I’ve been working the last few months at Old South Church in Boston. It’s been a fascinating experience to serve a community this way, and I’m working hard and learning a lot. Every now and then I’m given the opportunity to offer reflection, and I thought I’d share my most recent reflection in this space. In this time of winter, of mounting waves of illness, of trauma and fear and grief, darkness feels in high supply. This reflection offers a vision for how we might work cooperatively with darkness. The whole service is lovely, and my words start at around 22:00 in.
For Now: or, This'll all be over soon.
Wow, has it been a long time since I posted anything. I’m not sure my lungs are strong enough to blow the dust off this space. If there are still faithful and interested readers out there, bless you. Thank you. Still, I value this space, and so I want to continue to nourish and nurture it, and anyone who is still reading with me, thinking with me, practicing with me, praying with me.
Image Description: the nub of a candle in the palm of a brown-skinned hand, alit, almost burning out. Image by Eyasu Etsub via Unsplash
This summer was amazing. Impossible. Incredible. One of the hardest things I’ve done in recent memory: a unit of clinical pastoral education, which is to say deep personal work masquerading as hospital chaplaincy. I am still learning about what it is doing in me, but it’s changing a lot. One of the greatest gifts it is giving me is a growing comfort with death. I’m going to die. So are you. So is everyone you have ever known. Not in an abstract way, we’re going to get sick or old, or make bad decisions, or be in accidents, and the vibrant, delightful, hurtful, infuriating, confusing both/and that we are is going to end. It’s still scary, but it’s less strange now. One of the writing exercises we did was called an Ethical Will. It feels closest to something. Here’s some of it.
An Open Letter to my Loved Ones after my death:
If we were all at a cocktail party, I’d probably be working the room, trying to connect you all, the various circles of my life. But it’s not a cocktail party; instead you are reading this in the wake of my death. Take a deep breath together, Beloveds. There I am, with you in your breath.
I’m sorry that I hurt you. When I hurt you, I was likely hurting or afraid. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I was hurting and afraid a lot, and that made me careless and anxious, even when I wanted to be deliberate. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me. It doesn’t hurt anymore, so I hope you can let yourself off the hook.
Many of you told me I was brave when I was alive, and so to all of you I leave you my bravery. Do your best to listen to the voice inside you that is incessant about taking a step or making a change or doing what scares you. Interrogate it. Trust it. Listen to it. It’s okay to be afraid as you do the thing, but the fear doesn’t need to stop you from doing the thing. Recognize the fear of a hard thing and do what will move you closer to others and closer to yourself, even if it is hard.
Work a little less. Laugh a lot more. Say yes as often as you can, and say no whenever you need to, because a yes without a no is meaningless, and a no without a yes is cruel. Look for what is Sacred in what is Mundane. Acknowledge and play in paradox. Join the ends of the line and make a circle. Be changed. Pay attention to the small part of yourself and listen to what they are asking for or saying. They’re smarter than the part of you that runs the show.
Besties: thank you for being such excellent best friends. You teach me so much about how to live in community with the people who matter most to me and with the parts of myself that I value. You have taught me to be deliberate and careful, and so I leave to you my attention to detail, my capacity for listening, and my practice of looking without flinching at feelings. These are skills and lessons you already have, so I’m just fortifying your own stock. You know how to listen and when to surrender. If there is anything that I have that I can give you, it is a fire that moves us forward, so I leave you that as well. God knows there is enough to go around. May the fire burn off what is useful, clarify what is good and pure, and move you closer to the center of yourselves.
Teachers, I leave you my attention. I am so grateful to have been able to sit at your feet and listen to your words and surrender to your efforts. Thank you for the container you created for me. Thank you for letting me keep asking questions. Thank you for pushing me to do things I didn’t think I could do. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for changing the trajectory of my life. I listened to you so deeply, could you feel that? I hung on your every word, even when I thought it was crap! I am grateful for the moments when you saw me and made me feel seen; I am grateful for the moments we were able to step outside the one-up/one-down paradigm so prevalent in learning spaces in our world and just be people together. I am grateful that you didn’t laugh at me to my face when I was ridiculous, because we both know I was. I paid you attention. I was watching. I leave you that attention. May you continue to encounter students and people who listen to you so deeply that it makes you more deliberate and attentive with your words; and may you pay close and unwavering attention to those things and people you encounter as teachers, so that your learning, our learning, continues.
