Wine in the wilderness: many African Americans have known and risen above suffering and despair. Now black Catholics are called upon to give their "gifts of blackness" to help heal the country and the church.

One grandmother sang me through the day while she cooked, cleaned, worked in the garden, and simply sat and connected us with a past that smelled strongly of earth, ginger, and earnest effort. The other grandmother walked and worked and kept her fingers busy, preparing and shaping and "fixing things" and telling stories and laughing at life and taking more horror and frustration to prayer than could have been found in well-stocked monasteries in medieval France.

To honor them both on a weekend in May in 1972, and to make sure that all who came to the church in East St. Louis where I was to be ordained a priest would feel at home, I had to prepare a "welcome table" for family, friends, fellow Jesuits, and those who showed up to see who else would be there. Could any of us have known then that "black liturgy" could be revolutionary? Not really; all we knew was that those who came into the church had to find something of themselves once they had settled into the pews.

So a young man who played the organ in his family's Baptist church provided the meditation music and carried the old songs to those who knew them and to those who were visitors to something new. We sang "This Little Light of Mine" (because it truly was) and "Woke up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Jesus" (because we had) and "Amazing Grace" (because many in the church had come to witness just that).

What made it "authentically black"? Maybe my grandmother's wine and the songs of her/our kitchen and sanctuary. Or, most likely, the fact that making people feel welcome takes artistry, common sense, and a sure feel for what makes the heart lay down and take its rest among strangers.

The "catholic" part is always in the roundness and soundness of the welcome performed at the table. Everybody has a place and song.

Few documents produced within the black Catholic Church in the United States have announced themselves as prophetically as did the pastoral letter on evangelization from the black bishops of the U.S. The 1984 letter What We Have Seen and Heard begins: "Within the history of every Christian community there comes the time when it reaches adulthood." This letter also presents the great injunction for this church to be "authentically black and truly Catholic" in its development of liturgies that can be an "intense expression of the spiritual vitality of those who are of African origin, just as it has been for other ethnic and cultural groups."

Before this was published, some few other voices had been crying out in what was all too often a wilderness of neglect, condescension, misunderstanding, or open hostility. With very few exceptions, between 1930 and 1980, those who would have been identified--or identified themselves--as "black Catholics" (or colored or Negro Catholics) would have had a very hard time feeling like true adults within the Roman Catholic Church of the United States.

For many understandable reasons, "truly Catholic" almost always trumped "authentically black." Contrary to the vision of What We Have Seen and Heard, in the long years before that letter was written, it was nearly impossible for black people, through their engagement in liturgy, to "realize that the Catholic Church is a homeland for black believers just as she is for people of other cultural and ethnic traditions."

Only by the most ironic understanding of the word universal could one absorb hymns that were produced by Irish, Italian, German, and French musicians and never once experience the richness of African American sacred music at any liturgy anywhere. And where black Catholicism was most deeply rooted--in the Catholic regions of Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, and in various locations in Maryland--authentic blackness was judged even more negatively, as the manifestation of the pagan, "heathenish" practices of voodoo.

So how did the black Catholic bishops ascend to a place of prophecy, declaring a vision of church that was subversive to many and frightening to even more Catholics? To answer that question, we should attend to one of the "voices crying in the wilderness" alluded to previously.

Father Clarence R. J. Rivers Jr. charted the map of black Catholic renewal more than a decade before the bishops' pastoral letter. Rivers' early writings, collected in The Spirit in Worship (in 1978), are a feast at an oasis, even to this day. Rivers explains the high priority of renewing Catholic worship with the yeast of black culture. He also knew that no "authentic" black Catholic worship would be possible without "some form of independent authority within the church."

What We Have Seen and Heard was a beginning. On some levels, progress toward a measure of independence within the larger church community has never been realized. But perhaps the Holy Spirit had other plans.

The majority of black Catholics--about 1 million when Rivers announced his vision; almost double that number when the bishops initiated their Pentecostal moment; and triple that number now--have had to undergo a cultural conversion before "authentically black" could truly be interiorized. Some involved in that cultural and spiritual conversion would call the process a sankofa experience. Sankofa is a term from the Akan culture of Ghana and the Ivory Coast, meaning "to return to the past to bring necessary information to the future."

We had to first claim the music, openly and proudly. Many black Catholics came to Catholicism from other faith traditions--often Baptist or Methodist--that were the repositories of much of black sacred song. The old hymns and anthems--the "spirituals" of slavery and abolition and jubilee--were the treasury from which was gleaned much of what we know to be African American theology and spirituality.

These songs were never completely absent from the spiritual lives of black Catholics. Some had been born into churches where these songs were the foundation of worship. Some had relatives who offered the music as the atmosphere and underpinning of their daily lives. Some left a Catholic church and went home to turn on the radio or the phonograph and listen to the "down home" music of their friends and neighbors--thereby getting a feeling of "real church" after they went to Mass.

This music was composed in times of despair, alienation, oppression, abuse, acts of terrorism, and instability. It provided balance, hope, a sense of selfhood. Composing and performing the music strengthened communities, encouraged creative women and men to find their humanity in acts of art, and provided ways of secretly educating a community in ways of coping and strategies of liberation. The music made a "way out of no way" and gave an understanding of "home" to those whose whole lives were otherwise lived "in the raging storm." When a voice proclaimed, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child," communion was achieved with all those who shared the ache.

A great gospel hymn proclaims, "If we ever need the Lord before, we sure do need him now."

Now, at the beginning of a new millennium, the black Catholic Church is better situated than ever to embody the call of Pope Paul VI: "You must now give your gifts of blackness to the whole church." In the Catholic Church of the U.S., the voice that stood outside the gates, that cried in the wilderness, that moaned and mourned in a weary land, has a prophetic, healing power that the whole church seeks.

A balm in Gilead? For all the broken, abused, and ignored young? Yes. A lonesome valley? For all those who have been misnamed, unclaimed, and stepped over? For those who know that they have been called to ministry and no one will embrace them? For those who know that God made them to love, and the world (and the church) tells them to be less than God made them to be? Yes.

Why should anyone be left to hunger and homelessness? Why should those who seek to bind the wounds of the outcasts or proclaim release to the captives of our prison system be ignored or patronized within the pews of many churches? Why should those who call for an end to the war against the poor and the disabled be given crumbs from the table? I don't know why, but I know that "I've been `buked and I've been scorned, children/ I've been talked about sho's you' born." And I know that in spite of the "trouble all over this world," I "ain't gwine lay my religion down."

When black Catholics went back, sankofa, to get the old songs and sing them for themselves, they brought forth "wine in the wilderness" for all who need to feel the Spirit--in whatever place they find themselves. Acts of terror and abuse are not unknown, either to the church or to the country. Some have never had an option of taking a high and safe path from the "toils and dangers." Some have had to "wade in the water" and cry, "Pass me not, 0 gentle Savior, hear my humble cry/ While on others Thou art calling, do not pass me by."

From all the signs of the times, it would seem that now, more than ever, we are all standing in need of prayer. The black Catholic Church knows how it feels to "come out the wilderness." And we all need to sing that song. Together.

FATHER JOSEPH A. BROWN, S.J. is the director of the Black American Studies program at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and the author of To Stand on the Rock: Meditations on Black Catholic Identity (Orbis Books).