Swinging the Chariots: The Century-old Ritual of Seeking and the African-American Beatific Vision
Posted: Friday, July 18, 2008
by Walter Rhett
Charleston Perlo
The Beatific Vision
At another level, the Gullah (enslaved Africans, collectively named for those from Angola) also received a gift that tied the prophets' dreams to revelation's final judgment and opened the whole of heaven before them. They received a vision a beatific vision it fulfilled an extraordinary promise: "they shall see God." In their beatific vision, the Africans stepped directly into God's presence and witnessed eternal life in divine measure and the peace beyond understanding that God himself enjoys.
For the slave, as in the East India myth of the Ganges, the enduring heart met the Sacred Heart; those broken by suffering were those blessed and redeemed with a clear, open, and immediate vision of God. This vision granted an unbreakable bond and the angels and saints, the martyrs, the quick and the dead, the pure at heart and the humble, the prophets and innocents, the prayerful and the merciful, the warriors and well-doers, all surrounded God's throne, descending and ascending, breaking through the clouds, traveling into the light . . . to guide the chosen to an unbreachable, life-saving power.
For by the beatific vision, men and women on earth rejoice in the benefits they have in Christ. Their praise is as high as the angels. Here stands their happiness and eternal hope-a peace wrung out of stone, suffering, and sin.
Recall the people's greetings to Christ and his words to the Pharisee's upon entering Jerusalem (from Luke, who records seven miracles of Christ absent from other gospel accounts, chapter 19: 38-41): "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" "Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, "Teacher, rebuke your disciples!" "I tell you," he replied, "if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out." John Wesley took this to mean: " God would raise up some still more unlikely instruments to declare his praise. For the power of God will not return empty."
The Seeker
The Africans recorded the experience of their beatific vision in their music (the spirituals again), their prayers, and in a 200 year old community rite and religious institution called "seeking." Seeking required the seeker to fast and pray in isolation outdoors (woods near a river or a field) under the supervision of an elder. Seeking had to be completed before a person could be baptized. Prayer and fasting continued until the seeker received a personal vision or "dream," detailing God's purpose or plan or wisdom for the seeker. Jonathan Green's 2006 painting, "The Seeker," (filled with red, the fires of hell and the dawn of the new morning both calling the seeker, warring for his soul, as the seekers prays, still, eyes closed, to "know" the true light and find his soul) captures the experience of going into the woods to "seek" until pilgrim's head is "wet with the morning dew."
Seeking institutionalizes the beatific vision and makes it personal (in " Mary," the spiritual's lyrics affirm the beatific vision and the individual's seeker's revelation: "I stood on the rock where Moses stood"); it extends the tradition as it repeats and celebrates its extraordinary witness. As a gravestone is an outer marker. A seeker blazes, from completing thoughts, blooming impulses, deceptions, pleasures, and temptations, a pilgrim's path to the "true" inner guide of conscience
Thomas Wentworth Higginson from Boston, the editor and friend of the poet Edna St. Vincent Milay, served as an Army Officer at Hilton Head, SC during the 1861, and described "seeking" in his letters as being "in the lonesome valley," and noted that seekers tied their hair up in special patterns.
The angels descending and ascending in "Sweet Chariot" and "Draw Lebel," "the wheels" Ezekiel saw, the "plenty good room" of the Father's mansion, these and other expressions of beatific vision in the spirituals are texts under the seals of a witness affirmed by Biblical and contemporary events-but in today's understanding historic events have subsumed the meaning of the divine witness. (The enslaved are not singing of returning to Africa or leaving for Canada, literally or figuratively . They are divine witnesses to the most powerful religious vision that can be granted to the faithful. The cited references manifest this vision, document its evidence.
European worship is often rooted in text; African praise journeys outside of the text, and is expressed and received in visions, and documented in music. The beatific vision, its open door of truth and goodness, made the African inseparable from God. For the slave, this contact is a bond that becomes life-saving, a source of renewable energy to fight fatigue and weary cruelties, and the power to carry love and mercy all the way to the final Gate: "We will run and never tire." ("I can't stand the fire.")
A prayer recorded in 1934 on Johns Island presumes the beatific vision in its powerful intercession whose simple words conceal a relationship with God that is non-penitent or marked by adoration. It is direct, immediate, and intuitive. Christ's head on her knee, she strokes his temple, as she sits and speaks directly to God: "Lord, give them better."
In African prayer, song, and rites, the beatific vision is celebrated and its power and new place confirmed:
" Cry holy, holy !
Look at de people that is born of God.
I run down de valley, I run down to pray,
Look at de people that is born of God.
How to sing a new song in an alien land? "I will min' A'chie," the Gullah lullaby says, "me, A' chie, min'um." An unknown woman watched over A'chie as the pilgrims whose bones were picked clean of pink flesh by sharks were sent by heaven to the depths of the sea.
For a century in the lowcountry, the slaves took eternal rest in unmarked graves, land and sea, and "built their house on Zion hill."
This pluralism of African and European attitudes widened the circle of American meaning, bringing in elements later decried, and that circle in Charleston included the mainline churches. Despite differences in faith traditions and beliefs, Charleston's Anglicans, Congregationalists, Huguenots, Methodists, Baptists, Jews, and Catholics all conformed to the common style in grave markers, and every denomination has examples. They were on intimate terms with the African experience. This consistency across faith lies continues even as skulls and wings give way to winged faces and then to portraits and cameos. By the 19 th century, Greek and Christian symbols returned to Charleston's memorials, as pillars, finials, urns, vines, roses, and chaises. Europeans heard and sung the African spirituals. African songs chimed from St. Michael's bells.
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