[Dialogue] 4/14/2022, Progressing Spirit: Toni Anne Reynolds: The Banjo – A Symbol of Endurance in the Midst of Great Suffering; Spong revisited

Fri Apr 15 16:47:54 PDT 2022

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The Banjo – A Symbol of Endurance
in the Midst of Great Suffering
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|  Essay by Toni Anne Reynolds
April 14, 2022Over the last four years I’ve fallen in love with the banjo. It has been an interesting journey to take up this instrument. I’ve heard friends and family make comments about how strange it is to see a black woman with a banjo. A few have even expressed mild disapproval of seeing me with it, recalling the devastating era of chattel slavery that created the stereotype of “the banjo picking negro”. But really, the banjo is so much more than that. When I explain that I have taken up this instrument to remind myself of my connection to Spirit, that I love the banjo because it is a symbol of endurance, I watch their doubt slowly begin to soften.

Growing up I didn’t have much thought of the banjo. I certainly shared that distance from the instrument that my friends and family communicated. The banjo was an instrument that Uncle Tom played. It was a visual agreement to submit to the plantation politics that subverted black bodies underneath white ones. Without the use of any words to elaborate, the haunting dynamic of racial violence and capitalism could be summed up with a person of a certain complexion holding this instrument.

Simultaneously, the banjo freely roamed the worlds of bluegrass and country music. I remember seeing music videos and live performances of white musicians playing vibrant music with the help of the banjo. I was, and continue to be, unable to discern even an ounce of tension or lament about the visual story being told now that a body of a different complexion was playing the same instrument under the gaze of an audience. This contrast is of great interest to me.

In my quest to understand my own connection to the banjo I’ve happened upon a variety of essays, books, and documentaries that explore its history and evolution through present day North America. The most compelling moment happens in a documentary created by world renowned banjoist, Belá Fleck. The documentary is called “Throw Down your Heart” and it depicts Fleck and his crew traveling to various countries on the African continent. The point of the sojourn was to trace the roots of the banjo to its origins on the great continent of Africa. As the team stops in Senegal and The Gambia to visit Tony Jatta and his family, they explore the akonting as the ancestor instrument of the banjo and a brief, yet potent history lesson, is shared:

Therese Senghore: “Our parents explained to us that in the evening, they used this akonting to sing. So they would be in the forest singing, singing and suddenly they would disappear. And they would not see them again. So, they would say ‘Ah, the white man captured the slaves.’”

Tony Jatta: “The first trip, they had so many casualties. But the second trip, because of that instrument it actually helped them to gain more strength and they reached [the other side].”

Therese: “They cannot do it without the akonting.”

That line by Tony Jatta fuels me during this phase of my relationship with the banjo and my particular ancestry. “…because of that instrument it actually helped them to gain more strength and they reached [the other side].”  More than the contrast between which bodies get to play the banjo without contention, how people survive the histories that try to annihilate them is of even greater interest to me.

Not long after the trafficked Africans were docked in the Caribbean and later sold throughout present day United States, the akonting slowly evolved into an early version of the banjo. The descendants of the Stolen Ones continued to use the banjo to endure the horrors of the chattel slavery and the legacies that persisted beyond it. Though the instrument had morphed, the power and connection to Spirit remained the same. As the first waves of kidnapped Africans endured the Middle Passage with the help of the akonting, the enslaved Africans who were born into this brutal system had the help of the banjo to find a way to stay alive, to stay tethered to Spirit while enduring unspeakable horrors. History was preserved in the rhythms and divine love and strength was woven into the chords. They couldn’t have done it without the banjo.

So, how, and why, is it that seeing a black woman with a banjo is so odd?

