INTERFAITH HEALING SERVICE JUNETEENTH 2023
When I was asked to participate in this healing service, I wasn’t quite sure what was expected. I asked Rev. Stancy and she suggested that I share what types of healing practices or rituals are done within my community. Instead, I’d like to share with you my personal quest for healing and how I have sought and found that healing. I found myself feeling disconnected, searching for something I couldn’t actually name or touch. I realized that connecting with my African roots brings me a sense of peace and pride that offers inner healing.
AKWAABA — WELCOME (play drums quietly in background)
In the Twi language of the Asante people of Ghana.
Centering Ritual
AKWAABA welcomes everyone into the healing space. You have gathered here to celebrate freedom and seek healing for yourselves, your communities, and the nation. You recognize the necessity of ensuring liberty and justice for all by celebrating America’s newest national holiday—Juneteenth. Not freedom for a select few, but freedom for everyone.
Libations
One of the first steps to healing is recognizing who we are and where we come from. The land of the original inhabitants has been recognized by my colleague. As I pour this libation let us welcome the Spirit of the One who created us all, called by the name you know. In my tradition I would say welcome Holy Spirit. Please welcome the Creator in your language or name. I would like to also welcome into this space the names of ancestors gone on who may have died before the promised liberty and justice they sought was realized by pouring an offering of thanks or remembrance for those whose shoulders we stand on. Call out their names as I pour libation in honor of their memory.
Usually done outdoors, liquid (water or liquor) is poured onto the soil. This space requires it to be done differently. This plant represents the earth and the water represents life. And water is healing. Amen, Ashe, amin.
Healing
So we come today to participate in this healing service. What does it mean to be healed and why is it important? To be healed means to be cured of an ailment, disease, or trauma; to regain one’s health. Going to use a medical metaphor to explain the importance of healing and being healed. Let me use a disclaimer here: this is not intended to offend or upset anyone so please receive it in the spirit it is given.
First, I believe that healing for this nation will come through history. The United States is in critical condition, and is on life support. Wounds of the past have never healed, never been treated. Abscesses have been allowed to form around the wound, leaving a thick scar over a deep untreated wound. This has internally festered, been infected and now causes serious internal system shutdown. It has affected the heart, lungs, brain; metastasizing like a slow-growing cancer. Healing, true and complete healing to remove the cancer and bring about renewed health can only come after a serious and critical surgery. Deep incisions must be made to remove the cancerous flesh. Truth is the surgeon’s scalpel. Truth is the unadulterated history of this nation that must be taught and told, not ignoring the difficult portions, not glossing over or rewriting or purposely forgetting the hard truths about American history. Or making the teaching of certain cultures’ histories against the law. Parts of American history are painful and shameful. But hiding it only allows the cancer to spread.
How does this painful history become a bridge to healing and wholeness for the nation and the marginalized communities it has kept oppressed? By facing it together, not ignoring it or criminalizing the teaching of certain history because it makes a few uncomfortable, taking on guilt that no one is imposing on them. Ignoring and overlooking certain portions of American history is like ignoring the signs of someone’s serious illness because the diagnosis scares them more than the treatment. In this case the treatment is simple. Just tell the truth. We can all learn something from our history. Telling our personal stories is part of that history.
The problems with forgetting history goes both ways. While the perpetrator wishes to remain __________guilt-free, victims also choose not to remember atrocities inflicted against them because the memories are so difficult, too painful to remember. Some of the ancestors in my community chose to remain silent never telling the stories of lynchings and rapes during Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and early civil rights years. It was too hard to remember the heinous atrocities inflicted upon them. But their silence only covered up their deep wounds and sometimes passed the unexplained woundedness on to future generations. My family was silent about why they all left Georgia and migrated north. They never shared their experiences good or bad with their grandchildren. But they did turn to the church. They turned to prayer, worship.
My family chose the church as a way to heal the difficult experiences they faced in the South, and the struggles they worked through in the North. In the history of African-Americans the church is an institution, a place to practice rituals of healing, restoration, resistance, and restoration. Since the days of enslavement my ancestors knew who God was/is. Despite the enslavers attempt to force their form of religion and Christianity upon the enslaved, they brought their God with them from the Motherland, West Africa. They knew who saw their humanity and heard their prayers. The God who is no respecter of persons, who recognizes that the whole of creation is good.
To paraphrase Zora Neal Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, “You know honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come around in queer ways.” Branches without roots. What things come around in queer ways? Let me explain what this means to me. Branches refer to trees. A branch not connected to its tree, its source, has no way of knowing what tree it belongs to, or what its species is. It has no root system from which to draw nutrients and water to grow, flourish, and remain alive. They can’t propagate properly and pass on their history to the next generation. In the natural and physical realm eventually, the branch withers and dies. Think of this as a spiritual and cultural metaphor. A branch without roots.
