culture, worship and negro spirituals

I just finished reading _Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry_ a few weeks ago. I'd read it once before in something like the third grade but didn't remember anything about it except that I'd really liked it. Loved it this time. Such a good book (if you haven't read it, you should). It's about the Logans, a black family that owns land in the 30s in the South, about racism and family.

The thing about this book is that while reading, I found myself really relating to it. I caught myself identifying with so much and the truth is that I have for a long time.

But wait a minute. Sara, you're a white girl. Your ancestors weren't slaves, and you certainly didn't experience much of the injustice of racism. Kinda presumptuous, no? These are the easy questions, the easy answers and I did think of them at first. And the immediate jump-to was living with the Daniels. Does living a few years with a family that came, somewhere down the line, from this sort of history mean you automatically inherit that history too? Well, I don't know about that. I mean, I think it's fair you learn lots of things you're not aware of learning when living cross-culturally, you adopt things without realizing and yes, I'd say they become a part of you. Maybe it's not as fair to say you somehow share that history, though. And maybe it is--it's such a complicated thing, so hard to say.

But I did learn to worship with them. Not really, because I worshiped God in all different sorts of ways before I moved in with them. But I started going to church regularly for the first time in my life with them and learned to worship through music in a predominately black church. All those lyrics about ''going over Jordan, I'm just going over home,'' and the Promised Land and freedom and rejoicing. It's home, in a way.

And how strongly I relate to these themes! Longing for my only real home. Freedom from sin. This is the crux of it, I think. And I think we all long for these things. That the struggles of the Logan family, of racism and injustice, while wholly their own, are not altogether foreign to us, whatever our family history looks like. Because we're all living as aliens here, and we know about a God who sets all injustice straight.

One of these days I'll learn to embed songs and not just youtube videos but until then, here's a favorite one (although yes, I am aware it's actually written by some English guy and isn't one of the Negro Spirituals but I did think it was). Jack White's version is really good too.

"I am a poor wayfaring stranger
Traveling through this world alone
There is no sickness, toil nor danger
In that fair land to which I go
I know dark clouds will hover on me,
I know my pathway is rough and steep
But golden fields lie out before me
Where weary eyes no more will weep
I'm going home to see my father
I'm going home no more to roam
I am just going over Jordan
I am just going over home"