The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism
232
The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism
232Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822369035 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/05/2017 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Sales rank: | 267,699 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.49(d) |
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The Labor of Faith
Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism
By Judith Casselberry
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6903-5
CHAPTER 1
THE INSTRUMENTS OF FAITH
At nine thirty in the morning, my cell phone rang. It was Sister Ruth Holmes. "Hi. I'm on my way to Louise's house." She paused. "You know why," she said softly. "She went to sleep this morning." I jumped up. "I'm on my way."
Louise Franklin had passed away — forty-six years young — from a brain tumor, cancer. Six months earlier, in June, she had begun having severe headaches that prompted a series of diagnostic exams. In August X-rays revealed a growth in her brain about the size of a quarter. By October it had grown to the size of a small grapefruit. In mid-November she entered the hospital, but before surgery she slipped into a coma and never recovered. A divorced single mother, she left two teenage children.
I arrived at Louise's house around ten thirty on that cold December morning. Mother Joan Morris, broom in hand, answered the door. "Praise the Lord," she greeted me in the way of the saints (as church members refer to themselves). We hugged; then she continued sweeping the carpeted hallway. At the end of the long hallway, beyond the front door, Mother Geneva Reeves was cleaning the bathroom with the deep concentration to detail that can come with grief, as if the repeated motion of the sponge on the sink could eventually wipe away the sorrow. I went in and touched her back; she turned, and we embraced.
When I arrived at the Queens-based True Deliverance Church (TDC) about a year earlier, Mother Reeves and I connected almost immediately and had since grown close. From the beginning, she had showed an interest in my work, which opened the way for many conversations. (Sister Holmes and I had just visited her and her husband, Minister Joe Reeves, after Bible study a few nights before Louise passed away. We had talked and laughed; eaten chips, salmon, and grits; and drank coffee until four in the morning.) Mother Reeves is a complicated woman, deeply spiritual and discerning with a great sense of humor, yet a taskmaster in the ways of holiness, particularly as it pertains to women's dress and comportment. She admittedly does not trust women, while, at the same time, she expresses admiration for successful Black women.
Our hug in the bathroom was long and, I hoped, some measure of comfort for her. It was for me.
"Have you eaten?" I asked.
"No, I can't. I don't eat early," she replied.
"Do you want something to drink — tea, water?"
"No."
"If you need anything, just say it."
She nodded, tears welling, unable to continue speaking. We hugged again, and she returned to her cleaning.
In the kitchen Sister Anne Farmer sat at the table, mechanically eating scrambled eggs and home fries from a small Styrofoam takeout box. We hugged. "Praise Him," we said simultaneously. Her eyes filled with tears as she shook her head. Sister Susan Charles came in from the dining room, where she, too, had been cleaning.
"Praise Him, Sister Judith." We hugged. "How are you?" she asked.
"I'm OK, how about you?"
Her lips tightened across her teeth, and she gave a slight shrug — kind of like, "What can I say?"
"What needs to be done?" I asked.
"Well," Mother Morris said, entering the kitchen, "the stair and hallway carpets need to be finished." I didn't know whether she was tired of sweeping or just wanted to be in the kitchen with the other saints. I think the latter. I picked up where she had left off in the hallway, then moved on to sweep the stairs.
Numerous phone calls that morning had dispatched saints to begin the series of tasks that come with a death. This work is intense, concentrated in time, and done while juggling the rest of life's obligations. "It easily could be twenty-four hours, seven days a week," one saint later explained, "because the moment you find out that somebody passes, everything in your organized real life stops to go meet the need of that person." She continued, "So, literally, you can get a call that somebody passed away at one o'clock in the morning. Everybody is going to be at the house by one forty-five — gotten up out of their beds and come to the aid of that family to see what they need."
This certainly was the case with Louise's passing; a flood of questions had to be addressed. Does someone need to go to the hospital and view her before meeting with the funeral home? Who will go make arrangements with the funeral home? Do we need to shop for clothes to lay her to rest in? Someone will need to gather information from family and friends for the obituary. The order of the homegoing service needs to be planned — check with the church and set a date. Who will prepare the repast — do the grocery shopping and cooking? And the house needs to be readied to receive family and friends.
Louise's house was a mess. Her children, understandably, had given it no attention in quite some time. The saints had been coming regularly, since Louise had taken ill, to help with meals and cleaning, but now it was different. Divine healing was a central tenet of the church. No one had expected her to die, so the meals, the cleaning, the laundry, all that work, up until now, had been stopgap measures awaiting her return. Now the cleaning had to be deep, not only to receive the many folks who would be coming through in the days to come, but also to befit how much the house meant to Louise.
