Art is a powerful avenue for healing at this Black Boston church

This week’s Joy Beat is celebrating the healing power of the arts and community. 

Berklee’s Music and Health Institute, alongside the community healing initiative “Can We Talk?,” hosted Harmony and Healing. The event highlighted just how powerful art can be — specifically for BIPOC communities reeling from violence and trauma. 

Artists, local health care professionals and prominent local advocates gathered over the weekend to zero in on the intersection of arts and mental health, including the science behind it. 

The Rev. Liz Walker, community activist and founder of the Can We Talk? network, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss finding joy while working through trauma and grief. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Arun Rath: I have to say that I left out a lot in your introduction there because you’re also a retired journalist and kind of a legend — the first Black woman to anchor a TV newscast here in Boston.

You had an amazing career before you went to Harvard Divinity School and had this whole second life, so I’m just super excited to talk with you. Honored to talk with you. I guess we should now dig into talking about “Can We Talk?”

The Rev. Liz Walker: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’ve done a lot of things in life. It’s amazing how many things you can get in a life, I guess.

Rath: So, take us back to the start of the “Can We Talk?” network. What moved you to create this space for communities to heal through their trauma?

Walker: Well, you know, Roxbury Presbyterian Church is located right in the heart of Roxbury, on Warren St. When I was a pastor there — I joined that church in 2011 — the neighborhood was in the throes of a really violent episode of — I hate to say gang violence, because I’m never quite sure what starts this — but there were lots of guns, and people were being shot.

One of the people who was shot and killed belonged to our church. The family of this young man, Cory Johnson, who was a 27-year-old young man, a father of two and a very promising life — which actually describes most people, I think — was shot dead in the streets not far from the church.

We wanted to do something beyond the protests, beyond the meetings with the police, beyond the “Stop the Violence” campaigns. We were doing all of that, we were a social justice church.

But what I noticed was people who were impacted by the death of this young man were grieving in just dramatic ways, extreme ways. If you look at that neighborhood closely and look in the faces of people, you’ll see people grieving from deaths 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You see people grieving from racism, grieving from drug abuse. I mean, there’s a lot of trauma and grief in poor and working-class neighborhoods, and so we wanted to do something for those people.

We thought, well, maybe as a church, we can provide a safe space for people to come and grieve and talk about what happened to them — not to preach to them, not even to promise to fix them, but to listen to them.

That started the Cory Johnson Program, a program for post-traumatic healing. Can We Talk? was the signature event once a month. The idea is that people need a safe and sacred space to use, you know, to know their emotions and to deal with their emotions, which can, if unattended, be problematic.

I’m giving you the long answer, I’m sorry. I just —

Rath: No, you can’t really give a short answer to that because, you know, as you talked about, we’re talking about decades of trauma and people having to work through that and giving the chance to talk through that.

Walker: Exactly.

Rath: Talk about how art therapy is incorporated into that. There’s also science behind that, as well.

Walker: There is science behind that, and that came quite organically for us. Again, I approached this from a spiritual, religious background. So, you know, in churches, in many churches, especially in Black and brown communities, there are churches that are very expressive of the arts.

When you go into a church, you don’t just say a prayer; you may sing a prayer. You don’t just sing a hymn; you may dance a hymn. That’s kind of part of Black history, as far as the Black church.

When you look more closely at this kind of expression — spiritual expression, contemplative expression — you begin to see the healing power of that. Not just the spiritual healing power of that, but the physical healing power of that. People who dance, and people who move, that helps us release. So that became a real integral part of our monthly gatherings.

The monthly gatherings changed into weekly gatherings, and we invited artists who danced, we invited singers, we invited all kinds of artists. That, now, is a big part of what we call healing. Healing is not defined as curing, as stopping some pain, but it’s a way to move through a painful situation, so the arts are absolutely necessary.

Now, science says, “You’re right!” You know, so I always say that science is catching up with God because that’s been a part of our heritage. Science is teaching us, or concurring with us or agreeing with us, that movement and artistic expression is actually healing. It actually lowers blood pressure. It actually smoothes agitation and calms the heart.

Rath: Hearing you talk about that, I feel like I’m getting a deeper understanding of where you talk about God catching up with science. I’m thinking about the reaction that a lot of us who are not African-American have to Black church and gospel music, which is: How can such joy come out of so much suffering over the generations?

Walker: Right. And again, I don’t want to preach now, Arun — if you keep me too long, I’ll start a sermon — but in some ways, that is the way to joy. If the human condition is suffering, then you’ve got to figure out a way to get real joy. It’s acknowledging the suffering because that’s the first, I think, crisis we have in America. We like to get over things. We like to take a pill or just move on. Just get over it, whatever it is.

What we’re saying is, “No.” That’s not the way to heal. You have to name the pain, acknowledge what you’re going through and then you begin to express yourself. You listen to others. And it’s through that kind of community, of listening and expressing, that real healing happens.

It is, you know, a Black story. It is a brown story. And I think it’s a story that is so necessary in this country’s healing.

Rath: Tell us about some of the workshops and conversations that will be going on in the Harmony and Healing event.

Walker: We’re going to start out the day by actually explaining how the arts can play a vital role in improving mental health and resilience. We’re going to talk about decolonizing the expressive arts, and what happens when we reclaim the art forms of our ancestors.

This is stuff that our grandmothers used — I remember, as a child going to church with my caregiver. And she was one of those women who got happy. That was a word we would use in the Black church. I used to be afraid of that because I didn’t know what was going on, but she was expressing herself because she lived a really tough, rough life. Our ancestors have given us some tools for living a tough life, for living in a suffering world.

We’re going to talk about intergenerational trauma and how you begin to heal the line, how you begin to break up those strongholds of trauma, and opening yourself up to art. That’s what we’ll be talking about.

We’ll even be talking about recidivism and mass incarceration and how art can help lower those numbers and keep people as they come out of those situations — give them a rhythm to healing.

I hope you can feel or hear the excitement in my voice. It’s a pretty phenomenal thing, and I think the time for that is right now.

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