(RNS) — When the Rev. James A. Forbes Jr. has faced challenges throughout his life, he’s turned to two sources of inspiration that helped him persevere: his faith and his poetry.
The first Black senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church recalls experiences with adversity, such as being rejected from attending Duke Divinity School, attempting to sit at a newly desegregated Woolworth’s lunch counter and having his approach to his Pentecostal faith questioned, in his new book.
In “Veracity and Verse: A Preacher’s Reflections and Poems on Faith and Truth” — published by Broadleaf Books last month — Forbes writes, sometimes in prose, sometimes in poetry, about his family’s devotion to justice. That commitment ranged from his mother commanding the dining room table, to his brother organizing sit-ins, to inheriting his father’s Pentecostalism and determining that, as he saw it, it did not require publicly speaking in tongues.
“Many of my poems were created in memory of the dedication my parents and church community had for moving forward and staying connected by the faith, hope and love of God,” he wrote in the preface. “The segregated South was the backdrop of our living; however, the love of God sustained us.”
Forbes, 89, writes about his mother’s rule at dinnertime as he grew up as the oldest boy among eight children in Raleigh, North Carolin …