Fellow Writers and Artists, I leave you my voice. You don’t need it, but here it is anyway. A thing I have learned is that sometimes my voice is as powerful when it’s silent as it is speaking. You have such marvelous voices, and you are continuing to seek and share stories that need to be told. Listen even more. Be careful with your voice: make sure that the light and power you lend to a story is building and constructive of what is good, what our world needs. Do not tell a story that you don’t need to tell. Tell the story that won’t release you until it is told, and whenever possible, ask if it is your story, or if someone else needs the center of it, needs the voice. May you use the power of your own voice to amplify others. I don’t know if I did this with my voice, but I always wanted to. I do know my voice was loud, so use it as a microphone to lift up what has been silent too long.
Cousins, you are always in my heart, even when we are far away from each other. I’m sorry I didn’t know you better. I’m sorry you didn’t know me better. I love you like the brothers and sisters that you are to each other. I love your families. My life is less different from yours than we think; we have more in common than we know. K, I see you. Your life has value. To all of you I leave a longing to connect that moves you closer to those you have yet to connect with. May that longing be a thread that draws you closer to the folks that need you, toward the folks you need, and may your love make your family circle ever wider, ever stronger.
Sorors, thank you for teaching me of the power of the love of black women. Thank you for teaching me about a bond that transcends time and place, thank you for teaching me the shared values of sisterhood, volunteerism, movement, and joy. I love you. I love your power and your determination and your connection. I leave you my desire for belonging. Ship, I leave you all of the connection that we shared for so many years. You are the best. You are my twin who shares my soul. I want you to be happy. Take the connection that we shared and fashion it into a connection that you can build with the person who makes you happy, my dear friend and sister.
Husband. Ai-ren. Favorite. Loving you has been the greatest work of my life. I am so grateful to God for giving you to me, my greatest spiritual teacher. This isn’t how I wanted this. I wanted you to go first. I’m sorry. Do you feel alone? Are you scared? Are you sad? It’s okay, sweetheart. Take a year, don’t make any big decisions, let yourself feel the feels. Teach your brothers how to be with their feelings by being with your feelings. Smell my clothes and read my James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison and Sylvia Plath, and giggle whenever someone uses words like ontological or epistemological, and talk to me because I can still hear you. You have my heart, my life, my deepest and most abiding love. Do you remember the day you kissed me, standing in front of that Starbucks on Wilson avenue? And dinner at Le Colonial? And seeing each other on our wedding day? Do you remember when they wheeled me away for surgery, and when I left you at O’Hare to board a plane to India? Do you remember our fights, and me asking you, sweetheart, what do you want, and you never letting me quit or walk out? I look back and even our fights seem sweet now. All I remember is how much you made me laugh; the sound of your voice so calming it put me to sleep; watching you learn to tell me what you needed. I remember all the live music we heard together--Sade, and John Legend, and India.Arie, and EWF, and the hours and hours and hours of Kurt Elling, and making love, and all of the hours we wasted playing video games and watching mediocre TV. Thank you for teaching me to play, for reading me your writing, and for giving me feedback on my writing even when I was too stubborn or defensive to hear how smart it was. Thank you for holding me. Thank you for asking me to share your life with you. To you I leave this community of amazing people. Can you see my face when you look at them, can you hear my voice when they call your name? Let them take care of you. There is no separation between us, Bear, it is simply not possible to be apart; you take me with you wherever you go. If I know what love is, it is because of you.
I’m not ready to go. But it isn’t up to me. Thank you for everything you all have taught me. Use your phones less. Look around. Soften. Exhale. Finish writing your book. Have dinner together. Look beneath the anger. Drink your water. Get on your mat. And lead with vulnerability.
I wish we were both here,
jess
Want me to do it for you?
Part I: A Memory
It might have been the candlelight, or the winter periwinkle dusk light slipping down the streets and collecting in the corners of windows and doorways, or my shoulders hunched up around my ears against the wind. Maybe it was the tension of being in my final year of grad school, the words swirling around and knocking into each other inside my skull, or the stacks of student work in my dingy studio apartment I was behind on grading. Maybe it was the magic and the devotion, the prana that had been cultivated in the space. Whatever the case, that yoga studio, crouching halfway down the 5800 North block of Broadway, glowed like a beacon in the dark. I’d been wandering spiritually for almost a year. I’d recently moved out of my neighborhood where my favorite church was located because my roommate moved away, and I couldn’t find a new one in my new neighborhood, nor afford to stay on my own in my old neighborhood. On top of which, surprisingly, church felt too full of words. This isn’t a complaint I make frequently. I love words: I’m a reader, I’m a writer, I was getting a writing degree. But at that time in my life there was just too much talking; I needed quiet. The studio was around the corner from my boyfriend’s place. I’d go to practice on Sunday nights, and then we’d meet at the Thai place across the street (love you Indie Cafe, hope you’re still doin it despite the pandemic xoxo) and eat and talk and giggle at each other like the idiots in love we were.
