Reverend Dr. James Henry Harris is Distinguished Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology and a research scholar in religion and humanities at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Virginia Union University. He also serves as chair of the theology faculty and pastor of Second Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia. He is a former president of the Academy of Homiletics and recipient of the Henry Luce Fellowship in Theology.
He is the author of numerous books, including Beyond the Tyranny of the Text and Black Suffering: Silent Pain, Hidden Hope (Fortress Press, 2020). His latest book is N: My Encounter with Racism and the Forbidden Word in an American Classic, a memoir that describes and critically wonders about a graduate English class he took on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and provides crucial insight into the CRT conundrum. Harris and I agreed to hold regular conversations about the nature of Black Suffering. Here is my second of those discussions recorded on Tuesday June 9, 2022. This discussion focuses on Ministry in relation to Black suffering.
Harris and I agreed to hold regular conversations about the nature of Black Suffering. Here is my second of those discussions recorded on Tuesday June 9, 2022. This discussion focuses on Ministry in relation to Black suffering.
Podcast with Reverend James Henry Harris on 08/09/22
Black Suffering: Ministry
Somewhat edited for umms and hmms and repeats and some grammar.
[00:05:30]
John Hawkins: You have your own pains coming up to the pulpit. You have to keep on delivering. You know, you have to keep on standing, delivering in a kind of short, concentrated period of time. And, you know, I just find that like, you know, marvelous, you know, in the, you know, the sort of literal sense it's marvel. It's a marvel. I just kind of wonder if you could address this whole idea of suffering and hope. It's almost like you're a psychiatrist. Except you're not sitting down with one patient. You're standing up with the congregation. Every Sunday. Can you address your preparation or is it too esoteric?
James Henry Harris: [00:06:59] Well, I don't think it's too esoteric. But I do agree with you that in [delivering a sermon], you have to really focus on trying to be succinct. Like I said, my youngest son is a filmmaker who graduated from NYU's Tisch School of Filmmaking. And he always advises me to try to keep things short and succinct, mainly because of the attention span of people. So I mean, you know, a ceremony could be 3 minutes. I mean that should be, you know, and in some sense, that's pretty much the Jesus model. You know, whenever we read about Jesus sermons in the New Testament, they constitute about a paragraph or up to it. That's about it. And most of them are parabolic as well. So. I mean, you get a story and you have to go from there with a lot of the teachings of Jesus. But I'm not Jesus.
Addressing your issue on suffering and hope and help and your concern about how I'm able to negotiate the reality of suffering with some sense the [proleptic] vision of hope. With hope being something almost grounded in the future, more so than the present, However, my feeling is that like most Black people, we kind of just do what's necessary, what has to be done. As a pastor, part of my consciousness and my role is to encourage people, and to give people some understanding of both the reality that we live in, as well as, having hope that this reality can change.
My sermonic discourse in a very real sense is always about an underlying philosophical theory -- about trying to create a new world. I may talk about this a little bit in Black Suffering. That is, to create a new world for the listener and for the earth. And I think that's part of what the sermon is about -- trying to get to know people, [and] get people to understand -- particularly black people -- this world of suffering and pain.
So it's a reality I'm trying to give people. The hope of a new world. And this is not scatological. I'm talking about a new world here on earth, here and now. I'm not talking about anything futuristic, or Last Days, or anything like that. I'm talking about a kind of now-ness. It's sort of like Paul Tillich's notion of the Eternal Now. Raising the level of consciousness, at the same time trying to wrestle with some of the everyday realities. Which I acknowledge is very complex and very difficult.
My experience in the Black church is that people come to church in many ways to try to escape some of the suffering and some of the pain that they have to deal with on an everyday basis. And so the preacher is really walking a thin line between dealing with reality and sort of modulating or mediating this reality and this escapism that seems to also be a reality.
