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I recently visited a church where congregations speaking French, English, and Spanish come together once a month to worship together. This month West African French-speakers led music. The eldest, a woman in a smart blue dress and crocheted sweater spoke words of encouragement in between the songs. “If you don’t understand the language—hello? What about heaven!” People laughed and I could feel myself shedding layers of the stiffness I’d carried to this unfamiliar space.
We were a holy jumble of differing bodies. There was the Asian-American ten-year-old who welcomed me, and a grey-haired African-American woman she called “grandma,” though they were no blood relation. There were crooked limbs and big bellies, awkward glasses and untamed hair.
“You don’t need to understand the song—just go with us!” the woman in blue called, and a man began pounding out a bass beat on the drums. In acapella voices they sang, “Je sais qui je suis. I know who I am.” The African-print fabric of a woman on the stage swished left and right, and the white woman in front of me stretched her arms wide with a shout of joy. She took up a dancing march around the room giving hugs and fist bumps to everyone.
“I know who I am. I’m who you say I am,” the song lyrics say to God. Looking around I saw people collectively dropping the lies we’ve been told of who we are—despised, incompetent, foreigner, unwelcome, divided, unforgiveable.
Afterward the whole bunch headed to a birthday party where we would sing Happy Birthday in three versions. I would sit beside the woman called “Grandma” and learn that her relatives had been among the founders of the first Black church in our city, and that she first came to this church because she’d seen a pastor picking up trash and wanted to be led in that kind of humility.
The current pastor told me that when they first started combining language groups into one service, sometimes the English speakers would ask him why they didn’t put the English translation on the screen for every song. He raised his eyebrows as he recalled his response: “Do you think maybe this is what you need to learn? Maybe it’s good for you not to always know what’s happening. Non-native English speakers learn that lesson all the time—now maybe it’s your turn.”
As I interview people about their experiences in multicultural and multiracial settings, I notice that when white people are new at this, often they worry they’ll get things wrong. They have started to figure out that white people have a history of getting things wrong among people who are not white, and they want to do better. They’re walking into a room with a new song, and they don’t know the words yet.
But I also notice that the folks who have been at this longer have mostly stopped worrying about getting everything just right. They do have worries, and I can share those another time, but they know how to sway and listen when they don’t know the words or when it’s someone else’s turn to lead. They’re less worried about getting details right and more focused on being authentic. When they come together, they make spaces where anyone can say, “I know who I am.”
What about you? This week I hope you’ll follow an invitation to “Just go with us!”
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