In a recent lecture-concert at the Iliff School of Theology, Art Jones, founder of the Spirituals Project, explained that the primary features of the African American spirituals tradition are: the expression of grief and suffering and the capacity to transcend that suffering. “In order to transcend the suffering,” Jones told the audience, “you have to go into the center of the suffering. And as you go into the center of it, you gain the strength to come out of it.”⁴²

Slavery is a difficult subject to manage. For peoples of the Americas, our histories of genocide and slavery are the jagged foundational archetypes of our national psyches. The lacerating roughness from which we seem unwilling or unable to redeem ourselves. And so we bleed. Perhaps some of the problem is fear. Fear of being overwhelmed at the magnitude of injustice, wondering what it will cost us, internally and otherwise, to face this great trauma and live.

One of the major lessons and opportunities of the spirituals and other religious traditions of the diaspora, is that at the heart of any experience of trauma there exist the resources for the transformation of that trauma, the means for its own healing. Out of one of the most horrible chapters in human history, there emerged ritual and artistic traditions that carry, in their bones, the elements of healing from that horror. The medicine is for all who are descendents of the suffering – which is every one of us. We are all troubled by this pain at the center of our communal life.

The songs are the stories of the trauma, transformed into strength to last beyond it. The spirituals are history “running through your body,” Reagon and Sales attest. They are sacred vessels that hold the tenacity and sorrow of the slaves themselves and give us a way to reach there. They are the reminder, You got a right, you got a right. They are also, as scholar of Afro-Cuban philosophy Stephan Palmié suggests, a way to un-mute the terrifying historical experience that remains, rhetorically dispersed, at the heart of American identity.⁴³ These songs give us a language, an embodied knowledge about the complex nature of American consciousness. They hold in tandem the injustices that have been our generational inheritance as well as the lyric and unsentimental assertion we have also been gifted -- that we can always choose another way.

The spirituals, like the sacred stones, the balming leaves, and the ancestral waters are the memory of our forbearers offering wisdom and assurance. Urging us into the hard places, into the wilderness, into the truth of where we have come from together. And into the possibilities of where we might yet go. Showing us there is a way through. Our ancestors walked it. They ran to freedom through swamps. They tied their prayers in the branches of the tree of life. They spelled their griefs in low eliding tones and put strength in the songs for us to cultivate and shelter.