Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Christianity Today Award of Merit In the midst of our hectic, overscheduled lives, caring for the soul is imperative. Now, more than ever, we need to pause—intentionally—and encounter the Divine. Soul care director Barbara Peacock illustrates a journey of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care from an African American perspective. She reflects on how these disciplines are woven into the African American culture and lived out in the rich heritage of its faith community. Using examples of ten significant men and women—Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Darrell Griffin, Renita Weems, Harold Carter, Jessica Ingram, Coretta Scott King, James Washington, and Howard Thurman—Barbara offers us the opportunity to engage in practices of soul care as we learn from these spiritual leaders. If you've yearned for a more culturally authentic experience of spiritual transformation in your life and community, this book will help you grow in new yet timeless ways. Come to the river to draw deeply for your soul's refreshment.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 246
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
To Gilbert,my husband and prayer covering,thank you for leading our devotionsand for all the great meals.You are a wonderful and loving husband,but most importantly you are a man of God.
For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all God’s people, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Throughout the centuries, prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care have been woven into the fabric of the African American culture. While soul carers in our community do not necessarily have the formal title of spiritual director, they have been operating in such a capacity for decades.
My first models and mentors in spirituality were my grandmother, Mrs. Ellie Powell Peacock, my mother, Mrs. Sarah Peacock Lewis, and numerous aunties and uncles. How precious are my memories of them! They did not have official roles as spiritual leaders and contemplatives, but they devoted themselves to God and his people, and to the disciplines of their Christian faith.
Our family’s spiritual practices included prayer, Bible reading, singing, listening, silence, solitude, attending church, and enjoying God’s creation. The beautiful Carolina farmland God blessed us to tend was truly a gift. Many of the disciplines of my Christian faith were not learned from a book but instead implicitly from the natural environment surrounding our humble home. In those days of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies, we weren’t inundated with technology. Therefore living a life of simplicity was not a chore; it was all we knew.
I was joyfully raised in an environment where everyone farmed, and this shaped my learning. I learned from the land, the animals we tended, and farming ethics. The norm was to rise early in prayer in preparation for the tasks that lay before us. Such tasks included feeding the chickens, cows, pigs, horses, dogs, and cats; hoeing tobacco; picking strawberries, blueberries, grapes, apples, peaches, and cucumbers; and gathering walnuts and pecans. There is so much to be said for this rich heritage, though we were not considered rich at the time. Such humble beginnings have shaped me to be a natural caregiver, an intentional listener, a prayerful disciple, and a studious student. For me, life, ministry, and spiritual disciplines began on the farm.
MY SPIRITUAL BEGINNING AND CALLING
Due to my simple farmland lifestyle, I naturally gravitate to disciplines geared to form the soul. In particular, I am drawn to prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care. Undoubtedly these are my passions.
The unconditional love of my forebears was evident. In addition to thanking God for my maternal parents, I have a tremendous amount of gratitude toward my paternal parents. I thank God for my father, Arie Lewis, and for his father, Atlas Lewis, and my mother’s father, Richard Peacock. Both my grandfather on my daddy’s side and my great-grandfather on my mama’s side were among the founders of schools and churches in their respective communities. This legacy continues in the noted communities of Bladen and Columbus counties in North Carolina. I am eternally grateful that their legacy continues through the spiritual lines of thousands of men and women of God, myself included. Because of their God-inspired tenacity, I am able to press forward to impart what God has given me in my garden of life. Thus, in the spirit of my foreparents, we continue our sacred journey together.
Our home church, Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church, was where I received Christ as my Lord and personal Savior. During the fall revival of 1967 I asked him to come into my life and save me. To this day I can hear the church mothers saying, “He loves you. Just ask him into your heart. He loves you.” Over and over, they kept telling me how much Jesus loved me. And I believed them with everything in me! On this foundation, my faith journey of love began. And truly love is the foundation of my Christian experience. Most importantly it is the foundation of the Christian faith.
As Thomas Merton said, many Christians have “practically no idea of the immense love of God for them, and the power of that Love to do them good, to bring them happiness.”1 Many of us do not fully experience the joy of life, simply because we do not know the immense love that God has for us (as stated simply in John 3:16). One of the great markers of spiritual maturity is growing in awareness of the depth of God’s love.
