I feel vulnerable talking about my faith practice. My physical practice elicits a different kind of vulnerability: I run into the voices that say I’m supposed to look a certain way or do a certain thing, or I haven’t been teaching long enough to know what I’m talking about, blah blah BLAH. But spiritual practice is a different thing: organized religion has done so much harm to so many, I wonder if I’ll lose folks’ attention by triggering them, and they’ll go read any of the other jillion things available to read. Folks are myopic about their faith, and if I posit something outside their concept of the tradition, they’ll stop listening, get defensive or argumentative, and I’ve lost them too. On top of which, I carry a deep fear of being perceived as heretical by my home tradition, Christianity. Christians have a historical penchant for doing violent things to folks who don’t believe what they believe.
But this is where I am. Black folks just keep getting killed by police. When George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis by police and American cities erupted in protest, the despair that set in, that filled me with a rage and a grief so thorough I couldn’t communicate, it didn’t feel social or circumstantial; it felt spiritual. To get at it, I have to talk about faith.
My struggle is with a view that argues that God is in all the things: in the rage and the grief, and the fear and the oppression, in George Floyd’s neck gasping for breath and the boot constricting it, in the heart of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the bullet that ended his life. I struggle to wrap my head around the supposition that God is in the torture, abuse, and murder of black folks. I feel… connected to folks by our shared cultural identity and experience. Interpersonal complexities notwithstanding, there’s a kind of kinship that exists among black folks. I’m not saying it’s simple or universal, or even that it’s felt by all of us all the time, but it’s real. The fear, the anger, the tension of hating that to which you must grovel and propitiate—I know it because to be black in America is to know it. Someone recently told me it was arrogant to assume I knew someone else’s experience because I hadn’t lived it. Yes and No. I’ve never been a black woman trying to find a job in Jackson or Birmingham or Charleston; I’ve never been a black man in Oakland or Los Angeles, in the Bronx or Detroit; I’ve never been the only black person on the board of directors in corporation in Manhattan; I’ve never been a professor and thinker pulled over in my own neighborhood while going home; but the power of white supremacy to reach into all of these lives and squeeze is the same, and that’s a power I know because I live here. In America.
Crisis of faith is such an overused phrase, and man, it seems so cliché to be a div school student who is questioning her own belief. Somebody, stamp my card. But the stakes of this feel so high, because embedded in this knot is a lie that I am trying to untangle and dissolve: the lie that my life as a black woman, that our lives as black Americans, have less value. It’s hard to say that I am special, remarkable, lovable, if God creates a life for me that knows this suffering. I’ll acknowledge that this is not subtle and it’s not universal; I am entirely self-focused when I think, why would God want to embody the human experience as a black woman? Why would God create a context wherein to exist as a person means to be beaten, objectified, exoticized, assaulted, ignored, cursed, starved, and even killed? Who is God, to me, in this? Is God a comforter in the experience of oppression? Or is God a passive observer? Or is God another oppressor? Or all of the above?
I initially was thrilled by the idea that God/dess would choose the experience of a black woman to experience manifest reality. If s/he in all their glory and wisdom and massive incomprehensibility would choose my life’s experience, then there must be something of value in it. The idea that my voice is less important, that my body can tolerate more pain and illness (so I get substandard health care), that my visage is not as aesthetically pleasing but is aberrant (so don’t put me in art because no one will engage with it), that I can’t rise to meet high standards(so don’t challenge me), and that the fact that I can make coherent sentences is a miracle, (because, you know, I talk a certain kind of way), all of these are lies. They are lies that I’ve believed because the world around me supports them and because they’re perpetuated--consciously or otherwise--in systems, businesses, relationships, and art; they’re lies that it takes continual effort to dig up from my heart; they’re lies that we believe because white supremacy. Now I know they’re lies because God chose me, chose black woman, black person, black child, as a home for incarnation.
But if God is also the systems, the individuals of oppression, and quite frankly, and much scarier, if God is the legions of white folks comfortable with and defensive of their own ignorance and complicity in white supremacy and oppression of folks of color, then maybe they’re true. This is not about a desire in me to see myself or to see black folks as better than. This is a desire to see myself. To see myself as a relevant, present, meaningful part of the community, of society. White supremacy feels… gravitational. It feels like such a powerful planetary force that folks don’t want to or don’t know how to pull themselves out of, and if they do they’ll fly away. Maybe I don’t believe that anything other than white supremacy is possible, and if that is true, my work of using spiritual practice to foster relationship across identity boundaries is dust.
“[V]ictimage and violation are never simple functions of physical subjugation or speechlessness; they encompass the deeply-engrained, disguised, and habitual forms of “structural violence” that systematically negate the will and deny agency to vast numbers of people in modern societies simply because they are poor, “colored,” infirm, elderly, vagrant, or migrant… [Authur] Kleinmann has coined the phrase “social violence” to describe the pervasive indifference, endemic oppression, and sense of abjection that can make a person feel as though he or she is a mere object, nameless, of no account, ground down, in a world where agency seems to be entirely in the hands of others.”
Arrogance, I am told. It is arrogant for me to assume that I can know the will of God, that I can know anyone’s suffering other than my own. How can I possibly begin to conceive what God is doing in the fabric of the universe? I am playing at God to assert that life should be anything other than it is.