The tiktok version of this history lesson goes something like this. As the banjo continued to spread throughout the country, white musicians began to take interest in it. The banjo evolved even more, the resonator was added to improve the sound quality of the instrument during performances, different playing styles were popularized, and the fame of black face minstrel music grew in right alongside that of the banjo itself. From the United States to Europe, minstrel music, black face and the banjo, dominated the music scene for the better part of about 50 years. The prominence of black face minstrel music, the banjo, and the growing violence against the black folks who were caricatured in minstrel music (and the rest of US society) all functioned to sever people of the African diaspora from this instrument of power. To be close to the banjo meant to be close to the, now global, horrendously negative portrayal of black folks. To favor this instrument has meant a cosigning with the visual violence and skewed perceptions of an entire people.

Luckily, the story doesn’t end with any of these atrocities. There are many people, artists, activists, historians who work in service to the complex history of this instrument. Stewards who are helping to broaden the historical view of the banjo so that it reaches beyond black face; revealing the potency of this instrument not just for the social lives of a people, but for the spiritual lives as well. The importance of such work cannot be understated. (At the bottom of this essay you’ll find a list of some of these culture workers who focus on the banjo.) The temptation to sterilize history for the sake of modern, and privileged, comfort is a seductive temptation. Yet, it promises nothing but continued harm by way of delusion. Enduring the discomforts of remembering how the banjo came to be is far different from enduring the actual discomforts (aka – evil) inflicted on the many generations of stolen and enslaved Africans who created the banjo. Between the two positions, ours is luxurious to say the very least.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, a recently departed elder of the Dagara people says it best in his book “The Healing Wisdom of Africa” He says, “the symbolic and the spiritual are not far apart. In fact, in Dagara, there is no word that directly translates as symbol. There is no word for symbol other than the word Spirit, because there is an assumed indivisible connection between Spirit and symbol.”

I write what I write because I want the banjo to be known for what it is – a symbol of endurance and the persistence of Life, even, if not especially amid inconceivable suffering.

These times continue to be trying ones. Whether you are cued into your personal suffering, the collective suffering, or some combination, it is important to employ reliable tools in the name of life abiding. In my spiritual imagination we are all encouraging one another with our personal symbols of strength, hope, etc. in beautiful formation ready to do the Care Bear stare and melt down the source of our woes. As we gather together to remember our indivisible connection with Spirit, I’ll be sending my love with a radical strum on the banjo.
 ~ Toni Anne Reynolds

Black Banjo Resources   
   - Black Banjo Reclamation Project
   -  “On the Lost History of the Black Banjo”  with Rhiannon Giddens
   - American Roots Music “The Banjo”
   - Throw Down Your Heart, Documentary

Read online here

About the Author
Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality.  |

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Question & Answer

Q: By Roy

The Resurrection - Instead of reading the resurrection story of Jesus literally, can we understand it as a spiritual truth about how each one of us can transform our lives towards being more loving and kind?

A: By Rev. James Burklo
 Dear Roy,To answer you simply:  yes!But the sacred myth of the resurrection is not just about transformation.  It is a sacred myth that transforms. After his crucifixion, the gospel tells us that Jesus was in the tomb for three days, corresponding to the three trimesters of human gestation.  And then he resurrected.  Jesus’ body went into it, and the eternal and ever-present Christ, who is God, who is Love, came out. The pain and terror and horror of crucifixion went in, and hope and promise came out.  Anger and fear went in, and forgiveness and peace came out.Jesus’ body went into the tomb, and the Christian church came out, three days later. As St. Paul wrote much later, “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body . . .” (1 Corinthians 15:44)  Jesus’ body was a seed sown in the earth, and from him sprouted a beloved community that lives and bears fruit to this day. The myth of the resurrection is itself a seed.  We receive it into the soil of our souls, and there in the darkness of our unconscious it grows within.  The myth changes the narrative of our lives from being victims of abuse to being agents of reconciliation and renewal.  This potent story becomes the scaffold upon which we take the rough, raw material of our lives to construct a new and beautiful edifice.At Easter, Christians celebrate this spiritual transformation by coming together in the “spiritual body” that is the church.  We are the compassionate community that rolled away the stone and emerged from the tomb.  The Christ lives through us!  That’s what we mean when we repeat the ancient Greek chant:  “Christos anesti! Alithos anesti!”—“Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”~ Rev. James Burklo

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California.  An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021).  His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership.  He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org.   |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty" Part IX:
What is the Human Reality Our Ancestors Called Original Sin?

