The Ache for, and of, Belonging
I'm beginning to think alienation and rejection are the two great persuaders of our own unloveliness. The cunning will wield them against you so that you acquiesce to the systems of a community in order to retain membership in it. Perhaps you know what it's like to need to believe a certain doctrine or creed so that you can belong in a spiritual space, or to vote a certain way to belong at the dinner table. When someone places your very belonging at stake, they are prodding an ancient wound. Not all belonging is salve.
— Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
Connectedness to Every Created Thing
Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created thing comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are part of the story.
— This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us
The Face of Our Neighbor
To be able to marvel at the face of our neighbor with the same awe we have for the mountaintop, the sunlight refracting — this manner of vision is what will keep us from destroying each other.
— This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us
Liturgy and Dignity
Our liturgies begin with dignity, because that is where any kind of liberation begins: with an awareness that you are worthy of so much more than whatever form your chains have taken today. For now, you are here — breathing, being, granting a gift that cannot be replicated. Your simple, miraculous, necessary existence.
— Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
Nature as a Path to Humility
Grow in us a wonder that is willing to bow to the beauty of the natural world, that it would be a path to humility and not ego. That we would understand it does not exist for us, but it is our divine fortune that we would be moved by it. And we are moved, God.
— Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
A Prayer for the Mirror
God of all flesh, God of these hips, this nose, these lips. God of fat bodies, disabled bodies, aging bodies. God of Black bodies, glistening like the mirror itself. Speak over our flesh now: Our bodies are good. We have endured all manner of antagonism. We have been trained in a singular, white-exalting form of beauty. Grant us an enduring belief in our own loveliness, but keep us from punishing ourselves on the days we feel that we do not have access to that belief.
— Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
A Prayer “For the Places That Were Stolen from Us”
God who proclaims, Some of us didn't choose to leave. Whether by abduction or invasion, our place was stolen from us. When the colonizer is so miserable with their own life, when they hate themselves enough so acutely, they flee their home to consume someone else's. Reveal how that same self-hatred and hunger are still awake in many today. Expose them, god, that we would recognize wolves when they arrive at our doorstep.
— Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
Sacred Guides
We cannot help but entwine our concept of dignity with how much a person can do. The sick, the elderly, the disabled, the neurodivergent, my sweet cousin on the autism spectrum — 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.
— This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us
The Simple Beholding of Place
We are meant to be connected to our where, to the sensory experience of it. The simple beholding of place can slow your heart and steady your breath. It is quite the protective force.
— This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us
What Is a Calling?
[C]alling demands that we honor its fluidity. Not all calls are eternal. They ebb and flow with us — with our needs, our community, and our loves. If there is anything static in it, it is that we are called to whatever makes us more human. Not to what makes us matter — calling has no competency in this area. Its purpose is not to prove our worth, but to show us how we might practice it.
— Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
