by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
Drawing on African American experience, Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964) describes the image of God as “a singin’ something.” An educator who eventually gets her doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris, Cooper teaches and writes in the era after Emancipation and the Civil War when whites reconstruct limits on black folks’ freedom.
This period of social backlash aimed to put blacks back in their place after the dynamic push for freedom. Catholics live in a backlash dynamic today as some seek to return the Church to the way it was before the renewal of Vatican II.
Theologian Karen Baker Fletcher explores Cooper’s unique analogy for how we humans are like God, an analogy that arises out of African American spirituals and blues. Usually theologians identify reason and will as the human characteristics that make us like God. Cooper identifies voice and music as the irrepressible human and Holy Spirit in us, crying out against oppression and indignity.
The slave era generated an African American Christianity. Evangelizing introduced slaves to the God who heard the cries of the enslaved Hebrews in Egypt and sent Moses to lead them to freedom. In Jesus African Americans found someone like them who suffered at the hands of temple and empire officials but whom God did not abandon and instead raised up. They found Christ their kin and king.
Singing is one of the most intimate actions humans do together. We make single chords out of multiple voices. We listen and get a chord so in tune it activates the harmonics at every octave, ringing higher and higher, mystically. We become more together than we are alone when we sing. We feel together and inspire one another.
We also theologize together in the words and melodies when we sing. Spirituals sweeten the irony of some Christians’ hypocrisy, “Everybody talkin’ about heaven ain’t goin’ there.” The black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” remembers the history of slavery and the price ancestors paid for survival and freedom. Singing these songs awakens the “singin’ something” in us, our soaring spirit and likeness to God, the source of our human dignity.
- When has music stirred the “singin’ something” in you?