Slavery was a system designed to dehumanize and annihilate the soul and a people. It brought a people to a state of Nothingness. Says Dona Marimba Richards,
…herein lies the miracle of black existence in New Europe: out of “nothingness” we built a world. In an environment that denied Black being, we insisted on being.
Being triumphed over non-being—the forces of non-being brought forth hidden power and imagination from within the Black soul. Indeed soul itself took on a power, and so, too, did imagination and creativity.
Oppressed by dehumanizing circumstances we still found something in which to recognize enough of ourselves to revitalize our souls—to create new selves. They took from us everything they could, but there was something left inside that slavery couldn’t touch.
Key to this survival was creativity—creating “new selves” and a vision of the sacred.
We created a vision of the sacred in a spiritually barren environment…. We reached beyond European Christianity into the depths of the religiosity—this spirituality—and discovered the Divine within us.
Expression was key to this spirituality—creative expression.
From the very first we gave expression to that Divinity for it was our humanity….The expressions that emerged were our language, our music, our dance, our thought patterns, our laughter, our walk, our spirituality. These were the vehicles through which the African ethos expressed itself in America.
By taking the drums away from the slaves in North America, slave owners were trying to disempower and disconnect the Africans from their spiritual roots. It was live or die, survive or disintegrate, create or be annihilated. The African American chose creativity.
They attempted to isolate us, to cut us off from our source of spirit…. In order to survive spiritually, we had to create meaning. We had to create order in the midst of chaos… we were forced therefore to create something different. Some form within a modality compatible with the African world-view, through which we could make contact with the Source.
Unlike modern European philosophers, the African world view is not ill at ease with the concept of “soul.” Indeed,
soul is the essence of the human in the African view. It is that aspect of the person that expresses her union with the universal order and through it with all Being. To “touch” our soul is to touch us most deeply.
Leonard Barrett calls soul a
...force–Soul-force is that power of the Black man that turns sorrow into joy, crying into laughter, defeat into victory. It is patience while suffering, determination while frustrated and hope while in despair.
Soul combines feeling and intellect—it goes beyond the rationalistic European understanding of mind as reason alone.
It is that ability of the human being to feel which is, in terms of the African world-view, essentially human.
Molette puts it this way:
The Afro-American aesthetic places a very high value upon emotionally motivated behavior; or another term that might be used to describe it would be spiritually motivated behavior.
Adapted from Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells, pp. 240-242.
Banner Image: African drumline. Photo by Lee Pigott on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
Do you agree that “soul” is about touching the universe? Do you concur that feeling lies at the heart of being “essentially human” and that spirituality and deep emotions are synonyms? What follows from that?
Recommended Reading
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths
Matthew Fox calls on all the world traditions for their wisdom and their inspiration in a work that is far more than a list of theological position papers but a new way to pray—to meditate in a global spiritual context on the wisdom all our traditions share. Fox chooses 18 themes that are foundational to any spirituality and demonstrates how all the world spiritual traditions offer wisdom about each.“Reading One River, Many Wells is like entering the rich silence of a masterfully directed retreat. As you read this text, you reflect, you pray, you embrace Divinity. Truly no words can fully express my respect and awe for this magnificent contribution to contemporary spirituality.” –Caroline Myss, author of Anatomy of the Spirit
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
Because creativity is the key to both our genius and beauty as a species but also to our capacity for evil, we need to teach creativity and to teach ways of steering this God-like power in directions that promote love of life (biophilia) and not love of death (necrophilia). Pushing well beyond the bounds of conventional Christian doctrine, Fox’s focus on creativity attempts nothing less than to shape a new ethic.
“Matt Fox is a pilgrim who seeks a path into the church of tomorrow. Countless numbers will be happy to follow his lead.” –Bishop John Shelby Spong, author, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin
