Faith, Freedom and Vision: Sojourner Truth's Powerful Story

Sojourner Truth told a story of her life many haven't heard and it's about a deeply spiritual journey of inspiration. In this episode of our Beyond the Book series, you'll see Faith, Freedom and Vision: Sojourner Truth's Powerful Story. 

Sojourner Truth was a former slave who became a beacon of hope and a powerful voice for abolition and women's rights. Her unwavering faith and profound vision transformed her journey and touched the lives of many in her time.

You'll learn about her spiritual awakening, where she experienced a divine vision of Jesus and God, and how this moment shaped her mission to spread truth and equality. She had a rare ability to command audiences and we'll discuss her legendary speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention as well as her miracle at the Northampton riot.

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Transcript

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Imagine living a life so powerful and transformative that your story resonates across centuries. Sojourner truth did exactly that. Born into slavery, she beat the odds and became this beacon of hope, faith, and resilience. In this episode of Beyond the Book, we look at her incredible journey In the narrative of Sojourner Truth. I'm going to tell you how deeply her story spoke to me, and it actually provided amazing context on my own spiritual path about how to see beyond and be completely connected with it. It's something inside of all of us. We'll look into the truths that shaped her destiny. And later, I'm going to share with you the most important piece of wisdom from her story. And we'll also hear about two miraculous events where she defied laws of what was possible and just bent reality all around her. Miracles are possible. She was born Isabella Baumfree. She would eventually change her name to Sojourner Truth. Reading her words, one can see that she saw the truth. I believe that she was the truth in this journey or travel or pilgrimage, for truth was her name. It was also her imperative. She was this massive force. She was very gracious in her writing and covering her pain and suffering. She was able to relate the story in a way that conveyed these feelings. And yet she was careful not to draw people too far into that abyss. And let's ponder that for just a minute and really think about it all the pain and suffering that she endured and these hardships that she suffered as a slave. And yet she took the care not to draw us too deeply into that pain. And that's grace. It's this truly amazing thing. Grace is this great gift to the world that she gave. It should move us really beyond words. It really, truly moved me. We're reading about a powerful woman in history. Not just a woman, but a black woman. And not just a black woman, but a former slave. The deck wasn't just stacked against Sojourner Truth. She wasn't really even in the game. She didn't have a chance. Not even a sliver of daylight, according to most people. And yet, here we are talking about her over a century later. That's purity of power. Strength. Most of us can't even imagine. It's the kind of perspective you need to change your universal view to love our neighbors even more than we did before. We knew her story. The details of her life. They're important. If we know them. We have the context to understand why she's so remarkable. She was born into slavery. She was sold several times. She was married while in slavery, and she had five children. She lost so many family members, not to mention her friends, throughout this whole process. She escaped in 1826 with her infant daughter, and later on, in a landmark case, she sued for the return of her son from a slaveholder in Alabama. And this was one of the first cases where a black woman defeated a white man in court. And that that's amazing that she not only had the capacity to make it happen, to get someone to fight for her in court and fight for herself, but then to actually be successful and win the case. And this book's really about her entire journey, but a lot of it deals with her, her path that she took to see the divine. But at first, she didn't see God. She was a religious thinker and a teacher. As I got deeper into this book, I began to think that she might have even been a prophet. You know what's a prophet if it's not someone who's seen the grace of God? And then relays that to others. And that's what she did. She spoke the truth. She was this unlearned and illiterate person her whole life. And yet she was able to persevere and become enlightened, just resisting being swallowed by the abyss. Was this feat in and of itself. But she went so far beyond that. But to become aware of all this stuff around her and be able to see and feel the divine was this amazing thing. She was taught religion by her mother as a child when they weren't working. But she says she didn't really understand God. She didn't know God. And I can relate to this very deeply. I grew up Southern Baptist and I'll say I never got it. It didn't click. I didn't feel God in the church. And, think a lot of us can relate to that. Having grown up in the church and not feeling that connection to God. And as she got older, she spent time having conversations with God. She spoke to him as if they were friends. And in this very common way, she would do it out loud by herself in the woods. And I think these very frank exchanges with the divine might have deeply impacted her and put her on this path towards enlightenment. And she says, though, that even during these exchanges, these conversations she was having with God, she didn't truly know God yet. She hadn't. She hadn't seen