On a day when we learned more than we might wish to know about terror, oppression and suffering, it was transcendent to worship with the spirited people of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church.  The joy of all the music, but especially the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” with the lyrics of James Weldon Johnson telling the story of enslaved people with sober awareness and redemptive abandon– it lifted us up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyS3HPInHtI&feature=youtu.be

[This music video has some of the same stunning images of racism and heroism we have seen at the Conference this week, juxtaposed with the resolute language of the hymn. Worth watching and listening to.]

We have Come
over a way that with tears has been Watered,
We have come,
treading our path Through the blood of the slaughtered,

I have never felt more lovingly embraced in worship by the musicians, the preacher, by the worshippers themselves of Dexter Memorial, a church that lies in the shadow of a Capitol building with Confederate icons on its steps and Jim Crow remnants in its laws.

Out from The gloomy past,
till now we stand at Last
Where the white gleam
of our star is Cast.

Honestly, Victoria and I spent more time in church than in the Legacy Museum or the Memorial for Peace and Justice, but we had viewed them a year ago.  Like many others I was appalled by the rapid growth of the slave market in the early nineteenth century and the revolting revival of enslavement in the latter nineteenth century, with 73% of Alabama state revenue deriving from “contract leasing,” deployment of mostly-black prisoners in arduous labor.

“Gray Group’s” responses to the Legacy Museum and the Memorial ranged from dire despair to horror to anger to sincere self-examination. Many considered the psychological residue of enslavement most like PTSD scars remaining on today’s African American people. Some saw connections between slavery and current mass incarceration. Others cited the connections between lynching, police brutality and capital punishment. The persistence of the brutality weighed heavily on us.

Facing the truth is never easy, and these particular truths weigh cruelly. We have allowed ourselves to be touched by the pain of kindred spirits, and we have wished for reparations, whether they are emotional, spiritual or material.  May each of us find consolation in whatever brings us hope.

I cling to the hope I see from uniting in worship with the loving souls at Dexter Avenue Church. And I hope, in that great arc of history, to find justice from a merciful God. James Weldon Johnson gives words to it:

God of our weary years,
God of Our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus
Far on the way;
Thou who has by thy Might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us Forever in the path, we pray

Lest our feet
Stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts,
drunk with the wine of The world, we forget thee,

Shadowed beneath thy Hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.