Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church (review)

In recent years, the contemplative traditions of the Black Church have been the focus of growing attention in academic and ecclesial circles. As a result, there is now an increased awareness of the breadth, depth, and diversity of Black spiritualities in general. The 2003 Hampton University Ministers' Conference, which brought together some 7000 or more Black clergy, had as its focus the contemplative life of the Black cleric. A major initiative under the direction of Walter Fluker at Morehouse College "focused on cataloguing and publishing the papers of the late Howard Thurman" is ongoing. Secondary literature calling attention to the spiritual topography of the Black Diaspora within and beyond the Americas has seen a marked increase. Groundbreaking works such as Peter Paris's The Spirituality of African Peoples (Fortress, 1995), Anthony Pinn's Varieties of African American Religious Life (Augsburg Fortress, 1998), and Yvonne Chireau's Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (University of California Press, 2003) are three of many such monographs published in the last decade examining heretofore under-explored dimensions of religious praxis in the African Diaspora. Holmes' latest work, an examination of the contemplative practices developed and utilized within "Africana contexts" (vii), particularly those that are Christian, is a welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship that will prove of great value to a wide audience, including theologians and those engaged in pastoral work.

Following a preface and introduction in which Holmes provides both the rationale for her study and personal reflections on her initiation into the world of Black Diasporan spirituality, the book consists of seven chapters that offer: a brief history of the Africana contemplative tradition (Chapter 1); an overview of West African cosmologies and religious practices (Chapter 2); a survey of contemplative norms developed by African slaves in the Americas (Chapter 3); an assessment of the role of contemplation in the liturgical life of the Black Church (Chapter 4); an examination of contemplation as recurring trope in African American biblical hermeneutics (Chapter 5); a series of case studies that illustrate the ways in which contemplation has served as a theological foundation for African American social activism (Chapter 6); and an exploration of several modes of cultural expression—blues, jazz, tap dancing, and rap music—that are loci of contemplation in the Black artistic milieu (Chapter 7). The book concludes with an afterword in which Holmes calls for a retrieval of a fuller range of indigenous Africana contemplative practices to heal what she terms "the scars and traces of racism's collective demonic possession" (184) and the African American community's "inner conflicts and seeping psychic wounds that can no longer be ignored" (185). A nuanced reading of contemplative practices nurtured within an Africana ethos—one that encompasses a cultural and historical landscape inclusive of Africa and the global dispersion of African peoples from antiquity to the present—the book is also a manifesto for reform. Holmes sees modern conventions of worship that "have conformed more closely to familiar entertainment patterns" (185) as one of the factors eroding contemplative praxis in the Black Church and compromising what she so eloquently describes as "the deep solace of coming together" (185).

Throughout the book, Holmes weaves autobiographical reflection, historical analysis, cosmological theorizing, and theological inquiry into an insightful and engaging narrative. In a real sense, it models an extended form of the Africana midrash that she describes in Chapter 5 as griosh—a term "derived from the word griot, referring to African storytellers, who were also historians and keepers of cultural memory" (120). The sh ending the word is, for Holmes, emblematic "of the hush arbors where Christian diasporan faith perspectives were honed" (120). She creatively blurs genre boundaries in a manner consistent with the conventions of recent forms of ethnographic writing to bring to light the rich and varied assortment of Africana contemplative practices that, in her words, "have been hidden from view by the exigencies of struggle, survival, and sustenance...