Read this today and had my heart broke all over again.

We watched them until they were out of hearing. And we listened for a long time after that. At those sounds. Whether the sounds we were hearing were those of a buried or modified culture, merging with another as the dirt road merged with the bigger one being elsewhere, it would not have occurred to us at the time to ponder. But later we would remember them as the articulation and recitation of two hundred years of pathos. An emancipation which still had not reached them, or us, if in fact it had reached anywhere at all. A manumission inferred by Christian proselytizers, but undelivered by the steeples and structures they represented. Whether West African or European, Nigerian or Mississippian in origin, they were the pleadings of an African peasant woman to the son of a Jewish peasant woman to be with her in her travail.

They were Jesus sounds, absorbed from a nation and a culture Jesus was alleged to have had a hand in founding and forming, drawing, too, on a nation and a culture where he had not been known at all, yet meaning more to that which was African in this scene than he had ever meant to that which was American in it. 

And they were sounds which would not soon depart from us. 

 — Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly, 62.

Jesus sounds break the heart and make it alive again. 

Do you ever wonder why you do the things you do? Do you question your own motives? Motives are tricky. We don’t always know our own true motives until we reflect on our actions after the fact. This is the way of it. We make moral decisions in real time and then we engage in ethical reflection after the fact. Most often we try to justify what we have done. Less often, we critique our own actions and seek to change who we are and what we do. Then we find that we are most resistant to change. Real change is only possible by the transforming power of the Holy Spirit who grows holiness in us. The Spirit can help us assess our motives but we must also understand that the Spirit deals gently with us and does not reveal more of the darkness in our hearts than we are ready to bear. The spiritual disciplines – prayer, fasting, meditation, contemplation, etc. – are how we participate in the Spirit’s sanctifying work, how we come to understand ourselves as we are even as we are becoming our truest selves.