Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310017
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD SCHEININ KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Her words rose as a ``piteous hush,'' spoken to Jesus. Washington left his bed to kneel beside her in the darkness. And ``in many ways I have been in spiritual solidarity with my mother since that moment,'' he writes. ``She taught me to pray. Her silence and her action taught me that I must pray.''
Annie Beatrice Moore Washington is now 84, a retired housekeeper and church mother in Knoxville, Tenn., to whom her son dedicates the new anthology ``Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans.''
In the book, James Melvin Washington, now 46 and a religious historian at Union Theological Seminary in New York, collects the prayers of slaves, abolitionists, school teachers, preachers, poets, and modern African-American nationalists. Reading their ``conversations with God,'' writes Washington, an ordained Baptist minister, is a way to ``recover the history of the spiritual disciplines that sustained my people through slavery, Jim and Jane Crowism, and the civil rights movement.'' It is the spiritual wellspring from which sprang the vast movement for social change that Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead.
Washington, who edited a collection of King's writings, ``A Testament of Hope,'' likens prayer to breathing. It has infused life for generations of black Americans, he says, speaking from his New York apartment. But today, he fears, the black spiritual tradition is endangered by a sense of ``nihilism,'' rising from legitimate but ``undisciplined anger'' that infects portions of the black community. To those who say that religion has failed to make a difference, Washington says the persistence of prayer is a bulwark against ``the historical formations of evil.'' It is a critique of oppression: The person who prays knows that God, not the oppressor, holds the real power in this world.
Here is an interview with Washington:
Q: There's such warmth in your recollections of learning to pray - not only with your mother, but alongside her friend Helen Grady. She was disabled and shunned by many, but became your confessor. What exactly did she and your mother teach you?
A: They taught me that it is a privilege to call on God. It is not simply for the privileged. No, it is the most radical form of democracy conceivable. And one need not worry about feelings of inadequacy, doubt, or failure, because God has the ability and the generosity to respond, regardless. And seldom can you anticipate how God will respond. That's why they talk about God's response as ``Amazing Grace.''
Q: Can you remember how it felt to get down on your knees beside Mrs. Grady?
A: Oh, yes. I felt wonderful. I always recall the power and the simplicity of the faith of people that I've known. It's been like a beacon that has kept me from losing my center.
And what I always found interesting about people like my mother and Mrs. Grady was that they found God in such strange places. I never will forget - I probably shouldn't say this - that one day my mother played the numbers when she couldn't pay the rent. She and my father simply couldn't come up with the money. Well, she dreamed a number and she played it and she won. And her reaction was, ``Well, I didn't expect God to respond in this way, but he did.'' And she just moved on from there.
Is that a form of magical thinking? Today we often analyze things to the point where we're so awash in details that we deprecate and ignore wisdom. And I think we're starved for insight and these people had a calmness of spirit, and they taught me that you can't solve a problem if you wear it, if you're in the grips of hysteria. They have been some of the calmest people I have known in my life, and yet some of the most burdened.
Q: Mrs. Grady would turn to you and say, ``Honey, let's talk to the Lord.'' Do you still pray like that?
A: Yes. There's a consciousness of the presence of God - and I don't mean the presence of God in an anthropomorphic or human form. No, there's just a feeling of company, of the presence of a friend. And sometimes I just talk - I just literally talk to God. But I also look at prayer as a form of thinking. Insight to me is a miracle; I cannot explain how ideas come to me. I mean, these wonderful little brain cells that we have are a loan. We forget that. What arrogance! This is what the Scriptures mean when they say, ``The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.''
Q: You admonish people who mock or are embarrassed by unrestrained, prayerful expressions at revival meetings and such.
A: Well, yes. Oftentimes when we encounter realities different than our own, we belittle them and dismiss them.
A colleague once criticized the way I led a communion service. He said that communion was supposed to be a celebration, and this was like a funeral. See, in my tradition it's a memorial service, so you moan and you groan and you cry because Jesus is your friend. The crucifixion was an ugly moment in what Jonathan Edwards calls ``the history of the work of redemption.'' And then you universalize that moment by remembering all those times when you have been betrayed by others and when you betrayed others. And you then ask for forgiveness. You cry for the human condition.
