I love when one good book points to another. I finally got around to reading Dr. Theodore Walker, Jr.’s Mothership Connections: A Black Atlantic Synthesis of Neoclassical Metaphysics and Black Theology (which I briefly mentioned here). In the book, Dr. Walker quotes a line from womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher’s book A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper in which she writes how Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1859-1964) “[describes] God as a ‘Singing Something’ that rises up within humanity in every nation to cry out against injustice.” (p. 16) Or in Dr. Walker’s words: “Where there is injustice/oppression, the omnipresent influence of the divine singing something inspires human liberation struggle.” (p. 48)
Dr. Cooper was a teacher, author, scholar, and activist, and one of the first African-American women to obtain a PhD. Her original words from her 1925 doctoral defense “Equality of Races and the Democratic Movement,” read:
“That ‘In the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings’
and it is that ‘Something’—that Singing Something, which distinguishes the first Man from the last ape, which in a subtle way tagged him with the picturesque Greek title anthropos, the upward face, and which justifies the claim to equality by birthright to the inheritance from a common Father for the ‘Backward’ no less than the ‘Advanced’ among his varying but undeniable progeny.” (p. 5)
Digging deeper into Dr. Cooper’s work, Dr. Baker-Fletcher asks, “Where is God’s presence evident for Cooper?” Answer:
“God is in the very movement of reform. God is this Singing Something in human being that rises up against injustice and moves onward toward a full realization of freedom. God is the power of freedom and equality that moves them foreword. What is striking about her metaphor is that one can conceptualize God as a liberating voice within human being … To conceive of God’s message of freedom and equality as innate in the human spirit is empowering for the silenced and voiceless, for those whose knowledge has been trampled down on the underside of history, for those whose voices have been muted by the history of the Western Church with its distortions of the Gospel.” (p. 66-67)
I immediately fell in love with this image of God as a “Singing Something.” As a Song rising up everywhere justice is wanting. It gives new meaning to the spirituals, protest songs, and chants that play such an important role in movements for equality. They are all pieces of that Singing Something. A divine song inspiring communal action. But the real Song is the movement itself. The movement of people coming together to demand equal rights.
And while I think the Singing Something would certainly prefer to make beautiful music for its own sake, Dr. Copper is sure to point out that She sings loudest when “[crying] out against injustice.” Because, as Cooper claims, passages like Matthew 25 prove these songs are the most important to Her.
Dr. Copper lived through, and was inspired by, the rise of the Social Gospel. Despite its necessary reforming spirit, the Social Gospel largely failed to address the needs of Black people. Cooper saw and called out this disparity. Dr. Baker-Fletcher describes Cooper’s Christology:
“Christ received the least of these. Likewise, the Church must receive the least of these. Who were the least of these? Not just the poor of Western European descent, but the poor of every hue.” (p. 77)
The Singing Something Dr. Cooper heard rising up from within was more expansive and inclusive than what many others heard—especially white American Christians. They may have heard the song in part, failing to notice the rest because of their privilege. But folks like Cooper had ears to hear the full score.
I’m imagining the Singing Something’s voice as feminine. While part of this is because Dr. Cooper herself compares Christ to Black women1, I think it’s also because one of the first songs that comes to mind when thinking of her description is Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam.
Picket lines, school boycotts
They try to say it's a communist plot
All I want is equality
For my sister, my brother, my people, and me
Simone’s words, representative of the broader Civil Rights Movement, expresses a cry for her people. And even though at one point she sings “I don't belong here, I don't belong there, I've even stopped believing in prayer” I’m still convinced her song, and others like it, are prayer—musical manifestations of the Singing Something at work in the broader movement for civil rights.
Dr. Cooper’s Singing Something, the Lakota’s Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka (Great Mystery), and even more generic names like Love, Spirit, Breath, or Energy help me imagine God in new and expansive ways. The names for God that I grew up with (Lord, King, Father, etc.) tend to be rooted in hierarchy, often leading to images of God as a disconnected domineering disciplinarian. These non-hierarchal names for the divine, however, help me reimagine God as a part of and connected to the universe (and everything in it) as opposed to a disconnected or disinterested being severed from creation.
I’ve come to prefer these divine metaphors that are more descriptive of God as the “ground of being” (Paul Tillich) than those that describe God as “being” (although anthropomorphising God still has its place). Dr. Cooper’s Singing Something reminds me that God is intimately connected to the whole of the universe. Reverberating throughout the cosmos. The piece within us that urges us to sing out against injustice. It reminds us that while God is indeed everywhere, it’s in movements toward freedom and justice where She sings loudest.
“While she did not come right out and say that for the Black race Jesus was like a Black mother, her use of metaphor suggests as much.” Baker-Fletcher, p. 71
What a beautiful descriptor for God! Thanks for sharing.