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
April 26, 2012What does it mean to be human?  What does it mean to be alive?  Why are we constituted the way we are?  What was there and what is there about our humanity that caused our ancestors to develop a mythological understanding of human life, portraying it as fallen and infected with what they called “original sin?”  To answer these questions seems to me to be the first step in building a new way to tell the Christ story.  So allow me to roam deeply into the field of anthropology out of which these questions arise.When I was preparing to write my book that was published in 2009 under the title Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell, I made a simple determination.  I could not research life after death.  I could not interview people who had made that transition.  I could not get to the place where these people now existed.  What I could do, however, was to study life itself.  Life before death would have to yield the clues to the possibility of life after death, if I were to have anything to say about the greatest of life’s mysteries.  So, into the study of living things I plunged.My wife and I went to examine life in the Amazon rain forest of South America.  Here we looked at vines, some as thin as shoelaces, some as thick as an athlete’s thigh, but all of them apparently motivated by the drive to survive.  These vines sought out the darkest places in the jungle because they seemed to sense intuitively that the darkest part of the rain forest contained the tallest trees and if they attached themselves to these tall trees they gained access to the life-giving rays of the sun.  Vines are not thinking things, but the quest for survival still motivated their lives.We also saw ants’ nests and wasps’ nests that appeared to have worked out a mutual defense treaty.  In every tree of the rain forest where there was an ants’ nest in the lower part of the tree there was a wasps’ nest in the higher branches of that tree.  The reason for that was that the primary enemy of the wasps was another variety of ants called army ants that would climb the tree and devour the wasps’ larvae, thus destroying the future of the hive.  The wasps armed only with stingers were helpless before these tiny creatures.  These army ants, however, would not go beyond a regular ants’ nest, so by locating their hive above the regular ants’ nest, the wasps were safe and therefore capable of surviving.  The natural enemy of the ants on the other side of this equation was the anteater, which would climb the tree and devour all of the ants in the nest in a single sitting.  The anteaters, however, were large, visible and slow-moving targets for the stingers of the wasps.  So the wasps drove off the anteaters and saved the regular ants and those same ants provided a defense line against the army ants for the wasps.  The survival interests of both kinds of insects were met.  Seeing this mutual defense treaty in operation, one might even imagine that Henry Kissinger had come to the rain forest to negotiate this settlement.In another part of the rain forest, we discovered parakeets by the thousands, perhaps by the tens of thousands.  Parakeets live off the fruits of the rain forest, but the primary nutrients present in the fruit are contained in the seeds, which are toxic to the parakeets.  So if they eat enough of the nutrients to live, they die of toxicity.  The rain forest, however, offered them a survival technique.  Throughout the forest there are places called “clay licks,” the soil of which contains an ample supply of anti-toxins.  Each day swarms of parakeets descend on the “clay licks” until all have received sufficient anti-toxins from the soil to enable them to eat the toxic seeds of the fruits of the forest.  Nature in the service of life had provided the parakeets a natural alka-seltzer to fortify them before they eat their over-rich fruit banquets.  This drive for survival is in every living thing.We went to the Galapagos Islands to follow in the footsteps of Charles Darwin.  There we discovered that long ago pirates, hiding in wait for their next target on these islands, had imported goats into the Galapagos so that they could have fresh meat while there.  The Galapagos Islands do not have enough fresh water to support mammalian life.  The only mammals on the Galapagos Islands are sea lions that are related to their cousins in the Pacific Ocean near California, and bats that have a remarkable range making fresh water always available.  These goats, however, gradually adapted to the salty brine available in the Galapagos in order to survive and because they did they then threatened to wreck the ecology of these islands because there they had no natural enemies.  Life is powerfully driven by survival needs.We went to Northern Queensland in Australia near the Great Barrier Reef.  There, on a boat trip down a tidal river near the city of Cairns we discovered something the local people call “The Sacrificial Leaves” of the mangrove tree.  