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concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the
muezzinÆs call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly
learning my multiplication tables.
And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the
most spiritually awakened person that IÆve ever known. She had an unswerving
instinct for kindness, charity, and love, and spent much of her life acting on
that instinct, sometimes to her detriment. Without the help of religious texts
or outside authorities, she worked mightily to instill in me the values that
many Americans learn in Sunday school: honesty, empathy, discipline, delayed
gratification, and hard work. She raged at poverty and injustice, and scorned
those who were indifferent to both.
Most of all, she possessed an abiding sense of wonder, a reverence for life
and its precious, transitory nature that could properly be described as
devotional. During the course of the day, she might come across a painting,
read a line of poetry, or hear a piece of music, and I would see tears well up
in her eyes. Sometimes, as I was growing up, she would wake me up in the
middle of the night to have me gaze at a particularly spectacular moon, or she
would have me close my eyes as we walked together at twilight to listen to the
rustle of leaves. She loved to take children-any child-and sit them in her lap
and tickle them or play games with them or examine their hands, tracing out
the miracle of bone and tendon and skin and delighting at the truths to be
found there. She saw mysteries everywhere and took joy in the sheer
strangeness of life.
It is only in retrospect, of course, that I fully understand how deeply this
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spirit of hers influenced me-how it sustained me despite the absence of a
father in the house, how it buoyed me through the rocky shoals of my
adolescence, and how it invisibly guided the path I would ultimately take. My
fierce ambitions might have been fueled by my father-by my knowledge of his
achievements and failures, by my unspoken desire to somehow earn his love, and
by my resentments and anger toward him. But it was my motherÆs fundamental
faith-in the goodness of people and in the ultimate value of this brief life
weÆve each been given-that channeled those ambitions. It was in search of
confirmation of her values that I studied political philosophy, looking for
both a language and systems of action that could help build community and make
justice real. And it was in search of some practical application of those
values that I accepted work after college as a community organizer for a group
of churches in Chicago that were trying to cope with joblessness, drugs, and
hopelessness in their midst.
I have recorded in a previous book the ways in which my early work in
Chicago helped me grow into my manhood-how my work with the pastors and
laypeople there deepened my resolve to lead a public life, how they fortified
my racial identity and confirmed my belief in the capacity of ordinary people
to do extraordinary things. But my experiences in Chicago also forced me to
confront a dilemma that my mother never fully resolved in her own life: the
fact that I had no community or shared traditions in which to ground my most
deeply held beliefs. The Christians with whom I worked recognized themselves
in me; they saw that I knew their Book and shared their values and sang their
songs. But they sensed that a part of me remained removed, detached, an
observer among them. I came to realize that without a vessel for my beliefs,
without an unequivocal commitment to a particular community of faith, I would
be consigned at some level to always remain apart, free in the way that my
mother was free, but also alone in the same ways she was ultimately alone.
There are worse things than such freedom. My mother would live happily as a
citizen of the world, stitching together a community of friends wherever she
found herself, satisfying her need for meaning in her work and in her
children. In such a life I, too, might have contented myself had it not been
for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes
that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.
For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious
tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to
minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had
the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It
had to serve as the center of the communityÆs political, economic, and social
as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the biblical call
to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and
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