Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience

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Christendom: Isn't it odd

that Christendom -- that huge body of humankind that claims spiritual descent from the Jewish carpenter of Nazareth -- claims to pray to and adore a being who was a prisoner of Roman power, an inmate on the empire's death row? That the one it considers the personification of the Creator of the Universe was tortured, humiliated, beaten, and crucified on a barren scrap of land on the imperial periphery, at Golgotha, the place of the skull? That the majority of its adherents strenuously support the State's execution of thousands of imprisoned citizens? That the overwhelming majority of its judges, prosecutors, and lawyers -- those who condemn, prosecute, and sellout the condemned -- claim to be followers of the fettered, spat-upon, naked God?

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Spirit War

IN AN AGE when the national currency is fear, not from external threats, but from domestic ones, prisons have become places of pronounced spiritual and psychic assault. It is not surprising: as an old adage teaches, "Nothing so concentrates the mind as death." While the truism has obvious resonance to the thousands on death row, it also has its echoes for thousands more who face "life" terms. Here in morgue-like holding pens of Pennsylvania's penitentiaries, "life" literally sentences one to imprisonment for the length of one's natural lifespan, with no possibility of parole. "Life" is thus but a grim metaphor for death, for only death releases one from its shackles. "Life," it might be said, is merely slow death.

Faced with the spectral imminence of slow death, it is not unusual that for some, prison becomes a place of spiritual renewal. Often, it is men who fled religion in society at large who seek its solace in the secular hell of society behind bars. Sometimes their searches for spiritual meaning are lauded as evidence of personal progress; sometimes they are discounted as nothing but jailhouse conversions. Some may be. Others are surely not. Who can peer into the well of another's spirit?

It is not rare for a prisoner to receive, unsolicited, a religious tract from a group wholly unknown to the recipient. The pamphlet, some four to eight pages, is small -- palm-sized -- with biblical verses scattered throughout. "Jesus saves!" it may trumpet. Or, "Do you know where you'll be spending eternity?"

Well-intentioned as they are, prison tracts often have the opposite of their desired effect. No matter how eloquently or cleverly they purport to spread good-will and fraternal encouragement, their essence is the same. Though they profess to care deeply about where the objects of their missionary zeal will land after death, few spare a thought for how they may spend the rest of their earthly lives. While their piety is concentrated on the Hereafter, it forgets the Here. Their writers, it seems, are so intoxicated with the thought of heaven, they are content to close an eye to the simmering hell they have helped create on earth.

They endorse, by their silence, the very systems that consign their correspondents to life-long imprisonment and scheduled death.

Often, a tract's content makes it almost impossible for the reader to escape a deeply felt suspicion that those who have sent it to him are fixated wholly on the state of his hereafter -- that they couldn't give a damn about his living flesh and living soul.

IS THIS NOT STRANGE, the prisoner muses, given the spiritual adherence they claim to the teachings of a crucified God? Is it not remarkable, coming from believers of a Man-God who gave his life as divine ransom for the souls of sinners? Why is it, he asks himself, that so many Christians want to rush into a grave, those they want to save?

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Imprisonment



JUST BECAUSE your body is in prison doesn't mean your mind isn't free, and even though this thought might be trite, there is some truth in it, because we are our minds. In the deepest sense we are our spirits. When you think of a person, or of your own body - is not this a prison in some sense? Are we not in a prison of time? We age, we lose our faculties, but that doesn't mean we cannot overcome, and we do that by the power of mind and spirit. We reach beyond.

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Christian? Christ-like?

Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children that are slaves by birth, and by the charity and pity of the owners made partakers of the blessed sacrament of baptism, should by virtue of their baptism be made free, it is enacted that baptism does not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom; masters freed from this doubt may more carefully propagate Christianity by permitting slaves to be admitted to that sacrament.

-- Statutes at Large of Virginia. Act III (1667)

For centuries in America, the term "Christian" has been virtually synonymous with "white." It was used not so much to distinguish believers from unbelievers, but civilized, light-skinned colonists from uncivilized, dark-skinned natives -- the so-called primitive Africans, savage Indians, and other such heathen. It was a convenient spiritual underpinning for the sociopolitical economic order, that is, the "order" of white supremacy and domination. In such a context, the conversion of a non-white to the dominant, European faith meant next to nothing, for what did it matter what faith lived in the heart of a man, if his skin remained black or red?