it. So where is God? She says that she used to pray to God to ask for favor, to change her life and lead her to greener pastures. Right. We're always thinking about where that greener grass is. That other side. And then she understood that once she was eventually delivered to greener pastures, even when she was still a slave, she ended up in a in a better situation. And she enjoyed these new comforts and these accommodations. But she says that she forgot about God. She asked for deliverance. It had been delivered. And then she forgot about it. And how many times have we asked for something and said, oh, I promise I'm going to do this, or be better, or be more connected with the universe. And then we get what we want, and then we kind of forget about our promise. She says she didn't live up to her promises to God. Should she have been delivered from darkness like she was. And this eventually dawned on her and it had this real impact. She was outside one day and she became aware of this presence. She was visited by Jesus, and she saw him in front of this brightness. That was God behind him. This was her awakening where she truly knew God. It wasn't that she saw God or Jesus, and she did, but it's that she knew. It is that she understood it. And whether this is God, the Christian God, or God the divine of whatever religion or spiritual philosophy you believe in. I think this story is probably very relatable. Once she became free and was enlightened, having seen the presence of the divine, she sought the knowledge of God. She wanted to know more. She wanted to read the Bible. But she was illiterate. And so she would have adult read these passages to her, and she would ask them to reread that passage so that she could reflect back on it and process it better. But the adults that were reading to her wouldn't reread the passages. They would try to explain the passages to her. But she didn't want someone's explanation of what they thought it meant. She wanted to hear it again for herself so she could form her own ideas. So she stopped asking adults to read her the Bible, and instead she started asking children if they would read it to her and just simply relayed the text, which they would. That's what they do. And I think that's interesting on how we gain knowledge and wisdom, how you gain this knowledge and wisdom matters. You can use this as a reminder to seek information from as close to the source as possible. Sometimes that's going to be straight from a book. Sometimes it might be from a certain person. Sometimes it's going to be deep within you yourself where you get that information. So never doubt the courage of your convictions. They'll take you amazing places. We're going to talk about these really interesting events of this speech in Akron, Ohio. which is probably what Sojourner Truth is most famous for. It was delivered at the Ohio Women's Rights Conference in 1851, and stands as probably one of the most electrifying moments in the history of women's rights and abolitionism. The convention was held in this tense atmosphere, it was very charged. There were debates raging about, women's equality and suffrage. There were a lot of influential people that were there, and truth had a commanding presence as she attended this convention completely uninvited. Her appearance drew attention from everybody that was there. And she was one of the only black women, attending the conference. And there were all these hecklers, critics who dismissed women's rights and they were ridiculing not just Sojourner Truth, but all the speakers. And a lot of these attendees were hostile to the idea of women's suffrage and, of course, rights for African-Americans in the face of all this. She took the stage and delivered this iconic speech. It's known as the “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. She keeps saying, “Ain’t I a Woman?”, and then she she talks about all these different things and keeps saying that over and over again. And this speech was impromptu. It wasn't planned. It wasn't written down, but it was still delivered with such passion and conviction. And she addressed the crowd's prejudices directly. She basically completely called all of them out, and she subdued them. She quieted everyone, and she was using her personal experiences as a former slave and currently as a woman and an African-American, a black woman. And she powerfully argued for equality. She challenged this prevailing notion of racial and gender inferiority. So there was this other place that she went. There was this debate with ministers. It was another time she approached this large group of ministers at a gathering in Indiana. They were preaching doctrine and ideas about the divine that she disagreed with, and the ministers were shocked that she would oppose them so openly. And one of them directly engaged her in a debate. And he was kind, but he was very direct and very confrontational. And during their discussion, she completely held her own. And afterwards the minister said that Sojourner Truth wasn't knowledgeable in any scholarly sense. It's like she hadn't been taught anything, and that she didn't have the knowledge that each of these ministers had, but he qualified that. He went on to say that she had learned so much. That man had never taught her. And what he meant was that she had this divinely inspired wisdom, and it was wisdom that was instantly recognizable by this man of God. This guy that had dedicated his entire life to studying, his religion and his faith. And that's powerful. She saw and knew things as they were. So imagine this woman being able to move this minister in that way in that time. And this is an example of this amazing thing. How could it be