“Our hope can be only as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope.
Now there is a distinction to be made between true lament and the more sinister form of sadness we know as despair. Despair is lament emptied of hope. It is a shell that invites the whole of your soul to dwell in its void. Many of us will visit this shell, but despair depends upon our staying. With no framework for healthy lament, I was a prisoner to sadness.
Even still, it's not good to drag someone from their lament out of fear of despair. In fact, being forced too quickly out of lament can drag the soul into despair in secret. We are left to wander in sadness but without a confidant to help guide us out of the void.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“You used nunchucks on a moose?"
Wolfe got a haunted look in his eyes. "I used all sorts of things on that bastard.”
Source: The Golden Lily
“Stillness makes for a capable mirror. Look down in a rough and fast current, and you won’t see a thing. Still water allows you to lean in without danger and really see yourself. And in doing so, you may remember a liberty over yourself that is easily forgotten when things are jostling about.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Rest is not the reward for our liberation, nor something we lay hold of once we are free. It is the path that delivers us there.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“To encounter the holy in the ordinary is to find God in the liminal—in spaces where we might subconsciously exclude it, including the sensory moments that are often illegibly spiritual.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Solitude can be a profound teacher. It can teach us how to hold ourselves—how to affirm ourselves and listen. How much is the sound of your own voice worth? And yet, we were made for belonging. Maybe you’ve heard it said that you need to learn how to be alone before you can be with someone. I say you have to learn how to be with and part of something in order to know how to be alone. I think it is only out of a deep anchoring in community that one can be free to explore the solitary.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I’m learning to befriend my body again. It does not always move the way I want it to, but I have made a commitment that if it ceases to move at all, if I lose all control and agency, if my hands go numb in the night and never wake again, even still I will not forsake my body. To be people capable of extending welcome to the body, even those bodies the world discards and demeans, is to be people of profound liberation. By this we will know our faith: We will stay whole.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Liberation is not a finality or an end point; it is an unending awakening. It is something we can both meet and walk away from within the same hour. Our responsibility to ourselves is to become so familiarized with it, so attuned to its sound, that when it calls out to us, we will know which way the table is.
To answer the question of how one becomes attuned to liberation, I think we must ask ourselves: What sounds are drowning it out?”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Activism is the body of justice. It invites you into embodied declarations of dignity and worth. As you participate in its body, you find yourself increasingly grounded in your own.
I think activism is a virtue. To be a person who cares and honours creation is to be a person who acts in favour of its flourishing. I am distrustful of spiritual people who are not roused in their bodies on behalf of justice. We can disagree on what activism should look like, but not on the necessity of its existence or your participation in it.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“The first time I picked up James Baldwin, I finally saw myself. It occurred to me that I could be an activist from my own source of power—words.
It can only make our journey toward justice more robust, more beautiful, when we offer a diversity of paths, a more expansive vision of action. This is not new. This is Detour and Hiero Veiga's graffiti art resurrecting Black faces slain by the police. This is Tricia Hersey and The Nap Ministry creating collective sleeping experiences to reclaim the justice and liberation in rest. This is even, to some degree, some of the words you'll find in this book. Written in holy defiance of what is, and in imagination of what should be. If writing is a calling, I have a responsibility to demand justice in my writing as much as in the streets. When we expand our imaginations for activism, we enter into practices of lament and rage with more particularity, and we begin to realize more nuanced paths to justice.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us