And naturally I believe that critical energy, applied to any body of information, can unearth some truth. But for every unearthing, you don’t find absolute truth— you find another fallible truth, and then still another. That’s because each revelation is tied to another concealment. You reveal what’s been concealed, only to repeat the process into infinity. Enlightenment has no end. The paradoxes are never resolved.
In 1971, at age eighteen, my paradoxes went unresolved. At age fifty-six, the same is still true. I was excited about discovering my calling. I had to teach. I still have to teach—teaching as I had been taught—with loving passion for uncovering and recovering vital knowledge and wise insights that lead to intellectual clarity and moral growth.
The knowledge and insights could be found in textbooks, but they were also just as powerfully present in music. The music contained the paradoxes, expressed the paradoxes, and exploded the paradoxes with such a sense of heightened joy and rhythmic wonder that all we could do was dance the night away.
It was in 1971, working and studying and dealing with an America in the throes of massive confusion, that I heard Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On . It was everything I wanted, everything I needed. It was the ideological/theological feast of funk that got me—and countless others, black and white, yellow and brown— through these years of uncertainty and fear. Marvin worked with uncertainty and fear. They were his emotional clay. He molded them into things of lyrical beauty. His answer to the profound question “What’s going on?” was in the imagery of his songs. Police brutality. Ghettoes ravaged by drugs. Boys going off to die in an unconscionable war. A planet ravaged by greed and waste. A political landscape of hopelessness. Yet hope comes. Hope emerges from his gut-bucket black Christian faith, a faith powerful enough to transcend the sins of his own Christian father and have Marvin believe—believe to the very end of his life—in the transformational miracle of love seen from the cross. Like Marvin’s ethereal suite of songs, that love does not deny calamity or scandal. It sees injustice, just as Jesus saw injustice, as a worldly reality to be transcended through a funky faith. Marvin calls this faith the “Wholy Holy.” It’s nothing more or less than the love ethos, the love that lasts forever, the love that leads us from darkness to light.
So I was listening to Marvin, I was listening to Stevie telling us Where I’m Coming From , and then, at the start of my junior year at Harvard, I was listening to the Spinners singing about “How could I let you get away?” when I spotted this brown-eyed angel. I had to ask her to dance. We took off—mind, body, and spirit—and the Spinners were working it out, the Spinners were saying it for me: “Girl, I’m kinda glad you walked into my life.” The Spinners were bringing us closer together, Philippe Wynne whispering in this girl’s ear, “It takes a fool to learn that love don’t love nobody.” The Spinners breaking into “Mighty Love.”
This sister had style. Beauty. Brilliance. She was a knockout. I was smitten and smitten bad. One dance led to another. She was a freshman at Radcliffe and her name was Mary Johnson. Years later she’d become the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. But on that night of nights, when fate smiled and the planet tilted in my direction, she was just a young thing, filled with promise and boundless energy. Soon she’d become the most important woman in this stage of my life.
That night, after the dance, I walked her back to her dorm. She asked me what courses I was going to take in this, my junior year.
“I’m going to take eight courses each semester so I can graduate a year early.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Harvard hasn’t either, but I’ve got to do it. My sister’s going off to
In 1971, at age eighteen, my paradoxes went unresolved. At age fifty-six, the same is still true. I was excited about discovering my calling. I had to teach. I still have to teach—teaching as I had been taught—with loving passion for uncovering and recovering vital knowledge and wise insights that lead to intellectual clarity and moral growth.
The knowledge and insights could be found in textbooks, but they were also just as powerfully present in music. The music contained the paradoxes, expressed the paradoxes, and exploded the paradoxes with such a sense of heightened joy and rhythmic wonder that all we could do was dance the night away.
It was in 1971, working and studying and dealing with an America in the throes of massive confusion, that I heard Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On . It was everything I wanted, everything I needed. It was the ideological/theological feast of funk that got me—and countless others, black and white, yellow and brown— through these years of uncertainty and fear. Marvin worked with uncertainty and fear. They were his emotional clay. He molded them into things of lyrical beauty. His answer to the profound question “What’s going on?” was in the imagery of his songs. Police brutality. Ghettoes ravaged by drugs. Boys going off to die in an unconscionable war. A planet ravaged by greed and waste. A political landscape of hopelessness. Yet hope comes. Hope emerges from his gut-bucket black Christian faith, a faith powerful enough to transcend the sins of his own Christian father and have Marvin believe—believe to the very end of his life—in the transformational miracle of love seen from the cross. Like Marvin’s ethereal suite of songs, that love does not deny calamity or scandal. It sees injustice, just as Jesus saw injustice, as a worldly reality to be transcended through a funky faith. Marvin calls this faith the “Wholy Holy.” It’s nothing more or less than the love ethos, the love that lasts forever, the love that leads us from darkness to light.
So I was listening to Marvin, I was listening to Stevie telling us Where I’m Coming From , and then, at the start of my junior year at Harvard, I was listening to the Spinners singing about “How could I let you get away?” when I spotted this brown-eyed angel. I had to ask her to dance. We took off—mind, body, and spirit—and the Spinners were working it out, the Spinners were saying it for me: “Girl, I’m kinda glad you walked into my life.” The Spinners were bringing us closer together, Philippe Wynne whispering in this girl’s ear, “It takes a fool to learn that love don’t love nobody.” The Spinners breaking into “Mighty Love.”
This sister had style. Beauty. Brilliance. She was a knockout. I was smitten and smitten bad. One dance led to another. She was a freshman at Radcliffe and her name was Mary Johnson. Years later she’d become the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. But on that night of nights, when fate smiled and the planet tilted in my direction, she was just a young thing, filled with promise and boundless energy. Soon she’d become the most important woman in this stage of my life.
That night, after the dance, I walked her back to her dorm. She asked me what courses I was going to take in this, my junior year.
“I’m going to take eight courses each semester so I can graduate a year early.”
“That’s crazy,” she said. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Harvard hasn’t either, but I’ve got to do it. My sister’s going off to
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