Photo courtesy of Pixabay/Creative Commons
By Kenneth C. Ulmer
(RNS) — It was good news. It was bad news. Just days before, I had said a funeral service for a young Black man who had been found hanged, in what appeared to be a flashback to the era of lynchings. I had stood before his grieving family, proclaiming our church’s corporate commitment to justice and retribution. Now I learned that he had apparently lost his life to suicide.
The good news was that he had not been killed; he was not another Black man whose life had been snuffed out by racial oppression. The bad news was that he instead he had fallen victim to a dark and dim spirit that had quite likely haunted him for quite some time. It was not another chapter in the ongoing saga of racism, but a manifestation of the whispered, often hidden reality of mental illness in my community.
In the Black community, mental issues have always been hush-hush. We are more likely to trump our mental fears with spiritual faith. We are more likely to go to the altar than go to a therapist. This is not so much a rejection of the medical profession as the historic attempt to distance ourselves from demonic, spiritualist, occult practices. Whatever the origin, it is something we have never talked much about.
Most of all, you don’t talk about this stuff outside of the family; in fact you don’t talk about it too much in the family!
I traffic in the company of charismatics and Pentecostals. One of our buzz phrases is “the anointing.” We pray for it. We admire it. We judge it. We want it. We prioritize it. One of our staple Scriptures is Jesus’ announcement after his victory over temptation in the wilderness, as he stood in the synagogue on the Sabbath and proclaimed: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. Read more…