She was proud of this two-story, four-bedroom home, situated on a narrow one-way street in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. She bought it on her own and had done quite a bit of the renovation work herself. "She got that house and fixed it up like she was a he-man," one of the church mothers remembered. "Taking down walls, discovering doors and windows, and all that stuff herself, she was a hardworking gal." The first time I visited here, some months earlier at a Saturday afternoon summer barbecue, Louise showed me around. We began in the long front hallway.
"I had a hard time getting this [wall] even," she recalled, "'cause the house has settled and the floor and ceiling aren't level with each other. But I think I did a pretty good job."
"I think you did a really good job," I told her.
"Yes," she replied. "God is good."
Louise continued the tour, past stairs to the right leading to the second floor and, to the left, laid out in railroad fashion, entryways to the living room, formal dining room, and large, eat-in kitchen. The kitchen had a huge walk-in pantry at the back corner, full of Costco-sized packages of paper towels and napkins, canned and dry goods, condiments, and large bags of candy. (Louise was very close to the children at church and always brought them little gift bags of treats.) On this party day, the kitchen was abuzz with women from church preparing volumes of food to take outside. Two fans ran at top speed in a vain attempt to alleviate the heat of bodies, the oven, burners on the stove, and steaming pots.
Louise started helping with the food preparation, so my tour ended in the kitchen, and I made my way out to the newly cemented backyard. The gathering was in full swing. Most folks in attendance were from TDC, along with some from other churches in the parent organization, the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc., or, as they call themselves, COOL JC ("cool-JC"). As well, some non-churchgoing family and friends were on hand. Up against the house, a large canopy kept the sun off two large folding banquet tables that held plasticware, condiments, and restaurant-sized aluminum trays full of macaroni-tuna, potato, and green salads. Next to them, a young man attended a large barbecue grill crowded with hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken. A few feet away, folks sat in folding chairs and at tables, cross-talking and laughing. One table hosted a lively card game that drew animated input from a few bystanders. At the far end of the yard, a half-dozen young men and boys were shooting hoops and talking much mess.
On the cold December morning of Louise's passing, the laughter and aromas from that summer afternoon seemed long gone. Smells of Clorox, Pledge, Ajax, and dust mingled in the air as the saints prepared the house for grieving family and loved ones. Armed with ammonia and bleach, Mother Reeves left the bathroom and came into the kitchen, to begin the process of cleaning every utensil, dish, and surface. Amid the sounds of cleaning and thick silence of grief, from the kitchen she began singing a slow, plaintive hymn, in a rich alto-tenor register:
Thank you, Lord.
Thank you, Lord.
Thank you, Lord.
I just want to thank you, Lord.
Having spent most of her sixty-two years in church, Mother Reeves had been singing "to the glory of the Lord" for a long time. (Originally from North Carolina, she migrated to New York in 1970 with her husband and four young sons. The transition brought her out of a rural Baptist upbringing and into an urban Apostolic Pentecostal community.) Her song began softly, internally, and with each repetition it swelled in volume and intensity. Pulling, stretching each word — thaaaan-kuuuu-Laurrrrd — her resonant overtones cradled each syllable. Her gospel vibrato carried sadness; her vocal mastery relayed conviction.
In this moment, Mother Reeves took up another level of religious labor, beyond the physical and task-oriented cleaning of the space; her spiritual and emotional labor started shoring up religious confidence and soothing the hurt of the women gathered, her own included. Louise's death flew in the face of the saints' experiences and church teachings of divine healing and answered prayer: "And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it" (John 14:13–14). What is more, Louise had confessed before the church and one-on-one with friends, "God told me I'm healed." In these initial hours, before the family and wider church community gathered, these good women needed to bolster each other because some would later be responsible for conveying, in word and deed, confidence in the wisdom of God's plan for everyone. The church community now had to grapple with the paradoxes of divine healing and death, of Jesus's promise to answer prayer and predestination.
"WORK AT LIVING A HOLY LIFE"
Baptism in the Holy Ghost is an event, while living in holiness is a process that requires religious labor. To develop and fortify a holy life, a saint expends considerable energy on individual practices and communal activities including worshipping, praying, and giving testimony; absorbing and reiterating scripture in Sunday school, Bible study, orations, and conversation; and explaining current experiences and reinterpreting past events through the lens of church theology. If she remains steadfast, in the end, by way of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, she has the promise of eternal life.
The women of COOLJC face challenges to their faith all the time. Over time they hone religious skills that they then bring to bear on every aspect of living in "the beauty of holiness" (1 Chron. 16:29). The manner in which they contended with Louise's initial diagnosis, and then her unexpected passing, was, in many ways, no different from how they managed less traumatic, even mundane, events. Engaging physical, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual resources, they worked to align their dispositions with their religious convictions and church doctrine. Sister Addie Thomas highlighted the task at hand when, during Monday night Bible study, she said, "Walking with Christ means you decide about how you gonna act all the time. You don't follow your natural mind. You follow your spiritual mind. You let the Holy Ghost lead and guide you." She explained that wanting to live "in the world" was "natural." In fact, she contended, "Holiness is not natural. It's unnatural. You have to work against the world. You have to work at living a holy life." She described faith in terms of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual exertion needed to bring one's internal state into harmony with one's religious commitment and doctrine.