I thank God for his faithfulness toward my siblings and me in that he blessed us with an environment of a loving, caring, and nurturing community, including our parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, and cousins. Such a foundation in my Christian journey allows me to seek ways to love unconditionally. Consequently I emphatically embrace the theology of love. I believe that love covers all kinds of sin. I believe what the world needs more is love. And is love not the greatest commandment? This is the greatest call: to love.
An individual’s spiritual development is a powerful process that results in greater depth of character. This process is traditionally called spiritual formation, which writers Richard Foster and Emilie Griffin called “a series of concrete actions that will gently move us to transformation in Christ.”2 But they were careful to alert us to the fact that the disciplines themselves are not transformative; our transformation is God’s work, a work of grace. Such grace is what equips an individual in the kingdom of God to grow spiritually. The disciplines of the Christian faith are conduits of spiritual development that catapult men and women of God to new places in their faith journey.
Spiritual formation comprises a number of spiritual disciplines that assist us in communing with Yahweh. A list of practices can incorporate numerous disciplines, but the desired outcome is the same: spiritual growth.
In this book we will focus on three disciplines: prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care. Throughout we will see that oftentimes one spiritual discipline is enhanced by and even strengthened by another. It takes a plethora of spiritual disciplines for a disciple of Christ to reach higher heights and deeper dimensions of God’s glorious, loving grace. Though prayer is often an independent discipline, it is interdependent with spiritual direction and soul care.
Before we move further, it is important to note that in some contexts, spiritual direction and soul care are used interchangeably while in others they are used distinctively. Spiritual direction is the practice of discerning the activity of God in the life of another. The term spiritual director is applied to the person who seeks God’s directives for the life of another while attentively nurturing and caring for that individual’s very soul. That is soul care.
The call of the spiritual director is to be a conduit of God who assists directees in recognizing the activity of God’s holy presence. The spiritual director must be mindful that the ultimate director is the Holy Spirit; God sees fit to use human directors in connecting his omnipresence to their directees. Without a doubt, a key element undergirding spiritual direction and soul care is prayer.
In its simplest form, prayer is communication with God. This book highlights how prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care provide resurrection power in the lives of people of African American descent.
These disciplines have been intertwined for centuries in the African American community. Truly we are people that identify with the language of the soul. Our ancestors—and even today’s spiritualists—may not identify the attentiveness we possess as spiritual direction and soul care, but the Holy Spirit of the past and the present, the keeper of our souls, is the source that we engage in each other. We speak soul to soul and spirit to spirit as we seek God and the hearts of our sisters and brothers. This is spiritual direction and this is soul care. We are the people of spirit and soul!
However, the term spiritual direction is not frequently used in the African American community (though it may be more prominent in some communities than others). For the sake of clarity, I will use the two words together as one discipline and will extract definitions where necessary. In particular, I will discuss the meaning of spiritual direction. One goal of this book is to reflect on spiritual direction in mainstream European American Christianity and to see such disciplines lived out in the African American faith community.
Before I go on, note that many contemplative patriarchs of the early church had a genealogy rooted in Africa. In her book Joy Unspeakable, Barbara Holmes, president of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, makes this clear when she identifies the spiritual leadership of several figures of African descent—Tertullian, Augustine, Cyprian, and others—who were “instrumental in the expansion and theological grounding of the early church.”3 In addition to identifying these African spiritual giants, Holmes noted that “although initially the spread of Islam limited the expansion of North African Christian practices to sub-Saharan Africa, the trajectories of today’s Christian contemplative practices can be traced to the early communities in the Middle East and Africa.”4 Thus we see spiritual leaders of the Christian faith with African roots.
Persons of African descent have a rich heritage of Christian spirituality that can be identified as far back as the first century, long before they reached the colonized shores of North America. Such a legacy is embedded in the spiritual bloodline of African Americans and can be found in numerous heroes and “sheroes” who are recognizable in African American history.
THE SHAPE OF THIS BOOK
I am excited to share with you ten men and women of God who exemplify prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care in the faith community. They live (or lived) out and wrote on an African theology built on a rich spiritual heritage.
At the end of each section about a spiritual leader, you will find reflections and questions. A discussion of the disciplines of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care will be integrated with other disciplines that can support and intensify them. At the end of each chapter are five sections:
questions for reflection
talking with God
visio divina
prayer
hearing from God
At the conclusion of each chapter, you will be asked to write a prayer that relates to what you have learned.
