Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience

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Night of Power



IN ISLAM, during the holy month of Ramadan, it is said that one night is holiest of all: al Qadr, the Night of Power. According to Islamic belief, it was on this night that the Qu'ran was delivered to the Prophet Mohammed, and it is thus the holiest of all nights. On this night, prayers are granted "for everything that matters."

The Night of Power is so deeply ingrained in the Muslim heart that a short chapter in the Qu'ran is devoted to it. It begins, as do all chapters therein, with the exclamation, "In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful," and goes on thus:

Verily we have sent this
In the Night of Power.

And what will convey to you
What the Night of Power is?

The Night of Power is better
Than a thousand months:

The Angels and the Spirit descend in it,
By permission of their Lord,
For everything that matters.

It is Peace:
This until the rise of daybreak.

I will never forget the Night of Power that shook me, not during the holy month of Ramadan, but in the hot humid summer of 1995, when I sat on death row's Phase II with a date to die.

The sun had set behind the hills of West Virginia amid ominous thunderheads, and now the forces of nature struck like a divine assault team.

Lightning stabbed the earth as if in the throes of celestial passion, and so powerful were the bolts that the lights in the block -- indeed, the whole jail -- flickered out.

On Phase II, lights are kept burning twenty-four hours a day -- bright during the day, dim at night -- though in fact "dim" at two in the morning is hardly less than bright at noon. Tonight -- for now at least -- it was completely dark.

I sat on the cool metal table and looked out into the night. Cell lights, hall lights, yard lights, black lights, perimeter lights, and lights on poles had died, and not even stars broke the black carpet. So dark!

Then: a splash of illumination that bathed the hills in blue light, a rolling boom-BOOM of thunder, and a rapid procession of blinks as lights went out all over the prison complex.

It happened again and again and again, and yet again -- one sinuous bolt of lightning after the next forking the black sky, then white-washing it to midday brilliance for the brief space of an eye-blink.

I sat there in the first real darkness since my arrival to Phase II, transfixed by the display of such raw, primeval power. The strikes seemed so close, I felt the hair on my arms rise.

The storm moved westward, over the prison and across the hills, and in its magnificent wake, darkness reigned as man's lights bowed their mechanical heads to the power it had unleashed.

There I sat in the darkness, with less than a month to live, yet I felt better than any other night I spent on Phase II. I felt better even than I did a few weeks later, the night my stay was granted. Why?

Then it dawned on me, like bright writing etched in my brain:

"Here is true power, my son.

See how easily it overwhelms man's 'power'?"

Watching the veins of nature pulse through the night sea of air, making -- if only for milliseconds -- daylight over the hills, I felt renewed. How puny man seemed before this divine dance!

I saw, then, that though human powers sought to strangle and poison me and those around me, they were powerless. I saw that there is a Power that makes man's power pale. It is the power of Love; the power of God; the power of Life. I felt it surging through every pore.

Nature's power prevailed over the man-made, and I felt, that night, that I would prevail. I would overcome the State's efforts to silence and kill me.

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Material Life

America exists in a virtual sea of materialism. Here, one sees material excess in the midst of utter poverty. Here, in the cradle of global capital power, one finds more food, more clothing, more creature comforts, more material wealth than almost anywhere on this planet.

Ironically, the lives of many surrounded by opulence are awash in unhappiness. This nation eats most of the world's food. It consumes most of the world's energy. It treats the vast lands and seas of the earth as if it were a toilet bowl. It gains its material wealth from the theft of other people's lands and the exploitation of other people's labor.

Its principle is not -- and never has been -- something as amorphous as "Christianity"; it is naked materialism. This materialism drives not only the elite, but average, so-called everyday folk. It forms a perspective that permeates our entire society.

Even in the realm of sexuality we are, to paraphrase the singer Madonna, material girls and boys. We define ourselves by projections, the most variant quality in human personality.

If a man is born a male, but utilizes the latest biomedical technology to transform himself into a woman, is he a woman? Or is he rather a sexual materialist who has merely purchased a new sexual persona? Are we what we look like on the outside, or are we our biological functions?

As we are with our bodies, so we are with our environment. Consciously and unconsciously, directly and indirectly, by express intent and by oblique accident, we transform the natural world toward ends we neither know nor care to know.

We rape our Mother, Earth, for new toys to play with, in order to maximize profits for men already richer than Croesus. How much is enough?

If material things are not our salvation, why do we spend our energies in endless acquisition? If wealth makes us more cruel, more calloused, and colder, what is its good?

To be sure, we live in a material universe. We must eat, and we must drink of this earth's substance. Yet after we squander its resources and make it uninhabitable, will we be able, even with our material wealth, to restore the air, to reanimate our earth, to repair the genetic damage we have done?

