Texts: Isaiah 51: 1-3; Acts 17: 22-28
The Deeper the Wound, the Sweeter My Song[1]
The place to start is in a grove of trees, deep in the Cuban countryside. We walked across a rutted track in a field, and as we walked, the sounds of drumming and singing could be heard drifting from among the trees. As we made our way into the grove, the drumming stopped, and we were greeted warmly by several residents of a nearby village. They were pleased to see us, and lopped off the tops of coconuts with machetes, serving us the sweet water found inside the fruit. As we drank, three drums were warmed by a fire, in order to tune them to their proper pitch.
Soon, the drumming began. Over the course of the next several hours, there were sung prayers to ancestors and to spiritual entities called orishas. There were visitations from those orishas, who took over the bodies of their worshipers in order to bless and minister to all of us gathered in that grove of trees. One woman, possessed by a water spirit named Yemaya, hugged and blessed each of us as the drums encouraged her movements. Another became possessed by a spirit called Babaluaye, who had been inflicted by ailments, and now roams the earth as a consoler, and a healer. Another became possessed by an unnamed spirit of the dead, one of the ancestors, and called for something sweet on her tongue, a reminder of the pleasures found among the living. It was all a wonder to behold.
I was there as a member of a journey led by Ned Sublette, who spoke from this pulpit earlier in the year, and who has done remarkable work on the music and cultural legacy of the black Atlantic world. Though it was a journey meant to expose travelers to the religious practices of Cubans, I was the sole minister in the group, and I was often greeted with a kind of bemused curiosity, and not a little wariness, at least initially, when I shared what I do for a living. But that went away when I told my fellow travelers about you, and about the kind of things we tend to get into around here. Even if there was a broad reluctance about institutional forms of religion like the church, what I sensed among my fellow travelers was a hunger for spiritual experience, and an openness to the mysteries we were encountering in places like that sacred grove of trees. It’s a hunger I share.
But let me back up, and explain just how I got to Cuba, and why those sounds, those rituals, and those ceremonies have begun to mean so much to me. As most of you know, I’m taking a kind of staggered sabbatical leave throughout 2020, chasing some of the spiritual leads and intuitions I’ve had over the previous seven years as your minister. Throughout that time, I’ve become interested in how human beings, in all of our multiplicity and complexity, touch the sacred, which is to say, how we remain in touch with the deepest and truest parts of ourselves during moments of crisis, or pressure, or worse. I want to know how joy, and how festivity, are cultivated as strategic healing practices amidst those conditions. I want to know how certain groups of people have managed not only to survive, but to thrive under conditions of immense struggle. But I also wish to know how those life sustaining resources translate into wider visions of social flourishing. I wish to know how all of those elements combine to manifest the sacred, because I believe they possess wisdom that we can all of us use in our lives.
That’s part of a wider project that this church has pursued for nearly forty years now, if not longer, opening ourselves to the rituals, practices and perspectives of those on the underside of history – in South Dakota and South Africa, in Palestine and in Haiti, and more recently in our refugee and immigration work. It’s a way of being in the world that I’ve called “stretch theology.”
For those who haven’t heard me talk about it, “stretch theology” is a phrase borrowed from a jazz trumpeter named Christian Scott aTunde Ajuah, who released an album called Stretch Music a few years ago. In his liner notes to that album, aTunde Ajuah says: “We are attempting to stretch—not replace—jazz’s rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can.”
Replace “jazz” with “theology” in Scott’s quote, and you have a marvelous formulation for how the life of faith might function in the 21st century – stretching, not replacing, theology’s conventions with as many forms, languages, and cultures as we can. It’s an alluring way to configure the practices that we call church. We remain firmly grounded in the stories and teachings of Jesus. We remain grounded in the wisdom of the Apostle Paul, just as the words of the prophets continue to guide us. For us, it is as the prophet Isaiah wrote: “Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and the quarry from which you were dug.” That’s counsel we keep around here. We’re not replacing the historic conventions of our faith. But we are stretching it.