Virginia's Act of 1667 was no anomaly. A similar act became law shortly afterward in South Carolina, and in another colony, an act passed in 1690 declared quite openly that "no slave shall be free by becoming a Christian." And so, new generations of Christians were baptized, and new generations of preachers, holding them in the thrall of a system that made reading the Scriptures for themselves a capital crime, continued to intone submission: "Slaves, obey your masters."

What did "Christianity" mean to those tens and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children brought to our shores in shackles from the west coast of Africa? What did it mean to those hardy survivors of the dreaded Middle Passage who were forced to learn a new, foreign language and forbidden to speak their own tongue under threat of the lash? No less important, what does it mean today, to their great grandchildren, now legally free to practice the religion of their choice?

Should Afro-Americans praise the god of men who brought their forebears here in fetid, feverish holds? A god whose people wiped out all but the last vestiges of a native population? A god of invaders and slavemasters? Should anyone?

Formed in the age of Roman imperial supremacy and Palestinian servitude, Christianity became, in America, the faith of the slavemaster, the alleged belief of the rich, the protector of the propertied. For the slave, though, it was more farce than faith; in his eyes what was truly worshipped by all was wealth.

Indeed, "Christianity" became cultural shorthand for the status quo, the existing system of naked, race-based oppression. The fiction that the Euro-American conquest of the New World was motivated by efforts to "convert" indigenous peoples, or that African slavery was necessitated by a desire to bring "the gospel" to the "natives" is rebuffed by the hand of history. One need only examine the past five centuries from a native perspective -- centuries that brought devastating disease, bloody persecution, rampant alcoholism, and ultimately, confinement in concentration camp-like reservations -- to understand why the god of the pale-faced invaders seemed less a Great Spirit of goodness than a demon of destruction.

We have already seen above that even conversion had no real impact on the convert's state of bondage. As generations yet unborn were to remark, with a truth that resonated equally well for one of African descent as for the native American: "When the Europeans came, they had their Bible and we had our land; now, they have our land, and we have their Bible."

Did the native or the slave really expect his master to sacrifice property and power on the altar of piety? The story of the Cherokee, derisively referred to as the "White Indians," reveals a disturbing answer. [1]

In religion, education, cultural and political life, and even architecture, the Eastern Cherokee adopted European forms of life to a far greater degree than any other tribe in North America. By the early 1800s, they were building wood and brick homes; they also founded a capital, New Echota, organized a Cherokee Supreme Court, and published a newspaper in an alphabet developed by their famed linguist Sequoyah, a.k.a. George Gist.

Baptist and Moravian churches converted significant numbers to their faiths. The Cherokee were, relatively speaking at least, a wealthy people, with successful crafts and farming operations and hundreds of thousands of head of cattle, horses, and mules. So similar were they to whites that they owned a population of several thousand black slaves. Here was a tribe that was by all measurements a "civilized" tribe: it was Christian, literate, propertied, and law-abiding.

Cherokee "progress" did not come without a cost. Aside from the fact that it meant the destruction and replacement of their own indigenous culture by a European replica, it fueled the resentment of a white economic elite driven by supremacist and expansionist goals. In addition, poorer colonists agitated against their "red" competitors, and the government intervened. Before long, the Cherokee became victims of the same white greed that was to destroy every other native tribe.



Legal victory brought new hopes to the Cherokee in 1832, when they brought suit in the Supreme Court and won a judgment against Georgia, whose "Indian statutes" were declared unconstitutional and thus unenforceable. In Worcester & Butler v. Georgia (1832) the Court held:

The Cherokee Nation then, is a distinct community, occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves or in conformity with treaties and the Acts of Congress.

Yet President Andrew "Indian Killer" Jackson refused to follow the ruling and was quoted by journalist Horace Greeley as saying, "[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce it now if he can."

