On the Passing of James Cone

In my theological imagination, before I knew theology had an imagination, spiritual conversion (of the black protestant variety) happened in one of two places. Within communities of believers at Sunday services or summer revivals. Or in isolation, in a time when one really needs god. 

Theology without imagination, if my young presuppositions about conversion are any indication, is terribly naive. 

I had never experienced a conversion. I am the kind of person that one might call in the church but never really of it. The daughter of Emmanuel Baptist Church's children's choir director who cried the first time she was ever tasked with singing a solo. 

I was baptized in undergrad at the local church of christ. A community of believers with whom I spent a great deal of time. People who invited me into their homes and showed me that the love of family could come from people who weren't blood related. They struggled to answer my constant questions about god and faith and the bible. To know god, for me, was to understand god. I was on an unending quest to find meaning in that which is bigger than meaning. 

And so, what was supposed to be my conversion, has been relegated to the far corners of my memory. Except for the song that was sung to me by a friend on the other side of the door while I changed out of my wet clothes. God loves Shana, she sang in a melody that was all her own. It remains one of the most tender moments in my adult life. 

That feels like a lifetime ago. 

Then, a few years ago, my good friend sent me a video of James Cone's 2012 lecture given during a worship service at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. 

In it, Dr. Cone said the true power of the Christian gospel belonged to the crucified people of history. The forgotten and abused. The marginalized and despised. Those who are penniless, jobless, landless, and those who have no political or social power. The queer people of this world. The undocumented farm workers toiling in misery in our nation's agricultural fields. Muslims who live under the terror of war and empire. 

"Until we can identify Christ with the re-crucified body hanging from a lynching tree or a gay body on a picket fence there can be no...deliverance."

It wasn't until I heard the news of his passing that I realized that James Cone inspired what may be the only time in my life that I have experienced something like a conversion. I devoured his work after watching that one video. I remembered The Spirituals and the Blues from my first semester at Florida A&M University. I read The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Then, Black Theology and Black Power. After that God of the Oppressed. I read A Black Theology of Liberation.

James Cone's theology was the first time in my life that Christianity felt full of possibilities instead of limitations. I was awed by the idea that the lynching tree could be something divine. James Cone gave theology an imagination for me. This wasn't a conversion inspired by knowing the unknown and feeling the unseen. It was an understanding that black imagination is theology. 

Reading black literature and listening to black music and witnessing black art began to feel like a spiritual practice. In the midst of my dissertation research, James Cone even made Marxism a theology. (Really. He wrote a whole essay about it.)

Sit your butt down in that chair and write what you think.

It was this refrain that inspired James Cone to begin writing after graduate school. For this reason there is always something that feels urgent to me about his work. Like it was something he was itching to write and that the world needed to read. Which means it is flawed. And there are things missing, to be filled in fifteen years later in a subsequent edition. His are the kind of books that leave you both full and still wanting. 

Blackness saved me from whiteness and kept me sane.

So James Cone converted me. I didn't join a church. But like James Cone I was already saved. I just didn't know it. "Blackness saved me from whiteness", Dr. Cone said during his lecture. After pausing, he finished, "and kept me sane." Blackness saved me from whiteness too. And James Cone gave me imagination in a way that I had never experienced before. An imagination that can make even the lynching tree divine.