I was absolutely mad about that man (still am), in love with his warm, handsome smile, and his opinions about art and writing which occasionally bordered on arrogance, with how deeply he listened to me, but my favorite thing about those wintry Sunday nights was the yoga. They were taught by a lithe, elfin woman who would knot her dark hair into a pile on her head and then coach us through the half-primary series of Ashtanga yoga. (If you’re curious, there’s a PDF here. If you’re new to yoga, and click and then your jaw falls open when you see the pics, don’t be impressed. For one thing, I can’t execute perfectly on the majority of those poses in the specific way they’re taught, and besides, and I can’t emphasize this enough, the point of yoga is not the postures. Asana is a means, not an end. For the real deal on Ashtanga, in every way possible, check out this teacher/writer/dope human.) What was so remarkable about it was how quiet it was. There was no music, no sitar or harmonium or djembe, no iPod recording, no Enya or Deva Premal, and definitely nothing pop, hip-hop, or R&B. There was only the sound of the teacher, and the sound of my breath, and the sound our bodies made moving through space. It was silent, it was hard as hell, and made me feel brilliant, literally like I was shining.
I realized after several months of practicing this way that it was filling the space left when I departed my spiritual community, in fact that it was the first time I’d ever felt like I’d embodied prayer. It felt like an act of worship without words, without language. It felt like I was communing with Something and didn’t need the tropes I’d used before to do it. I’d found a spiritual community, and a spiritual practice, inside myself and I was using my body to do it. I was praying on my yoga mat: doctrine, theology, denomination were all irrelevant, it was just me and What Is Greater.
This is one of my favorite depictions of the person who was Jesus, called Maori Jesus by Sofia Minson. I first saw it in a lecture in an Intro to New Testament class, and it still speaks to me. Deep bow, Sophia.
“Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it IS a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.”
photo by Nathan Dumlao via unsplash. Thanks, Nathan.
Part II: Context
I grew up in black evangelical churches that I would call charismatic. In James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Tish talks about Fonny’s mother, “She was saved the moment she entered the church, she was Sanctified holy, and … there was nothing, nothing, nothing you could ever hope to say to her unless you wanted to pass through the hands of the living God: and He would check it out with her before He answered you.” My churches were full of these women: impeccable in the external appearance of their spiritual practice, both approachable and untouchable at the same time. Fallen, but only conceptually. Remember the women in The Bluest Eye, who don’t sway too much when they walk, who don’t apply lipstick to the fullness of their lips and who worry about the edges of their hair? I grew up among these women in the church, tiptoeing around them, trying not to ask too many questions that made them mad, and listening closely to the hushed conversations they had with my mother when they forgot I was around. (Only-children learn invisibility among adults as a superpower early.) These are women who could organize and mobilize, who used phrases like bless your heart, and I’ll pray for you. On their faces, both phrases sound kind and generous, thoughtful even, but if you know what you’re listening for you can hear their scathing edges. I knew what these phrases meant. Bless your heart sometimes meant, “How stupid/clueless/inept are you?” or “That’s what your lazy, triflin’ ass gets,” and even sometimes, “Ha! Better you than me, you selfish cow.” I’ll pray for you was more nefarious. In a community where spiritual communion is encouraged, where prayer is a means of comfort or clarity, a place where the mystical way of knowing God is available and the miraculous is always possible, you’d think a sentence like this would indicate generosity, affirmation of hope and faith. As often as not, though, it means, “I know better than you do about your struggle with me/ with you/ with your situation, and I will talk to God on your behalf and appeal to Him that He do for you what I think he should do. I will go to God and elicit the outcome I desire in your life.”
Let me be honest: I heard folks say this a lot to me as a girl and young woman, and it was often in the midst of having shared with them some venture in my life that they objected to or were concerned about—some relationship, some decision, some obstacle, something that made me vulnerable. It was a phrase that came at the end of a conversation wherein they pursed their eyebrows at me, or nodded slowly, puzzled, or after which they peppered me with questions. It never felt like comfort, it never sounded like, I affirm your desire for this moment in your life, and will put my energy and my thoughts of you in the same direction as you do for yourself. Instead it felt like judgment, it sounded like, well that’s a shit idea, and I can only hope that God will show you the error of your shiftless, moronic ways before you’ve made an irreparable mistake. There were many times when I was insecure about choices I was making, and maybe the kindness of others I only saw as shade. Maybe it’s possible that women who said this to one another had only the best, clearest, and most grounded intentions, and the duplicity that I’m speaking about is just a projection of my own struggles with how organized religion meets my insecurity. I’m sure it is.
