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

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Cole Arthur Riley

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“Fears tend to hide behind one another […] I am not afraid of snakes; I'm afraid of pain, of immobilization or death. Telling the deepest truth of the fear requires thorough acquaintance with our own stories and interior lives, and it can so easily bleed into this next form of fear, a fear that endures past particular situations and can very nearly transcend time: anxiety. Fear becomes anxiety when it makes its home in you. Its chief attachment is not memory or villain or situation or future; its chief attachment and subject is you […] As an antagonist, fear can disrupt the most sacred patterns of rest and restoration. Fear reminds us that we are not in control, that there is far more in life that is inevitable than preventable.”

ActivismBelovedBlack Lives MatterBlack AuthorsToni MorrisonCole Arthur RileyBlack LiturgiesThis Here Flesh
Book:This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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“The psalmist says, ‘He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.’ I find it beautiful that in the face of terror; God doesn't bid us toward courage as we might perceive it. Instead, he draws us toward fear’s essential sister, rest—a sister who is not meant to replace fear but to exist together in tension and harmony with it […] And, of course, there is a fear that leans more toward awe than terror. A kind of delight. Your gut plummets within you as you drop from a bungee cord. The drum of a heart turning corners in a corn maze. I believe fear has the holy potential to draw out awe in us. To lead us into deeper patterns of protection and trust. To mould us into people engaged in the unknown, capable of making mystery of it instead of terror.”

ActivismBelovedBlack Lives MatterBlack AuthorsToni MorrisonCole Arthur RileyBlack LiturgiesThis Here Flesh
Book:This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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“Uncertainty is fear's playground. I don't know how to wade in it and not drown […] The ancient answer to fear is the recognition that to be human is to be vulnerable—to pain, to suffering, to death itself.”

ActivismBelovedBlack Lives MatterBlack AuthorsToni MorrisonCole Arthur RileyBlack LiturgiesThis Here Flesh
Book:This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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“We are seldom impressed by simplicity, unless it is the kind inflated with theatrics, which inevitably draws attention to itself—capsule wardrobes, minimalism, van life—and still is, in a manner, doing […] We become obsessed with the language of how God might ‘use’ us, never pausing to ask ourselves, What if God doesn't always want to use you? What if sometimes God just wants to be with you? We've become estranged from this idea. We would never articulate it as such, but undergirding much of our concept of calling is the belief that our primary relationship to God is anchored in transaction. God resists this. People think the sabbath is antiquated; I think it will save us from ourselves. When God tells the Israelites to practice rest, he uses the memory of their bondage to awaken them to what could be. ‘Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore, the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day’ (Deuteronomy 5:15). When we rest, we do so in memory of rest denied. We receive what has been withheld from ourselves and our ancestors. And our present respite draws us into a remembrance of those who were not permitted it.”

ActivismBelovedBlack Lives MatterBlack AuthorsToni MorrisonCole Arthur RileyBlack LiturgiesThis Here Flesh
Book:This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
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“The fourth challenge we face is to unite around powerful action programs to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice. We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice.”

EvilJusticeRacismInjusticeActivismPersistence
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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