Q: And yet I'm struck by the generosity and patience - the lack of moaning - in many of the prayers in your anthology. Absalom Jones, a celebrated pastor who was pulled from his knees and thrown out of a white Methodist church, prays for the president and the nation, even as he calls for the abolition of the slave trade.
A: I think there was a great deal of pity for the oppressor because, in order to oppress, he has lost some of his humanity. And they felt so sorry for him, so sad.
I'm thinking of ``A Slave Woman's Prayer,'' in the book. This woman overheard her master expressing doubts about the dirtiness of his involvement in slavery. He felt it was something he had to do to support his family, so he held his nose and did it. But he didn't like himself for it. So she prays, ``O, Lord, bless my master. When he calls upon thee to damn his soul, do not hear him ... save him.''
Q: Aren't there times when the prayers of this woman and others demonstrate too much patience?
A: I wasn't in their situation. But from my vantage point, yes, I think there was too much patience. ... Between 1889 and 1920 there were 3,900 black people lynched and burned in this country. That's almost one a week. That's terrorism. I got a little taste of it. I was born in 1948 in the South. And it was humiliating to have to sit in the back of the bus to go and see ``The Lone Ranger'' at the white theater, having to go through the side entrance and so on. That was painful enough, and yet it doesn't begin to match the absurd cruelties my predecessors were subjected to.
Q: After the abolition of slavery, the men and women who prayed continued to refer to themselves as slaves. Frederick Douglass in 1893 says, ``I am left in the hell of unending slavery. O, God, save me! God, deliver me!''
A: It's like dealing with the Holocaust. It's the memory. There's a book sitting in front of me now, called ``History of Memory in African American Culture.'' The memory of the slavery experience - it's like the memory of someone who's been raped. It's a ghost in your head. That's one answer. The other answer is that slavery hadn't died. It had been replaced by the institution of segregation. The humiliation of African-American people remained one of the favorite pastimes of white America. It's an ugly history.
Q: So the question arises: Why keep praying when the ugliness persists? The black church has been criticized for selling escapism - telling its people that things will be better ``in the by-and-by,'' the afterlife. Yet you characterize prayer as a form of ``justice education.''
A: Yes, prayer becomes a form of empowerment. It becomes a reminder to the oppressed that the power of the oppressor is not ultimate or definitive. The very act of prayer is a form of educating the one who is oppressed and who prays - it teaches that person to recognize who has the real power. It becomes an act of resistance. Because you're saying that the oppressor doesn't have the last word; God has the last word.
Q: How does that conception operate in King's life and religious philosophy?
A: It's critical. In King's demonstrations that I was involved in, you were educated in how to conduct yourself: ``This is the reason that we pray. This is the reason that we sing.'' There's a psychological reason and a strategic reason and a spiritual reason. ... The spiritual reason is that you're minimizing the power of the so-called powerful elements of society. You're saying that just because a city council, a state legislature or a Congress gets together and legislates laws, it doesn't mean they're right. It is a refusal to sanctify majority opinion, because majority opinion is not always moral. We don't hear that too often, do we?
Q: So King helped to formulate this social-justice framework for prayer and singing. It's interesting that you repeatedly treat hymns as prayers in the book. I was struck by the words to Charles Albert Tindley's ``Stand By Me.'' They practically sang themselves off the page.
A: Oh, my Lord. That one's precious to me. I used to sing that for my congregation when I was a pastor. Charles Albert Tindley was a special person, a pioneer of gospel music. He was a custodian of a church in Philadelphia and he was such a holy man that the church sent him to college and then got their bishop - these were Methodists - to place him as their pastor. By 1914 he had 10,000 members of that church. His hymns are some of the most well-loved by African-Americans.
Listen to the words:
In the midst of tribulation,
Stand by me.
When the hosts of hell assail,
And my strength begins to fail,
Thou who never lost a battle,
Stand by me.
by CNB