We are greedily eating the very heart of our tomorrow and our children's tomorrows. And meanwhile our god -- the dark force of international corporate power -- decides, hour by hour, how destructive the day's economic engine will be; how much long-term gain will be destroyed in the race for short-term profit.

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Life's Religion

We northerners are undoubtedly descended from barbarian races, also in respect to our talent for religion: we have little talent for it.

Supposing one were able to view the strangely painful and at the same time coarse and subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking and unconcerned eye of an Epicurean god, I believe there would be no end to one's laughter and amazement: for does it not seem that one will has dominated Europe for eighteen centuries, the will to make of man a sublime abortion?

-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The reading from the vantage of a distant star of the capital letters of our earthly life, would perchance lead to the conclusion that the earth was the especially ascetic planet, a den of discontented, arrogant, and repulsive creatures, who never got rid of a deep disgust of themselves, of the world, of all life, and did themselves as much hurt as possible out of pleasure in hurting — presumably their one and only pleasure. Let us consider how regularly, how universally, how practically at every single period the ascetic priest puts in his appearance: he belongs to no particular race; he thrives everywhere; he grows out of all classes. Not that he perhaps bred this valuation by heredity and propagated it — the contrary is the case. It must be a necessity of the first order which makes this species, hostile, as it is, to life, always grow again and always thrive again. — Life itself must certainly have an interest in the continuance of such a type of self-contradiction. For an ascetic life is a self-contradiction: here rules resentment without parallel, the resentment of an insatiate instinct and ambition, that would be master, not over some element in life, but over life itself, over life's deepest, strongest, innermost conditions; here is an attempt made to utilise power to dam the sources of power; here does the green eye of jealousy turn even against physiological well-being, especially against the expression of such well-being, beauty, joy, while a sense of pleasure is experienced and sought in abortion, in decay, in pain, in misfortune, in ugliness, in voluntary punishment, in the exercising, flagellation, and sacrifice of the self. All this is in the highest degree paradoxical: we are here confronted with a rift that wills itself to be a rift, which enjoys itself in this very suffering, and even becomes more and more certain of itself, more and more triumphant, in proportion as its own presupposition, physiological vitality, decreases....

Granted that such an incarnate will for contradiction and unnaturalness is induced to philosophise; on what will it vent its pet caprice? On that which has been felt with the greatest certainty to be true, to be real; it will look for error in those very places where the life instinct fixes truth with the greatest positiveness. It will, for instance, after the example of the ascetics of the Vedanta Philosophy, reduce matter to an illusion, and similarly treat pain, multiplicity, the whole logical contrast of "Subject" and "Object" — errors, nothing but errors! To renounce the belief in one's own ego, to deny to one's self one's own "reality" — what a triumph! and here already we have a much higher kind of triumph, which is not merely a triumph over the senses, over the palpable, but an infliction of violence and cruelty on reason....But let us, forsooth, my philosophic colleagues, henceforward guard ourselves more carefully against this mythology of dangerous ancient ideas, which has set up a "pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge"; let us guard ourselves from the tentacles of such contradictory ideas as "pure reason," "absolute spirituality," "knowledge-in-itself": — in these theories an eye that cannot be thought of is required to think, an eye which ex hypothesi has no direction at all, an eye in which the active and interpreting functions are cramped, are absent; those functions, I say, by means of which "abstract" seeing first became seeing something; in these theories consequently the absurd and the nonsensical is always demanded of the eye. There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a "knowing" from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our "idea" of that thing, our "objectivity." But the elimination of the will altogether, the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, granted that we could do so, what! would not that be called intellectual castration?... "Life turned against Life," is — so much is absolutely obvious — from the physiological and not now from the psychological standpoint, simply nonsense....the ascetic ideal springs from the prophylactic and self-preservative instincts which mark a decadent life....it points to a partial physiological depression and exhaustion, against which the most profound and intact life-instincts fight ceaselessly with new weapons and discoveries. The ascetic ideal is such a weapon: its position is consequently exactly the reverse of that which the worshippers of the ideal imagine — life struggles in it and through it with death and against death; the ascetic ideal is a dodge for the preservation of life....The ascetic priest is the incarnate wish for an existence of another kind, an existence on another plane, — he is, in fact, the highest point of this wish, its official ecstasy and passion: but it is the very power of this wish which is the fetter that binds him here; it is just that which makes him into a tool that must labour to create more favourable conditions for earthly existence, for existence on the human plane — it is with this very power that he keeps the whole herd of failures, distortions, abortions, unfortunates, sufferers from themselves of every kind, fast to existence, while he as the herdsman goes instinctively on in front. You understand me already: this ascetic priest, this apparent enemy of life, this denier — he actually belongs to the really great conservative and affirmative forces of life....His "nay," which he utters to life, brings to light as though by magic an abundance of graceful "yeas"; even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of self-destruction, it is subsequently the wound itself that forces him to live.

