Browse 76 quotes about Cole Arthur Riley.
“Some callings come to you only in memory. Some come only on the mouth of someone you trust. Some don’t need to be heard in order to be lived. And not all calls come from outside of you.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“We are poorly attuned to one another's bodies. It is a latent evil. To know your own body is a spiritual care and protection. To know the body of another is a spiritual union and conciliation. We must become so acquainted with the physical good that when evil, affliction, sickness, and pain come, we can name them with the urgency they demand. These hands may move, but not the way my hands move. There are times when the sacred fidelity to self—fully embodied soul-self—may keep us from death itself.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“We had learned from the native Onondaga tribe, who dwelled on the land long before Silas Marble was unjustly granted it for serving in the war, that believing yourself a possessor of the land is a damaging practice. I believe them. My ownership of the apple grove or barn or brick is an illusion that I chiefly entertain as a societal formality; or rather, my ownership does not mean what you think it means. The land I live on is not mine to have, but mine to nurture. I am responsible […] This is okay. I have known that my devotion to this place rests on my willingness to release any pretense that it belongs to me more than it is making
me.
Ask me what I'm made of and I'll tell you to look down.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“When I watch somebody name what should not be and earnestly question God about it, I immediately become a fraction of the skeptic I am. Lament is a very compelling apologetic.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“A Black woman I admire once drew me into a line from Jeremiah 9:20 that says, ‘Hear, O women ... teach to your daughters a dirge, and each to her neighbour a lament.’ When she told me this, two things occurred to me. The first: Lament is intergenerational. The second: It is something that can be taught.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“We are born knowing how to cry, but it takes another to teach us how to cry well and with purpose. As we watch our elders cry, we are learning. Sister June taught me how to grieve with my body. She taught me how to feel the tears on my face and not wipe them away.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I think the terror of bonds of friendship is that just as they can be chosen, they can be unchosen. You might say this of all bonds, but in friendship the risk is perhaps felt more acutely. I’m convinced that in most bonds it is not conflict we fear; it is abandonment after conflict. We fear it because we know something is at risk. For this reason, we can become cruellest to those we know will stay. And we resort to flattery or appeasement for those we are uncertain will do so. This can lead us to drink from shallow waters. Durable friendship is a bond that is able to endure both truth-telling and conflict. Bonds without these things become brittle.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Solidarity is a group that stands together, and would do so for even its weakest member. It is that community which resists the intoxicating lie of individualism—we live for ourselves and by ourselves. Solidarity dismisses self-preservation in favour of a new way—to sense the injustice, need, or glory of any one part as the unflinching responsibility of the collective.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“We can see a mirror, and it’s doing its best—but that is not your face, just an image of it, reversed and distorted […] We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person. I cannot trust myself to describe the curve of my nose because I've never seen it. I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another's behalf.
Audre Lorde said, "Without community there is no liberation." There is no promised land without a multitude. You think you can get there alone, and maybe by some rare chance you do. But what will become of the promise when it is collapsed by loneliness? Who is going to drink all that milk and honey with you? Look down in the cool, running stream. You cannot see yourself.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Lament is not anti-hope. It's not even a stepping-stone to hope.
Lament itself is a form of hope. It's an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why?”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I belong to a God capable of holding the ugliest parts of my anger.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“You might think justice is a form of choosing sides, choosing whom to stand behind. In a way, maybe it is. But justice doesn't choose whose dignity is superior. It upholds the dignity of all those involved, no matter whom it offends or what it costs. Even when demanding retribution, justice does not demean the offender's dignity; it affirms it. It communicates that what has been done is not what the offender was made for.
They, too, were made for beauty. In justice, everyone becomes more human, everyone bears the image of the divine. Justice does not ask us to choose.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“The freedom of God's people did not occur in a vacuum. There were consequences. There was truth-telling. And there was a disturbingly costly justice. There could be no liberation without it. You might ask yourself if you can ever really be free if you have not received justice for your bondage. But as Bayard Rustin said, "When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him."
Justice does not always come in the manner we long for, but there is always a path to it.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“What is the worth of a woman plagued by sadness?
When people demand joy always, it makes the world seem incompatible with those of us whose happiest days are still anguished. In this way, joy was one of my earliest alienators.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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?”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I once heard the activist John Perkins say, “You don’t give dignity, you affirm it.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“To be a human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation. It is a challenge to believe that this right is ours.