Apparently he couldn't. Already the same year, large tracts of Cherokee ancestral lands were surveyed, divided up, and assigned to white settlers by lottery. By the end of the decade, Georgia's entire Cherokee population was decimated. Evicted from their lands under force of martial "law," whole settlements were marched off to faraway Oklahoma under military escort, straggling along a wintry Trail of Tears whose hardships cost them (and their black slaves, though these were never deemed important enough to count) thousands of lives.

"Civilized" and "Christianized," the Cherokee still lost everything dear to them -- their ancestral grounds, their homes and livestock, their children, their women, their elderly, their sick -- all because other "Christians" wanted their land. Yet to white minds this unholy program of "resettlement" entailed no losses: it was simply another step in building the foundation on which the very existence of most southern and western states rests.

Today, the Cherokee exist only as a remnant of the past, their reservations an attraction for passing tourists. As for the descendants of Virginia's Christian slaves, they are now free, but the vast majority are still dutifully Christian. True, their churches have remained distinct from white churches in many ways. But those cultural trappings aside, one is tempted to wonder whether the black church doesn't carry the selfsame mission as its white counterpart -- and whether the vision that guides it isn't the same.

Certainly there have been men and women in every generation who have raised their voices to rouse their fellow brethren from stultifying slumber. In the fifties and sixties, one of the more notable of these, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought a new vitality to a church that up till then had largely sought the solace of martyred silence.

King's church was crippled not only by white supremacist terrorism, however. Equally crippling was its own counsel of quietude. Even in the face of naked injustice, there were clergymen -- most white, but some black -- who sought to emasculate his message: "Slow down!" "Hush, don't create such a stir!" "Wait for the right time." In a time of unprecedented struggle against the beast of American apartheid, they chose to stand firm in support of the status quo, to sprinkle on the meek and the dissatisfied alike the unholy holy water of centuries.

King's legacy lives on, but it has been twisted. His name and his words have become tools in the hands of the cleverest amongst his enemies to attack, belittle, and deny the very people he sought to serve. His dreams -- eloquently set to paper in speeches or essays such as Letter from a Birmingham Jail -- have been transformed, in the mouths of the powerful, into nightmarish excuses for new chapters of negrophobia, and into attacks on those few, limited, forward steps such as affirmative action, which -- if it did nothing else -- was at least able to open doors previously sealed by judicial decree.

In our own time, Jean-Bertrand Aristide has noted how Haiti's history has been marked by two imperialisms, political and religious, and how the second has resulted in the development of a theology that serves only to zombify the spirit of the people in order to further subjugate them.

Jesuit scholar Ignacio Martin-Bara has used the Latin-American context -- in particular the bitter milieu of countries scarred by recurring civil strife -- to similarly illustrate the continuing use of religion as a weapon of psychological warfare against the poor and oppressed. [2] Writing of the dueling purposes of the evangelical church and the Christian base communities in Brazil, he points out that whereas the latter have "gradually assumed a critical tendency" that questions the existing social order, the former has retained a "pentecostal posture of submission, marginalizing its converts and driving them away from any form of protest." He goes on:

[In] the banana plantation zones of Guapiles, Costa Rica, where aggressive labor unions have traditionally held sway ... the "Christians" (as they call themselves) not only do not join political or labor organizations but also oppose the struggles of working people and frequently work as scabs or strikebreakers. These "Christians" have become the banana bosses' trusted workers, and the bosses throw all their support behind the local evangelical churches and pressure their workers to join them.

-- Writings for a Liberation Theology, 142

Clearly, no matter how long ago the stone of white religious hypocrisy was cast into the waters of black and native consciousness, we still live in its ever-widening ripples.

At root, the message of the Bible is one of liberation. In the Old Testament it is exemplified by the exodus of the Jewish slaves from Egyptian bondage; in the New, by the coming of a Messiah who (it is promised) will save his people from the yoke of oppression.

Until those who today call themselves "Christians" acknowledge the carnage that has been carried out in his name, it is hard to see how they cannot but continue to commit deeds of devastation and evil. In his name they go on fighting wars of avarice, campaigns of greed, legalized land-theft, and regulated robbery; they go on firing their holy hatreds against the rest of the world. In the very shadow of the cross, they continue to pillage and rape. And in the name of one who, they claim, came "to set captives free," they continue to enslave.

