This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us.

In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.

I don't want to make it to the promised land if it means I forget the wilderness.

Those who believe love is a scarcity are less likely to give it away freely.

Seeing a person or piece of creation trampled should always disrupt something in us. It should always do something to the soul. And when you trace that trampling back across generations and systems and powers, a quiet sorrow is born in you.

I’ve accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me. This may sound troubling to those who’ve been conditioned to believe that our journey is to God and God alone, but I say the two paths are one. My journey to the truth of God cannot be parsed from my journey to the truth of who I am. A fidelity to the true self is a fidelity to truth. I won’t apologize for this.

Audre Lorde said, “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings…. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.

The chasm between the spiritual and the physical is no greater than that between a thought and a word. They cannot be disconnected. And it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, perhaps because there is no such place.

How boring to spend the whole of my vocational energy trying to figure out if I am choosing the right work. It is of much greater interest to me to talk about how I’m going to do the work with integrity. How am I going to protect dignity as I work? And what truths are calling out to me as I work?

It takes time to undo the whiteness of God. When I speak of whiteness, I am referring not to the mere existence of a person in a particular body; I am referring to the historic, systemic, and sociological patterns that have oppressed, killed, abducted, abused, and discredited those who do not exist in a particular body. Whiteness is a force.

And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people.

The land I live on is not mine to have, but mine to nurture.

Wonder then is a force of liberation, it makes sense of what our souls inherently know we were meant for. Every mundane glimpse is salve on a wound, instructions for how to set the bone right again. If you really want to get free, find God on the subway, find God in the soap bubble. Me, I meet God in the taste of my grandmas chicken, I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simones voice, I see the face of God in the boney teenager bagging my groceries and why shouldn't I? My faith is held together by wonder, by ever defined commitment to presence and paying attention.

I have to believe that if we didn't need to protect ourselves, we wouldn't be so prone to avoiding rest. When fear enters the story, something changes. In response to the risk and need around us, we have constructed systems around labor that leave even the hardest workers vulnerable, in deficit. Labor is no longer a gift. How could it be when one is withering from hunger? Labor instead becomes a means to an end, not an avenue for flourishing but a transaction for survival. This is a grim human development, for no one wants to spend their days merely surviving. And this transaction is nearly always incongruent with the amount of labor one does. You can work, as my gramma did in California, for a full month just to be able to finally move from the shelter into low-income housing. Meanwhile, the powerful convince us that there is not enough while their pocket spill out in the open. They distract us from this by dangling opportunity in the opposite direction. They appear as rescuers, demanding ceaseless labor from us but presenting it as a gift. We are expected to feel deeply lucky and even indebted to a society that allows us to work, even if that work cannot satisfy our most basic needs.

Isn't it something that in Genesis, God makes a home for things before God makes the thing? Not the fish first but the sea. Not the bird first but the sky. Not the human first but the garden. I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling mud like it's the last flame in a windstorm. A God who says, Not out of my own womb but out of this here dust will I make you. Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.

Did you know that birds do not land because they're tired? It is a rememberance. They know and have always known that their liberation depends on their ability to recall the ground.

These are spiritual afflictions in and of themselves, but in religious communities, when whiteness becomes inseparable from the character of God, you’ll find customs such as evangelism equated with conquering, but admissible under the guise of “love.” You’ll find guilt-driven spirituality, which is obsessed with alleviating guilt and becoming “clean”—for whiteness always carries the memory of what it has done to those in bodies of color, and guilt is its primary tormentor. The irony, of course, is that this guilt cannot be relieved save by a rending of whiteness from the image of God (which the force of whiteness will never do). In order to rend whiteness from the face of God, we must do more than make new images.

We are a people much more concerned with ruling than loving. This is a mistake that positions us in places where we are no longer close enough to another person or thing to perceive its pain or need. To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us. To protect everything may seem like too great a call. But we will not survive without it. Everything should be called by its name. So let justice roll down and twist and juke like a movement. Let it march into your bones, into seas of charred cane. Wash the earth in justice and watch what rises to the surface. Curses can't breathe underwater.

When we wonder, we loosen the cords that restrain our love. And the people most in love with a thing are prone to become its fiercest protectors.

Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.

How will we make space to hold the memory of the collective? There are times when belonging is not cemented in the lived moment of an experience but in the lively or sombre retelling of the moment afterward. Which means we can transfer belonging to the next generation by welcoming them into memories that they (or we) have not lived but choose to steward. In many spaces, to foster collective memory well, we must habitually ask ourselves, Whose story gets told, whose story is believed, and who gets to tell it? If we surrender our individual egos, these questions can function as a pruning process, as we contend with accounts that don’t line up quite flush. This interrogation may reveal false memories.

I belong to a God capable of holding the ugliest parts of my anger.

People who truly know how to wonder don't expend a great deal of energy talking about it; they are off catching snowflakes on hot tongues. They're folding themselves in half to smell the sweet potatoes in the oven just one more time. I no longer try to convince someone of the delight of soup dumplings; I take them to Dim Sum Garden on Race Street in Philly and let them watch me slurp. I let the steaming miracle broth run down my face and lap it up in remembrance. I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually.

Forgiveness came to her, not in a dramatic flourish or sudden comprehension, rather it grew on her as slowly and fatefully as the fingernails crowning her hands. You participate in it. It comes from you, but it also is something that happens to you without you necessarily noticing. I don't think we have as much control over our forgiveness as we think. You can't force hair to grow faster than your body allows. I think this is okay.

My first prayer was into a purple plastic toy megaphone. I even went into the closet to do it in case God was shy like me.

When we grow accustomed to neglecting beauty, we eventually become creatures of hatred. We lose our imagination, a virtue to which wonder is helplessly tied. Why care for barren land? Why advocate for justice in a system predicated on injustice? We become so accustomed to that bitter taste that we can taste nothing else. Slowly, even mirrors feel like an oppression. We become unable to conceive of anything worthwhile in our own image until we empty ourselves of all beauty and turn against our own bodies in disgust.

Bravado tends to drown out the sound of wonder. Perhaps you've known that person who devours beauty as if it belongs to them. It is a possessive wonder. It eats not to delight, but to collect, trade, and boast. It consumes beauty to grow in ego, not in love. It climbs mountains to gain ownership, not to gain freedom.

We tend to assign a lesser social value to those whose doing cannot be enslaved into a given output. We should look to them as sacred guides out of the bondage of productivity. Instead, we withhold social status and capital, and we neglect to acknowledge that theirs is a liberation we can learn from.

I used to think that Christian contemplation was reserved for white men who leave copies of C.S. Lewis's letters strewn about and know a great deal about coffee and beard oils. If this is you, there is room for you here. But I am interested in reclaiming a contemplation that is not exclusive to whiteness, intellectualism, ableism, or mere hobby. And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people. To suggest a form of faith that tells me to sit down alone and be quiet? It does not rest easy on the bones. It is a shadow of true contemplative life, and it would do violence to my Black-woman soul.

I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people.