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Lent/Easter - Maafa Remembrance window
Maafa Remembrance Window
Out of the Depths: Christ’s Body as Slave Ship
by Victoria Emily Jones
Standing at the heart of Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood is a French Romanesque–style church, built in 1910–11, that’s home to New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church. When this predominantly Black congregation bought the building from the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago in 1993—it originally housed the Irish Catholic congregation of St. Mel’s—they inherited with it a program of stained-glass windows and wall paintings portraying Jesus, Mary, and a number of other biblical figures and saints, all as Caucasian. Some of these artworks, particularly the three large rose windows, had structural damage.
Rather than spending significant funds on repairing the rose windows, Rev. Dr. Marshall E. Hatch Sr., the senior pastor, made the decision to replace them with new ones that better reflected the faith stories of his parishioners. The most striking of the three new windows is the Maafa Remembrance window on the wall to the left of the front altar, facing the Atlantic Ocean, which replaced an image of the Assumption of Mary. It was dedicated December 17, 2000, the church’s fiftieth anniversary year.
Maafa (mah -AH-fah) is a Swahili word meaning “great disaster” or “great tragedy.” Since the late 1980s it has been used to refer to the transatlantic slave trade of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, during which ten to twelve million African men, women, and children were kidnapped from their homes and forcibly brought to the Americas to work plantations without pay, building the wealth of their white enslavers.
Based on an illustration by Tom Feelings from his extraordinary book The Middle Passage: White Ships / Black Cargo (1995), the window commemorates the Maafa through an evocation of the Middle Passage, the second leg of the triangular trade route. On this harrowing two- to three-month voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, at least two million enslaved Africans died of malnutrition, dehydration, disease, captor-inflicted violence, or suicide.
In Feelings’s image, an African Christ figure stretches his chained arms out, as if on the cross. His body is constituted by the famous schematic representation of the crowded lower deck of the Brookes slave ship’s human cargo hold, first created in England in 1788 and widely disseminated throughout the nineteenth century. The perspective is such that we’re looking down on a body-as-slave-ship gliding through the waters—but it’s also a crucifixion. The Son of God carries the suffering of the sons and daughters of God, feeling it in his own body. He wears the slave ship like a giant wound that will forever mark him because it has marked his ecclesial body, the church.
The window professes Christ as Emmanuel, God-with-us. Clinging to this truth, the psalmist wrote, “If I make my bed in hell, behold, thou [God] art there” (Psalm 139:8b). In his great compassion, God descends with his children into the depths, and bears them up.
Descent and ascent are two of the themes the window addresses. As Emmanuel, Jesus was below deck, in the miserable belly of the thousands of slave ships that traversed the Atlantic, suffering with those chained inside. Christ’s arms are draped with chains, notes Marshall Hatch Jr., who heads the church’s MAAFA Redemption Project, “but he’s rising. And at some point those chains will break. That’s the hopefulness that shines through.”
Thus, the window commemorates both tragedy and triumph. It honors those who died on the Middle Passage and through the sinful institution of slavery more broadly while also honoring those who persevered all the way to freedom.
The border around the window’s central image calls parishioners to “REMEMBRANCE.” They must remember their history, the great catastrophe their ancestors endured, and, having faced the truth, commit to ending slavery’s legacy of racism in America’s civic, social, and religious spheres and in their own psyches.
Two of the roundels in the bottom border show a map of Africa and a Communion table laid with kente cloth, a loaf of bread, and a flask of wine. The roundel between these two displays the open word of God, which guides Christians forward in our work of justice and reconciliation.
A powerful reclamation of Christian iconography, New Mount Pilgrim’s Maafa Remembrance window weds Black history and Christian theology to offer West Garfield Park a communal symbol that bears witness to what African Americans have been through as a people and reminds congregants that they worship a risen Christ who breaks chains and brings life out of death.
This article is condensed and adapted from the Art & Theology article “Stained glass in West Side Chicago church reclaims an identity for Black youth.”
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Maafa Remembrance, 2000. Designed by Marshall E. Hatch Sr. in collaboration with the fabricator, Botti Studio of Architectural Arts, Evanston, IL, USA (bottistudio.com). It is based on an illustration from The Middle Passage by Tom Feelings. Stained glass window, diameter 25 feet. New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, West Garfield Park, Chicago. Photo: Victoria Emily Jones.
Victoria Emily Jones lives in the Baltimore area of the United States, where she works as an editorial freelancer and blogs at ArtandTheology.org, exploring ways in which the arts can stimulate renewed engagement with the Bible. She serves on the board of the faith-based arts nonprofit the Eliot Society and as art curator for the Daily Prayer Project, and she has contributed to the Visual Commentary on Scripture and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. Follow her on Instagram @art_and_theology.
ArtWay Visual Meditation 1 September 2024