Is my praying in vain?
Is my labor in vain?
Is my singing in vain?
Is my speaking, is it in vain?
I often wonder why and how I still believe in God. I watch and hear the screams of babies all over the world, covered in evil’s soot; Their lungs like apocalyptic trumpets heralding the existence of Hell on Earth. I witness injustice as we waste time in the wondering of just who our neighbor is.
I wonder why and how I still believe in God.
I have become unafraid of sitting with these questions and often as I meditate I am taken back to my Nanna’s gold imprinted loveseat and become conscious of an inherited faith.
I can still feel her hands guiding mine as we skimmed through her bible’s thin, gold leaf-paper edges.
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, Acts and Letters to the Romans,” she would sing.
I was never really interested in Sunday School and the rigmarole of church practices. From a young age, I was more interested in the parables and the riddle-like mystery of faith. I was interested in my mother’s tears as she sat singing on wooden pews and the calming spirit that would fall over my Dad every Sunday after one of his weekly Saturday rages. I had a lot of questions, and my Nanna would sit and listen to me, searching for answers in the grey with an urgency to meet me. The truth I’ve come to believe was that being “saved” was not what was most important in her teaching, it was my safety. She too was an opinionated black woman with questions, and she knew I would need a safe and expansive place to ponder. She was teaching me that to be Black in America, to come from oppressed people, is a constant paradox. One that requires a divine sense of self-love to step into a fullness of being. She was passing down a truth that radicalized and freed her and my ancestors. She was giving me a history lesson.
Over the last few years, I have allowed this inherited faith to be the spool that supports in unraveling of religiosity. What I have loved is seeing how my cultural identity allows me to know and experience God in such complex ways.
I have sat with the Bible as a history of oppressed people. Not some scroll that was written by white men seated on supreme court thrones judging us from afar, but a God that became an outcast, “despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces… we held him in low self-esteem.1 A God who gave up power to become love. Who writhed into brittle flesh to ignite senses and taste the earth’s longing.
I have sat with this book as a hymnal, discovering that the substance of things hoped for sounds like a jubilee song being sung under the southern plantation sun. Psalms like David’s, created from the blood of hands, tired from the cutting of the dried bristle of the cotton plant. Piercing like the thorns crowning a Savior’s head.
I have sat with this book as an intimacy guide, loving this Dark and lovely body… for I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.” 2 I have learned to Eat, friends, and drink; [To] Drink [my] fill of love.”3
I have dined with this book like a black feminist guide, basking in the ways women poured out their bodies for this movement. The Lilys like Rosa Parks, the Marthas like Fannie Lou Hamer, the Marys like Tarana Burke; leaders of the movement who devoted themselves to birthing and mothering a grander vision for the freedom of all. How, through deep intimacy, women were the first to meet with God in the revelation of Christ and pass on the good news that we shall never see death.
I have sat with this book like a visionary pamphlet for the future where power looks like men locking eyes to kneel before one another in humility. Where they embrace one another, washing one another’s feet, and anointing callused and crooked toes vulnerably with holy oil. A future where Judas’ kiss is reversed, and instead, soft win/win kisses of unity are laid on one another like benedictions, leading them to find rest on one another’s shoulders in delight.
I have sat and meditated on God being non-binary and how releasing them to be vast in identity allows me to see a bigger picture of creation. One that includes both the masculine and the feminine in the makings of the universe.
I have let the Bible radicalize me to see and fight for love to prevail for all people no matter their race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, criminal background, or financial status. For once we all were not a people, but now we are the people of God. Once we had not received mercy, but now we receive God’s Mercy. 4
And as I make this my practice the unraveling becomes a loose thread available for the knitting together of God’s Love. He begins to use it to sew the fragmented pieces of my heart that rip open at the baby’s trumpeting cry. God connects this unraveled thread to the quilt being created with my neighbors all over the globe and reminds me of the beautiful tapestry being built from the contemplation of our wonder of why and how we believe in God.
And in this contemplation, I am transported back to my Nanna’s couch. My eyes are still full of questions and wonder. I see her smile, she is my spool, happy that I have found my way home.
No, of course not
It's not all in vain
No, no Lord, no
'Cause up the road is eternal gain.5
Isaiah 53:3
Song of Solomon 2:1
Song of Solomon 5:1
1 Peter 2:10
Is My Living in Vein Sung by the Clark Sisters, written by Barry White & E. Clarke
Pauline Rebecca Maxwell my Nanna Boo
Very introspective and beautifully written. You are truly gifted. There are millions that have pondered the same questions. Thank you for sharing.