Thomas J. Csordas uses the concept of disposition, in the context of Catholic charismatic healing, to look at the "expectancy or 'faith to be healed.'" In addition to a follower's internal state or "expectancy," he also calls attention to "the disposition of persons within the healing process vis-à-vis social networks and symbolic resources," in other words, the ways in which people place themselves within religious settings. For our purposes, thinking about disposition in this way allows a doubling that can account for both a saint's inner mind or will and also her placement and level of engagement within the religious environment. Her positioning within sacred spaces and her interior state fold back into and reinforce each other as a result of specific strategies.
Sister Thomas pointed out the two registers of disposition. "To work against the world [and] ... to work at living a holy life," she "decides" (engaging inner will) "how [to] act" (determining her placement within the religious environment). This requires developing skills, and, as with any skill set, the amount of exertion, effort, and practice determines the level of expertise attained. Both the context and content of Sister Thomas's comments speak to the training saints undertake. First, her comments took place at Monday's Bible class, one of three weeknight services — Wednesday's missionary service and Friday's Joy Night service being the other two. Through immersion (literal positioning) in multiple weekly services, she received training in COOLJC theology, doctrine, and practices so that she could develop and learn how to "follow [her] spiritual mind."
Second, her observations show that practices shape disposition; repeated action ("work," not "natural" desire) kept her "living a holy life." Sister Thomas's declaration also resonates with Saba Mahmood's analysis of Egyptian Islamic women. Mahmood calls attention to the idea of "ethical pedagogy" (applicable to both Islam and Pentecostalism), in which the virtuous interior of a devout woman develops by way of specific practices. She argues, "Action does not issue forth from natural feelings but creates them. ... [R]epeated bodily act[s] ... train one's memory, desire, and intellect to behave according to established standards of conduct." Yet, distinct from Islamic women, Sister Thomas pointed out that, along with work, the Holy Ghost "leads and guides" her in making the right choices to live holy, "according to established standards of conduct." In the daily work of living holy, the borders between individual will and the "move of the Holy Ghost" are fluid and constantly being negotiated. Saints "decide about how [they] ... act all the time," while letting the "Holy Ghost lead and guide [them]."
Mother Reeves intoning, "Thank you, Lord," on that solemn morning operated in the fluid space of deciding and letting the Holy Ghost lead. But why did she sing? We can think about her unction to sing as a means of production that demonstrated an "exercise in the strategy of choice," in which she was "exercising her sense of economy of signification." She knew from learning and practice which particular instrument within the Apostolic tool kit would help her come closest to achieving the desired results. She exhibited what Catherine Bell names "a sense of ritual" and "ritual mastery." Mother Reeves's sense and mastery developed over time and "indicate[d] something of the 'work' of ritualization." Her specialized knowledge was "an embodied knowing," the means through which she demonstrated her sense of which customary practices may prove effective in a given situation. In this case, it was song, and she sang to minister to those present, herself included. What work did this song do? How did this action navigate the paradox of divine healing and death? How might her actions have aligned her disposition with her religious conviction and church teachings? To answer these questions, we need to understand more about the saints' confidence in divine healing, the promise of prayer, predestination, and eternal life, and, specifically, the practices that shape and are shaped by convictions — the work of faith.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Labor of Faith by Judith Casselberry. Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Prologue ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction 1 1. The Instruments of Faith 17 2. Church Building 45 3. Church Sustaining 79 4. Women's Work 104 5. Harvesting Souls for Christ 125 6. The Beauty of Holiness 152 Conclusion 170 Notes 173 Bibliography 197 Notes 207What People are Saying About This
"Judith Casselberry's masterful The Labor of Faith is an important contribution to the study of American religion and African American religious culture in particular. Casselberry's attention to the concept of 'labor' helps reshape our well-worn attention to agency in the study of faith-filled women. The beauty of her narrative voice brings alive in striking detail the lives of the women of the Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ."
"Anthropologist and Africana Studies scholar Judith Casselberry’s The Labor of Faith is a rich interdisciplinary and ethnographic study that integrates spiritual, material, social, and structural spheres of twenty-first-century metropolitan New York Black Apostolic women’s work. Casselberry highlights the role of Black women’s religious labor in defining and sustaining personal faith, building churches and faith communities, and navigating intraracial and intergender power relations. An engaging study that expands the field of Pentecostal studies and a must-read."