Maybe so. So what? For one thing, I think God is absolutely big and strong enough to fight with me about the need for, and God’s hand in, violence and injustice, without anyone else standing in between us. If what I believe to be true about God is true, then there’s nothing I can say to God, no argument we can have, that’s going to separate me from God. God is not put out that I would question them. So let’s get at it.
Additionally, it doesn’t take a lot of magical thinking for me to know the plight of black folks in America. See above.
I can’t write lately, and when I can’t write, I read. Every morning I pick up some book as I’m sitting down to meditate: lately there are two, Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman, and Waiting for God by Simone Weil. I reread this essay. It’s like an anchor that I’m holding onto in practice these days. I read from it recently in a weekly meditation I was invited to. It always has something new. Quick background: Simone Weil was a French Jewish philosopher, and an often-thwarted activist who lived and died in the mid-twentieth century, and who wrote about the teachings of Christ. Her work is problematic, though I wonder how it might have changed if she’d lived long enough to bear witness to or experience the Holocaust. She died at 34 years old from a hunger strike.
In the essay, she writes, “Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the attack of immediate apprehension of physical pain… There is not real affliction unless the even that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical. The social factor is essential. There is not really affliction unless there is a social degradation or the fear of it in some form or another.” In this, I recognized my experience. At the very best, she writes, he who is branded by affliction will only keep half his soul. That was the feeling: I was asking, begging, shouting, How could You do this? Where are You in this? Why would you choose blackness if this is what blackness means????, and getting only Silence.
It’s a bit of a downer, right? Am I supposed to be writing galvanizing, encouraging messages of exhortation and direction? Because what I’ve got is affliction.
The idea of affliction being a bodily experience, and not just a spiritual one, appeals to me. If the body, mind, and soul are somehow connected, and if the body is a manifestation of Divine, as some of the soul is, too, then of course affliction is as much a physical experience as a spiritual one. “When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen and peasants have this fine expression: ‘It is the trade entering his body.’” One of her points in this essay is that learning to see God in all things, in oppression and imprisonment and violence and destruction, is a lesson we can learn.“ As one has to learn to read or to practice a trade so one must learn to feel in all things, first and almost solely, the obedience of the universe to God. It really is an apprenticeship… Through joy, the beauty of the world penetrates our soul. Through suffering it penetrates our body… The body plays a part in all apprenticeships.”
Look at that: the same idea in Tantra, expressed by a Christian thinker, saying the same thing.
Let’s be clear: Weil was big into valorizing suffering. In the Christian tradition this glorification is not new, and I don’t know that it’s always useful. Still, she is not advocating that we should surrender to injustice, violence, and inequality as a result of this apprenticeship to seeing God in all things, but only to recognize God in all, and even the worst as obedient to God. Consider this radical love that she is calling us to, even in the midst of this affliction: “we must love absolutely everything, as a whole and in each detail, including evil in all its forms;…” “…through all the horror, he can continue to want to love… It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul.” This is a big ask. We live in a world of our senses and experiences: we know the perfectly ripe cold watermelon on a hot day; the smell of a baby’s head; the bowel-churning anxiety of waiting for word; we know a good full-body stretch; we know the hole inside us when something or someone is gone that won’t return, that we don’t know how to fill; we know surprise, fear, grief, desire, and all of these things make us feel a certain way. The yoga tradition calls it attachment and aversion. Consider how felt watching that video of George Floyd being killed, or how you felt arguing with your white friends or relatives who still, still(!) say ignorant shit to you, or how you felt when you realized that remark, or that silence, came out of white privilege or white supremacy. Consider what we are attached to and averse to, what we cultivate and what we reject, in our work. Perhaps, so long as I continue to draw things toward me that are easy to see God/dess in, and push away those moments, sensations, or experiences that are hard to see God/dess in, I continue to be pointed in the wrong direction.
A friend recently told me that her favorite part in the Bhagavad Gita is when Arjuna says to Krishna, show me the real you, and Krishna takes off his flesh disguise and shows himself and Arjuna freaks out and Krishna says, I AM TIME I AM THE EATER OF WORLDS, and Arjuna says, I give, I can’t take it. A similar story is in the Hebrew Bible, wherein Moses asks to see God, and God says, son you can’t handle it, but I will put you into this here crevasse and walk past you, and when I pass you, you can see the back of me, and Moses comes down from this encounter with God with the covenant for his people (the Ten Commandments) his face is shining so much that his friends are afraid to approach him. I recently had a similar prayer: show yourself to me, I asked my ishta devata, let me experience you. Maybe that’s what’s happening: this full-bodied affliction that makes me feel, to use Weil’s metaphor, pierced to my very center like a butterfly on a board; this boiling over fury that leads folks to destroy their own property, or others; the blue wall of police pushing back against peaceful protestors, and the peaceful protestors pushing against the blue wall; a president embodying the worst, the weakest, and most cowardly leadership in modern history; every thoughtful Tweet and ignorant-ass reply; every heartache and every embrace, every release and transformation—maybe God* is in all of it, if only I can learn to see.
Now my prayer is for a new set of eyes. I am trying with an infinitesimal part of my soul to want to love, and I am apprenticing myself to a new kind of vision.
“Suppose there was a book full of only the word,
let – from whose clipped sound all things begin: fir
and firmament, feather, the first whale – and suppose
we could scroll through its pages every day
to find and pronounce a Let meant only for us –
we would stumble through the streets with open books,
eyes crossed from too much reading; we would speak
in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself – and still
we’d continue in rounds, saying let and let and let
until even silent dreams had been allowed.”