Hawkins: [00:12:02] And that's true of like any congregation. You know, I grew up Catholic and many times, you know, if there was a death in the community or something that was tragic, or an accident, you know, the priest would give a parable or in some way of try to assuage or comfort people. So there's a comfort factor. But still despite that, I mean, you've described the differences in that chapter of your book [Black Suffering] between a white minister and a black minister and the kinds of issues that a white minister might avoid. For instance, [you note that he] might avoid social justice issues, because they're uncomfortable addressing them, whereas that's not a privilege or luxury you have because you're not only a minister, you actually experience the same things as your congregation [as a Black person in a racist world].
Now, that may not be as true for a Catholic priest. These priests live in the rectory and kind of live isolated lives these days. Maybe the seventies. The Jesuits especially got out into their communities and were hell raisers, as it were. But these days, a lot of people are in reserve mode, you know, they don't get out to the community as much as they used to. Just like we don't have cops anymore who are what we used to call flat foots, you know, walking the beat. If there's an emergency now. You go there and shoot somebody, you know, usually someone Black. Welcome to America. There is the difference between the white minister and black minister on something like a social issue, let's say like George Floyd. There would have been the heart ringing from the white ministry, going, This is really abhorrent. But for you and for a Black congregation, it's more than just "abhorrent." It's not something that you're getting ministerial feedback on, or that you take home and think about or rationalize it.
Whereas yours is emotional; there's more emotion because there's a sense of the direct [line' to the Black experience, you know, that cannot just be rationalized away. And I just wonder how does this guy do this week after week? You know, it'd be kind of like a psychiatrist who has to listen to people in sessions all the time and absorb that and not get totally emotionally broken down themselves. It seems to me you do that -- a whole congregation, you know. And there's something about that has the ring of Jesus, you know, the ministering, or the handing out the bread and fishes, and that kind of thing, sort of comforting and giving people what they need.
Harris: [00:15:11] No, I understand. I think it's very complex. But I agree with you 100% in the sense that it's really a balancing act. I talk to young people all the time and I interview them and I ask them what their thoughts are. I try to get feedback from them on a sermon. Recently, one of my young leaders says that, you know, and I don't necessarily agree, I should mix it up. That is, not talk about social justice issues so persistently as I do. So I'm saying that this is the kind of critique that I'm getting. It's an internal critique coming from Black people, young black people who want to feel some kind of release from my constant dealing with issues of social justice, issues of racism, and some of the issues endemic to Black people. My experience is that even some of my own people want a break from it, from time to time. I understand that. And I'm saying to myself, when I hear that critique, that I want a break from it, too. But there is no break from it. So I'm trying to I'm trying to deal with reality, on the one hand, and embracing in my own soul and body a real dialectic that is always jockeying, always a battle between the Real and the Ideal, you know, in a traditional kind of dialectic or Hegelian sense" But I do try to find some resolution, to some degree, in the distinction that exists between the Real and the Ideal. Even in my in my sermonic discourse, I try to inspire. I'm trying to inspire people and also encourage them to think. And in the middle of all of that a sermonic discourse has to be a bit entertaining as well.
Yeah. I mean, you know, you can't constantly be discussing or talking about something that will make people turn you off. Right? So you have always try to keep the interest of the listener. And my approach to that is to try to deal what I call the real, you know, the reality, the real life situation of Black people. And, you know, that that brings in the life situation of whites, as well. Yeah. But I can say, in my own experience, that while a lot of Black people attend white churches, very few white people attend Black churches. And, particularly a church like mine, where the focus is going to be on racism and injustice and unfairness, and things like that, and trying to argue that this is what the Gospel is about . Addressing these issues is not about glossing and placating the perpetrators of injustice and unfairness. And that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, I think that's exactly what the white church does. The white church has a whole different agenda that is, I guess, to make their congregations feel good about the -- I must say -- the evils that they have done historically. I'm trying to raise the level of consciousness for Black people regarding Black suffering and trying to advance the notion of uncomfortability, even among our own people. I argue in the book that many African Americans are not as conscious of their own suffering as they should be in my view.
