IDEAS ALONE ARE NOT ENOUGH
By Grace Lee Boggs Michigan Citizen, Nov. 19-25, 2006
In my October 15 column I described a thoughtful conversation on religion at the Boggs Center.
Here is another view of the same conversation from activist/poet Will Copeland.
“It was a beautiful thing to see Vincent Harding, an activist with a long history in progressive Christian movements, conversing with Valdina Pinto, a priestess of Candomble, an Afro-Indigenous religion developed by Brasil’s enslaved and free Africans. All too often Christians look down on indigenous practices. ‘You need Jesus!’
How can Nationalists communicate with Christians when they condemn them for being brainwashed by ‘White Jesus’ or fleeced by church systems?
What is the value of having identity? Valdina strongly bemoaned the Christian influence on Brasil’s Africans, tricking them to view traditional African practices as devilry and bewitchment. Her story reminded me of the role Christianity played in pacifying enslaved Blacks with a pie-in-the-sky gospel and in decimating Native American peoples.
Valdina said that Candomble’s power to connect with ancestors and the natural world has given her the strength and the motivation for social justice and to fight for a better quality of life for her community.
What about Christianity today? The room grunted in recognition when Valdina talked about Brasilian ministers and church officials who live in mansions while their congregation fight the daily struggle for survival. One attendee asked about the impact of the ‘Prosperity Gospel.’ Is it the claim that all people deserve wealth and only ‘poverty consciousness’ is holding you back? Is it the claim that the rich are better, more sacred, more valuable than the poor?
Valdina talked about how these messages have been used by Christian churches to get Africans in Brasil to despise themselves, their ancestors, and each other.
In our post-integration landscape African Americans need to have this conversation distinguishing between poverty/ scarcity, wealth, and luxury. Does our power come from our ability to amass individual holdings? I remember Granny always said, “You got to bring something to the table.” At the same time my maternal grandmother lamented the mindset as individual families attained income and status and moved out of the black community.
Immediately after Reconstruction, prospering black communities were attacked to make way for Jim Crow’s apartheid. Will the ‘prosperity Gospel’ help us build community-based and cooperative economies ?
We talked about simplicity and withdrawing from the ‘need to want’ continuously advertised consumer economy. Vincent Harding described the power of faith (walking courageously into the unknown) and collective organization as being the power base of the southern Civil Rights Movement.
What is the purpose of church? Is it to help us plan and strategize to meet our material needs or to give us the internal fortitude to walk boldly into the unknown, overcoming our own fears? Is it to teach us ways of being connected to our Creator, to our own energies, to the natural world of which humanity is just a part? Is it to teach us to love, including loving ourselves and our past?
In general, parents want a better life for their children. Even this desire is dialectical, coming out of the contradictions our parents experienced: poverty, discrimination, immigrant status, abuse. Parents don’t want their children ‘go through what we did.’
All the above questions would be great for interfaith, intergenerational, inter-geographical, multiracial discussions . They would help us clarify what our shared and individual values are. They can be boiled down to: What do we mean by leaving a better life for the future and are our methods likely to work?
Through community discussions like these we can look at the messages our communities broadcast and transform our communities to represent our most cherished values and bring us health.
Grace Boggs emphasizes ‘the power of ideas.’ This discussion suggests that ideas are not sufficient for cultural resurrection if we only think about them. How do they become sparks of energy that move us to relate differently with each other, to bring joy into each other’s lives, to honor our ancestors and relate to their presence in this moment, to find peace even in trying situations, to communicate with people, animals, trees, waters—the spirits that make up the world we are a part of—without which we couldn’t live at all? We need these ideas to help us realize a new way of being – in harmony.
I have developed meditation practice for myself via Isha Yoga, libations, Reiki, and others; and art/activism practices to internalize a new way of being and share it widely.
Vincent Harding described the Boggs Center work as sacred: wherever humans come together to assert good ways of being human together. I agree with Valdina when she says that this synthesis is the true environmentalism.
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