Early on in his novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison depicts a fateful encounter between his young protagonist, a college student, and Jim Trueblood, a sharecropper who has brought disgrace upon himself and the local black community by impregnating his own teenage daughter. Trueblood explains how it happened—only incidentally for the benefit of the college student, mainly for the benefit of the elderly white trustee for whom the young man is serving as driver during his visit to the college. And Trueblood ends his story by relating his anguished search for solace. He goes to his preacher, but the preacher sends him away. He moves out of his house because his wife and his daughter both have rejected him. He is in agony. And then:

"Finally, one night, way early in the mornin', I looks up and sees the stars and I starts singin'. I don't mean to, I didn't think 'bout it, just start singin'.

I don't know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I know is I ends up singin' the blues. I sings me some blues that ain't never been sang before, and while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen. I made up my mind that I was goin' back home and face Kate; yeah, and face Matty Lou too."

This passage came to mind again and again as I read To Stand on the Rock, which is about nothing so much as the saving power of black music.

As Fr. Joseph A. Brown tells it, black music—the authentic stuff, the kind that resonates with Africa and the sweltering American South, that combines slavery and the faux freedom that followed it, that comes from the depths of the souls of people whose unique characteristic is a history of enslavement—can save individuals from insanity, families from fragmentation, communities from disintegration. As with Ellison's Jim Trueblood, it can restore order to a soul in chaos and call forth strengths that individuals did not know they possessed.

The question that underlies this volume is: Can black music—and the people and culture it reflects—find a place in the Catholic church? Is it possible to be, in the words of the black bishops in their letter to the church, "authentically black and truly Catholic"?

Almost four decades ago, when I was a teenager, there somehow came into our house a recording of something called the "Missa Luba." I had been a Catholic all my life, and in my youngest years my family had been part of an all-black parish in the South. But I had never previously heard anything like this recording of African voices singing the Latin liturgy of that pre-Vatican II time and what must have been some African-language hymns as well. They made me want to move, to clap, to shout, to sing along in ways that Gregorian chanters certainly never could. It was the first inkling I ever had that, somewhere in the Catholic church, there was soul.

Later, in the post-Vatican II era, I began to hear all kinds of music in the church. Frankly, a lot of it was (and is) very bad music: unsoulful, unsingable, all head and no gut or groin. And even when the music is good, the performance can be abominable. The way "Amazing Grace" is sung in Catholic churches, for example, is a disgrace and an affront to the ears.

So far, I regret to say, except for what may be performed in all-black Catholic churches, I hear very little music that feels African American, that makes me want to sway and clap and sing along, that makes me want to shout at the end, "Amen!"

To that extent, the African American experience has not truly penetrated and become part of American Catholicism; to that extent, African Americans remain unknown to the church. For, as Father Brown wisely observes, "It is in the songs that we shall find the keys to unlocking the treasure of African-American theology and culture."

The first half of his book is devoted to unlocking that treasure by meditating on some of those songs and on the culture and theology they embody. While at times this exercise seems tedious, it is necessary in order to appreciate the second half of the book, which is more explicitly about issues black and Catholic. And even amid the tedium, there are arresting insights.

Two things are central in this meditation: the continent of Africa and "the abductive act of enslavement." Africa is the land of the ancestors, and in Africa (as, for that matter, in Catholicism) ancestors are spiritually important personages. In Africa, Father Brown writes, "Those who sink into the earth are no more dead than is the sun. They, the honored ancestors, are without bodies but possess the full power of the spiritual world and are valued as guides, protectors, and arbiters of communal discernments." (Catholics ought to be able to detect, in this description, more than a little similarity to their view of the dead as the "faithful departed" and intercessors with God in heaven.)

Enslavement is central because it is the defining fact of African American existence: "African-Americans carry within us, every one of us, only one essential or 'universal' quality of blackness, no matter how many authoritarian voices insist on defining 'how to be black.' We share the fact of historical enslavement."

It is impossible, Father Brown says, to overstate the impact of that fact, that "abductive act," on those who experienced it:

The dislocation and relocation of the millions of Africans … did much more than move human beings from one piece of land to another, for whatever form of servitude. The leaving of the land, as an act in itself, served to sunder the cosmos of the Africans thus uprooted. … The Africans suffered singularly real and permanent trauma in that the concept of ancestral land was not abstract but a lived experience upon which all notions of culture were grounded.

The response of the Africans to this sundering? Well, some committed suicide, hurling themselves into the Atlantic, "[c]hoosing physical death over alienation from the land of their birth." But for those who physically survived the transit from Africa to America, from freedom to bondage, religion became a balm, their refuge. Father Brown quotes the historian John Blassingame: "In short, religion helped him [the slave] to preserve his mental health. Trust in God was conducive to psychic health insofar as it excluded all anxiety-producing preoccupations by the recognition of a loving Providence."

In this context, the songs of the slaves "become medicinal because the singers attest that they will sing, shout, and never grow weary; that they don't feel no ways tired while they sing of their deliverance. The act of singing and praying is therapeutic."

All well and good, but what does this have to do with Catholicism? Everything, says Father Brown, and nothing.

In the second half of the book, he recurs again and again to the late Sister Thea Bowman and the challenge she threw down to the nation's Catholic bishops in 1989:

I come to my church fully functioning. I bring myself, my black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become, I bring my whole history, my traditions, my experience, my culture, my African-American song and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing and responsibility as a gift to the church.

She brings it, I bring it, every African American who "wishes to take the water of life as a gift" brings it. But is the church ready to accept us and our gifts, to acknowledge us as "fully functioning adults" as it appears to have accepted our white brothers and sisters of many and varied nationalities?

It certainly has not been in the past. "Far too often," says Father Brown, "the story of African-Americans who wished to be a part of the Roman Catholic Church could have taken as its theme the song Sr. Thea Bowman sang to introduce her 1989 speech to the Catholic Bishops: 'Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.'"

The reason for this is all too familiar: racism. In the time of slavery, even bishops of the church were slaveholders. They justified this grotesquely un-Christian behavior by various means, all of them involving an acceptance of the fundamental inferiority of black human beings. "The underlying assumptions concerning the humanity of, the spiritual and social value of, and the possibility of salvation of enslaved Africans have not changed much over the history of the Catholic Church in the United States," writes Father Brown. Sadly, "some of these assumptions still retain their potency in the contemporary church."

These assumptions—the association of black with evil and sinfulness, the conviction that blacks are sexually licentious, and others equally pernicious—make it difficult to impossible for many white Catholics to accept the notion of blacks as people "fully functioning" and bringing great gifts to the church.

A bit more than a year ago, I was fortunate enough to be a participant in the first Cardinal Bernardin Conference of the Catholic Common Ground Initiative. I was one of only three African Americans in the group. And I said during that meeting that every good thing that has happened to me in my life—and the number of such things has been considerable—I felt had happened because I am Catholic.

I try not to be a naive person—professionally I cannot afford to be—but I genuinely believe that is true.

It's not a matter of magic or Pollyanna-ish good luck. Rather, it's a matter of faith.

I have seen the pernicious effects of those racist assumptions that Father Brown writes about; God knows they have not disappeared. But I also have seen and experienced the goodness and kindness and generosity of fellow Catholics who, aware of their nation's and their church's disgraceful past, have felt moved to try to change its future. May their tribe increase, so that someday, neither I nor any other African American will wonder whether it is possible to be "authentically black and truly Catholic."

Don Wycliff is editorial page director of the Chicago Tribune.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.