Hawkins: I think you can make the same case for people who are poor, whether they're Black, white or green or any other thing. That have to settle into a hierarchal assignation, and that's what you're going to be. You know, you're going to be lower middle class or working class or whatever. And I remember, you know, you could take jibes, during the 80s at UMass, from some of the Harvard type professors that moved into the faculty, and the humanities, and feminism came out on the rise and looked like CRT. There was there was you know, there was an aggressive movement to make sure that people became more aware of feminist issues, and reader response theory came in, that kind of thing. But there are assignments, there are assumptions from that from their end, from the from these Harvard-trained people that because they're teaching at a school in this case, UMass-Boston that had just merged with Boston State, a more traditional lower tier, with primarily Blacks, and presumed they were talking to whites in the class who were probably from white Charlestown or Southie. Some white sexist, racist kind of community who needed this critical theory stuff. And they just made assumptions like that. And I think a lot of that happens. You know, people get comfortable with being sort of pigeonholed into a particular kind of thing.
And indeed what you're saying, what we're all saying, which is [we need] a raising of consciousness, that opens up your mind. Sometimes people go for drugs, you know, they go for psychedelics or something like that to open up their minds. We used to do in the 60s, you know, you get LSD or something just to expand your mind and the way you look at the world. And I think, often, that helped actually. But you know, we need something like that to break us out of our inability to see that we're causing suffering to each other in ourselves. And now, in terms of the Black experience, you know, I have limited understanding. I have none, really, I'm not Black. I think as a white, you know, of the divide, you know. To me, the shocking question I have is how is it possible in the 21st century that we can still be all about this dividing me from you, that you have Black skin and I white skin? How could that possibly be meaningful, you know, and how could that be saved as a card up the sleeve at some later point to gain an advantage over somebody? And to me, that's just something really profound about our species, you know -- look at what we do to each other in wars all the time, you know, rip each other apart. We're the only species that does that. So there's something wrong with us, it seems to me, you know, in the genes, you know, there's a set of violence strands there that we don't seem to have addressed yet. It shouldn't be happening, you would think, at this late stage of our development and evolution.
I guess my question is, Nietzsche once said, as you know, the famous quote, what does not kill me makes me stronger. And I wonder how that applies, if at all, to the Black experience of suffering. There's lots of Black suffering. Does it make for a stronger Black man? Or is it just wadng in the deep end of the shallow pool all the time?
Harris: [00:25:06] Yeah. I mean, it's a complex issue. I guess theoretically, you know, Nietzsche might be right, but I claim it's probably easier for Nietzsche to say than others.
Again, the implication has to be that no one consciously, or in their right mind, welcomes suffering. I mean, you know, everybody, from that perspective is trying to avoid suffering as much as possible. We understand that that's a [universal] given. But Black suffering is unique. It's a phenomenon grounded in racism and hate. And evil. You know, that kind of thing. Here in the US, I don't know if you've kept up with it -- the three white men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery were sentenced again this week to life in prison. But, I mean, the confounding thing is, at any given point, any black man can be just chased down and murdered? Yeah. Yeah. You know, like police always say, you know, I felt that my life was being threatened. I mean, in other words, if you show up at a scene, and there's a Black person there, that's a threat to your life, in your own consciousness, and, therefore, that person ends up being murdered. In the Ahmaud Arbery case, he was just chased down, like an animal. And killed. And there are so many cases like that ,and they continue. You know, it's really a pandemic. You know, and it's endemic as well. And I think it has become so endemic that we have just written it off as saying it's just something we're going to have to live with, the suffering of Blacks, the violence perpetrated against Blacks. It's just becomes so much a part of the fabric of our society.