If our foundation can be glimpsed in that line from the prophet Isaiah, the stretch can be found in the restless movements of the Apostle Paul, who spent his life criss-crossing the Mediterranean, and making connections among the people who lived in that part of the world. Stretch theology is born from a similar impulse, though we’re not interested in making converts. We do it in a spirit of reverence and humility, the same reverence with which Paul greeted the Athenians in our morning passage. Paul observes among their worship an altar to an unknown god, and he uses that altar as a bridge, as a means of connecting two disparate ways of being. It’s true, many have used Paul’s journeys to justify a program of cultural and religious chauvinism, but I would have us treat his affirmation of the altar to the unknown god, one in whom we live and move and have our being, as an early instance of stretch theology, a mode of faith fitting for the 21st century.
That’s something of why I went to Cuba. But there were other reasons as well. On previous trips to that island, I’ve been transfixed by the complex system of music and worship that continues to animate many people in that country. The polyrhythms practiced by the drums and the visual beauty of altars composed for the orishas moved me deeply, and I wished to know more. It all comprises a hidden form of modernity, what I’d like to call an alter-modernity, forged in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade. It continues to inform the lives of people living throughout the Americas, in the US, in Cuba, in Haiti, in Brazil, and many other places. Traces of it can be found in popular culture, like in Beyonce’s Lemonade, or in the young adult novels my daughter Sabina is reading by Tomi Adeyemi. Learning to read these traditions is a part of what it means to be religiously literate in our pluralized world. But it’s also what it means to become a better neighbor, as we learn to love the people with whom we share that world. In any event, if you want to understand African religions as they’ve developed in the Americas, the place to go is Cuba.
Let me return to that scene in the sacred grove. It would be easy to misunderstand it all, given the ways those expressions have been mischaracterized by colonialists and fundamentalists alike as a part of the occult. Please. These are world historical faiths, every bit as rich and as narratively complex as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. They deserve to be treated as such. Most of what transpired in that grove came from two ancient sources: the Kongo tradition, the oldest of the African traditions in Cuba, with practices that originated in parts of the present day Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as parts of Angola; and the Yoruba tradition, with practices that originated in what is now Nigeria and parts of Benin, arriving in Cuba mostly in the 19th century. Those traditions now overlap, and are often practiced side by side, by the same people, the way some of you sometimes move back and forth between FCCOL and some other Christian expressions. The Kongo tradition is practiced under the name of Palo, and it attempts to stay connected to the world of one’s ancestors through a deep attention to the natural world. By contrast, the Yoruba tradition is practiced under the name of Santeria, and it attempts to connect to a dynamic pantheon of divinities called orishas, spirits brought to the new world by the enslaved, who continue to provide strength and wisdom to those who revere them.
Used together, both Palo and Santeria can be understood as creating liturgies that provide instruction for generous, thoughtful, and wise living. Like our own services, they begin with a call to worship, an invitation to the spirits, and then they move into the singing of praise. They include moments of offering, and if the ceremony goes well, they culminate in a visitation from one of the orishas, who, it is said “speaks in the voice of Africa.” For all the outward differences, as a minister, I couldn’t help but feel a close kinship with the structure of each ceremony. And though this is a world that feels relatively far from our lives here in Old Lyme, it’s one that can be profoundly instructive for all of us, trying as we are to remain human in inhumane times. They do so in three ways.
First, they remind us of what Christianity once was. We too once comprised a small, misunderstood sect, outlawed by political authorities. That’s what the way of Jesus was for a long time – a weird, hybrid aberration that made a lot of people very nervous. That all changed in the 4th century, when Christianity became the religion of empire and of power. It was pressed into the service of kings, rulers, lords, and yes, presidents. Its language and its symbols were used to justify everything from the slave trade to genocide, from colonialism to the pillaging of the earth for natural resources. True, some faithful people throughout history have reminded us that the way of Jesus is a repudiation of that form of power, but it can be very hard to remember that, and still harder to follow the implications of that insight all the way down. Sometimes, we need to step outside of our own tradition, the better to recall our own humble origins. In form, if not in specific content, the earliest versions of Christianity bear far more resemblance to the form of praise found in that sacred grove than to a good deal that travels under the name of Christianity here in the United States.
