RECOMBINANT CHRISTIANS
Rediscovering one's long-lost child surely must be euphoric, ecstatic, and life-changing! It is revealed to be so in accounts of unexpected family reunions in the Bible and in popular literature.
Africans in America, both, prior to and during chattel slavery, itself, often suffered destruction of their immediate families by slave masters, traders, kidnappers, accentuated by their sale. Eventually, each family member was sold, separately, to the four winds, most never to meet again!
But, some did miraculously meet again! African American slave narratives--of which there are thousands--tell of these chance meetings, as well as do our histories. Charles Waddell Chestnutt, the great 19-20th century author and lawyer wrote of this happenstance occurrence in "The Wife of His Youth," a marvelous short story about a former slave woman's dogged 40-year search for her long-lost slave husband after the Civil War; and how they found each other finally in a very different place and time, and reunited! http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai2/identity/text1/chesnuttyouth.pdf
Mark Twain and William Wells Brown, two of Missouri 's most gifted authors, both wrote moving short stories of a former slave mother recognizing her long lost son decades later, adventitiously, by his birth marks, while working in a Connecticut kitchen.
The famous story of the prodigal son in the Bible is of this unexpected family reunion genre.
Nearer to our day, Chaplain Garland H. White of the 28th U.S.C.T. (U S Colored Troops) was fortunate to have been rediscovered by his slave mother, 20 years later, on April 3, 1865, in Richmond, Virginia, on the date of its fall in the Civil War.
Africans rediscovered Christianity when they were brought to the Americas and "civilized"--ha!--by being reintroduced to its tenets. They slowly and carefully examined it, at first. Then, they saw certain birthmarks , scarification, that identified it as their own issue, mysteriously having returned to them!
They were delighted to rediscover this long-lost progeny, kindred soul, whose textual-ritual life was not too different than their own, amid its prophetic double folds, the Old and New Testaments.
They found this religion's "Superhero," to be Jesus Christ, who was born of a virgin, Mary, not by natural male semen, but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This man-God, Jesus Christ, ministered for three years, frightened and/or offended the scribes, high priests, and money changers. He was crucified by the world's great power, Rome, and he arose from the dead, following his crucifixion. Yet, His own supernatural powers, Jesus taught, were also accessible by faith, work, perfection, proof, and grace, to them, and to all of those, who believed in Him; in the powers and promises reposed in Him. Theses were man's divine gifts from Almighty God, as exemplified within and by Jesus, himself. He also promised that a "Comforter" would come to reveal all things, as he was going to the Father. The slaves identified with, sensed, intuited Jesus' poverty, adversity, spirituality, humility, fragility, seeming futility and innate nobility, to be very much like their own innate properties. Some day in heaven, and ideally yet sooner on earth, they too would join Christ in eternal supremacy.
Their Christian belief structure girded them, emboldened them, comforted them, and gave hope to them for tomorrow.
This theological creed, Christianity, was itself African in origin, like the African slaves themselves, to whom it had been reintroduced, unwittingly, by their European slave masters for, they supposed, control purposes.
African Latin Christianity from the 2nd-6th centuries, is the textual and doctrinal source of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity--East and West--and the others, Coptic, Ethiopian, etc., by perambulation.
So, we, black scattered peoples, had found, mysteriously, our long lost, almost forgotten, Christian progeny and legacy. In Jesus Christ's story and lessons, we recognized and reconnected with ourselves, allegorically, yet prophetically, as revealed in scripture. These scriptures were in our history verified, reified, personified, in stark reality; by our own centuries-long dissemination to Asia, Europe, Americans, the islands of the seas.
Spiritually, we inseminated each land in which we sojourned.
We reunited-in-Christ Christians are those "recombinant Christians" akin to the more well-known recombinant DNA, in the human genome . We have recombined with and been reconciled to our own spawn in the Holy Spirit.
