No More Pain: Spirituality in the Black Community
The
Black community has sought to struggle for social equality, religious
freedom has been the spearhead of their fight against oppressive
structures. With respect to wherever you may fall on the religious
spectrum, every form of spirituality has been essential to the Black
experience, while also being expressed in unique ways within Black
culture. Additionally, religion has very much been a coping mechanism
for African-Americans in the face of suffering.
If anyone intimately knows about suffering, it would beAfrican-Americans.
Suffering can be a cause of the powers that be, natural experiences, or
life’s inconveniences. In the Christian language, a religion of
suffering does not only entail complacency in the midst of evil, but
rather one to seek good during a fallen world and pressing forward.
Suffering is unfortunately something that no human has managed to
escape; it is inevitable. If you are living, at some point you will
experience some form of anguish.
Jesus
has never promised that his people would be exempt from experiencing
turmoil in life. In fact, God, from a biblical standpoint, arranges our
inconveniences for eternal purposes, while simultaneously promising to
walk with us through our suffering. One of my favorite writers,
Ta-Nehisi Coates, further explains this point in his book “Between The World And Me.”
Coates expresses:
Like
Coates, none of us have a place to retreat in response to the dope boys
on the corner, that the prison system craves, or the young men
abandoned by the system that have been in Rikers Island Prison
throughout the time that Kalief Browder spent
there. God, being all-powerful and all-knowing is an everlasting
paradox. However, our doubt has not caught God by surprise, nor does the
evil and suffering of this world.
Why is Black Theology Significant?
In
Christianity, there is a lot of range for intellectualism, feminism,
and Black politics. Through these margins, Black Christians have room to
biblically theorize and strike the status quo head on. Most well-known
revolutionaries, who were Black Christians,
have been unapologetic in their exposing of the systems that have
winked at American capitalism for centuries. African-American Christians
were not reluctant to condemn white people for their involvement in the
suffering of their brothers and sisters, as well as their religion that
subtly reinforced the idea that black people were to naively accept their social condition.
Black theology must
be recognized as a doctrine that springs from the depths of the souls
of an oppressed group of people. This expression of Christianity is an
affront on the white-washed religion that was used to colonize and
enslave Africans. Additionally, this theology confronts the notion that
any group must trustingly endure suffering inflicted upon them. The
significance of spirituality in the Black community is its response to a
world that has excluded Black self-esteem and sanctioned our pain by
stripping our independence throughout history. Religion has been the
only constant peace in times of suffering since slavery. In any case, God does not insist upon us blindly accepting any form of suffering that comes outside of his will.
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