I am aware that visio divina might be new to many of you. When I entered Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1999, I embarked on a journey that transformed my life. During the first stages of my tenure, I was introduced to a drawing that made a tremendous impact on my soul and spirit: Jesus and the Lamb by Katherine Brown.5 As I studied this sketch in seminary, it began to speak to me in numerous ways. Truly an illustration is worth a thousand words. It captures intimacy, love, conviction, direction, soul care, prayer, and so much more. It reminds me of the price that Jesus paid so we could encounter his majesty on earth as we sup with him.
As time went on in ministry, I began to incorporate more images and photos into my teaching and preaching. I also began to implement the concept of visio divina during moments of meditation and contemplation in individual and small group sessions of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care. Visio divina is an ancient spiritual discipline that calls us to see spiritually beyond the actual photo, illustration, or picture. Our mental and spiritual reflections cause us to sink deep into the revelations that can be found within the image. Such spiritual insight is revealed only by the person of the Holy Spirit.
The Latin meaning of visio divina is “divine seeing, or sacred seeing.” This ancient discipline of seeing God is a visual encounter that allows one to draw closer to God through an image. Visio divina invites you to the artistic call of seeing more creatively. It invites you to see all there is to see with a thirst for a continuous and transformative revelation of what you are viewing. Such insight requires seeing beyond ones immediate first impressions. This reflective insight calls the soul to travel with and beyond the artist’s medium.
From these numerous settings and experiences, it is evident to me that a picture or an illustration can make an impact on the life of a learner. Reflecting on Jesus and the Lamb time and time again inspired me to include a section on visio divina at the end of each chapter. We will use two images of Jesus as the Good Shepherd as our subjects of reflection in this book. While reflecting on one image or the other, I encourage you to practice visio divina by entering into a prayerful posture of reflection, meditation, and contemplation.
When you reach the visio divina section of each chapter, take precious time to ponder. Notice and be okay with any thoughts that arise. Set aside moments for prayerful study in each section. Seek God as he reveals insights on each topic. The questions that relate to a picture or sketch are guides to enable you to look at the artwork and person from a different perspective as you reflect with an open heart and mind. Questions after each time of reflection will draw you deeper into insights that are designed to evoke a soul-filled response.
As I wrote each section, I knew how a single illustration can speak a transformative message to each and every person. Some may share a similar perspective while others may not. And that is okay. Please notice the illustration and allow it to speak to you. My prayer is that your time of visio divina blesses you. Every time I look at the lamb and man by Katherine Brown, it speaks to me differently and continues to nourish my soul, even after ten years.
Now let us dive into some origins and groundwork of African American spirituality. This beginning reading is the foundation for understanding the disciplines of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care from an African American perspective. Let’s settle in for this rich journey!
At the end of each chapter in part one, we will reflect on this illustration of Jesus as the Good Shepherd. Each time there is a reference to this image, please take a moment and let it speak to you spiritually, physically, and emotionally. Allow all your senses to be involved in sacred moments of reflection, prayer, meditation, and contemplation.
INTRODUCTION
African American Spirituality
African American spirituality has its origins on the continent of Africa. Before people of African descent were brutally transported to North American shores, they had already developed spiritual practices. They were devotees of Vodun, the river gods, Yahweh, Allah, and Olodumare, among others.1 However, once loaded on ships like animals, everything in their lives changed, including their spirituality.
Though everything around them was changing, the God they served would remain the same. Because of the sovereignty of their God, his desire for them was that they have a personal relationship with him. Such a relationship required intentionality amid oppressive living conditions. That brings us to a question: What does God require from those whose spirituality involves developing relationships in the midst of adversity? Regardless of any crisis, Yahweh, the God of all creation, requires consistent communion that allows people to be immersed in him. He desires a relationship with his people that is authentic and personal.
In Spiritual Theology: A Systematic Study of the Christian Life, Simon Chan noted, “Knowing what God wants heightens rather than diminishes our responsibility.”2 One overarching intention for creating humanity is that human beings love God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their mind (Matthew 22:37). Developing such a love relationship is a lifelong spiritual journey often complicated by the inner and outer struggles that are frequent in the Christian life. However, within these difficult moments God’s love is particularly communicated and results in the sufferer having not only a greater awareness of one’s true self but also a deeper comprehension of God’s love and will. Deep within the vicissitudes of pain, anguish, and despair, persons of African descent hold onto this immeasurable love.
