Skip to main content

Black and Beautiful

Balkis ., Queen of Sheba (-1000 - d.) - Genealogy 

 

I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon

         --The Song of Songs, 1:5 (trans. from the Greek LXX)

 

The early Church Fathers believed that the Song of Songs in the Old Testament was a love poem composed by King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (today’s Ethiopia), who was a beautiful woman with black skin. In their allegorical vision, this couple symbolized Jesus and the Church.  

 

As Fr. Cyprian Davis writes,  “Solomon is a type of Christ, and just as the queen of Sheba came to Solomon to consult him because he was wise, so the Church comes to Christ who is Wisdom himself.  As a result, since the queen of Sheba is black, so must the church be black and beautiful.  Her very blackness is a symbol of her universality; all nations are present in her.” 

 

In America, having black skin carries a heavy burden.  Black men routinely see others cross the street to avoid sharing a sidewalk with them.  Police “stop and frisk” teenagers and detain drivers for “driving while Black.”  In countless subtle ways, Black Americans are told they are less beautiful, less worthy, less human.   Yet Scripture tells us that the beloved of Christ is black and beautiful.   That we who call ourselves Christian are incorporated into a black body that is the image of universality, completeness, and the unity of all peoples in time and eternity.  

 

Questions

What might it mean for us to picture the beloved of Christ as a black woman?  What might it mean for me to imagine myself incorporated into a black, beautiful feminine body?  In a Church where our icons of saints, angels and Jesus himself  are so often white (even when the people they represent were black or brown), can I begin to reconceive of blackness and identify it with holiness? 

 

Prayer

O God who dwells in mystery and darkness, we pray with longing for the day when we are brought into one in You and in the body of your Beloved.  Help us to see your image in the faces of Your Black children, shining with beauty, holiness, and dignity.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Envisioning a World that Has Never Existed

  “In every age, no matter how cruel the oppression carried on by those in power, there have been those who struggled for a different world. I believe this is the genius of humankind, the thing that makes us half divine: the fact that some human beings can envision a world that has never existed.”        ~ Anne Braden (1924-2006), Louisville racial justice activist   Anne Braden was a local white advocate in the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ‘60s.  She and her husband Carl are most famous for purchasing a house in the then exclusively white neighborhood of Shively for a Black couple.  Both Bradens were arrested as “Communists’ for their act and the house was dynamited after irate neighbors shot it up and burned a cross in the front yard. Anne was not deterred and continued the fight for the remaining fifty years of her life, founding a newspaper and several antiracist organizations.      Anne provides an exce...

The Catholic Church Alone Can Break the Color Line

  The great Catholic Church … is the only place on this Continent where rich and poor, white and black, must drop prejudice at the threshold and go hand in hand to the altar. The Catholic Church alone can break the color line. There could be no greater factor in solving the race problem than that matchless institution whose history for 1900 years is but a continual triumph  over all assailants.     --Daniel Rudd, Black Catholic journalist from Bardstown, Kentucky [consolidated quotes from his newspaper the  American Catholic Tribune ]   One of the beautiful things about being Catholic is our church transcends the divisions of country, nation, and race.  Even on the small scale of our archdiocese, we have members who are rural and urban, English speaking and Spanish.  It comprises those born here and born afar, including priests and religious from India and Africa and Asia.  This Church is a model of a new country, a new society...