Tuesday, April 5, 2016
RECOMBINANT CHRISTIANS
RECOMBINANT CHRISTIANS
Rediscovering one's long-lost child surely must be euphoric, ecstatic, and life-changing! It is revealed to be so in accounts of unexpected family reunions in the Bible and in popular literature.
Africans in America, both, prior to and during chattel slavery, itself, often suffered destruction of their immediate families by slave masters, traders, kidnappers, accentuated by their sale. Eventually, each family member was sold, separately, to the four winds, most never to meet again!
But, some did miraculously meet again! African American slave narratives--of which there are thousands--tell of these chance meetings, as well as do our histories. Charles Waddell Chestnutt, the great 19-20th century author and lawyer wrote of this happenstance occurrence in "The Wife of His Youth," a marvelous short story about a former slave woman's dogged 40-year search for her long-lost slave husband after the Civil War; and how they found each other finally in a very different place and time, and reunited! http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai2/identity/text1/chesnuttyouth.pdf
Mark Twain and William Wells Brown, two of Missouri 's most gifted authors, both wrote moving short stories of a former slave mother recognizing her long lost son decades later, adventitiously, by his birth marks, while working in a Connecticut kitchen.
The famous story of the prodigal son in the Bible is of this unexpected family reunion genre.
Nearer to our day, Chaplain Garland H. White of the 28th U.S.C.T. (U S Colored Troops) was fortunate to have been rediscovered by his slave mother, 20 years later, on April 3, 1865, in Richmond, Virginia, on the date of its fall in the Civil War.
Africans rediscovered Christianity when they were brought to the Americas and "civilized"--ha!--by being reintroduced to its tenets. They slowly and carefully examined it, at first. Then, they saw certain birthmarks , scarification, that identified it as their own issue, mysteriously having returned to them!
They were delighted to rediscover this long-lost progeny, kindred soul, whose textual-ritual life was not too different than their own, amid its prophetic double folds, the Old and New Testaments.
They found this religion's "Superhero," to be Jesus Christ, who was born of a virgin, Mary, not by natural male semen, but by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. This man-God, Jesus Christ, ministered for three years, frightened and/or offended the scribes, high priests, and money changers. He was crucified by the world's great power, Rome, and he arose from the dead, following his crucifixion. Yet, His own supernatural powers, Jesus taught, were also accessible by faith, work, perfection, proof, and grace, to them, and to all of those, who believed in Him; in the powers and promises reposed in Him. Theses were man's divine gifts from Almighty God, as exemplified within and by Jesus, himself. He also promised that a "Comforter" would come to reveal all things, as he was going to the Father. The slaves identified with, sensed, intuited Jesus' poverty, adversity, spirituality, humility, fragility, seeming futility and innate nobility, to be very much like their own innate properties. Some day in heaven, and ideally yet sooner on earth, they too would join Christ in eternal supremacy.
Their Christian belief structure girded them, emboldened them, comforted them, and gave hope to them for tomorrow.
This theological creed, Christianity, was itself African in origin, like the African slaves themselves, to whom it had been reintroduced, unwittingly, by their European slave masters for, they supposed, control purposes.
African Latin Christianity from the 2nd-6th centuries, is the textual and doctrinal source of Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity--East and West--and the others, Coptic, Ethiopian, etc., by perambulation.
So, we, black scattered peoples, had found, mysteriously, our long lost, almost forgotten, Christian progeny and legacy. In Jesus Christ's story and lessons, we recognized and reconnected with ourselves, allegorically, yet prophetically, as revealed in scripture. These scriptures were in our history verified, reified, personified, in stark reality; by our own centuries-long dissemination to Asia, Europe, Americans, the islands of the seas.
Spiritually, we inseminated each land in which we sojourned.
We reunited-in-Christ Christians are those "recombinant Christians" akin to the more well-known recombinant DNA, in the human genome . We have recombined with and been reconciled to our own spawn in the Holy Spirit.
