When I think about my childhood, there are a few images that immediately come to mind: eating cookie crisp cereal at my grandparents’ house on those days when I was home sick from school, building “mansions” made of blankets that hung down from the top of the bunk bed to the chair below, but most of all, I remember being in church. My church memories are perhaps my most vivid because they are colorful and a bit scary at times. I never knew if someone would “catch the spirit” this week and take off running, screaming, crying or just fall out. As a child I did not quite understand what was going on. I equated such outpouring of emotion to something bad, and whenever I saw a loved one on the cusp of “catching the spirit,” I tried to quench the spirit by distracting them. Apparently my pattern was detected because I remember my grandmother asking me one day, “Now are you going to let me worship today, or are you going to bother me?” That was my last day of quenching the spirit.
Despite my confusion about what was occurring around me, I still loved attending church, not only as a religious institution, but also as a cultural center within the Black community. It was in the church, as I observed the wide array of people around me, worshipping and engaging with each other in different ways, that I learned the complexity and richness of blackness. The songs we sang told our history; they embodied our struggle as a people. The sermons affirmed us in the struggles we endured in those days between Sundays. The rituals and practices we partook in were an inheritance from our ancestors that we continued to pass on. Although I could not name it then, I now know that what I sensed and appreciated about the church was that it was a place of cultural transference between generations.
Given this role of the church, I must confess that I am disheartened when I hear so many of my students say they are not familiar with the church or have no personal tradition of attending church. While I understand the religious landscape of the Black community is shifting and some may find the move away from the church to be beneficial, I would challenge us to rethink about the full implications of a generation growing up outside of the church. The church in the Black community serves as a space of intergenerational cultural transference, matched perhaps only by the black family. Therefore, one wonders if its decline cannot occur without some detriment to the Black community as a whole. There is a certain level of intentionality required in transferring culture, history and tradition, and the dismissal of one of those channels of transference without a replacement will disrupt the process. Thus, if one is content with the church’s decline, then what institutions exist or will we create to replace its functions? More importantly, if there is no institutional replacement, then what important aspects of cultural, history lessons and traditions will we lose?
The answers to these questions are unknown, and maybe not fully knowable. But I think pondering these questions is the first step in eliminating any potential breakdown in the passing on of critical information and the creation of memories for future generations.
–Until Next Time–
Palooke
