Heart singing is a way to offer effective worship to God, and includes prayer. It becomes, in its practice, instructional to persons (singers) on ways to deepen their spiritual lives. It seems unselfish and praise focused. There is truth of yearning, and often of faith, in devotional and aspiring music. Commonly, devout monks are represented as chanting and nuns to singing.
Historical records affirm that though oppressed, slaves sang. The songs were often addressed to God and to heaven. This was common practice for slaves of all races. We may forget that in ancient times most slaves among the lightest skinned people were light skinned slaves, among the Asians, there were Asian slaves, and black/brown among black/brown. Strong Indian tribes would sometimes take slaves from weaker tribes. Certainly there was increasing crossover among races. Societies dominated by white people emerged as major owners in the grisly business, if the ownership of human beings may be defined as a business. (Buying and selling slaves became a major source of income for Thomas Jefferson.) Experience in the western world that enslaved the dark-skinned people to the light-skinned, if that is the only story told and remembered, distorts or unjustly narrows the whole ugly history of slavery. If everything were known, many moderns have, somewhere in their ancestry, a relative who was a slave, or indentured in some way. Even the democracies of the ancients were slave states – off and on.
Slavery, in the biblical story of Israel, was near the bottom of things. Only death was lower – the lowest. Prophets were firm in denouncing Israelites permitting their children to be enslaved. However, like their neighbors, some Israelites held slaves. Currently we do not easily understand the frame of free minds that interpreted slavery as a kind of death experience if imposed on a free people, but some of those same free, as Washington and Jefferson, owned slaves. John Newton, writer of the hymn, Amazing Grace, did not become a major slave trader until after he became a Christian. Newton grew to hate the slave trade, acting firmly against it – with positive influence.
However, in the oppression, there were elevating parts of the slave culture that relieved depressed spirits with music wafted or shouted to the ears of man and God. There is a promised land, and “I’m a-comin’ too. . . So tell my mother that I’m a-comin’ too.” This cry of the soul, and those yearnings like it, certainly had prayer in them. Slaves sang the experiences of weariness, suffering, death, and robbed aspirations, all to be made right in the end. “Swing low sweet chariot. . . There’s a’ band a’ angels a-comin’ after me.” Israel, when oppressed, felt the same singing prayer spirit, becoming reticent when their captors demanded entertainment from them in their spirituals. The words leap out to sensitive readers: “. . . for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, ‘Sing us one of the Songs of Zion!’ How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?” (Psalm 137:3-4) The slave-holders asked for Minstrel Shows from Jews long before Jesus, and that before modern black people were characterized, and mimicked. Slaves did sing, not for their tormentors, but to God and for their own comfort and restoration. These were their prayers, answered at last. Free, at last. Free at last. True of all God’s children, who know they are freed in believing. Our hearts can sing even when our voices can’t carry a tune in a bucket. There is a shadow of this meaning when great crowds rise from seats for the music of the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s Messiah. God provides music out of the soul and nature itself. There is a balm in Gilead. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020