If you didn’t grow up this way—not just churchy, not just Christian or Catholic, not just in “the house of God,” but in the kind of church where a note sung right by the choir could lead to the whole front pew collapsing, could lead to sister Bernette who was always otherwise prim and proper foaming at the mouth . . . if you didn’t grow up in the kind of church where the thick-boned mothers would tell you your past and future and sin and warning between prayers, where the pastor would whoop and sing over a grieving organ until somebody’s screams broke through, where the hours could spill unnoticed from day to night talking to God and calling demons out from the body, then it’s difficult to explain the spiritual encounter I had at Pastor Covil’s small Pentecostal church in Greenville, North Carolina.
I was twelve. The circumstances were my standard as a preacher’s kid; we drove from New York to North Carolina, where my father’s spiritual father would host us. It was my first time visiting his church, but the mechanics seemed similar to my family’s Sunday morning fare in Brooklyn; the friction between my tulle and stockings kept me just as alert as the choir belting, Have you triiiiiied Jesus? while we sang back, HE’S ALL RIGHT! I couldn’t tell you what part of the Gospel Pastor Covil urged us to heed this day, but I do remember laughing at his jokes about being too out of shape to run through the aisles. It probably was the laughter that disarmed my spirit more than anyone’s fervent prayers.
It’s important to note that before visiting Pastor Covil’s church, I thought all charismatic embodiment of the Spirit was improvisational theater. Sometimes, when I was alone, I’d try to shape my mouth in the way of my grandfather and his congregants. Their tongues were fluid as water and all of my sounds were clumsy. Sometimes, I’d practice falling over—an ungracious swoon at the altar. Once, my aunt caught my rehearsal and I lied when she asked if I knew how to speak in tongues. In the end, I concluded that like pig latin, it must be something only grown-ups could do.
Pastor Covil would call me up from a leathery wood pew to ask me to take three deep breaths. My grandparents had been smearing oil-slick crosses on my forehead for years—their hands shaking with more strength than my smaller body contained. Nothing ever happened. This is not their fault as much as it is the fault of familiarity, which disrupts our ability to see between spiritual planes and consequently prevents encounters with the spiritual world.
Pastor Covil, whom I hadn’t known, gently placed a hand on either side of my face, He whispered in my ear, you gonna take three deep breaths and on the third one you gonna feel the Spirit of God. As clearly as I can remember his voice, I can feel the agitation of my eyes rolling in my impatience to go back to my seat. He breathed with me as I filled my lungs methodically for the first and then second time.
W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term “the frenzy” in The Souls of Black Folk when he wrote,
Three things characterized this religion of the slave,—the Preacher, the Music, and the Frenzy . . . the Frenzy of “Shouting,” when the Spirit of the Lord passed by, and, seizing the devotee, made him mad with supernatural joy, was the last essential of Negro religion and the one more devoutly believed in than all the rest. It varied in expression from the silent rapt countenance or the low murmur and moan to the mad abandon of physical fervor,—the stamping, shrieking, and shouting, the rushing to and fro and wild waving of arms, the weeping and laughing, the vision and the trance. All this is nothing new in the world, but old as religion, as Delphi and Endor. And so firm a hold did it have on the Negro, that many generations firmly believed that without this visible manifestation of the God there could be no true communion with the Invisible.
I can only explain what happened on my third deep breath as the embodiment of the frenzy. My livelihood is crafting language and building worlds, but like many of us who have experienced religious ecstasy, my language fails when I try to document it. This could be fear that what I’m describing is a kind of madness to those who don’t believe in the supernatural. This could also be a failure of my formal seminary education, which taught me words like “religious ecstasy” or “charismatic embodiment” when what I really mean is catching the Holy Ghost. Here’s what my body remembers—painless electricity and Jell-O joints that stole my muscles’ function. The feeling of the old carpeted stairs against my face in front of the altar. Attached to my bones, suddenly, were heavy weights. How can I describe the emotions besides overwhelm? Too much? Imagine falling into the center of the ocean on the darkest night with no fear. Imagine carrying the full weight of the moon to a lover like a bouquet of lilies. Maybe this isn’t helpful. I cried for hours after the service ended—at the altar, in the car, in Pastor Covil’s bathroom. It is as much memory as it is myth. For years, I held this as my moment of proof that God existed.