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Notes:

1. For documentation of Cherokee history, see John Ehle, Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1988).

2. Fr. Martin-Baro, five fellow priests, and their housekeepers were assassinated in November 1989 by a US-trained and -armed military death squad in El Salvador.

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Miracles

"Woe unto you that are rich,
for ye have received your consolation."

Not of a god of thunder,
a god of silk,
a god of the rich
did the carpenter speak,
but of a God of compassion,
of peace, of a day brighter
than today;

a God whose miracles still work
in the slave pens and shacks,
in the projects,
in the hellish daily life of the poor
and the oppressed --

not miracles
like walking on waves,
transforming water into wine,
but miracles of love arising
in hearts where it seems least
likely to flourish --

here and there
in the barrios and the favelas,
among those who have least,
beat hearts of hope,
fly sparks of Overcoming.

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The Faith of Slaves

The tradition of the dead weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
-- Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

AS IN ANTIQUITY, the black church was born in the womb of oppression, and its adherents labored under the heel of slavery. In a climate of general repression, blacks (even so-called "freed" slaves) were prohibited from a wide range of jobs and crafts.

One area begrudgingly allowed them was that of preacher. It was a useful allowance, for an obeisant minister -- especially one who believed in the efficacy of long-suffering over rebellion -- could exercise tremendous influence over his fellow captives and save his white "Massa" countless difficulties. Vestiges of the same attitude can be seen in a recent controversy that surfaced during Christine Todd Whitman's first gubernatorial campaign in New Jersey: GOP strategists allegedly donated considerable sums to black preachers, who in turn promised to urge their congregations to refrain from voting. (The ministers in question, of course, vociferously denied all knowledge of this.)

On the positive side, the black pulpit has been a powerful battery that energized the struggle for civil rights, and as such, other human rights movements in the late twentieth century. It is noteworthy that the most influential African-Americans of our time have been clergymen, albeit of many varied religious traditions. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Minister Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) are only two of many who come to mind.

King's influence has been reflected in the recent past in many ways, especially in the widened access blacks have gained to professions and positions previously closed to them before the passage of various civil rights laws. The influence of Malcolm X, while equally evident in the same basic realms, is also reflected in the emergence of a new and different consciousness, particularly in the Black Panther Party and many other similar black nationalist organizations across America and the black world in the seventies.

The first, though perceived by many of his contemporaries as a radical, was at base a traditionalist whose views were largely synchronous with the conservativism of the black church in which he was raised. The second, known in many circles solely for his searing revolutionary oratory, complemented (at least in his later years) the radicalism of his earlier message with a more conservative spirituality colored by Arabic-influenced Islam.

Both were assassinated in the prime of their lives as they stood on the brink of exercising unprecedented influence on national and international affairs.

WHEREAS KING was a dyed-in-the-wool Baptist, Malcolm X was proudly non-Christian and regarded Christianity as a white man's religion, wielded by slave masters to control their black chattel. He excoriated the kind of Afrophobic religious thinking described in Blyden's Islam, Christianity and the Negro (1888), where the following observations are recorded:

It was our lot not long ago to hear an illiterate negro in a prayer meeting in New York entreat the deity to extend his "lily-white hands" and bless the waiting congregation. Another, with no greater amount of culture, preaching from John 3:2: "We shall be like Him," etc. He exclaimed, "Brethren, imagine a beautiful white man with blue eyes, rosy cheeks and flaxen hair, and we shall be like Him." The conceptions of these worshippers were what they had gathered from plastic and pictorial representations as well as from the characteristics of the dominant race around them.

Such psychological enslavement might seem unbelievably blatant to us today, yet to our black great-grandparents it was a simply an expression of a lingering self-hatred that even emancipation could not drown from the subconscious. Its echoes reverberate even in the present.

One example is the depiction of the deity that continues in black churches: of a white, blue-eyed Christ peering down upon the congregation through shimmering stained-glass windows. It might seem like a small thing in itself, but coupled with the undeniable fact of America's persisting caste system, the power of suggestion it possesses is tremendous. Perhaps it is such images that have disenchanted and alienated many African-Americans and turned them from the churches of their youth to the various schools of Islam, to pre-American or syncretic African faiths, or to the rejection of the religious dimension of life in toto.

