Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church. Barbara A. Holmes. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004. PB. $19.00.

Joy UnspeakabU is a study of African-American spirituality. Barbara Holmes's thesis is that African-American religion and culture have a cognitive dimension that is essential for human fulfillment. She defines joy as "the conviction that life, one's life even, makes sense" (184), and she points to contemplative practices as the source of this joy. Contemplation deepens consciousness, a person's sense of self, and awareness of the self in relation to God and others, according to Holmes. She identifies, in African-American religion and culture, the various methods and means that transform ordinary consciousness in order to enable people to encounter God and to perceive and experience direcdy life's finest quality. Religious and mystical experience of this kind is "joy unspeakable."

Defining contemplation variously as "the shared experiences of holy abiding" (17), "mediation" (25), "that which moves a congregation towards listening and communion with God" (42), and "spiritual centering in the midst of danger" (69), Holmes is troubled by current attitudes toward contemplation. Those attitudes about contemplative practices range from naive assumption to benign neglect or denial of there being any such practices in AfricanAmerican churches.

According to Holmes, black worship is unrecognized by academic studies that are reliant on limited categories, and it is made trivial by media that caricature African-American religion in order to target African-American consumers (8-9). African-American religious life is made to appear superficial, sensational, and lacking in substance. Toward proving the existence and relevance of contemplative practices in African-American churches, Holmes conducts a broad investigation of spirituality in African-American churches, in early Christianity, in Africans' initial encounters with Europeanized Christianity, in West African traditional religions, in the slave communities of antebellum America, in the Christian Bible, in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, and in secular music and dance.

Joy Unspeakable consists of seven chapters. In chapter 1, Holmes gives a historical overview and definition of contemplation from an Afrocentric perspective. She examines contemplative practices in early Christianity, in monastic traditions of North Africa, and in the initial encounters of Africans with European interpretations of Christianity. Next, she challenges the construal of contemplation as something distinguished by silence and solitude only, which...