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I was fourteen in Detroit the first time I competed in a poetry slam. My grandfather had placed me on many stages behind pulpits with a microphone in my hand. It was a prophetic gesture. It was his way of dreaming for me before I could dream for myself. When I was three, before I knew any hymns, I’d confidently sing the Barney theme song in front of his congregation. He’d laugh, clap, and yell, “What I always tell y’all? Don’t let a Dawkins get hold of a microphone!” Without the cushion of family and a familiar congregation, at fourteen I trembled as I read an objectively horrible poem about the poor representation of women in the media. I was a young Black girl in the 2000s emphatically rhyming about self-love via respectability politics. In the second round, I performed an even more problematic love poem that used pregnancy as an extended metaphor for my relationship with a knuckle-headed boy my mother told me not date gone sour. One example of God’s grace that I witnessed was not being snatched off a stage for being unapologetically loud and wrong.
I had been compulsively writing a kind of poetic prose without a name for it since elementary school. Before he became a pastor, I watched my father write 16’s and hymns. I’d sit with him in his makeshift studio in my grandparents’ cement basement, before it became unlivable due to its flood risk. With his ducktail braid against his neck and Sony headphones over his ears, he’d rehearse and record, testing the language in his body. Sometimes, I’d make him tape me singing a Motown love song I knew nothing about. I watched my grandfather shut himself in his home office for hours, praying, writing and revising his Sunday morning sermon. I’d know that week’s sermon was finished when he’d exit his office with a stack of printed papers, carefully inserting them into the plastic sheet protectors in his binder. Each Sunday in our family church in Brooklyn, they’d bring their creations through worship and preaching and people would shout, fall out, and descend into the frenzy. So then, the first writers I knew had this in common: it was by spiritual encounter that they were able to write—and that writing would live in the body by way of rapping, singing, or preaching. It was a revelation when in middle school I stumbled across Def Jam Poetry’s YouTube page and thought, Yes, that is what I do.
The kind of spiritual encounter that took twelve years and a road trip to a small church in North Carolina to achieve happened all the time then. It happened in poetry slams. It happened on late night phone calls with poet friends as we scrambled to share our work—ink wet and brand new. It happened when I was on stage, riding the intangible feeling of a poem moving through my body and stirring an audience. These encounters that I’ve only ever experienced between poem and worship left me crying, rejoicing, groaning, repenting for my lovelessness, seeing a world that doesn’t exist, tingling all over my body, and exhausted. It was all too familiar, really.
I found the Spirit of God easier to access without the pressure of right religious performance as a pastor’s (grand)daughter. The mechanics were the same, but my position was different. By that, I mean that any time there is a room of people, eager with expectation, there is an increased chance for an ecstatic experience. In my grandfather’s church, there was an expectation of my response to the call of God. In poetry, I stood in shared expectation with other lovers of language that something would shift and we would not leave the same.
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My personal faith practice evolved like this: it was first easiest to pray in groups, surrounded by the hungry sounds of others. Eventually, I could be alone in a quiet corner, scrubbing my kitchen sink, standing in the steam of my shower, and suddenly, amid the smallest prayer, the veil between this world and that of the Spirit would dissolve. This too, is how it happened with poems. It began in the overwhelming energy of poetry slams and now, sometimes, I read a single profound poem with a spiritual reality wedged in the caesura and I’m wrecked for days.
Maybe you’ve heard the stereotypes of pastors’ kids—wild as a firestorm, always lust drunk, always in rebellion between Sundays. I’m not saying that they aren’t true. I am saying that somewhere between our Brooklyn church and my Detroit poetry slams, between my small college Bible study group—led by radical Black feminists—and my writers’ retreats in the backwoods of South Carolina, between my getting grown enough to lose and find my faith and my poems turning their critical eyes toward my interior life . . . I accepted myself as an imperfect practitioner and true believer whose primary spiritual technology is the embodied word. Years of swearing I would never be a pastor like my father and grandfather, only for me to find myself chasing spiritual obsessions—enrolling in a seminary program to study the history of the Pentecostal movements that reared me and a poetry MFA program at the same time.
