Buried Seeds: Learning from the Vibrant Resilience of Marginalized Christian Communities opens and concludes in dialogue with an unexpected issue. The book is a study of two formations of collective spiritual resistance, one developed by enslaved Africans in hush harbor gatherings and the other by the Latin American poor through Base Ecclesial Communities (BECs). Yet authors Alexia Salvatierra and Brandon Wrencher begin and end their work with a meditation on the decline of Gen Z participation in Christian institutional life. Declining church attendance may strike the reader as a peripheral concern beside plantation slavery, colonial capitalism, repressive dictatorships, and pressing contemporary crises. And yet in the declining church participation of youth, Salvatierra and Wrencher sense an unmet longing deeply connected to these vast harms. “Without encouraging the integration of personal and social transformation,” the authors argue, “the church will not meet the need young people of color have for holistic spiritual community” (2, emphasis mine). Through gatherings, mobilized by the marginalized, where inner and communal lives can be reintegrated, the authors believe the church can rediscover the hope of liberation from the disintegrations plaguing our inner worlds, frayed communal ties, and the violent distortions of our broader social fabric.
Buried Seeds progresses by providing a historical outline of BECs and hush harbors alongside an interpretive account of core principles undergirding their respective praxes. Hush harbors and BECs were small, rooted in particular places, and led by a critical mass of oppressed and marginalized people. These characteristics set the conditions for a common set of what the authors call “themes” to emerge. The authors use these five “themes” as an analytic for studying the two communal forms: kinship (familia en communión), leader-full (participación), consciousness (concientización and el mensaje de liberación), spirit-uality (sanidad and la teología de las abuelas), and faith-full organizing (alma y fermenta de la sociedad). Despite their differences, what distinguishes hush harbors and BECs is an inherent integration of these five themes through an incarnational mysticism predicated on the affirmation of life for self and community. This materialist spirituality becomes the resource for creative resistance to socio-cultural structures of domination. “Spiritual practice [was] incarnate in action” while “social practices incarnated their faith and spirituality” (169).
Buried Seeds is at once an academic study and a practical guide. Salvatierra and Wencher’s analyses are presented in a practical manner to support contemporary groups who may want to take up and apply the book’s lessons. To this end, the authors are sensitive to the social positions of their readers. Each theme moves through a hermeneutical cycle of Ver (“to see”), Juzgar (“to judge” or “interpret”), and Actuar (“to act on what you have understood”). Right action, the authors argue, depends on one's relationship to/as the marginalized. Recommendations in each Actuar section, therefore, are presented for three audiences represented by biblical characters: Amos, who stands for grassroots leaders of the oppressed; Lydia, the wealthy benefactor whose solidarity aided the early church who represents privileged outsiders seeking to be in solidarity; and Ruth, who came from among the oppressed but later rose to greater power and privilege.
Beginning in the 1960s, BECs were organized across Latin America (most numerous in Brazil and, influentially, in Central America) and the Majority World, including the Philippines, where Salvatierra was a participant in the late 1980s. The liberation theologies that appeared at the end of the 1960s both interpreted and pointed back toward the life of the poor present in BECs. Salvatierra argues that the “seamless integration of the spiritual, therapeutic, communal, economic, and political arenas by and for” the poor were functions of three animating principles (12). At root was the preferential option for the poor; as Gustavo Gutierrez described, the church was to “be marked by the faithful response of the poor to the call of Jesus Christ” (16). This manifested as “contemplation in action” through practices of “encountering God in the poor, in solidarity with the struggle of the oppressed, in a faith filled with hope and joy that is lived within a liberation process whose agent is the poor people” (23). BECs practiced this among themselves through the second principle: “building the family of God.” BECs were dedicated to the care of their own and infusing that practice with sacred import. From that foundation of internal care, the third principle was an outward orientation to become “the soul and leaven of society,” leading them to found cooperatives and land trusts, undertake local fights for basic rights, and join larger justice movements.
Hush harbors were a synthetic religious practice of enslaved Africans who “stole away” to clearings in the woods where they could sing, dance, and care for one another. In the hush harbor, plantation logics held no spiritual or ideological power. Slaveholder Christianity was reformulated through spirituals and storytelling into an affirmation of the participants’ humanity and freedom, which was blended with “a rich continuity of Africanisms” (32). Wrencher describes what he calls the “eight marks” of hush harbors: steal away (connoting autonomy, fugitivity, escape to freedom, “embodying a different path”), north star (code for eternal and historical freedom), joy unspeakable (mystical joy as resistance), talking book (liberative biblical interpretation through metaphor, story, and song), sankofa (“go back and fetch” the ancestors worldviews), ubuntu (“I am because we are”), all God’s children got shoes (egalitarian contribution of leadership and service), and stay woke (developing consciousness through remembering and re-membering). For Wrencher, “what is most critical for participation in a hush harbor is solidarity with the aims of liberation, mutual care, and freedom for all Black people” (47).
Buried Seeds may be two books combined into one. The writing styles are reflective of having one author who is an academic while the other is a minister. The methodologies used to study the two communal forms differ in part due to the authors’ backgrounds, but this difference is also reflective of the differing archives available for BECs versus hush harbors. Salvatierra quotes extensively from narrative histories of BECs, scholarly direct studies, and first-person testimonies as well as direct participation. By contrast, Wrencher’s work—while able to access some primary sources through slave narratives, song lyrics, and testimonies recorded in the years after slavery—looks further back in time into a history whose records were suppressed. To address these challenges, he engages in what Saidiya Hartman called “critical fabulation” or imaginative work to fill in what is excluded from white supremacist archives. The book is not worse for these differences, however. In their plurivocality and epistemological privileging of subaltern witnesses, this book is rich synthesis that marks an important contribution to decolonial theological projects transecting spirituality studies, ecclesiology, sociology of religion, and theological studies of community organizing theory.
“A good garden,” Salvatierra and Wrencher reflect, “and its relationship with gardeners, is not a project of mastery but a project of fellowship and transformation” (206). May these Buried Seeds be tended, spread, and allowed to grow in their own unique expressions toward new forms of integrated, liberated, and liberating life together.
Nathan Davis Hunt is a PhD student in theology at Boston University.
Nathan Davis Hunt
Date Of Review:
December 3, 2024