And I also know what those women meant when they said I’ll pray for you.
The echo in that sentiment has always been hard for me to receive. Few know what I pray for because I don’t talk much about it, so I seldom trust others to agree with me in prayer. This has only grown richer and more complex as my concept of Divinity has diversified. Sometimes prayer means not in English, or not with words, or not just to the God of Judgment throwing lightening of misfortune, nor the blond-haired, blue-eyed suffering Jesus with diminutive stigmata on the candles and the fans. What if prayer names a different deity, names sacred objects or practices outside of the tradition or in another, what if it involves action or movement? Are the church ladies going able to pray with me when they learn I am praying to an Elephant-headed deity with light, dancing feet and a pot belly who broke off his own tusk so he could use it as an implement to write the Mahabarata, the longest written epic poem known to human civilization? Or will they pray for me, that white Jesus will deliver me from my heathen practice involving (gasp) false gods, breaking the very first commandment?
Nowadays, I get spam messages from folks who want to put me in their prayer tree, from communities I’ve never heard of and don’t seek to join, saying that they’ll pray for me. I imagine that these communities, like the church ladies of my early faith formation, aren’t praying in accordance with my own prayers, but instead are praying that my politics and behaviors might align more with their own. They’re praying for a turn from my ways; for my assimilation; for my erasure.
This phrase, I’ll pray for you, describes a relationship called intercessory prayer. I’m not going to get all lecture-y and obnoxious about this, mainly because I don’t know enough. I’ll only say this: when I hear the word intercessor, I think of words like ally, like advocate. Someone who will go to, go before, who will petition on behalf of another. There’s almost a kind of broad-shouldered quality about it, as if one were taking on the burden of another by going on their behalf.
photo by Rob King via unsplash. Thanks, Rob.
Part III: The Consideration
I have a (mercifully, brilliantly) long break between semesters in school right now, and this year I’m using it to take a J-term class, what some schools call a class in a condensed timeline. Some of them are three weeks long; the class I’m taking, Comparative Monasticisms, taught by my supervisor, colleague, and mentor, HDS Chaplain Kerry Maloney, involves a contemplation of sacred, critical, and academic texts, and a week of intense practice/ritual, wherein we all take a collective temporary vow. Evidently, in seasons past this would happen in a space where we could live in community, as monastics did and do, but you know, COVID and all that. So we’re alone together, in the cells of our homes making vows to one another and to our values and gods of how to spend our time in contemplation, worship, silence. Preparing for this time, I’ve been doing the coursework: we’re reading a lot of Thomas Merton, folks like Rev. angel Kyoto williams, the Rule of St. Benedict, the rule of the Bikkhu Patimokkha, Thich Nat Hanh, and so many others, as well as watching a fair amount of documentary footage of various Cistercian, Carthusian, and Buddhist monastics and communities. It’s fascinating. It’s sometimes deeply frustrating. In one doc I recently heard a contemplative say that those who enter a life like this—and I’d wager, specifically a Christian life, though the point could be argued that that’s not exclusive—do so because they believe that they can serve the world more fully, as well as their god, through a life of strict prayer and contemplation, than they can in a life that requires a level of interaction with the “outside world.” It’s not the only way to lead a contemplative life, but it’s the way that they feel called to lead one, and their work is to spend hours of every day in prayer and communion with God, whether that means in prostration and corporate prayer, alone in their tiny scrap of a bedroom, feeding or milking livestock, digging in the garden, begging for food, or whatever it means to do life. Pray without ceasing. And part of that prayer is for those of us doing life on the outside, someone said so in a film, too. They’re in there praying for us. What are they praying for: that we’d all turn away from practices and choices they view as hateful, spiteful, sinful? That we’d choose the life they’ve chosen, away from family, friends, comfort and society, and move with slowness and humility toward nature and our own mortality on the fringes? Are they praying for our “salvation”? Are they praying for healing? Equity? Justice? Are they praying that we may all be one?
I’ve no idea. So far, none of the monastics who’ve addressed the cameras that move through their spaces, witnessing their lives has disclosed what they pray for. Really, I don’t need to know what these people are praying for, and if their prayers for me are like my own. It’s most likely that their prayers are mostly about the state of their own relationship to/with G_d and I’m just inserting myself into a dynamic that doesn’t involve me.
