Hands of hope sometimes emerge from darkness. This seems to be the message of the meme making rounds through a shadowed America right now: the open hands of surrender and prayer.

People held their hands up last weekend in rallies at Rosa Parks Circle and Calder Plaza, and chanted "Hands up means don't shoot" at Rosa Parks. It was a show of solidarity with demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo. protesting the Aug. 9 fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, by a white police officer.

Howard University students also held hands aloft in a Twitter photo bearing the hashtag "Don't shoot." The Aug. 13 demonstration was organized by the Howard University Student Association, whose president, Leighton Watson, is a 2011 Lowell High School graduate.

These dramatic displays pointed public attention to the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, where clouds of tear gas waft over the latest battleground of our deep national divide about race and justice. According to his companion Dorian Johnson, Brown raised his hands and pleaded with an officer to stop shooting before crumbling to the ground under further fire.

Conflicting accounts by Johnson, police and other witnesses make it difficult to know exactly what happened. All that’s clear is that an unarmed black man was killed by a policeman, and that in America this kind of scenario still happens too often.

Sure, Brown allegedly stole cigarillos from a liquor store and is accused of shoving a clerk, and he and Johnson were reportedly walking down the middle of a street when Officer Darren Wilson stopped them and told them to get on the sidewalk.

What happened next is what we don’t know, except that Brown ended up shot at least six times and his body lay in the street for several hours.

That hardly seems a just consequence for stealing cigarillos and jaywalking, unless there’s a whole lot more we don’t know.

It’s not hard to understand why people have taken to the streets in Ferguson, corralled by police in military gear and an armored truck compliments of Homeland Security: anti-terrorism tools on display in the heartland. “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” protestors shouted, as bottles and tear gas canisters flew.

It looks all too much like Detroit in 1967, or all of America after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. There’s a rage and an outrage here that never goes away, but flares up when another injustice is done.

It’s hard to react with anything other than rage and violence. But hands held high don’t just signify surrender to the cops. They can also show submission to a higher power and a more righteous response, as the prayers of a New York City congregation showed Sunday.

Parishioners at Middle Collegiate Church, a historic congregation of the Reformed Church in America, held hands aloft in a prayer led by the Rev. Adriene Thorne. The black minister explained this was the way ancient people of faith prayed as a sign of surrender to God. A beautifully multiracial and multi-aged group of worshippers closed their eyes and held their hands open as Thorne prayed over the deaths of Michael Brown as well as actor Robin Williams. (See video below.)

“God, we surrender but we do not give up,” Thorne prayed, as a young black boy smiled up at his mother and a white baby wriggled in its mom’s arms.

“We surrender but we do not give up anger, which fuels our faithful disobedience. We surrender but we do not give up joy, which informs our vision of your preferred reality. We surrender but we do not give up faith in a God who is able to transform situations and guide people on a path of justice and righteousness.”

It is a moving moment of faith – in this case, faith in a God of hope in the midst of darkness. But it wasn’t a snow-globe kind of faith delicately encased in a pristine church, but a call-to-action kind of faith that won’t sit still in the pew while injustice reigns.

It was the same kind of faith expressed in the churches of Ferguson over the weekend, where anger and surrender contended with open palms and clenched fists. Even the open palm doesn’t signify surrender to authority and injustice, but to a God who demands justice as well as mercy and love.

Faith is a complicated thing, especially when fire burns in the streets where unarmed young men die.

Email: honeycharlesm@gmail.com; blog: www.soulmailing.com