WHEN THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL were delivered from Egyptian bondage, they traversed the desert for over forty years, until almost all those who had lived in slavery had passed away. One reading of that wilderness experience regards it as a necessary prerequisite to what was to follow: it concludes that no one with a slave psychology could live as a truly free person in the Promised Land and that, moreover, a survivor's psyche would be so indelibly etched with the taint of enslavement that it would even pose a danger to the next generation.

We who are familiar with the biblical account of the same exodus recall that, in times of peril, hunger, and doubt, a cry arose from the people, longing for the land of their oppression:

And when Pharaoh drew nigh, the children of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians marched after them; and they were sore afraid; and the children of Israel cried out unto the Lord.

And they said unto Moses, because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness? Wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to carry us forth out of Egypt? (Ex. 14: 10-11)

The Jews later mimicked their Egyptian masters by fashioning an idol in the form of a molten golden calf -- an ancient example of a people adopting the religious mores of their oppressors.

In our own era and culture, the Reverend Albert Cleage created considerable controversy in Detroit when he commissioned a stained-glass montage and altarpiece for his Shrine of the Black Madonna, which featured an African Mary with an African Christ.

Not unlike the Israelites before them, it has taken generations for a once-enslaved people to reach the point of mental freedom from which they can see the face of the divine in themselves.

When the face and the presence of the divine can be glimpsed in the smile of a child - or the hope of a bride, the fecundity of a green field, the wisdom of the ancients -- it is a small sign that a people are emerging from the dark coffin of bondage.

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Hope

What keeps me alive? My belief -- my religion, which I call Life -- the teachings of John Africa and the example of my MOVE brothers and sisters across the state, many of whom have survived imprisonment for years and years. Their example has buoyed me up over fourteen years behind bars. Also, my faith in the power of commitment, in the power of family, in the power of love, of community, of God. I could give you one term instead of four or five. "Family," for example, means unity, commitment, love. That is "family." The other thing, of course, is laughter. Very simply, it's human to laugh and to find humor, even in something small. Every day. Every day there is something to laugh about! That keeps me human.

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Salt of the Earth

Blessed are they
who are persecuted
for righteousness' sake;
for theirs is
the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye,
when men revile you
and persecute you,
and say all manner of evil
against you falsely,
for my sake.

Rejoice,
and be exceeding glad,
for great is your reward in heaven:
for so persecuted they
the prophets before you.

Ye are the salt of the earth;
and if salt loses its savor,
of what use is it!
It is good for nothing
but to be cast out
and trodden underfoot.

-- Jesus of Nazareth (Mt. 5: 10 - 13)

IT DOES NOT TAKE a biblical scholar to see that the righteous have indeed been persecuted throughout history. The "meek" may well one day "inherit the earth," yet for the last few millennia it has been the exclusive property of those in power, whilst the meek have inherited the grave.

American history provides plenty to illustrate the point: as an unsurpassed disinheritor of aboriginal peoples, it is an imperialistic nation-state composed primarily of stolen or forcibly seized territories. Were the so-called founding fathers meek, that they should inherit this piece of earth?

Central to the question is the proposition that America is a Christian nation -- a nation composed of men and women eager to be persecuted for righteousness' sake. If this be so, then it is Christian to wipe out whole native peoples and commend their ravaged remnants to barren reservations; it is Christian to steal millions of people from their overseas homelands and hold them in bondage for centuries; it is Christian to cast thousands of Japanese into concentration camps and to seize their properties on the pretext of that magical word "security." If it is really so, then it is Christian to vaporize hundreds of thousands of fellow humans by dropping an atomic bomb on them, as a global "demonstration" of power; Christian to cage millions and execute thousands; Christian to devise a socio-economic system that marginalizes the weak, the awkward, the inarticulate, the downtrodden poor. Or are we to conclude that perhaps America is not a Christian nation after all?