Hawkins: [00:28:33] Yeah, that's right. And, you know, it's funny you say that because because I've been reading articles where they're trying to develop A.I. applications for people and they're discovering that they have built in biases. You know when they program the A.I. and it takes over and uses its algorithms, it's picking up on a human bias and targets Black people and [other] people of color. And it's, like, even the next generation, as we merge into the singularity of the AI and human, which I'm all for in a way, you know, I mean, mostly because it's an opportunity to improve ourselves, to get rid of some of this nonsense, but probably not if this kind of thing is happening, if we're building in our biases to. These machines of the future that will determine what we do online. For instance, you know, the algorithms already come along and check out profiles and determine whether white or Black, and then treat us differently. You know, even with something more advanced [on the evolutionary scale], we just can't seem to knock it off.
Harris: [00:30:08] Yeah. That's extraordinary. And it's amazing. But, you know, the robots are designed by people who impose their own biases, and everything else, on the machines. Yeah. This is true. So. You're right.
Hawkins: [00:30:36] But getting back to ministering, is there a place you go inside yourself to get emotionally ready? You know, because again, you have to sort of find that no matter what's happening in your personal life, you're still going to have to address the congregation. And I'm just wondering, is there like a little exercise or something you have to do to sort of get the appropriate mojo going to sort of deliver and be effective. I mean, I don't know how that works, whether you actually go with the emotion you have if something has happened in your personal life, or do you feel like you need to sort of keep a centralized balance with your emotions, to deliver the same even way every week so that people can depend on your emotional stability. Is that something they can sort of feed off of? Is there something like that that goes on as a minister?
Harris: There's a lot of preparation that goes into ministry" [indistinct]"There are there are periods of meditation that are built into the service. " [indistinct]"And I try to do this every day by walking and stretching and things like that. I do that. Trying to open up my own spirit, of my own soul, to relax and other kinds of things. So, before I preach. Generally, I try to walk. Three or four miles in the morning for services at 11 a.m..
Hawkins: [00:33:31] You walk alone?
Harris: [00:33:35] Yeah. And people sometimes want to walk with me, but I try to avoid it. I try to avoid the company of walkers. I just try to walk alone. Now, I'm going to tell you, I have had to do that, even in writing Black Suffering. Well, in order to do the writing, I had to spend almost each day in some kind of meditation. ..So my own ritual is I try to walk. Really listen to the birds and listen to the voices of nature and really observe what I call the aesthetic beauty. So just observing the atmosphere, the geography. And that really does kind of help me a lot in terms of delivering the sermon, which has an element of the performance. I mean. .. Sometimes I have to think of myself an R&B singer or a rock star, or something, and perform. But there has to be a balance. You know, between the performative. And the meditative"Unfortunately, the majority of people really have no interest in what difficulties you've had in getting here this morning, what your experiences are, how much pain you might be in, or whatever. Their concern is mainly that, you know. You are here to deliver a service. [You are there] to minister to them"You know, the ministry is a very lonely profession.
It's a miracle from God that most Black people, not just the ministers, have not lost their mind.
Hawkins: [00:36:51] One thing that came up in the last chapter -- Suffering and Hope -- was really interesting to me. Let me just quote:
As a young seminary student at Virginia Union University, I first read James H. Cone's God of the Oppressed in 1975 during a Systematic Theology course. Cone was to theology as James Brown was to soul music"-a godfather. He was a superstar among Black students and some professors, a fresh, defiant, loving, and radical voice in the Black church and in the theological community. He was eloquent and bold, and he would not back down from the arrows of criticism thrown at him from every direction"-from Black and white preachers, pastors, and theologians worldwide.
Do you want to explain that more, and then tell me whether you try to follow that kind of the pathway or is it a little bit different for yourself?
Harris: [00:37:47] Well, I mean, to some extent. Cone was basically an academic theologian. You know, and, uh, a theologian grounded in the classroom, a pretty elite classroom, as the professor at Union Seminary in New York. Probably considered by some, at least historically, as one of the most highly rated theological institutions in the world. And so in that sense, I mean, his appointment, his professorship was at a predominantly white institution.