As we embark on an exploration of the foundational journey of an African American ministry of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care, I will reflect on African American spirituality beginning with slavery and continuing to the twenty-first century. These reflections will be based on the lives and thoughts of the following African American spiritual leaders:
Dr. Frederick Douglass
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mrs. Rosa Parks
Dr. Darrell Griffin
Dr. Renita Weems
Dr. Harold Carter
Dr. Jessica Ingram
Mrs. Coretta Scott King
Dr. James Washington
Dr. Howard Thurman
These leaders have a track record of spiritual leadership and making an impact on society. Though not perfect, they were chosen and set aside by Yahweh, and each are examples of a life of prayer.
Prayer was and remains a recognized and respected discipline among people of African descent. However, beyond prayer, God called people of African descent to other dimensions of spirituality. Their listening ears and their declarations to others represent numerous traits identified in what we know today as spiritual direction and soul care.
Even though prayer is a prominent discipline within the African American community, threads of the practice of spiritual direction and soul care are interwoven and dispersed within our faith community. As these disciplines have not been highlighted or elevated, there is a minimum amount of material written about spiritual direction in the African American tradition. Therefore, it is necessary to engage in the history of persons in the African American community while seeking to unveil lives that represent spiritual direction and attentiveness to the soul. However, before we focus on them let us reflect on our rich heritage.
AFRICAN AMERICAN SPIRITUAL FOUNDATIONS
In Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction, Robert Kellemen and Karole Edwards recognized the need to document the history of the African American culture to more effectively comprehend and talk about Afrocentric spirituality.3 Various dimensions of spirituality existed among people of African descent, but to my knowledge there are no documents that originally named the discipline of spiritual direction or soul care among African slaves who traveled to North America during the Middle Passage.4 This does not mean these disciplines did not exist; it simply indicates they were not called that.
Even before people of African descent experienced the African diaspora, spiritualists of African descent were trailblazers of a contemplative movement. Though patriarchal spiritual giants such as early church fathers Tertullian and Augustine are known for their contemplative contributions, mainstream religious history has not prominently emphasized their origin and their African heritage. Holmes wrote, “Communal practices in Africana contexts have been hidden from view by exigencies of struggle, survival, and sustenance. As a consequence there have been scant opportunities to reflect on the journey. But the time of reflection has come.”5
Numerous historians, along with theologian Elizabeth Johnson, identify the beginning of slavery around 1619. During this time slaves were transported from Africa to the North American colonies. Over nearly four centuries, approximately ten million Africans were sent to America.6 Even though millions of lives were lost during the journey, millions survived. Stripped from African soil, slaves pondered the past, not knowing what to expect in the future.
Map of the Middle Passage
Many had memories of slave traders tearing them away from their spouses, their siblings, their children, their friends. They wondered if they would ever see their loved ones again. Some families remained intact until they were loaded on the decks of ships like herds of cattle. Thousands of souls traveled thousands of miles from their homes.
The deck of the slave ship Wildfire, April 1860
As Kellemen and Edwards visualized the transporting of slaves from Africa to America, they wrote, “Even while stowed like animals below deck, they saw the shining North Star of God with upturned eyes of faith looking out spiritual portals.”7 While in chains, many slaves expressed great faith in God, the only one who could deliver them from such inhumane circumstances.
Many were infected with ferocious diseases, including respiratory ailments and fevers that accompanied infections. Moans and groans penetrated the atmosphere as a result of pain, sickness, sorrow, and loss. No doctors were there to prescribe medications or apply appropriate salves. No preachers were there to perform eulogies. No food was there to fill hungry bellies in the midnight hour.
During these challenging hours and days on slave ships, many Africana fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and cousins were attentive toward each other’s weary, tired, and wounded souls. Many times their conversations kept them alive. Care, love, and prayerful conversation were the best prescription for the oppressed. Imagine strangers listening to, caring for, and encouraging one another in such conditions. See them holding one another even as they died. All too often, death was inevitable and, at times, considered a more comforting option than life. Those who lived expressed their faith by believing and trusting God that a better day would come.