But what if they are praying for me, and for you? What kind of karma is established between each of us, and the siblings on the hill, behind the wall, tucked in among the mountains, who whisper to G_d about us in the lean early hours of the day and night? (Is it the same karma that exists between each of us, all of us, as beings on this shared planet, in this shared space and time, with perhaps a clearer, brighter line drawn, electrified, between us?) What is being bound, or burned off, between us in that prayer?
I heard once that someone, somewhere, is chanting the Maha Mrtyunjaya mantra all the time, every moment of every day. (You can read about it here and here, though I dislike when folks frame prayers as the magic remedy for “prosperity.” Yuck.) I like believing this, because this mantra has powerful resonance for my own spiritual practice (why is not important, or is for another day), but it’s one of those mantras that you can chant and give away. Sometimes we choose or are given mantra—prayer—that is for ourselves, our hearts, our vessels, and the Maha Mrtyunjaya can be that, but we can also chant it for others: for someone who’s dying, or grieving, who’s in the throes of addiction, illness, fatigue, curse-breaking, burnout, who needs healing. We can chant it for the whole world if we want. Perhaps this is a kind of intercessory prayer—not that we are necessarily asking to take on the addiction/illness/fatigue/curse of another, but that we are witnessing it, and agreeing with them in their need for relief or healing or renewed stamina and fortitude.
Ultimately, this prayer is about letting go of the fear that stands between us and dying. May I, it implores, and we implore when we chant it, be released from death and liberated to immortality by You, and then it looks to a metaphor of our natural world, much like the cucumber is released from the vine in its time. (Please note, I’m not translating, I’m speaking about translations of this mantra that I’ve read, my Sanskrit is nowhere near good enough to do so.) Often when I hear/use the word liberation, I mean it positively: liberation from oppression or addiction or corruption, from poverty into comfort, from violence into peace, from hunger into satiety, these all sound “good.” Is liberation from life into death a “good” thing? (Who told us the spiritual life was supposed to “be good” or “feel good” anyway? This, too, a conversation for a different day.) I’m not saying that I think this mantra is like praying that I or you or any one of us would die. I don’t think that. This mantra is about our fears. What are we afraid of—that we aren’t good enough to do the work, that we will be gunned down by malevolent forces, that what we love will be compromised, that we will be hurt, exposed, made vulnerable, made small, made uncomfortable, made weak. All these things are the case all the time. This prayer is about stripping us of the distractions and lies that we wrap ourselves in so that we forget the temporary and tender nature of our existence, an existence with a one-way trajectory. So if I chant it and give it away, my prayer is that your liberation allows you more easily to have the experience of life, and of death, clarified for you, so that you might not resist or run or fight it, but see it as a welcome and necessary (and frankly inevitable) part of your life on this plane and in this time.
It feels important to say that prayer is not about stuff. Pray that I get a new car, or a girlfriend, or a new job. I don’t know about this. I mean, it’s easy for me to say that prayer isn’t about stuff, because I’ve got a lot of stuff. (This is about privilege, right?) I’m certainly not attempting to say that if you’re suffering or lacking in this life, just pray, and God will reward you in the next, I’m pretty sure I don’t believe it, and my ancestors have suffered too much under that shallow theology and cheap grace.
Here’s what I’m trying to say: I have, at various times, been debilitated by depression. Not new, in good company, yes. I remember coming home to my parents’ house for a time during one of these occasions, and wanting to die, wanting to pull the great curtain of gray over my head and obliterate everything that was and never to return to the world again. My mother, bless her heart, tried so hard to have me pray what I was suffering up off me. She meant well, and she could see that I was suffering with something that she didn’t understand. I was in the clutches of some demon of depression, and if only I would pray (there’s Fonny’s mother again, “I pray and I pray, and I pray…”) to God, sincerely and fervently and devotedly enough, I would be free of it.
I balked at this. I was so unhappy I could barely see; but the idea that my faith and my prayer life would cure me of this feeling were just… awful. I felt it reduced God to some kind of cosmic Santa Claus, or a capricious, demanding entity of power in my life to whom I hadn’t propitiated sufficiently, who was either harming me outright, or failing to show up in the way his people say he did. Where was the rescuer that was promised in the poetry of the Psalms, in the vision of Revelation? Is this all God was? I prayed to him and he fixed it? Turns out my mother was wrong. Part of what lifted that debilitating depression, what caused the flood waters to recede, was the right prescription. Part of it was being healed from harmful theology. Part of it was getting to live life on terms that reflected my values.
