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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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“Joy situates every emotion within itself. It grounds them so that one isn’t overindulged while the others lie starving. Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps them from swallowing us whole. Society has failed to understand this. When it tells us to find joy in suffering, it is telling us to let it go, to move on, to smile through it. But joy says, Hold on to your sorrow. It can rest safely here.”

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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“You may think we are called to holy things that involve praying on your knees and going to church, and maybe we are. But I haven't known God to regulate holiness. I think they injected it into every bit of everything. And I imagine they are very concerned with every element of life, including our work. And why wouldn't they be?”

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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“Memory is meant to be given. It isn’t held well alone. It is meant to be held in a collective and across generations. Memories that remain exclusive to a particular individual or even community are at risk of becoming false. The smell of lavender becomes the smell of grass. The abduction of Black bodies becomes their “migration.” When memory endures no scrutiny or curiosity or challenge from the exterior, it can lead to a profound loneliness at best; at worst, individual or collective delusion.”

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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“This is a society that will very rarely demand justice in favour of the desperate but will always demand it in favour of the judge, the powerful. In the company of these tainted moral authorities, the most significant wrong will never be the one that caused all the others. This is a world that demonizes those who transgress the system but has great sympathy for the system itself. You can ask my father why he, who cradled the head of his best friend's father on the bathroom floor that day, lived to hustle. But will you also question the system, which demanded his hustle in order to live? His justice has been denied since birth, so before you fault him, you must first fault this.”

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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“It is very important that our belonging before God not depend upon our ability to hide or extinguish truths in and about us. We must trust that our maker can look on our rage, and even our hatred, and perceive those stories, fears, and vulnerabilities that reside in us and have stirred us toward our present emotional expression. As we allow God to behold our rage, a sacred intimacy emerges.”

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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“If you've suffered an anxiety attack, maybe you've encountered the grounding techniques of the five senses. What's one thing you smell? Tell me two things you hear. There is a mysterious entanglement between our welfare and our capacity to ground ourselves in a particular 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.”

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 train our focus on beauty here or there—this poem, that architecture—because it is easier than bearing witness to our own story. We begin to gravitate not toward beauty but toward illusion. In this state, you are not approaching what you seek. You are running from your own face. But this is not the way of wonder. 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 a part of the story.”

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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“Practicing wonder is a powerful tool against despair. It works nearly the same muscles as hope, in that you find yourself believing in goodness and beauty even when the evidence gives you every reason to believe that goodness and beauty are void. This can feel like a risk to those of us who have had our dreams colonized, who have known the devastation of hope unfulfilled. I once heard the Japanese artist Makoto Fujimura say, "The most courageous thing we can do as a people is to behold." This gave me great empathy for those who have lost their wonder. For myself. We are not to blame for what the world has so relentlessly tried to crush in us, but we are endangered because of 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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