and inside that story. It would take nearly two decades for me to stumble upon a lineage parallel to base communities within which both my feet and my soul could become well situated, that of the hush harbor communities of Black enslaved people of the American South. 

The most vivid depiction of a hush harbor I have yet found is portrayed in the fictional novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison. In a scene that has become almost a sacred text for me, Morrison’s character, Baby Suggs goes out into a clearing cut deep in the woods. She sits down on a rock, prays silently, and then puts her stick down into the earth. She next shouts, “Let the children come!” Men and women, young and old, flock from their hidden places among the trees at her signal. It is as if Moses has called the children of Israel to freedom once again. Turn by turn, she invites the different groups to embrace their emotions in embodied ways—children to laugh, men to dance, women to cry. The clearing becomes a place of purging and release, within a circle of dignity, care, and community. 

“It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women, and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried, until exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

“She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or the glorybound pure.

“She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.”

While this is a fictional account, it is historically true that Black, enslaved folx did find ways to slip off the land of their enslavers, often under the cover of night. They would find deep woods, cane breaks, ravines, or any place that provided adequate distance from the master’s knowledge and gaze in order to find emancipated space. Such space existed thoroughly outside of the colonizing practices of white supremacy and the accounts of formerly enslaved people reveal that often these spaces were places of human dignity and of various forms of worship.

Embracing decolonial Christian theology and practice requires us to learn to speak treason. But it also requires us to find communities which live out treason sometimes simply by their very existence, sometimes by the commitments they pursue, often by both.

Christian base communities in Latin America were such communities. Hush harbors of the enslaved also provided such space—off the plantation, beyond the master’s gaze, beyond the imagination of empire. As a pastor, I’m convinced that we need more churches that can courageously recognize both our intuitions and our factual knowledge about the ways our world is ordered. We need churches of holy subversion, places that embody their resistance not simply by what they say, but also by how they are organized. Speaking treason and organizing church in ways that feel so far outside of the colonial mold that they are traitorous to the existing order is part of our decolonizing work. And while acknowledging that such work is necessary may seem calculating or even cynical, it is actually the only work that will bring us back in touch with a wider imagination for grace and the gracious world we are meant to inhabit. It is the very work—and the only work—that can bring us back to our hearts.

¹ Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde

² Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis

³ Beloved by Toni Morrison