I share this to say that if I, if you, if we want to pray to God for stuff, we can certainly do that. But I think that’s not what spiritual life, what spiritual practice, is really about, at least not any practice I’m about. Every time I turn around Jesus was telling folks to get rid of stuff, to sell it and donate the proceeds. He was comparing us to lilies and sparrows, who bloom where they are planted and who are fed and nourished, indeed who live and who die, by the elements. When he taught his students to pray, he offered language about reconciliation and forgiveness, about avoiding what distracts us from closeness with the Divine, and about aligning what we want—job, relationship, sensation, stuff—with the Divine will of Creation. We can debate it. I guess I’m just saying that praying for stuff doesn’t prioritize a relationship with the Divine, and I think prayer does that. Prayer is about nurturing the cosmic relationship, the vertical, and in so doing, it allows us to do better at considering and nurturing the horizontal relationship, the manifest. They’re the same thing.
“In praying for others, we learn really and truly to love them. As we approach God on their behalf, we carry the thought of them into the very being of eternal Love, and we go into the being of him who is eternal Love, we learn to love whatever we take with us there.”
Part IV: The Invitation
This Spring I hope to take a class about Julian of Norwich. Julian was a 14th-century English anchorite and mystic who wrote a text called Revelations of Divine Love (the oldest known book written by a woman in English), based on a vision she had while she was sick with an illness—an illness that she prayed that God would give her so she could have this vision. The idea of this woman, who was quite literally walled into her community church, whom folks would come to visit, bringing food or encouragement to pass to her through a small window, asking for wisdom or prayer; this woman who prayed to get sick, who, while sick, had a mystical experience and then wrote about it… it just knocks me out. I expect I’ll be writing about her for a while longer. Right now I’m just thinking about the nature of having an intercessory prayer on call in your neighborhood. I feel certain that Julian has something to teach me. I’m trying to listen.
Part of the practice of this Comparative Monasticism class is to take a vow, right, I’ve said. So I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll carve out space during my temporary vows for a practice of intercessory prayer. Maybe I will try to name folks I know, or don’t know, and to draw them, to draw us both, into the cone of eternal Love that I imagine, and to consider what happens to me, my vertical relationship, and my horizontal relationships, when I do this. I don’t know what will be; I’m obviously still trying to think this through, to discover what happens, and what I feel about it, through the practice. But if you want to observe with me, or if you just like the idea of someone “praying” for you, try this:
In the form below, put your name and any relevant info. I will gather the seeds I get from this, and take them with me, into this time of retreat, reflection, and contemplation, and likely into my day-to-day later. Think of it less as me advocating to Cosmic Santa that you change some way of being, or that your Coke turns to Pepsi, or you finally get that whoever/whatever. Think of this as an invitation to step together into a Love, a Love I don’t fully clearly understand, but want us both to know better, because I believe in Love’s radical, transformative power.
Election Day musings
The 2016 general election was devastating. I do remember the surge of joy I felt stepping out of Old Saint Mary’s on Michigan Avenue, having just cast my ballot for a woman for president. (I wasn’t a dyed-in-the-wool fan of Hillary, but I was ready for her, and there was no way I was voting for a rape-y, racist reality star whose whole reality was a house of cards.) Finally, in this country, that thinks itself so progressive, so powerful, so much at the forefront of the world. And I remember the gut-wrenching grief, the hours of sobbing, the sense of profound betrayal I felt at the outcome. I had dared to hope. In the aftermath of that election, I felt certain that electing a person who was so clearly not up to the job would result in many of us on the margins, with less money, power, or agency being sacrificed, abused, maligned, and further marginalized under such miserable, patently selfish, autocratic leadership.
The last four years have been worse than I thought in that regard.
Now I’m braced for an equally devastating turnout. I am not hopeful. There is no bottom to which we are not willing to sink. I am only planning on what it means to survive more of the worst I have known in my lifetime.
*
“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
I want to write to you about all the things you can do to stay healthy, the way to keep caring for yourself in the midst of a difficult time, with sunshine and hope of what the future will be. But I can’t. I’m angry. Yesterday in my practice I was doing sun salutations and composing language—sermons?—about the dissonance between what we say Christianity is, and how we practice it. What does it mean when we refuse to feed, clothe, and shelter the least of us? What exactly do we think we’re doing? How flawed is our walk with Christ if we believe following his teaching asks us to ruin families, to bully, demean, and assault folks, to kill people? In what have we placed our faith? How can we possibly see the love of Christ in actions of violence, division, and destruction? Is it the commandment to love what undergirds our faith practice or is it white supremacy? I think often about my friend, Daniel Hill and the work he is doing to dismantle white supremacy in the (white) Christian church, and the heat he is catching from other white folks about it. He inspires me. And I look at his ministry and think, white people, he came out of you. He comes to his own, and many of y’all don’t receive him. If you can’t hear what he has to say, then humbly, whatever I could have to say to you, however we might connect, I am already lost to you.
