The Seventh Shrine Meditations on the African Spiritual Journey: From the Middle Passage to the Mountaintop by Orland Bishop

When I navigate the currents of the soul, I find myself within my ancestral pool. I find myself swimming in their grief, and the longing during the great event and initiation called the Middle Passage. I find myself in their collective soul journey from a place of homeland to a dream of the Promised Land. This book is a telling of the soul striving of people of African heritage into the American experience of creating a community—a community created for the possibilities of new covenants within the larger collective sphere of human life. The work to which I have dedicated my life is to attend to the ancestral shrines. Ancestral shrines are co-creative imaginative influences on how I see the world. They serve to enhance the human encounters that form relationships and communities within which I work and live. The primary emphasis of my work is to support the recovery of the individual’s capacity to stand in openness for the higher purpose of one’s own life. My work is in service to the