A Song of Ascent

Introduction

Opening Prayer

Lord, hear my cry. Our species is dying. Our earth is dying alongside it. Mainstream attempts at solving the problems of people and the planet are not working and the genocides occur with more frequency and environmental destruction rages rapidly. Our children are suffocating in political insurrection, climate change, infant and maternal mortality, an ever-expanding prison industry, rising sea levels, and natural resource shortages. Lord, we need the new earth of John’s apocalyptic vision. Show us the way there, today.

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Section I

Searching

Have you ever stood at the foot of a stately hill and lifted up your eyes? Do you remember the sensations that washed over you? Sometimes I try to imagine what it must have been like for the enslaved African men and women who were stolen, first by the Spanish, then later the English, and forced aboard vessels to cross an entire ocean. I try to imagine them being forced to choose between having knees that were woefully bent or willfully broken. I try to imagine them on the ship as they saw the hills of Jamaica break the clouds in the distance for the first time. Jamaica is beautiful. Its hills are majestic. Did they see God when they came upon the shores? Did they see beauty in God’s creation then? Did they lift up their eyes and cry out to the hills for help? 

What can their lives teach us about faith? What can their lives teach us about freedom? What can their lives teach us about healing? 

I try to imagine the hundreds of thousands of enslaved African men and women who have looked to the hills of Jamaica and cried out for help. The hills remind us that even the most oppressive man is nothing but a man. And for the African men and women crushed under the grindstone of enslavement, the hills were monuments to God’s unending power. 

Those hills became their shelter, their safety and their sanctuary.. Those hills became the fortress that surrounded their bodies and the walls that moved their praises up to heaven. The first groups of African men and women who ran to the hills in search of freedom were called Maroons and they called those hills holy, they called those hills home. 

These African-Jamaican Maroons, many of them from the Asante and Igbo people of West Africa, wielded political acumen and military skill. Most importantly—they held onto their advanced African religions and plant medicine systems. The Maroons were able to look to the hills and find safety there because they were competent in African herbal healing. They learned the plants of Jamaica and cultivated them for food and medicine. They carried over religious systems where the priest who presided over ancestor veneration was also the healer.[1] When it came time to wage war on the British who controlled the Island, the Maroon healers doubled as military leaders. The Maroons mastered guerilla warfare by first mastering a harmonious relationship with the land and they were successful in fighting the British because their leaders approached the natural world with reverence. 

Queen Nanny is the most notable Maroon. She was a fearsome warrior, skilled military leader and a powerful medicine woman.[2] She was a legend. It was said that Nanny knew the land of Jamaica extremely well and mastered guerilla warfare. It was also said that Nanny was so skilled in plant medicine and plant magic that she could bounce British bullets off her behind. Nanny was the original bulletproof superhero. Figures like Nanny remind us of the power of plants and the amazing feats that are possible when we live in harmony with the natural world.  Queen Nanny and the early Maroons actually looked to the hills, took up residence in the hills and let the hills protect them from British Plantocracy and white economic oppression. 

The first Jamaican Maroons—men and women broken by a vicious British capitalist operational system—found healing in the plants of the Island and shelter in the hills. They gifted humanity a belief system called Myal. Myal, the Island’s first indigenous African-Jamaican religious tradition, was organized around ancestor veneration. Myal recorded the names and memory of the people who passed on; it also kept folk medicine, ritual music and spiritual dance alive. Myal gave the Island its early priests who also served as political leaders, healers and revolutionaries. Myal, the religion of the Maroons, gave us a testimony about looking to the hills for help.[3]