For years, poetry and faith had existed separately in my life. This was in spite of the fact that I’ve sat in poetry readings and been brought to the very edge of frenzy. In my own writing, I come to poetry to lament, to pray, and be delivered from spiritual bondage when I have little control over my material conditions, which feels like always. I’ve written without feeling the passing of time. I’ve written and resurfaced to words more insightful than I believed I was capable of, in a voice I didn’t know I had. Images and characters have found me in my dreams—sometimes in visions. I have fasted for the lyric to come to me unhindered by my creature comforts. Lines have been whispered to me as I sat in my house, alone. Even as I write this, something is stirring in my chest, letting me know that the frenzy is near if I surrender. The Spiritual world is not a metaphor that allows me to dramatize my work but the foundation for my process as a writer.
I was emboldened when I read bell hooks’s insight that
Not much is written about the connection between writing and spirituality. Even though New Age writing describes circumstances where writers receive ideas mysteriously, rarely does anyone talk about the sustained link between spiritual practice and writing. Writers are reluctant to speak about this subject because literary elitism engenders a fear that if we describe “unseen forces” shaping our vision and the structure of our writing we will not be taken seriously. Women writers have been more willing than their male counterparts to speak of visions that serve as a catalyst for the imaginative process. When describing the process of writing The Color Purple, Alice Walker spoke of images appearing in her dreams, of voices, of spirits calling to her.
This insight from bell hooks unlonelies me—me who has always understood writing to be a kind of channeling and the requisite research to be discourse with ghosts.
A hermeneutic is “a method or theory of interpretation.” Jon Michael Spencer, a Black religious scholar, urged scholars of the Black church and Black religion to write about the way the Harlem Renaissance was also a spiritual movement. He suggested that secular scholars would always take care of the secular hermeneutic, and so the duty of religious scholars is to offer a religious hermeneutic. I am bending this line further as I sit between my masters of theology and my personal practice of faith. My faith and scholarship are then, like old friends, leaning into each other, whispering back and forth their loves and disagreements that make me committed to the religious and spiritual hermeneutics of Black poetry.
My Pentecostal commitment to mysticism permitted me a tender eye into the literary landscape. A Holy Ghost–filled Pentecostal church and a poetry slam had few differentiations for me. In the tradition I was reared in, ascribing holiness and spiritual encounter to what is operating the secular and potentially profane is sacrilegious, but for me, the art world was simply an expansion of all the ways I could encounter God, because I believed that the act of creation was sacred. And the sharing of what came of that sacred act led to the potential of ecstasy. I believe intentional craft decisions are critical to how many of us enter into “the Spirit” or “catch the Holy Ghost.” It is not that I believe through our work that we manipulate the Spirit of God to enter the room—instead I believe that through our craft decisions, we can shift the metaphysical location of our audience, making them more aware of how thin the veil is between us and the Spirit of God.
When Josef Sorett, another Black religious scholar, talks about Aretha Franklin’s performances of “Spirit in the Dark,” he discusses it as spiritual or religious curation existing outside the church. Its opening line, “Are you getting the spirit—in the dark?” was performed in night clubs, in front of all-white audiences, and a myriad of other places where its Black religiosity and the location did not align. My favorite recorded performance of Aretha Franklin is from 1971 at the Filmore West, a secular music venue in San Francisco where she all but demonstrates that the spiritual exists beyond the designated sacred space. Poetry proved this to me as I’d enter a secular room and a few poems in would be so embodied by the frenzy that it became sacred—holy.
