Let the Blessings Flow: Liturgy and Race in the Last Fifty Years

Abstract

The experience of Africans with Christianity predates the trans-Atlantic slave trade, yet many neglect this. Africans have been Christian since the earliest days of Christians. The reality that African American Christians continue to feel both the effects and traumatic reverberations of America’s problem with race cannot be doubted. This article has two foci: liturgy and race. I was asked if I would share a reflection highlighting aspects of what was referred to as the symbiotic nature of the relationship between liturgical scholarship and practice with particular attention to race in light of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Liturgy. In giving this more thought, the realization soon came that implementing such writing is akin to tiptoeing through a minefield. Generally speaking, what exists in the minds of many about the development of historical worship practices are the result of gross oversimplifications. Amending simplifications by complexifying comprehension about what is popularly believed is beyond the limitations of this article. Yet, at the very least I hope to recast a few obscurities. We bring the world we live in and the culture(s) we live into the places and communities in which we worship. We worship, we say, so that—in the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel—we may be released from the “tyranny of the world, from the tyranny of time,” and so enter into the realm of God, the realm of the divine. In that light, here are some questions I will address: Is racism coded within us? Are the neural pathways of those who claim “whiteness” predetermined so that those who make this claim believe that they naturally are entitled to receive and always be given the best and first of the world’s goods? Can we claim the existential ontological underpinnings of our faith traditions wherein we confess that the immersive waters of baptism and the Holy Spirit really wash away sin, death, and evil? Does baptism enable us to receive God’s gift of healing grace and blessing, a blessing bestowed to us through God’s created order, a blessing that permits us to go on living without yielding to the sin(s) of the cultural worlds from whence we come? Worship, in the popular imagination is seen often as a form of escapism—a flying away from the world—rather than that which grounds us, allowing us to exist more freely with God and within God’s realm, God’s kin-dom. Does the diversity of our understandings of Christianity forever lock us into separateness? The baggage of the world we bring can stop us from acknowledging that we all are children of God, that the parentage we ascribe to God, is meant to include everyone. What happens when the genius of Black culture(s), of African American culture(s), of nonwhite cultures are disinherited? What illnesses, what evil, what perilous death-dealing behaviors go unrecognized? How did the world we share, the worlds which we bring to our worshiping