The Maroons were so effective at fighting that the British signed a treaty recognizing Maroon people, lands and most importantly—freedom during enslavement. Sadly, the story of the Maroons was not a reality for all Jamaicans. The Maroons won their freedom by entering a treaty with the British that included capturing fugitive slaves and helping put down slave insurrections.[4] But the hundreds of thousands of African-Jamaicans enslaved on British plantations also looked to the hills and in the process created a legacy of liberation. British planters did not provide enough doctors to care for the illnesses they inflicted through neglect and poor working conditions; early African-Jamaicans enslaved on plantations used medicinal plants and herbs to heal themselves.[5] The African-Jamaicans on the plantations slowly came to know Christianity. But because the British were no example of holiness or reflections of Christ’s image, the African-Jamaicans took creative license to make Christianity in their image. The image they created was an indigenous African-Jamaican Christianity called Revivalism. Revivalism reflected a community effort to provide holistic healing, transmit ancestral lineage and preserve African-Jamaican culture.[6] Like Myal religion, African-Jamaican Revivalism also relied on herbal knowledge and plant medicine for ritual use and healing.[7]  Revival’s connectivity to the earth made the practice the backbone of the African-Jamaican fight against economic oppression.

The British gave enslaved African-Jamaicans Sunday as a rest day so they could grow their own food. You see the British were intent on maximizing profit while cutting every margin, even food and healthcare. They provided enslaved African-Jamaicans with dry, hilly plots of land to grow their own food in order to minimize the overhead of feeding a plantation full of free-laborers.[8] The British called the areas provision grounds. But the African-Jamaicans were also business savvy and so not only did they grow their own food after working on the plantations, but they turned around and set-up markets on the one Sunday they had off and in these markets sold the food that they grew during the week right back to the British.  

The tradition of the Sunday market grew and became an important feature in Jamaican life and culture. The Sunday markets gave poor men and women the chance to create an income stream in the midst of enslavement. Even after enslavement ended, these markets functioned as a platform for economic independence for poor African-Jamaicans. My own grandmother for example, started selling peanuts at Coronation Market, Jamaica’s largest food market. From peanuts she started selling herbs like thyme and scallion. From herbs she saved enough to begin selling clothing. She was so good at that she used the money to travel the Caribbean sourcing clothes to resell in Jamaica. My grandmother flipped peanuts into a house, into economic stability for her children, into plane tickets to America for her family in the ‘80s and ‘90s. My grandmother, like many Jamaicans before her, looked to the hills and turned a profit out of nothing. 

By the time slavery was abolished in 1834, African-Jamaicans had two religious evolutions and two social revolutions. The Maroons formed a religious system rooted in African traditions in Jamaica’s lush hills. Their religious system became the backbone for their freedom struggle against British rule. The enslaved African-Jamaicans on plantations formed Revivalism, a religious system merging Christianity, African traditions and herbal healing. Their faith was the foundation for the slave revolts that made freedom a reality for all Jamaicans. But Jamaica was still ripe for another massive shift because the African-Jamaicans on the Island remained under the chokehold of economic oppression.

Rastafarianism, Jamaica’s most known religion appeared almost 400 years after the arrival of the first Africans. Like the Maroons with their practice of Myal, and the enslaved Africans with their creation of Revivalism, Rastafarianism was born in the hills in the midst of a freedom struggle. 

Firmly rooted in the African-Jamaican indigenous religion of Revivalism, Rastafari was founded as an aggressive response to economic and political oppression of poor African-Jamaican people.[9] Importantly, as Black people all over the Western world struggled for the recognition of their humanity, Rastafari rose up and strove for the realization of Black divinity while Rastafarian leaders and followers daringly created a radical social justice mission. Rastafarian religious life revolves around an indwelling Black God, oneness with nature and natural living, detachment from oppressive anti-Black government and social constraints, and creating African-centered social programs and economic opportunities in support of Black people.[10]

When the Rastas gather to worship in the clearings you feel the ground shake as the earth responds to the call of their drumbeat.  Rastas set their cries to rhythms and gave us reggae music. Some reggae songs are deeply impactful because they condemn economic oppression and colonization while reminding us that the Earth is our partner in God’s creation. 

