{"id":860,"date":"2014-02-27T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/02\/the-role-of-spirituals-in-living-faithfully-with-depression.html"},"modified":"2014-02-27T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T07:00:00","slug":"the-role-of-spirituals-in-living-faithfully-with-depression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rhetoricraceandreligion\/2014\/02\/the-role-of-spirituals-in-living-faithfully-with-depression.html","title":{"rendered":"The Role of Spirituals in Living Faithfully with Depression"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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By Monica A. Coleman<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
R3 Contributor<\/span><\/div>\n
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Music is an important part of my life. Whether jamming to an upbeat rock song at the gym or playing a sad song incessantly after heartbreak, I, like many other people, can imagine creating a soundtrack to my life filled with the music of my generation. Music gives me the words I can\u2019t find, and it gives me a rhythm to dance or slowly rock to.<\/span><\/div>\n
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In fact, it\u2019s probably the music that constitutes my strong attachment to black churches. I was raised in black Baptist and Methodist churches populated by people raised in the South. With my mind\u2019s eye, I can still see the deacons in their plain black suits and ties sitting single file across the front row with curved spines rocking back and forth. To their right are the deaconesses in their white dresses, white hats, and white shoes, sitting proudly with straight backs and gloved hands. Intoning together in low voices, everyone sounds like altos and tenors.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Peering around the heads in front of me, I kneeled in the pews of my parents\u2019 home church in Washington DC, trying to get a better glimpse of the singing in the front.<\/span><\/div>\n
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My mother didn\u2019t pull me to my seat; she was swaying herself.<\/span><\/div>\n

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Wade in the water.<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Wade in the water, children.<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Waaaaaade in the water.<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
God\u2019s gonna trouble the waters.<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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While I appreciate a good hymn, gospel music, and contemporary Christian music, my earliest memories of church include the harmonious a cappella moaning birthed in the sharecropping cotton and tobacco fields of Georgia and the Carolinas.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Spirituals are such a part of my life that I\u2019m still realizing which songs are spirituals. \u201cEvery Time I Feel the Spirit\u201d and \u201cEzekiel Saw the Wheel\u201d are songs I learned in Vacation Bible School. I assumed all little Christian kids did. <\/span><\/div>\n
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The further I\u2019m away from Southern black churches, and the more I understand depressions, the more I need spirituals. Created by enslaved Africans in the United States, spirituals express both suffering and dependence on faith. Indigenous to the African American slave experience in the United States, spirituals are the Psalter of my people\u2014expressing rage, despondency, hope, and joy to God. Like the Psalms of the ancient Hebrew community, the slaves took their emotions to God, putting them to music and singing them in the secret hush arbors of their religious gatherings, while working and marching, and as lullabies to their children at night. Many scholars have argued that spirituals even served an insurrectionary role by encoding the paths to freedom in ways that slave masters could not understand. And, as James Cone argues in The Spirituals and the Blues, the spirituals are theological because \u201cthey tell us about the divine Spirit that moves the people toward unity and self-determination.\u201d The spirituals moved slaves from suffering through to God and to release. Perhaps only music can do this.<\/span><\/div>\n
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The spirituals give me a way to be sad without being alone. Because they are sung in community, they say: It\u2019s okay to suffer. We know how you feel. We are suffering too. We all are.<\/span><\/div>\n
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They aren\u2019t afraid to linger in the painful places. They have no need to rush to praise. They can be slow . . . drawing out one syllable over tens of seconds . . . taking their time . . . waiting. I don\u2019t dare say that enslaved Africans were living with what we now call clinical depression. I don\u2019t have the expertise or information to assert that. But they knew how to take moans, make them hums, and then turn them into words. They knew how to give voice to pain and how to do it together.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Thus I\u2019m convinced that when Jesus cried out, \u201cMy God, My God, why have you forsaken me?\u201d from the cross (Matthew 27:45- 46), he wasn\u2019t making a profound theological statement about the hidden God. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, the spirituals of his people. He was in pain, and he began to sing. In my sanctified imagination, I see the people at the foot of the cross joining him as we do today in my faith community: slowly at first, one voice, then another, humming, then forming words. It sounds like this:<\/span><\/div>\n
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Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n
Along way from home<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n
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When the women of Sweet Honey in the Rock sing this spiritual, they add a verse: \u201cAnd I can hear my mother calling me, she\u2019s calling me.\u201d They remind me that if you stay in a spiritual long enough, you\u2019ll hear God, you\u2019ll feel hope. In the depths of depression, I can think of no greater spiritual gift.<\/span><\/div>\n
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\nFollow Monica on Twitter @monicaacoleman<\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
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