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 gramma's chicken. I hear God in the raspy leather of Nina Simone's voice. I see the face of God in the bony teenager bagging my groceries. And why shouldn't I? My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Collective memory requires that we piece together the fragments of individual memory and behold something not necessarily larger but with greater depth and colour. I think the whole Bible is predicated on collective remembrance. You have feast and fast days, storytelling, and most conspicuously, the Eucharist. A shared table and a shared loaf. Take, eat, drink. The Christian story hinges on a ceremony of communal remembrance. This should train us toward an embodied memory. My hand on a ballet barre, and every muscle knows how to come awake again. My father takes up my detangled hair in his hands, and his fingers dip and twist so fast they blur and become one. Do this in remembrance of me.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully.
Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that God's wholeness is in a multitude.
I do not know if God meant to confer value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity.
I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I don't believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. We've grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us.
Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom—the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky—if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos?”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Sometimes, it is only in the hands of another that a memory can be fully encountered. All of a sudden it is not the front of the car you see but the street from the back side window. The memory expands past two dimensions. This is the beauty of collective memory.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I once heard that joy and happiness do different things to the body. Happiness, which works itself out in the sympathetic nervous system, makes you excitable and energetic. It's important but fleeting, grounded in the immediacy of a moment or the whim of a feeling. Joy is more tranquil. It has to do with the parasympathetic nervous system, and it's much more about peace than vibrancy.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Liberation loves company. It is not threatened by another person's identity, because liberation is not a scarcity. It can only affirm itself in another person.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Memory is frail. It requires a delicate touch, a tenderness.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“For me, the story of God becoming body is only matched by God's submission to the body of a woman. That the creator of the cosmos would choose to rely on an embodied creation.
To be grown, fed, delivered—God put faith in a body. In Mary's muscles and hormones, bowels and breasts. And when Christ's body is broken and blood shed, we should hold in mystery that first a woman's body was broken, her blood shed, in order to deliver the hope of the world into the world.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“White anger is something else. It can spit on a kid and appear victim enough to have someone else thrown off the bus. White rage, like all rage born not in defense of dignity but in defense of oppressive power, is manipulative. It is one of many examples of the difference between anger that dominates and anger that liberates […] Anger that dominates relies on fear tactics and abuse to live. It makes no demand of the world except that it bow. This is often because it fears being ruled or overpowered itself. This is no excuse. Holy anger is that which liberates. It marches, chants, and flips tables, demanding wrong be called by its rightful name. It is both passion and calculation, longing for more but for the sake of justice and dignity.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“The children will sit first, because they are unafraid. And the elders will follow, because they are unafraid of their fear.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“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
“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
“Awe is not a lens through which to see the world but our sole path to seeing.
Any other lens is not a lens but a veil. And I've come to believe that our beholding—seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment—is no small form of salvation. When I speak of wonder, I mean the practice of beholding the beautiful. Beholding the majestic—the snow-capped Himalayas, the sun setting on the sea—but also the perfectly mundane—that soap bubble reflecting your kitchen, the oxidized underbelly of that stainless steel pan. More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop.
When people or groups become too enamoured with mountaintops, we should ask ourselves whether their euphoria comes from love or from the experience of supremacy. For example, whiteness, as a sociological force and practice, loves mountaintops. Being born of an appetite not for flourishing but for domination, it loves the ascent, the conquering. It will tell you about the view from there, but be assured that it is only its view of itself that rouses its spirit. It is about bravado and triumph.
There is nothing wrong with climbing the mountain, but 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.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Call it archaic, but I think confession is liberation. It is easy to think that in injustice only the oppressed have their freedom to gain. In truth, the liberation of the oppressor is also at stake. Whether it's the privilege we've inherited or space we've stolen, what began as guilt will mutate into shame, which is much more sinister and decidedly heavier on the soul. It doesn't just weigh on the heart; it slithers into the gap of every joint, making everything swollen and tender. We learn to walk differently in order to carry the shame, but then we become prone to manipulate things like nearness and connection just to relieve our own swelling […] Truth-telling is critical to repair. But confession alone—which tends to serve the confessor more than the oppressed—will never be enough. Reparations are required. To expect repair without some kind of remittance would be injustice doubled. What has been stolen must be returned. This is not vengeance, it's restoration.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Any injustice demands something of us. But the only thing more healing than forcing someone to pay is when a person chooses to pay by their own conviction.
I have always wondered why Christ had to die. If we needed saving, if wrath was to be had, couldn't God just snap his fingers or send a great wind or blink and have everything wrong made right again? Why is it nothing but the blood? Nothing else? This will always be strange to me.
But if it's true, the law is cosmic and eternal. Maybe it's written into everything, and even God themself is not too bold to undo the way things were meant to be. Maybe they needed to show us what the most tragic and noble reparation could look like, the sacrifice of life itself, so we might learn the courage to choose to make repairs when our moments come.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us