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Out for a run the other day, I was imagining what my future might look like, in five or ten years: might I have a career as a chaplain, might I be writing and teaching about embodied theology as anti-racism, might I be working in a whiteish community as a member of a pastoral staff, might I be brought into covenant with a church who says it wants and seems like it wants a black woman in leadership; and what will happen to us all when that desire encounters the reality of confronting white supremacy and the ways it has been left fallow, reinforced, or deliberately sown, and how I will work against it. What might it mean to preach to a community of red-hat-wearing, Harris County, get-off-my-property folk who cannot see me as created in the image of God because when they look at me all they see is the curse of Ham? Will I be safe to go jogging through that community, or will I be shot and killed for running while black? Will that church be willing to put a BLM sign and a rainbow flag beside the church’s marquee (because of course we’ll need to, I don’t believe anything can change that fast), or will it get a brick through the sanctuary window, or something more destructive?
My fear of encountering violence based in racism and sexism while in ministry is real. It is present to me even now. But what troubles me even more is my own lack of ability to see Christ when I draw up the faces of these folks in my imagination: the octogenarian I visit in the hospital who is unwilling to pray the Our Father with me because he’s never had a nigra pastor before and he ain’t about to start now; the head of the ladies’ auxiliary who feels sure that my book group about white supremacy and intersectional feminism would be more popular if I were just a bit nicer, and didn’t talk about race so much; the community members who curse me and vandalize my property, who send unsigned letters of violence and mutter epithets when they pass my husband and me on the street. I look into these faces in my imagination, and all I see is hate and fear and violence. I’ve never met these folks, but I know them. And so do you. How do I find the love of Christ for these people, who feel so thoroughly threatened by my freedom, my joy, my capacity and my intensity—who feel threatened by my very existence? How do I treat them the way I am inviting them to treat others?
My friend Cassie Montenegro read one of her poems in class today, and (I’m going to bungle it, Cassie, I’m sorry!) one of her lines was, “what if what we needed to keep us afloat in the moment isn’t what we will need tomorrow?” It had a brilliant resonance of her family, and when she read it, I heard the Divine say, that’s it, Jess. Everyone is afraid of something. Remember what Uncle Jimmy wrote? Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature… Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don’t be afraid. Remember that? Everyone is afraid of something. These white folks are so afraid of losing their comfort, their privilege, their money and influence, their understanding of their place in the world, they are so afraid of looking at their own pain and anguish, at the violence done by their own hands and the blood that still stains it, that they will vote for an ignorant, stupid, racist, violent, sick, misogynist, morally bankrupt, fascist narcissist in need of genuine mental help because he will help them uphold their perception of themselves. They are afraid of confronting their need to grow, and this f-ing dude isn’t going to ask them to grow at all. But they don’t have to be afraid anymore. Maybe this choice that they made yesterday isn’t what they will need tomorrow.
I guess we’ll see. In a day or two. In a week or two. Whatever the case, The wind blows where it pleases, the spirit will move me somewhere, and I will have to put myself into spaces to do the work and meet whatever is there with courage, with tenderness, and with truth.
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The results won’t be in for a while. The work goes on, even if fascism takes a firmer, more established root in our government, in fact, if this is the outcome, then my work needs to level up. This morning in practice, I was paging through the Book of Common Prayer, and came across a Collect, #17, For the Nation. (Sounds ominous and serious and weighty right? This text came out of the English split from the Catholic church, and was crafted as a tool for the order of worship by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Thanks, Wikipedia!) In pursuit of understanding the practice of public prayer, like a writer, and because I was curious, I rewrote it:
Creator of the Universe, Source of Dissolution and Nothingness, you have breathed life into us, shaped us from the dust of your creation and invited us to live lives as expressions of our gratitude to you, colored by freedom and in peace with one another: Observe the artificial boundary we have placed around ourselves and called ‘country’, what a silly thing, carving up your creation, we know it’s silly because it’s ruined our capacity to see what is right and to pursue and practice it diligently. Detoxify us. Whet our appetites for justice, strengthen our capacity for struggle and growth, so that we can use our discomfort and privilege to manifest more of your will in this time and in this place. Thank you for the model of love and sacrifice, of courage and humanity, that you shared with us through the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and the mystery of the Holy Spirit whose voice we can hear in the wind, in the tear, in the , if only we are still and humble enough to Let Her Speak and to listen. Amen.