Second, the African derived expressions of faith found in Cuba stand as a summons to transform the raw materials of human woe into something beautiful, something transcendent, something powerfully life affirming. Here’s Robert Farris Thompson, one of my favorite guides within the world of African faith practices, talking about their spiritual importance for modernity: “Behind all the…groove (within these religions) is a philosophy that says in the horror of these times there’s an antidote. From drab little villages of concrete stalls and portable generators (or, I might add, from sacred groves in Cuban fields) comes this message-bearing music that says you can ‘play back’ disaster — that you can transform it,” turning it into a wheel that brings it back in altered form in order to give our lives a renewed significance and purpose.[2] That was happening all over Cuba, as we witnessed the rituals and ceremonies that have strengthened that people through the horrors of the middle passage, all the way up to the present day. As Jose Marti, the doomed and heroic poet of the Cuban people put it in the 19th century, “the deeper the wound, the sweeter my song.”
But that’s what we’re called to do as well. I don’t want to establish a false equivalence between those in rural Cuba, say, ancestors of the middle passage, and those of us here in Old Lyme. But those rituals are a powerful reminder of what religion, what the spirit that we call Holy, summons us toward: we too gather to be reminded that in the horror of these times, there is an antidote. Faith, in all of its various manifestations, is a fallout shelter from the logic of violence and conformity, from the corrosive effects of discrimination, dehumanization, and fear. In faith, and in our worship, however it unfolds, we play back disaster, renewing our shared humanity, proclaiming the ways of peace, and upholding the worth and dignity of all people, and not only people – of the natural world too. In sacred groves and New England meetinghouses alike, we proclaim that there is an antidote to the horrors of the time.
Finally this: in all of the ceremonies I attended, there were always at least three drums present. The groove was undeniable, though I can tell you, for a white boy like me, it was sometimes hard to find the underlying rhythm holding each song together. These rhythms, these patterns, are unbelievably dense, unbelievably complex. But I want you to know, I tried. Hard. It’s impossible to keep from moving, at least a little bit, and at times, I would even try to follow the steps of the some of our Cuban hosts. Invariably, I failed. Still, the lesson is this: you stand still at your own peril. This is worship to move to, to swing to, to feel in your knees, your hips, and your shoulders.
At one point, someone observed that it was probably pretty different at home in my congregation here in Old Lyme, the implication being that the Cubans know how to let loose, while we sit here locked up in our self-consciousness. But I wasn’t having it. I rose to your defense and to mine, and I said, “On the contrary!” We don’t know how to move quite like that, it’s true, but we do know how to move. We do it when we go forth from this place. We do it in our immigration and refugee work. We do it in our peace and plants potluck, and the rest of our environmental ministries. We do it in the thousand and one other ways in which we’re active and engaged, moving our bodies through the world. You see, we do share something in common with that ceremony in the sacred grove. We understand that religion is for lovers, for those capable of being transformed by the ecstasy of movement and grace. It can be hard, I know, to follow the underlying rhythm sometimes. But we do manage. This is a congregation that knows how to move.
Toward the end of that ceremony in the sacred grove, a woman was filled with the spirit of Babaluaye, the ancient king who became afflicted, and who thereafter became a compassionate healer. All who wished could come forward to receive that spirit’s blessing. There was nothing I wanted more. It was earthy and raw. She knelt on the ground beneath a giant tree, and I bent down to receive her embrace, first on one side, and then the other. She rubbed a consecrated oil upon my head, my arms, my hands, and my legs. She drew me down, until our foreheads were pressed together, and waited until I opened my eyes to meet her fierce and insistent gaze. She stared intently into my eyes, and then released me, spinning me in place as a gesture of spiritual reorientation.
It felt nothing short of holy. It felt like stretch theology in action. It felt like a blessing, delivered from an ancient African deity, through an effervescent Cuban woman, conferred upon me, and now brought back to you. Stretch, she seemed to say. Know that you are blessed. Reorient yourself around the things that matter most. And get moving.
Born from a wound, it unfolded within a sweet, sweet song. I pray to be made worthy of such profound exaltation. I pray that we all might be worthy of such a profound spirit of grace.
[1] A quote from the poet and essayist Jose Marti.
[2] See Rolling Stone, in a magazine profile of Thompson from 1984 by Fred Iseman, entitled “Canons of the Cool.” Available online.