I must declare my love for this man and everything that he represents. I must publicly mourn my precious brother. In another era and in a far different context, W.H. Auden mourned the death of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats with these lines: In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. Jim Washington taught us all how to praise. Perhaps his most enduring legacy is his monumental Conversations with God: Two Centuries of Prayers by African Americans. Jim left us with our people’s most beautiful praise. In the introduction to the book, he writes, “African-American prayers, a literary genre and a religious social practice, assume that God is just and loving, and that the human dilemma is that we cannot always experience and see God’s justice and love. We pray for faith to trust God’s ultimate disclosure. Thus prayer as act and utterance teaches the believer to exercise what Adrienne Rich calls ‘revolutionary patience.’ But the literary history of African-American prayers suggests that, besides anticipating God’s ultimate self-disclosure in the history of the oppressed, we are the trustees of a spiritual legacy paid for with the blood, sweat, tears, and dreams of a noble, even if not triumphant, people.
