The Meaning of the Moan and Significance of the Shout in Black Worship and Culture and Memory and Hope

Abstract

In black worship we hear uttered the “language of the sacred” Long wrote of in the above quote taken from Significations. Black worship, of course, has no monopoly on this language of the sacred, but it does have its own way of speaking this language. This language is rooted in the signification of silence referred to earlier in chapter four, “Being, Nothingness, and the ‘Signification of Silence’ in African American Religious Consciousness.” I tried to show in chapter seven, “ ‘The Signification of Silence’ Revisited: African American Art and Hermeneutics,” how this language is given visual expression in that medium. In this chapter, I will engage in a phenomenology of the language of the sacred that is uttered in black worship but which, I also argue, structures the whole spectrum of black experience.

This type of structuring of the primary religious expressions does not arise from the metaphysical desire to construct the world. The intent of this structure is a more modest one. Through this structure a pattern, a “language” of the sacred, is revealed, a language that describes human immersion in life—in this case as a confrontation with the sacred. It is through this language that the human being deciphers the meaning of the sacred in history. This language or structure of the sacred is the medium through which historians insert themselves into the historical being of others. The use of every structure, whether biological, aesthetic, or religious, points to the endeavor to find a common form for the self and the “other” which is the object of interpretation. Structure is thus a mode of communication …

This communication of the “intelligible something” (in our case religious structures) should lead to an opening of ourselves and permit us to order unexplored areas of our lives. Our return to the archaic and traditional religious forms does not express a desire merely to trace casual connections. It is a return to the roots of human perception and reflection undertaken so that we might grasp anew and reexamine the fundamental bases of the human presence. (Significations, p. 46)