-- The Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche

***

And one day Zarathustra made a sign to his disciples, and spake these words unto them: "Here are priests: but although they are mine enemies, pass them quietly and with sleeping swords! Even among them there are heroes; many of them have suffered too much, so they want to make others suffer. Bad enemies are they: nothing is more revengeful than their meekness. And readily doth he soil himself who toucheth them. But my blood is related to theirs; and I want withal to see my blood honoured in theirs."

-- Thus Spake Zarathustra, by Friedrich Nietzsche

ONE MIGHT be both accused and excused of hyperbole if one were to assert that God has been utilized to justify more human evil than has Satan. Yet dozens of philosophers (not only Nietzsche) have pointed out that whatever its origins and promises, the reality of religion is this: it has often been less a force for liberation than a tool of oppression -- an impetus for civil unrest, warfare and genocide.

Wherever one stands on the religion divide, it seems clear that a new, life-affirming spirit needs expression as we end a century of carnage and move into a new millennium. Our supposedly enlightened age -- the Modern Century -- opened with the Boer War; it is still following the bloody path: after the Armenian massacres came the World Wars, the Holocausts of Jewish and European millions, and the atomic incinerations of Nagasaki and Hiroshima; then came Korea, Vietnam, and widespread civil war in Africa, Latin America and, most recently, Europe, not to mention the brutal repression of one small country after another by self-appointed "peacekeeping" superpowers.

If religion has had no impact on the shedding of this blood (has it done anything other than aid and abet it?) then why the need for it? How is it that we have become so numbed, that we can pretend our faith is one of resurrection and life, when in reality it serves as one of the worst flash points of conflict in our culture of death?

We live in a world of megadeath, on lands reddened by its original peoples, and saddened with the tears of unwilling captives. We missionize and maim, westernize and rob, torture and starve the same fellow humans around the globe. We kill each other, but not only that; we abuse the Earth, our common mother.

We kill animals so as to be able to eat the dead. We make of our rivers, lakes, and seas, cesspools of leaden lifelessness. We pillage and burn our forests, then seek to determine why the raped earth beneath them dries into desert. We violate the mountains and line our pocketbooks with the sum of their gleaming ore. We poison our air.

Beyond the tide of materialism that encroaches our island of survival, the flood of death rises yet higher. We have attempted to mechanize, control, restrict, the very rhythms of the life process itself, and made our women's wombs into tombs. Chilled test tubes are the incubators of our perverted progress.

WHERE IS THE FAITH that truly trusts in Life? Where is the faith that seeks to bring her message to a world sliding down the slope of death? Where is the religion of Life? A religion that sets forth all the living as sacred? A religion that sees the human experience as only one paradigm in the whole connected web of nature?

Is our "God" the god of man alone? Can a Creator-God really bring into being creatures whose sole function is to serve the interests of themselves? Or is such belief really a smokescreen for our narrow schizophrenia, for the unholy greed that has brought our environment to the brink of destruction on which it now teeters! Put quite another way, do alligators live solely to be skinned for expensive shoes and luggage? Don't they -- doesn't every life-form -- have an intrinsic right to exist?

It is time to recognize, as do increasing awakened numbers, that the old split-brain approach that perceives man's existence in a vacuum dooms humankind, and species uncounted, to oblivion.

We are in need of a religion of Life that sees the world in more than merely utilitarian terms. A religion that reveres all life as valuable in itself; that sees Earth as an extension of self, and if wounded, as an injury to self.

We need a religion that recognizes the interdependence of man and this world; which sees that the atmosphere surrounding our globe is the same air we breathe, and part and parcel of our lungs -- that Earth's water is no different from the saliva in our mouths.

We need a religion that rediscovers the idealism that existed before institutionalism; to rediscover the primordial awe felt by ancient man when he first beheld creation spiraling outside of his insignificant self.

John Africa found such a faith and taught its simple, clear ways to others. In keeping with his natural simplicity, he called that faith Life. "Revere life," he taught: "Protect life, move in harmony with life." Founding the MOVE Organization on this life-affirming principle, he imbued his followers with an indomitable will to practice them and proclaim them to the world.

He explained to them the worth and power of unity, the relevance and necessity of natural law, and the meaning of resistance and rebellion against a system bent on global self-destruction.

He taught that Earth cannot be a mere way station for the next world, to be fouled, spoiled, or ignored.

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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.

_______________

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.

[admin]

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.