A Word from Bob
I’ve developed today’s post from my book Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care. For a free copy of Chapter 6, the Old Ship of Zion: More Than Just Sunday Meetings, click here. In Chapter 7 of Beyond the Suffering, we learn about the slave spirituals in A Sorrowful Joy: Everybody’s Hearts in Tune.
Empathy and Encouragement
The slave spirituals illustrate the importance of blending hurt and hope, empathy and encouragement, the earthly story and the heavenly story.
Thomas Higginson, a New England abolitionist, commanded the first freed slave regiment to fight against the Confederacy. He recorded the songs sung around the evening campfires by the First South Carolina Volunteers. Writing about their slave spirituals, Higginson highlights their balance.
“The attitude is always the same. . . Nothing but patience for this life,—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the combination is always implied.”
Higginson then illustrates this interplay between patience and triumph. In This World Almost Done, for instance, we hear patience motivated by future hope.
Brother, keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,
Keep your lamp trimmin’ and a-burnin’,
Keep
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