He was a very consciousness-raising theologian who really didn't back down from just a panoply of criticism from every hand, you know, Blacks, Whites, American,. Europeans, and so forth, because he was making these bold claims about theology and about God being the God of the oppressed. Theology being about liberation, about confrontation with injustice, and all of those kinds of things. And what Cone did was he gave voice to the way a lot of us who were seminarians were thinking. And prior to him, you didn't encounter any Black theologians, per say, in the study of systematic theology, liberal theology from the traditional white theologians. And Cone made his way in the midst of that and gave many of us, really, a new hope, a new understanding of God and all of the things surrounding God, and surrounding the church, and now the Black church. The black church was not necessarily that receptive to [Cone] because they considered him mainly a theoretical philosopher, so to speak, and university-based. And that was fine. And I had my own critiques of him at the time. I thought that he himself had a certain distance from the struggles and sufferings of Black life. That a pastor like me, you know, I was like on the ground, a great respect for his work, just great respect for his work. And, you know, really came to believe that you didn't have to be on the ground in the pastorate, in the church, and in the community to advance the kinds of things that he was talking about.
Hawkins: [00:41:41] Right. Well, there's one question he asks that you quote in Black Suffering, that I think is germane to what we're talking about right now. Cone says:
The reality of suffering challenges the affirmation that God is liberating the oppressed from human captivity. If God is unlimited both in power and goodness, as the Christian faith claims, why does He not destroy the powers of evil . . . If God is the One who liberated Israel from Egyptian slavery, who appeared in Jesus as the healer of the sick and the helper of the poor, and who is present today as the Holy Spirit of liberation, then why are Black people still living in wretched conditions without the economic and political power to determine their historical destiny?
And that's a fantastic question. And how do you answer it or how do you begin?
Harris: [00:42:34] Yeah. These are the questions that come, put before all of us and put before the world. And I think that's what made him the father of Black theology because he put these critical questions front and center. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a question that Black people ask themselves. You cannot help but ask yourself why the persistence. Your suffering and pain. And at the same time, you know, Blacks refuse to embrace the Nietzschean 'God is dead' phenomenon, in spite of the suffering.
My thinking is, you know, that a lot of people ask [the question], and, I'm sure that those within Judaism ,after Auschwitz, and so forth. How could God possibly be the God of liberation? I think that Blacks could ask the same thing after 300 plus years of slavery. But at the same time, Blacks have continued to distanced themselves from any notion that God is not alive and working and operative in the lives of people. That's inexplicable in many ways. And I think to some extent, that's what that's what Cione is trying to get at or ask.
Hawkins: [00:44:32] Related to what we're talking about. In the last week, for some reason, Bob Marley tunes have been coming up. There's a song called "Talking Blues." And this one bit where he goes:
'Cause I feel like bombin' a church -
Now - now that you know that the preacher is lyin'.
So who's gonna stay at home
When - when the freedom fighters are fighting?
I feel like bombing a church now that, you know, the preacher is lying, you know, and it seems to go into the whole Master /Slavery of the Black mind. You have to assimilate and accommodate, and we're not getting it. His song has a Nat Turner kind of feel to it. It's like it's not enough just to feel like we can be liberated by words. But so who's going stand up tall or something for the revolution? You know, his songs were about revolution towards the end there. And I guess what I'm saying is that for him, especially with that particular song, "Talking Blues."
Harris: [00:46:45] Yeah. Again, I think that the [Cone] question reflects the complexity of these issues .. Most blacks are, I would argue, don't lean towards a Nat Turner end of the spectrum. I think most blacks lean more towards the middle or to the right. And in a much less actively violent kind of [way]. But in the book, I suggest that even in the next chapter or in other places, that Black violence is often a response to the violence of whites. Blacks seldom even historically initiate violence. And even then, that Turner Insurrection was a response to [his violent conditions]. To the violence that is still endemic to the south is the plantation life to the slave-ocracy, and so forth. So again, um, very, very, very challenging. Just very, very challenging.
Black Suffering by James Henry Harris can be purchased at Fortress Press.