The earlier limitations of my faith were in part due to my strict beliefs about where and how the Spirit could move and reside. Years into being a fundamentalist evangelical, the doctrines failed me; what was described as Godly accountability turned my relationships into an extension of the surveillance state, what I understood as holy discipline turned my pleasures into shameful fears, and the places I was taught were Godless were the ones that revived my faith when I considered turning away. When I believed the Spirit of God was available only in a church, only by way of rowdy ceiling-bursting prayers, I missed the most expansive evidence of God. Beyond my most intimate relationships—which are my foremost demonstrations that God loves me—I have seen the clearest evidence of God through my own creation and by being a witness to what others make as they co-labor with the Spirit. Few things have blurred the line between secular and sacred, and consequently destroyed my concept of where the Spirit of God resides, more than the work of Black writers.
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Poetry has always been present in sacred texts. For me, it is the Black church and Black writers who have shifted my metaphysical location so that I could more clearly see and feel the Spirit of God, who was always there. Who has taught me more about eschatological vision (i.e., the theological matters of death, judgment, and the destination of the human soul) than Danez Smith building a heaven for Black boys in “summer, somewhere” as they write,
but here, not earth
not heaven, we can’t recall our white shirts turned ruby gowns.
here, there’s no language for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call us dead, call us alive
someplace better.
we say our own names when we pray. we go out for sweets & come back.
Who has taught me more about prophetic imagination than Aurielle Marie’s imagining a world safe for Black gxrls in their poem “pantoum for aiyana & not a single hashtag” as they write,
There go a Black gxrl, shirt still dry no river of marrow or tears following her up the block no bile from her head
Can we call her into form? not a river of marrow & small tears of
sweaty fabric, but manna & honeysuckle
from her skull no bile, but beatniks
in bloom. Can we celebrate the child on this side of the grass?
Who has taught me more about counter-hermeneutics (alternate interpretations of scripture) than Jericho Brown interpreting Romans 12 with a queer lens as he writes,
in my 23rd year,
A certain obsession overtook
My body, or I should say,
I let a man touch me until I bled,
Until my blood met his hunger
And so was changed, was given
A new name
As is the practice among my people
Who are several and whole, holy
And acceptable.
Who has forced me to create new theological frameworks about the impossibility of affirming the spirit without also affirming the flesh in a world that has made hatred of certain bodies critical to its foundation more than Brittany Rogers’s poem “I’m too pretty for this” as she writes,
Don’t think
me dramatic. People have died touch-starved, penniless.
I will not settle for anything
less than sunflowers in every room, a vase full of their ornate faces, bone straight backs.
Everything keeping me alive is the most beautiful. Every day’s color is yellow.
The thing about a true spiritual encounter—about having your metaphysical location shifted by the craft of another creator who too was deep in encounter—is that it is impossible to remain the same person you were before. It is impossible not to become a believer of something—not to see yourself anew—not to be sensitized to alternate worlds and possibilities. A proper encounter forces you to begin to correct your faulty love ethic, your failed and individualistic politics, your self-hate, your unearned guilt, your dishonesty with yourself. A proper frenzy relieves some of the grief of this world’s violence and stirs hope toward building a new one. I started studying Black poetry as a sacred practice because it was by the sacred labor and imagination of Black poets that I could see God, myself, and others with greater love and clarity. I started studying Black poetry as a sacred practice because sometimes I would read their work and it was all I could do to stay in my chair, to keep from crying out, to not yell AMEN.
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Notes:
The title of this essay, “Are You Gettin’ the Spirit,” is borrowed from the opening line of Aretha Franklin’s song “Spirit in the Dark.”
W. E. B. Dubois explains “the frenzy” in the chapter “The Faith of the Fathers” in The Souls of Black Folk.
The bell hooks excerpt is from her chapter “divine inspiration: writing and spirituality,” from remembered rapture.
Jon Michael Spencer discusses the Harlem Renaissance, the secular hermeneutic, and the religious hermeneutic in his essay “The Black Church and the Harlem Renaissance.”
Josef Sorett discusses Aretha Franklin’s “Spirit in the Dark” in Spirit in the Dark: A Religious History of Racial Aesthetics.
The quote “the implicit etcetera of this list” is from Thiahera Nurse’s poem, “Some Girls Survive on Their Sorcery Alone,” published in The Offing.
