Devotion (“I Am on the Battlefield for My Lord”)

By way of my mother, the deacon with the slick gray hair and money clip in his pocket can claim a percentage of my body like tithe rights. And on this Sunday, as with every other Sunday, he is a slender ebony panel in the fence of faith, one man in the company of men standing shoulder to shoulder in suits, tapping their toes, clapping their hands, putting muscle to work in the making of praise music. We Baptists call this devotion, my working definition of which is faithfulness to the light. To the extent that God is as white as the clouds of heaven, this theory holds. To the extent these particular men are dark, I must consider other possibilities: that God remade himself in my image so that we could be closer or that devotion means the commitment of black men to stand with one another