anything other than divine or universal action in play here? She became a divinely inspired force for good. She would move forward with this enlightenment to change the world the best that she could, She would do more than her part for the rights of black men and women. She would do more than her part for the rights of all women, whether they were black or white. This was her purpose, her dharma, her higher purpose. And she was this real presence on earth. She was nearly six feet tall. And she spoke with this voice of thunder. She would tell people as she spoke to them at events, children. I talked to God, and God talks to me. And I think she's probably right. When you read this book, when you hold it in your hands, when you when you, when you are able to absorb it, you can feel that she knew God, she knew the divine, it touched her and was directly connected to her. And what touched me is that she found God. She had seen the divine and she didn't want. She didn't want it to be a secret. She wanted to share it with the world. There was a third example of her kind of having this, this ability to bend the reality around her. There was, I call it the miracle at the Northampton riot. It was in the 1840s and she had joined the Northampton Association. And it was this utopian community that was committed to abolitionism and women's rights. The association was super progressive, and it was this inclusive community where people of different races and backgrounds lived and work together. What an amazing thing, right? And this riot took place in that in that same town in Northampton, Massachusetts, where this organization was located. And there was tensions between the abolitionist and the anti abolitionist. And this mob gathered with the intention of disrupting this meeting of this society. They wanted to incite violence and intimidate the members as the mob grew. They were more threatening, they were more aggressive, and they wanted to harm the abolitionists. It was about to turn violent. And so Sojourner Truth took action. She stepped forward and began to sing hymns, and she began to speak to the crowd in this thunderous voice. But it was also unwavering and calm, and there was authority. There in her voice. And her demeanor had this profound effect on the mob, and they gradually diffused their anger. The hostility started to bleed away, and witnesses reported that her presence and word seemed almost miraculous. As they quelled this violent crowd and these these harsh intentions of this mob, and she restored the peace and like, just imagine this black woman and in the mid 1800s, having this force and being able to subdue all these angry white men that wanted to harm. This group wanted to harm. how confident and brave it was for her to even try to do what she did, and then to go pull it off completely. It's it's phenomenal. It's an amazing thing. And so was she a mystic? And I think partly, you know, reading through this book, what I got from her is that she has this, like, pantheistic universal oneness. Take on things, almost a mystical take on Christianity and occurred to me again and again as I read through this book. And mystics tend to be more universalist in their approach to spirituality. They're open and there's something, I think, deep and very base about seeing the divine that mystics kind of see. They come to know it like wholly and completely, and they're more concerned with their own link to the divine than they are to these dogmatic and manmade touch points that surround religion and spirituality. The readers and the keepers of these mystics writing sometimes might try to tell you what the mystics kind of actually meant, or what they were really trying to say, but that's just someone else interpreting that person's words. I can pretty much be sure that each of us can do a pretty good job of figuring that out for ourself. we're beyond what we're told that we are. I keep reading and learning about these brilliant thinkers from around the world. It forces me to go back to the fact that generational conformity keeps us locked in this cage. And by generational conformity, I'm talking about us living someone else's story that they've written for us because it's the it's supposed to be the way and this, this desperate pushing of conformity has narrowed this aperture of our spiritual vision. What we can see kind of what we're allowed to see, where we're told we can see. And so if this illiterate, and completely uneducated former slave could break free with all of the odds completely holy stacked against her, how can we not follow that example of living whatever life is meant for us, the life that we need to lead, not that we want to lead the life that we need to lead. If she can do it, you can do it. if she can do it, it's there inside of you, just like it was inside of her. And she'd tell you it wasn't something that she did alone. It was this divine thing she came to know that made it possible. And that's there inside of all of us. The single most important takeaway from her story is this no matter the circumstances or obstacles that you face, the power of your spirit and the truth within means that you can overcome anything. Her unwavering faith and this relentless pursuit of her purpose, her higher purpose, her dharma, transformed her life and the lives of countless others. Her story teaches us that embracing our own truth in our own higher purpose can lead to profound changes and inspire everybody around us. As you've heard this amazing story of Sojourner Truth, how can you live your own truth? Check out the video on the screen about living your truth and being your best authentic self. And until next time, I wish you peace on your journey.