This is the plight of many African-Americans. We cannot connect our branches to our roots because they were stolen, severed, denied, and outlawed. After so many centuries of being on this continent with no connection to the motherland, we are like Zora Neale Hurston’s branches without roots.
Though First Nations People have historically & systematically been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands, have had their tribal languages and lifeways outlawed, they still know where their ancestral lands are, can name them and theoretically can possibly regain their land. They can restore and speak their tribal languages and practice ancestral customs and rituals; their branches still are rooted on this continent. They know where they came from, know where their sacred lands are though desecrated by American expansion, the Indian removal act, and countless treaties broken by this government. Their branches still have roots. The roots may be thin and weak, but the roots are still here.
We cannot say the same for the majority of the African American community. Most of us who identify as African American no longer have the same connections to our homeland, tribal identity, or language of our African ancestor who was forcibly brought to this continent. Our branches have been disconnected from our trees, and our roots have been severed. Our humanity has been denied we have been enslaved, mistreated and abused. Yet, since 1619 Africans in America have always resisted slavery and oppression in order to remain living, whole human beings. Our ancestors resisted slavery the best way they could, despite narratives to the contrary. Even now we live daily in a mode of resistance in order to claim, maintain, and express our humanity in hostile environments.
If you, people in your community or your group have never been the target of discrimination brought about by unfounded hate, embedded racism, unjust laws, and mistrust just because of melanin in your complexion or the clothes you wear, you may not understand how just living in the African-American community or other marginalized communities can become an act of resistance.
In Zora Neal Hurston’s words “Healing for us will come about in queer ways.” Healing for me has come about in the acceptance of my full black African American self. It has been a gradual transformation from shedding Western styles and standards of beauty. Not that they’re wrong, they no longer fit me. From embracing my natural hair to my preferred style of dress—African and African-inspired clothing has become for me an act of resistance and restoration, connecting me to my unknown African ancestors, and my personal search to find and heal myself.
This personal quest has led me to research and develop what I call Rituals of Restorative Resistance.
To simultaneously resist racism and oppression while restoring and healing the psyches of generations of traumatized communities, Rituals of Restorative Resistance require physical and spiritual activity that also becomes a critique and correction of America’s refusal to reckon with her past. These nine tenets of Rituals of Restorative Resistance invoke collective memory to become the anamnestic tools through which cultural amnesia and cultural trauma begin to be healed; ruminate, remember, reclaim, repudiate, resist, reframe, restore, refresh, and reconnect.
Tenets of Rituals of Restorative Resistance
- Ruminate: reflectively observe and question one’s present position, recalling and meditating on the systems and circumstances that brought you/us to this place.
- Remember: allow memories or re-memory to come forth; to call to mind personal or historic communal past experiences.
- Reclaim: take back with a sense of pride, possession of ancestral cultural identity consisting of language, art forms, music, religions, spirituality, cosmology, standards of beauty, and ways of being.
- Repudiate: call out and reject the demonic forces that have systematically denigrated indigenous cultures, stripping people of their lands, resources, and dignity; to diminish the power these forces have attempted to exert over people, cultures, and countries.
- Resist: oppose and confront racist and segregationist ideologies that have consigned black and brown people to the balconies of American society.
- Reframe: challenge the status quo and present history from the viewpoint of the colonized and enslaved (not a revisionist history but a corrective history); to correct false and misleading narratives around the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness.
- Restore: instill a sense of pride in individuals and communities that have withstood the effects of systemic injustices. Storytelling is one avenue of restoration.
- Refresh: offer a quiet space where participants are able to reflect on and through the process of restoration.
- Reconnect: communicate with others seeking to restore spiritual and emotional well-being to individuals and communities who have survived and thrived despite the sociopolitical and socio-historic conditions inflicted by the residuals of anthropological poverty.
The connecting component that allows the creation and enactment of Rituals of Restorative Resistance is the ability to remember. Even those memories that are “too painful to remember”35 must be excavated in order to move to a place of healing.
In my time with you today, I’ve shared how one African American woman has found personal spiritual healing in America. By inviting the ancestors to sit in the room with us, we have in effect allowed the healing of their spirits as well. Some need to forgive, some need to be forgiven. Our gathering here together of many ethnicities, nationalities, faith traditions, genders, and generations has become a means to heal the past, the present, and the future. Walk in blessings and healing.