Reggae artist Jah Cure’s song “Mother Earth” warns us about the dangers of our actions on the earth and asks us to learn how to treat the planet. He asks us if we “realize just how much we really need her” and he apologizes “ for the way that we pollute her air” and challenges our actions toward another aspect of God’s creation.[11] When Rastas gather to worship from sun up to sundown they chant down Babylon and send our collective prayers and praise up to heaven. 

The poor, downtrodden and oppressed African-Jamaican men and women of a small island looked to the hills, recalled their roots, uplifted their own humanity, declared their own divinity, took charge of their own healing and took control of their destiny. These efforts were not mere exercises in creative ingenuity, but reflect African-Jamaicans’ never ending quest for liberation from physical, mental and economic slavery. African-Jamaican indigenous religious resistance to enslavement, exploitation, and cultural extinction was possible because they looked to the hills and cried out for help. The African-Jamaican spiritual freedom-struggle is a testament to what is possible when we look to the hills and submit ourselves as part of God’s creation. 

Economic oppression happens at the same time as environmental destruction.  When we begin to see the hills around us as equal to us in God’s creation, we can begin to look to the hills for an alliance against our shared oppression. We can begin to see that God has a place in our fight to save the earth and the earth has a place in the war for the economic liberation of all people. 

The answers for our future may live in our past. The hills and rivers, the desserts and plains, the jungles and swamps have held us and have helped us, even as we destroyed them in the process of destroying ourselves. We have forgotten that we found God on the summit of the mount and the endless face of the sea. It is time to go back to these places with reverence and to listen with humility to what the rest of God’s creation has to say about freedom struggles and liberation. 

Footnotes

[1] Ivor Morrish, Obeah, Christ and Rastaman: Jamaica and It’s Religion (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1987), 23-24. 

[2] Anthony B. Pinn, ed., African American Religious Cultures (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 2:214-218.The Maroons organized themselves into nations—the Leeward Maroons, Westmoreland Maroons and Windward Maroons. Twi-Asante dominated Maroon dialect. Newman et al., “West African Ethnicity,” 391-393.

[3] Myal is derived from Asante and Akan-influenced spiritual systems that center medicinal healing and skilled priests working between the spiritual and physical realms. Myal is loosely organized and practiced in groups and features ritual drumming, possession and ecstatic worship. Myal was important in the struggle against oppression and the communal nature of Myal worship strengthened the growth of Myal practice alongside the development of resistance movements. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 171-174.

[4] Phillip Sherlock and Hazel Bennett, The Story of the Jamaican People (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1998), 140-141.

[5] Arvilla Payne-Jackson and Mervyn C. Alleyne, Jamaica Folk Medicine: A Source of Healing (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2000), 15-20. 

[6] Revivalism uses temporal spaces to invoke and invite particular spirits to human hosts. Though individuals may have personal spirits, the entire religious system is tied together under the belief in the Christian God and all forces are under the control of the Holy Spirit. Revival’s spirit hierarchy consists of heavenly spirits (angels and saints), earth spirits (Prophets, Apostles, fallen angels and satanic powers) and ground spirits (all human dead that are not listed in the Bible). In effect, for practitioners who are possessed by a personal spirit, the spirit works with them as intermediary between practitioners and the Holy Ghost. According to the authors “The angel or biblical prophet who visits a person through dreams or visions becomes that person’s guardian spirit” (Payne-Jackson and Alleyne, Jamaica Folk Medicine, 63-67).

[7] Diane Patterson, Jamaican Herbs: Nutritional and Medicinal Values (Montego Bay: DeSola Pinto Associates, 1988), 2-3.

[8] Payne-Jackson and Alleyne, Jamaica Folk Medicine, 15-20.  

[9] Rex Nettleford, “Discourse on Rastafarian Reality,” in Chanting down Babylon: The Rastafari Reader, eds. Nathaniel Samuel Murrell, William David Spencer, and Adrian Anthony McFarlane (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998) 316. 

[10] Pinn, African American Religious Cultures, 345-346.

[11] Jah Cure, “Mother Earth,” Jah-Lyrics. https://www.jah-lyrics.com/song/jah-cure-mother-earth.