For those faceless, nameless black, brown, and yellow millions who have been savaged by America, it might even appear that the course of its history has been guided by some demonic orientation. Instead of Christ, perhaps Dracula should be substituted for this nation's guiding god -- for has it not sucked the blood of the planet's other peoples for two centuries? Does it not do so now?

Where is the God of the poor, the powerless, the damned, the crushed? Where, in national political life, is even one voice of Christ-like compassion heard?

The Roman historian Tacitus described the first Christians as a "sect" who entered his city "clad in filthy gabardines" and "smelling of garlic," a people of poverty, the salt of the earth. How, we must ask, did they come from that to this: from a tribe of the lowly to the vampires of the planet?

In order to trace the devolution, we must begin by admitting that a second crucifixion of Christ has taken place, not by a second Roman empire, but by the very men and women who bear his name: his Church.

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Community

Revolution is not a word but an application; it is not war but peace; it does not weaken, but strengthens. Revolution does not cause separation; it generates togetherness.
-- John Africa, Strategic Revolution

Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
-- Margaret Mead

FOR MILLIONS, perhaps billions of us, life is a search, a journey of seeking for that which we found unfulfilled in our youth. We search for love; we search for family; we search for community. And in so doing, we seek the completion of Self in others, in the larger Self where similar selves are united in commonality -- in community.

As we search and grow, we find that modern life, with its bursting balloons of materialism, leaves us more and more empty inside; "things" that once seemed to fill us now fail to bridge the gaping chasms in our psyche. Our inner selves are pulled in too many ways at once -- the demands of work here, and social obligations there, the pressures of financial need (or the lesser burdens of wealth), public responsibilities, the needs and wants of our private sphere -- and finally they break, atomized, meaningless.

The dominant societal ideology of the hour is a perverse individuality hammered into our consciousness by myth and legend. It ignores the historical verity of community -- of groups striving to move the social order forward. It ignores the reality that people working together are the only viable solution to any social problem.

As human beings, we are at root social creatures. Outside the bonds of our familial and social relations, we cannot truly live. Our very sanity depends on them. We are birthed in and into community. We grow in community. Community determines who we are. It is not the individual self per se, but its place in the broader social network of human society that defines our identity and gives our life meaning.

Whether in religious, political, economic, or educational matters, collectivity is a basic requisite for meaning. Can there truly be a religion of one? What political action can be effectively undertaken by a lone person? Doesn't every step toward economic progress require at least some level of social agreement -- some willingness to put aside antagonisms -- for it to function? Doesn't education, especially as it is presently constituted, consist largely of teaching youth how to play by the rules of the broader social order? Is it purely coincidental that students are organized into "classes"? Doesn't it teach them how to acquiesce, not how -- or even whether -- to transform the status quo?

And what of a circumstance in which the status quo is unfair or oppressive? Such can be said to have given rise to a community of resistance, known as the MOVE Organization, which, in the words of its legendary founder John Africa, has as its raison d'etre total liberation:

The MOVE organization is a powerful family of revolutionaries, fixed in principle, strong in cohesion, steady as the foundation of a massive tree. A people totally equipped with the profound understanding of simple assertion, collective commitment, unbending direction.

While the so-called educators talk of love, mouth the necessity for peace, we live peace, assert the power of love, comprehend the urgency of freedom. The reformed world system cannot teach love while making allowances for hate, peace while making allowances for war, freedom while making allowances for the inconsistent shackles of enslavement. For to make allowances for sickness is to be unhealthy; to make concessions with slavery is to be enslaved; to compromise with the person of compromise is to be as the person you are compromising with. [1]

John Africa founded and forged a remarkable family, a small but potent community of resistance that took Life as its creed and fought to protect the lives of all the living, even animals like dogs and cats.

Everyone is born into the family of their flesh; here was one of choice, commitment, and faith. It was a family embattled, but a family nonetheless. It lives, grows, and thrives today. Long live John Africa's revolutionary family!

_______________

Notes:

1. "On the Move: from the Writings of John Africa," Philadelphia Tribune, 28 June 1975, 17.

