Fire in Our Bones

Beloved in Christ, 

This past Monday, our nation observed Juneteenth, which commemorates news of slavery’s end finally reaching the state of Texas, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. It’s a day when we are called to grieve and lament our shameful past, acknowledge its ongoing legacy in our common life, and recommit to building a future that looks like justice and offers healing for all. 

Martha Mangan from Calvary, Rochester sent me a reflection from the Jesuit publication, “America,” about Professor Albert J. Robateau, who taught at Princeton and had a profound impact on the study and understanding of the Black religious experience in this country. In a 1994 essay for “America,” he cited the experience of a former slave speaking just after emancipation: 

“The old meeting house caught on fire. The spirit was there. Every heart was beating in unison as we turned our minds to God to tell him of our sorrows here below. God saw our need and came to us. I used to wonder what made people shout, but now I don’t. There is a joy on the inside, and it wells up so strong that we can’t keep still. It is fire in the bones. Any time fire touches a man, he will jump.”

Robateau went on to write that “the image of ‘fire in the bones’ stuck in my memory and eventually became for me a metaphor of the distinctive character of African-American Christianity, a mood of joyful sorrow, sorrowful joy, or more accurately, sorrow merging into joy.”

That strikes me as a profoundly beautiful way to describe the Christian posture. We live in a world that is both fallen and redeemed. We live by resurrection light even in the face of death. We are all simultaneously saints and sinners. God’s promise of life, liberation, and healing for all God’s children is sure, yet not fully realized. We live in sorrowful joy, joyful sorrow. Sorrow merging into joy. Despair merging into hope. 

What our suffering, unjust, broken world needs more than anything is people who are alive with a fire in the bones. Pray for a spirit of revival in our diocese, so that we might have a fire in our bones for waging love, for building peace, for tearing down the sinful scaffolds of racism, for shining the light of God’s promise into every hidden, painful corner, until the whole creation jumps, shouts, pulses, and burns with God’s perfect liberating love.

Grace and Peace,

The Right Reverend Craig Loya
X Bishop