CONVENTION 2020
“ At our baptism we are anointed priest, prophet and king. Priest to serve and intercede for God’s people, prophet to proclaim God’s Word by our words and our actions, and king to lead people to Jesus.”
A tiny organism is forcing us to revisit our values, our divisions, and our decisions how we want to live in the world as we come out of quarantine and as many remain in it and try to consider the future, ambiguous as it is. Will life go on as status quo or will we change?
We would be remiss if we refuse to grasp what this pandemic and protest movement are trying to teach us: that we must join with one another if we want to endure; that we are fragile despite our capacity to invent, reinvent and annihilate, that the divisions that have defined us over the past must be tossed aside for our own good.
We must think as one human family, each member having a role to play. First, we must cast aside our arrogance and acknowledge that there is much we do not know about this disease. We must respect Mother Nature and the inherent power within her to create and destroy. We must work not just to protect our lives and the lives of our families and friends, but also the lives of every human person in the world. Every life is precious—womb to tomb— and every life is part of the human family. Above all, we must thank and celebrate the God who is Emmanuel, whose love knows no bounds and who above all, in the midst of hardship and pain tells us, never fear, DO NOT BE AFRAID, my Son went before you. By his stripes you are healed.
Mary Birmingham is the former director of music, liturgy, and Christian Initiation at Ascension Catholic Church in Melbourne, Florida, and a former presenter for
the North American Forum on the Catechumenate. An accomplished author and national clinician, she is one of the foremost authorities on Christian Initiation.
Excerpted from
All God’s Children Got a Robe: Te Garments of our Faith
Intended, Promised, and Realized: Religious Transformation and Black Sacred Song
By Fr. Joseph Brown
In one of the great, great contributions made to spirituality, St. Ignatius of Loyola tells us in Te Spiritual Exercises: when you are reading Scripture, seek the composition of place. Take a story and put yourself in it: Who are you? What is Jesus saying to you? What are you doing? What are your responses? If we are going to talk about Black sacred song and the incredible contribution of Black believers to liberation theology, it will be required of all of us to put ourselves into the place where the song is being sung, and I believe that we will find ourselves in a radical new awareness of who we are and what we must be doing with our calling . . .
We call down the power of God into our midst. Tat is theology: the act of God in the human condition.
In our Christian churches, we do not generally sing about how we were oppressed, enslaved, aliens, and how we were beaten and abused and scorned—that’s not the music most of us learn from our regular church services. But it is the music of America, it is the music of liberation, it is the music of hope in the midst of Hell . . . We're not going to play these songs in our churches just to let everybody know we like Black people. We’re not going to be playing these songs just so we can say that we are inclusive. No. We are going to be playing these songs because we have been called to remember who we are as a people of God. We are those who have been delivered from bondage. We will respond to God’s loving kindness and liberation by being faithful to his covenant. We will make that promise—and that promise is that we will never harm the alien, the sojourner. We will never oppress the fatherless, the widows or the poor . . . [Exodus 22:21-24]
Do we start every liturgical ritual by reminding ourselves of who we really are? Do we understand that? America was not founded as a God-fearing
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