It was on those slave ships making the Middle Passage that we find the origins of African American spiritual direction and soul care. Even though the intent was to destroy Black people and to strip them of their heritage, God’s divine hand prevailed. In the midst of the most inhumane conditions the slaves were strengthened by their spirituality. As Johnson reminded us, slaves did not debate the existence of God, but wondered “whether God was with them in their struggle.”8 The slaves needed to know that God’s abiding presence remained with them during times of questioning his attentiveness. How could a loving God allow such inhumane behavior? How could a loving God allow such oppression? How could he watch the never-ceasing humiliation of the people he created?
Despite these reasonable questions, some slaves maintained a spirit of hope. Kellemen and Edwards noted:
Individually and corporately, the slaves tapped into the Holy Spirit at every turn. In bound community, they shared with one another the Spirit of God within them, their hope of glory. The collective gathering of the power of his presence in their inner being provided life-sustaining strength in the midst of death-bidding despair. The all-surpassing power of God (see 2 Cor. 4:7-9) shared among these captured souls transformed them.9
Though the traditional principles and language of spiritual direction and soul care were not a part of the lives of those held captive on slave ships, it is evident that the presence and power of God were operative. Reflecting on the horrible bondage that Africans experienced during their transatlantic journeys and seeing God’s continuously delivering hand in the twenty-first century reveals the sovereignty of his loving care and direction. Even though the lives of Africana people are still not without challenges, we must thank God for the progress we have made because of his grace and mercy.
Days on a slave ship provided time for contemplation that was not in vain, despite the difficulties present. St. John of the Cross shed insight on the slaves’ plight. During such a time of darkness, the soul journeys to God in what he called pure faith:
For pure faith is the means whereby it is united with God. Few there are who walk along this road, because it is so narrow, dark, and terrible that, in obscurities and trials, the night of sense cannot be compared to it. . . . But God also, by means of this dark and dry night of contemplation, supernaturally instructs in his divine wisdom the soul that is empty and unhindered (which is the requirement for his divine inpouring).10
If we take the perspective of St. John of the Cross, it is clear that even in the midst of the darkest hours, God was still directing the faith-filled souls of slaves. He heard their faintest cries and pleas for deliverance, comfort, sustenance, support, relief, and love. When they were in a state of darkened weariness, anguish, and despair, God was at work in the hearts and minds of people of African descent. He bestowed his presence and unmeasurable wisdom on a people considered castaways. Even though they were devalued by mainstream society, God saw them as precious souls. St. John of the Cross wrote:
A great benefit for the soul in this night is that it exercises all the virtues together. In the patience and forbearance practiced in these voids and aridities, and through perseverance in its spiritual exercises without consolation or satisfaction, the soul practices the love of God, since it is no longer motivated by the attractive and savory gratification it finds in its work, but only by God. It also practices the virtue of fortitude, because it draws strength from weakness in the difficulties and aversions experienced in its work, and thus becomes strong.11
Despite extreme oppression, men and women from Africa learned to be more than survivors. Their faith in God gave them the spiritual tenacity to endure persecution by their captors. It was that faith that equipped them to receive his unconditional love while living in extreme torment in dehumanizing conditions. During their weakest moments of oppression, the love of God catapulted them into a position to receive his supernatural strength.
Though African captives experienced the worst of oppression on the decks of slave ships, the overarching good news was that God still prevailed. God’s loving awareness of their conditions was not absent. Centuries later, God continues to unveil his loving Spirit for those of African descent and is still working all things together for the good of those whose foremothers and forefathers endured that journey by faith. Truly, persons of African descent can say, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
Regardless of the harshness of the spiritual, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse they suffered, there were slaves of African descent who maintained an indescribably rich spirituality. Their understanding of God was shaped out of their experiences, unveiling for us the principles of African American theology.
AFRICAN AMERICAN THEOLOGY
Throughout this book I use the term African American frequently. However, over the years, the name for people of color has evolved from slave to colored, from colored to Negro, from Negro to Black, Africana identity, African-American, and/or African American. In The Prophethood of Black Believers, J. Deotis Roberts wrote:
The term “African American” can have meaning for us in two directions. It makes us aware of a peoplehood rooted in a long heritage going back to Africa, just as others look back to Europe and Asia. It also provides an equal status for blacks in the multicultural mosaic of American society, where we share with others the culture of this country.12
African Americans have a rich heritage that evolved from numerous references based on identification and diversified roots. But more important than a name that references a culture is the character of a people who know their past, present, and future identity in Christ.
