Songs of Hope

Source: iveyhayes.com
Song of the soul
Cry from the heart
Celebration of life
The daily struggles of life!

The heavy life of their days
The life of all nights
The life of all mornings
The life of all evenings!

“When I fall on my knees
With my face to the rising sun”, sings the Spiritual
A song of the spirit
A spirit committed to its life’s purposes. 

The Spiritual keeps all its strength
All its acuteness of heart
All its power to vibrate the soul
A soul in search of its destiny.

It’s the song that invokes the hereafter and evokes the here and now:
“Let us break bread together on our knees
When I fall on my knees, with my face to the rising sun”.
It’s a Spiritual, a song “out of the depths”.

A song that soothes the spirit
And heals a collective memory plagued with wounds
From the Tulsa Massacre to the Tuskegee Study,
A song to re-focus on life and on the essence of life.

To give life a renewed meaning and value:
“When I fall on my knees, with my face to the rising sun,
O Lord, have mercy on me”, sings the Spiritual,
The Gullah Spiritual, a song of hope!

 

Dodzi Jean-Antoine Amemado is a university scholar. He also works with the Federal Government in Ottawa.

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4 Comments
  • suzanne renaud
    Posted at 11:48h, 16 March Reply

    Beautiful! Thank you for sharing.

  • Grace Colella
    Posted at 12:52h, 16 March Reply

    Thank you Dodzi for reminding us that Spirituals are some of the world’s most soul-felt expressions of human suffering and liberation.

  • Peter Bisson
    Posted at 22:13h, 16 March Reply

    Thank you Dodzi!

  • Philomène Amemado-Attipou
    Posted at 10:06h, 17 March Reply

    Thanks so much for sharing this.

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