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Men of the Cloth

Pam Africa, minister and disciple of the teaching of John Africa, tells the true tale of a meeting between the latter and a man of the cloth behind the old headquarters of the MOVE Organization in the Powelton Village section of West Philadelphia.

The scene: a man, middle-aged, bearded, booted and blue-jeaned, is called to the back door by the leader of a small group from a nearby church. Though both are black, they present a fascinating tableau of difference. The one wears a T-shirt, sweat soaking his breast; the other is impeccably dressed in silk suit and tie, the only touch missing is coattails. The one's hair is rough, gray-fringed, uncombed, and hanging like ropes to his shoulders; the other's is pomaded, greased and brushed smooth -- the head of a preacher-man.

The air is thick and charged with controversy, for the city is threatening to remove MOVE from their property and the neighborhood after a series of highly publicized confrontations with the police that has left several MOVE men and women beaten and bloody, and one MOVE baby dead.

"So, you're sayin', all I gotta do is pray, and everything will be all right?"

"That's what I'm saying, brotha."

"If I pray, the cops will stop beatin' up my people?"

"Yes! That's what I'm saying, brotha."

"If I pray the cops will stop killin' us?"

"Yes! Pray -- in Jesus name, brother -- 'cause the Bible say, 'Ask, and it shall be given unto you.' That's it, brother."

"And if I pray, our people will truly be free?"

"Uh-huh. Yessir, brother!"

"Well, c'mon, Reverend. Let's pray then."

John Africa drops to his knees, oblivious of the soft mud already staining his jeans.

"Whoa! Whatcha doin', brotha?"

"You said we needa pray, right?"

"Uhh ... uhh ... "

"Come on, Rev, pray with me, okay?"

"I ... I ... I meant, pray in the church."

"Why, Reverend? Ain't God out here in the open air, ain't God all around us? Come on! Let's kneel down here on God's earth and pray."

At this point the Reverend backs up, and John Africa says, "What's the matter? I thought you said we should pray. Well, come on down here and pray with me."

The Reverend continues to stand there, staring. John Africa asks again, "What's the matter, man? That suit you got on more important than God? I thought you said you believed in God. This dirt is God, so why don't you kneel down here and pray with me?"

"Well, uh ... excuse me, brotha, but I gotta be getting back to my church."

At this point the people standing around the two men begin to speak: "You see that! That man is down there on his knees in the dirt; he got to be for real. That Reverend ain't nothin' but a phoney. He scared he gonna dirty his suit. He talkin' 'bout how he believe in God. He don't believe in nothin' but that suit."

One woman comments to another, "That preacher's a hypocrite. See, that's why I don't go to church, cuz I don't believe in them preachers, cuz they ain't nothin' but liars; they ain't for real. That man there kneelin' in the dirt is for real."

John Africa goes on, "You don't wanna pray with me, then, Rev?"

"I gotta go, man, uhh ... I'm sorry."

"Why you leavin', Rev?"

The dashing preacher beats a hasty retreat from the muddy yard, more intent, it seems, on saving silk than souls ...

Several years later, and several miles westward, the city would torch MOVE's home and headquarters with a helicopter-borne firebomb, incinerating John Africa and ten other "longhairs" (some of them women and children) in a massacre plotted to take place on Mother's Day.

The scene: smoldering remains of an entire neighborhood, only hours before the site of a blistering, billowing inferno. Philadelphia's men of the cloth have gathered once again, though only to examine the carnage -- not to weep for the fallen, nor to pray for the dead.

They have come bedecked in robes and collars, the purpose of their gathering to pray in support of the mayor of a city that has bombed its own citizens, and obliterated, incinerated, and dismembered its own babies.

The police commissioner, the fire chief, the mayor, and his officers are almost to a man "Christian" -- Baptists or Catholics, most of them -- religious people. Yet these men who have gathered to pray are not only churchgoers. They are ministers, pastors, priests! Aside from praying, though, it seems that they mean to do little. Why should they? They've just winked at a full-scale war waged over mere misdemeanors: at the deaths of eleven people blasted by a sky-bomb, the destruction of dozens of homes, and the permanent scarring of a neighborhood.

And so they pray and leave for home, their duties fulfilled. Men of the cloth, yes. But men of the spirit?