On St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a former Danish colony, I came across a most amazing church a few years ago. It wasn’t its architecture or its liturgy that blew me away, it was these words on the front of the bulletin:
The Cathedral Church of All Saints
St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands
“The Virgin Islands Greatest Monument to Freedom.”
Built in 1848 by the people of St. Thomas in thanksgiving to God for freedom from slavery. Because of a severe drought in 1848, molasses was used to mix the mortar used between the stones.
Our family made jokes with one another about this being the “sweetest” Church we were ever likely to worship in. (Get it? Molasses in the walls?)
But then it struck me: molasses was one of the main reasons the people who built this Church were slaves to begin with. They were captured in West Africa and brought to the Virgin Islands to work the sugar plantations for the Danes, the French and the English. Their freedom had been taken from them for the sake of this sticky black liquid and the rum it could produce. They must have hated molasses.
I’d visited sugar plantations in the islands and been appalled at how horrible life was for the slaves who worked there. It was back-breaking work planting, cultivating and cutting the cane. It was crippling work, turning the mill stones by hand to crush the cane, when the wind refused to turn the windmill. It was hell-hot, dangerous work, tending the fires that boiled the crushed cane down to molasses. And the slaves were forced to produce this molasses with the lash on their backs and not much food in their stomachs. Their lives were a misery, all for the sake of molasses.
When the slaves had been set free in 1848, they couldn’t wait to erect a Church to give thanks to God for their freedom. There wasn’t enough water to mix the mortar, but that wasn’t going to deter them. They were going to go ahead with the project even if it meant using molasses. It was going to be something to tell their children: they had put the hated molasses in their monument to freedom, their thanksgiving to God.
Using the molasses that had been the symbol of their slavery to make a symbol of their freedom made sense to them, because they were Christians. They had grown up venerating the cross on which their Savior died a miserable death. They worshipped a God who had taken this instrument of torture and used it to bring his people freedom.
I guess that only makes sense to those of us who are Christians.
Blessings,Rev. Phyllis Taylor
