from Sorrow Songs—the Ground of Hope
(part eight)

Finally, we turn to an examination of the place and significance of the fact of heaven in the thinking of these early singers. Heaven was a place—it was not merely an idea in the mind. This must be held in mind, constantly. The thinking about it is spatial. It is the thinking of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. “I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you I shall come again, and take you unto myself that where I am there you may be also.” “In my father's house are many mansions.” These word pictures supplied a concreteness to the fulfillment of all earth’s aspirations and longings. The songs are many, expressing highly descriptive language of this character:

I haven't been to heaven
But I've been told,
The streets are pearl
And the gates are gold;
Not made with hands.

What a plaintiff wistfulness is found here:

In bright mansions above,
In bright mansions above,
Lord, I want to live up Yonder;
In bright mansions above.

Such an aspiration was in sharp contrast to dimly lighted cabins with which they were familiar. Perfection, truth, beauty, even goodness are again and again symbolized by light. This is universal.

Heaven was as intensely personal as the facts of their experience or as the fact of the Judgment. Here at last was a place where the slave was counted in. He had the dignity of personal registration.

O write my name, O write my name,
The angels in heaven are going to write my name.
Yes, write my name with a golden pen,
The angels in heaven are going to write my name.

Heaven is regarded as a dimension of self-extension in the sense of private possession:

I want God's heaven to be mine, to be mine,
Yes, I want God's heaven to be mine.

Who is there that can escape the irony and the triumph in :

I got a robe,
You got a robe,
All God's children got robes.
When we get to heaven
We're going to put on our robes,
We're going to shout all over God's heaven.

There will be no prescription, no segregation, no separateness, no slave row, but complete freedom of movement—the most psychologically dramatic of all manifestations of freedom.

All of these songs and many others like them argue for an authentic belief in personal immortality. In large part it is a belief growing out of the necessities of life as they experienced it. Family ties are restored, friends and particularly loved ones are reunited. The most precious thing of all was the fact that personal identity was not lost but heightened. Heaven would not be heaven, it would have no meaning, if the fact of contrasting experiences was not always possible and evident. There was a great compulsion to know then a new and different life, which knowledge could only be real if the individual were able to recall how it once was with him. We are not surprised to find a great emphasis on reunion. There was nothing more heart-tearing in the far off time of madness than the separation of families at the auction block. Wives were sold from their husbands to become breeders for profit, children were separated from their parents and from each other—in fact, from the beginning, the slave population was a company of displaced and dispossessed people. The possibility of ever seeing one's loved ones again was very remote. The conviction grew that this is the kind of universe that cannot deny ultimately the demands of love and longing. The issue of reuniting with loved ones turned finally on the hope of immortality and the issue of immortality turned on the fact of God. Therefore God would make it right and once again God became the answer.

This personal immortality carried with it also the idea of rest from labor, of being able to take a long sigh cushioned by a deep sense of peace. If time is regarded as having certain characteristics that are event-transcending and the human spirit is not essentially timebound but a time binder, then the concept of personal survival of death follows automatically. For man is never completely involved in, or absorbed by, experience. He is an experiencer with recollection and memory—so these songs insist. The logic of such a position is that man was not born in time, that he was not created by a time-space experience, but rather that man was born into time. Something of him enters all time-space relationships, even birth, completely and fully intact, and is not created by the time-space relationship. In short, the most significant thing about man is what Eckhardt calls the “uncreated element” in his soul. This was an assumed fact profoundly at work in the life and thought of the early slaves.

This much was certainly clear to them—the soul of man was immortal. It could go to heaven or hell, but it could not die. Most of the references to hell are by inference. Not to be with God was to be in hell, but it did not mean not to be.

(For the Inward Journey: the writings of Howard Thurman.
Selected by Anne Spencer Thurman. pages 219-221
Originally published in The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death)

I had the great fortune of spending time with colleagues yesterday. I attended the Sunday service at Towson Unitarian Universalist Church and was deeply moved by the homily of Rev. Clare Petersberger. She spoke out passionately about the abduction of Rumeza Ozturk on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, where Petersberger lived while a student at Harvard Divinity School. This abduction, apparently a response to her co-authoring an op-ed piece urging Tufts to divest from Israel, included her being flown to Louisiana without the opportunity to speak to a lawyer, and the government’s silence about her whereabouts. The equating of First Amendment protected speech with terrorist acts is terrifying, to me, and I think but a small reflection of Thurman’s statement, “There was nothing more heart-tearing in the far off time of madness than the separation of families at the auction block.” My prayer, our hope, I think, is that due process will ease the heart-tearing of this moment.

I remember working on Maxine Klein’s play “Boston Remembers” in 1980, the 350th anniversary of the founding of Boston. One scene, that was ultimately cut from the play, took place in a cell on Deer Island where the fictional character Emma Finklestein, a crowd-moving firebrand, had been taken during a raid by the actual U.S. Department of Justice under the leadership of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 in two months arrested over 6,000 immigrants in over 30 cities and deported 556 foreign-born residents. It had a chilling effect on the labor movement, then involved in a number of general strikes, and the movements of anarchists, socialist and communists in the United States.

Palmer was appointed by Woodrow Wilson. It was under President Wilson that the federal workforce was re-segregated. Wilson also had a screening in the East Room of the White House of the racist trope “Birth of a Nation.” When I was at First Unitarian Church of Baltimore, one of the “fun facts” that was told about First Church was that Woodrow Wilson, when he was a student at Johns Hopkins University, was a singer in that congregation’s paid quartet. We told the story that he chose us over our Presbyterian neighbors because we paid better. Snicker, snicker. But what we seldom considered was whether or not Wilson ever listened to any sermons at the church, and whether those sermons might have helped him overcome the cultural racism that had formed his upbringing.

Listening to sermons alone cannot change the human heart. The words we use must be supported by the ways we behave, and those ways create the new culture we hope to enact, develop and enshrine in institutions, like congregations and systems of law, and thought, reflected in the writings of people like Thurman and heart-moving and mind-changing sermons like that of Rev. Petersberger.

Thank God (whether you spell god with one or two Os) for the desire and capacity to make the wrong into the right.