Love Notes
the light is hitting your face in such a nice way today. you look splendid.
are you tired? I am tired. this is a difficult time. sometimes the strategies we have for difficult times work, and sometimes they don’t. let’s stay flexible.
drink your water. floss. go to bed earlier. in the words of the oracle of the movement, there is always enough time to do the right work.* move at the pace of the breath, and if the breath is too fast, stop. slow it down. pay it attention, like it could save your life. because it will.
move your body, ideally in a way that pleases and delights you. release fully and entirely the notion that it has to look any particular way as you do so. the movement might be slow or it might be fast, but let it move, let it respond to the space around it, let it work with and against gravity, let it feel air on your skin, let it build the warmth of push and pull and effort inside you. let the sensation make enough noise that you stop listening to the ticker tape of your own thoughts.
look for the rhythm of the natural world, and align yourself with it. yes, we’ve hurt her deeply, and she’s aching badly right now. and she is still continuing to ripen fruit, to coax flowers open and introduce them to insects, to put on fine colors, to bed down for a long, heavy nap. can we turn toward the rhythm she’s showing us, and tune our lives to it? if we do, if we diligently turn toward it and listen, and adapt, it will teach us to make lives that are less fraught with struggle.
sitting with yourself in discomfort is not easy. without the breath, it is impossible. even if it feels short and shallow, take a breath. take another, slower. feel the full and the empty. feel the breath in you come and then go. each breath changes the discomfort just a little. eventually, you’ll be able to feel the change.
did you eat yet?
many people have done this before you. it feels hard because it is hard, but you are not the first. before you were born, people were working hard, feeding their families and keeping their children in decent clothes and shoes. and and when they were without, they were leaning on each other. yes, this is a mountain. it is sharp and wild, and you are tired of climbing, and your feet are cut and the air is thin. and you are not the first person to climb it. the ancestors at the top are waiting on you.
no one has done this before. no one has tried to survive public health/racial&reproductive justice/climate change/global pandemic crises all while trying to keep their kids in shoes, make rent, and while asking the Big Questions: what is meaning? what is suffering? are we alone? what happens now? who is coming? so cut yourself a break, because what you are doing is hard, brand new, and no one can do it for you. you’ll screw it up. your neighbors will screw it up. your leaders and teachers will screw it up. grace is like a magic well: the more you dip into it, the more there is to share. so keep filling your bucket.
photo by joel drzycimski
a thing is sacred because we make it sacred. bread. breath. water. sandalwood paste. wool. a gesture. a word. an action. an embrace. a renunciation. a ritual. it means what we mean it to mean. so light a flame, pour out a libation, utter a sound and seal it with a gesture, an incantation, a mark. find the repetition of value and beauty in your life and make meaning.
eliminate anything from your day-to-day that is not moving you toward clarity, stability, and compassion. frivolity is good on occasion, but beware that occasional becomes habitual, for there we fall from rest into collapse. consider: rest is generative. collapse is possessive: it takes from you and leaves you with nothing but sticky fingers, malnourishment, and a space full of anxiety longing for time that will not come back.
ask for help.
offer help.
accept help.
seek silence whenever possible and appropriate. there is noise everywhere, and some of it is useful, but most of it is only trying to steal your time, attention, information, and energy. music is a gift, but if you are filling the space with it to distract from emptiness or silence, it becomes the same grating din as the talking heads and the clickbait and the machines. listen t your breath. listen to far away sounds. listen to the poetry in the silence.
draw me a picture. draw yourself a picture. who cares of what, just put the pencil onto the paper and make it move. shape, color, texture. draw a self-portrait of how you feel today. keep breathing. and now frame it. or burn it. or hang it on the refrigerator. look what you made.
are you doing too much? why? are you busy, or overcommitted? what can you let go of? hard as it is to hold, the world can live without you. the decision to do more than you can do comes purely out of your ego. set a boundary. say no, kindly and sincerely. accept the limitations of your own human existence. you are not the whole world, and you can do a lot, but you cannot do everything. have you learned this yet? it is simply, blessedly true. you cannot do everything. please stop trying. draw a bright, blessed line around what is yours, and kiss the rest to god/dess.
laugh. read poetry. concentrate. simplify. do not hide from what is difficult, and look for what is beautiful in all things. if there is someone, somewhere, who can look at you in your most insecure, petulant, ignorant, thoughtless, heartless, frightened moment and see something worth loving—and there is—then you can do that for someone else.
I’m glad you’re here.
*adrienne marie brown, emergent strategy