Along the banks of this river were groves of mangrove trees, a freshwater plant with dark, slick green leaves. In this river basin, however, they were living in a place where the ocean tides brought great amounts of salt into the water.  To survive in this environment, these trees had to deal with the salt.  They did so in two ways.  First, they developed a huge root system with hairy tentacles stretching in all directions that served as filters against the salt.  Still, however, too much salt entered the trees for them to live, requiring some additional step if they were to survive.  So second, the mangrove tree developed a system that routed the incoming salt to designated leaves on the trees. These leaves first absorbed the salt, then turned orange and finally fell off.  They were called “Sacrificial Leaves.” These leaves died so that the tree could live.  Survival drives every living thing.We went to Kruger Park in South Africa, the world’s largest, natural game preserve.  There at incredibly close range, we could see the survival techniques of higher animals, all of which were equipped with a “fight or flight” syndrome.  When a predator appeared, the flocks would flee as one for survival.  When a single creature was cut out of the flock and trapped by the predator in a one on one chase, it fled until it could run no more.  Then it turned to face its enemy in one last, hopeless fight for survival. No creature sacrifices life without a struggle.  Suicide is not an option in the subhuman animal world.   We even discovered that among the herds of impalas or springboks from which the great cats of the jungle got their dinner every day, the flocks tended to be organized so that the older and less productive members of the herd were put into the more vulnerable positions on the edges of the herd, a kind of natural death panel, though I do not think anyone should tell Sarah Palin about this.Everywhere I looked at life, whether plant, insect or animal life, I found it driven, even motivated by the drive and will to survive.  The nature of life is survival.  Since human beings are part of the animal world, it should not surprise us that we too are survival-oriented creatures.   There is, however, one major difference in human life.  Human beings are self-conscious and thus we are capable of rational planning, even scheming about our own survival.  We do not just adapt to an environment like an unthinking vine or a mangrove tree.  We do not even adapt by natural instinct like the animals of the world that survive and thrive in the jungle.  We rather install the natural survival instinct at the center of our conscious life.  Our own survival is the highest value in our lives.  That being so we look at all things, at all events and at all people from the vantage point of how each will affect our own survival.  We are, therefore, biologically wired to be self-centered creatures.  Our self-centeredness is not the result of some fall from  perfection, it is present biologically in our very DNA.  We gained the competitive edge in the struggle for supremacy in our evolutionary history by sharing in this biological reality. That was the behavior that our religious ancestors observed and what they called “original sin,” which they defined as a pre-disposition toward that which they regarded as evil.Out of our survival instinct evil does flow.   That is why we fear and hate people who are different.  This is why we are tribal people, racist people, homophobic people, and xenophobic people.  We relate to that which we do not understand as if these realities threaten our survival.  We will kill when we believe our lives are in danger.  We will push others down in order to build ourselves up, to enhance our chances of survival.  That is the nature of human life.  Like all living things, we are survival-oriented creatures, but because we are self-conscious people and capable of charting our own destinies in rational ways, our survival instincts are far more powerful and far more pervasive that these found in any other living creature.So, if this is what was once called “sin” or “original sin” then what does salvation from this understanding of sin look like?  Can we be saved from this reality by an invading deity?  Can we be set free from an essential element in our biology? Can we evolve beyond our survival mentality?  What in the world does the Christ figure have to offer to this diagnosis of human life?We will attempt to address these questions as the series develops.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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The Mystery of Death
Starting April 18th, this e-course consists of 12 emailed lessons delivered on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Each has an essay by Bourgeault on the themes of The Mystery of Death, along with questions for conscious reflection and spiritual practices to do; the latter will focus on surrender or “letting go” practices, common to all the world’s sacred traditions.  READ ON ...  |

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