Most of what I want to communicate through my blogs is contained in the hyperlink references highlighted in red, which, thanks to WordPress analytics, I am informed hardly ever gets noticed, which should have frustrated my persistence a long time ago, being assured that hardly anyone is paying attention. What fuels however my effort is the sure knowledge that truth, even when spoken into a vacuum is powerful and that what is recorded speaks long after both contemporary writers and readers are long gone. God, silent listener to every conversation, master of both time and season is also the final judge of every word expressed, heeded or unheeded and is more to be regarded than the fleeting opinions of men.
My Catholic theologian friend once opined that the Catholic church’s big mistake was snubbing Luther in the time when they still had the opportunity to productively engage. It is almost meaningless now to use hindsight to try to imagine what could or should have been. The Reformation, both blessing and bane is now a fact of history, and whether Christianity can ever recover from endemic schism to again exert global dominance, while no longer a rational probability, is still an article of faith for true believers, but about as conceivable as the conundrum posed by the Spirit to the prophet Ezekiel – Can these dry bones live? No one even seeks to imagine, being comfortable enough in fundamentalist cloisters, each claiming exclusive theological purity and false piety, while the world around mostly rots in ashes of hell.
I listen to both versions (the Black gospel and the White one) and indeed they are poles apart, and if one hasn’t noticed that, their head is buried in the sand…and eventually same sand will bury lifeless traditions as surely as Byzantium fell to the Muslim hordes more in tune with the impulse of the times. History has its own flow and narrative currents that are hardly responsive to ideological cloister and cocoon. Those who think otherwise might want to read it – as much of the 6000 year printed record as one can, and the preceding 94,000+ printed in stone and remnant DNA.
That record does show however how kinetic and transformative ideas and movements can be when aligned with contemporary human demands and aspirations. Smug believers perhaps can contemplate more deeply the implications of Jesus’ radical statement ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’. Religious fundamentals (like the Sabbath…or any other claimed cardinal precept, dogma or doctrine) become nothing more than Shibboleths when unresponsive to man’s greater need – the balance of justice and mercy which should concern every prudent religious and political leader, since our Bibles claim them to be the very foundation of God’s throne.
True Justice and Judgment demand for every voice to be heard – the slave-master’s greatest nightmare. The devil’s daily duty is to banish dissent so tyranny can rule unabated. Revelations 6:10 give us a picture of heaven we rarely focus on, out of sync with the No-more-crying-over-there consolation theology sold slaves as barter for earthly freedom. Those who seek to defeat Jesus’ teachings by forever divorcing earth from heaven need to explain what need those disquieted crying voices have for avengement in paradise and those who would rather forget entirely the past explain why we are surrounded by (the book of) Hebrews’ cloud of witnesses. What do these ancestors want from us today?
The voices of the dead which like that of Abel continue to speak to a listening God, ignored though they be by deaf earth, have stories well worth considering. Evangelists in a hurry to bury the ancestral baggage of PST (Post Slavery Trauma) represented so eloquently by Hilary Beckles in our last year’s Emancipation Day conversation, are certainly on a mission, but not of redemption. Cornel West’s claim that justice is what love looks like in public, and its calling card is to allow the voice of suffering to speak, is well made.
Can the Caribbean church once again produce leaders like India’s Dr. Shashi Tharoor or South Africa’s Julius Malema who grapple with the burden of the people ?
Join our conversation this year.
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YeKengalé 