Browse 69 quotes about This Here Flesh.
“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
“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
“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
“There are some of us who have grown weary of talk of reconciliation. This is probably because it comes to us on the tongues of men who have paid no time to the process of true repair. It is both ego and shame concealed in shallow unity-speak that regresses any progress that has been made.
And you'd of course be right to ask the question: Can we be reconciled if there was no harmony to begin with? I suppose it is my faith that allows me, despite all the lack I see, to trace the plumb line back to an origin story of harmony—a shalom that can be repaired, however slowly and painfully.
But language of unity has functioned as a locution more of restraint than of liberation. Those who are too insecure to practice an ethic of true repair attempt to accelerate resolution for the sake of their own protection. They are umprepared to fully face the chasm they have created, the blood on their hands, the sight of their own face, so they rush to an assurance that the sight isn't as ugly as it seems.
Reconciliation cannot be forced if it is to last. And unity should not come at the expense of the vulnerable. Its integrity depends upon its ability to make the union safe and honourable.
How can you become one with a person or system who will not acknowledge or relent in their torment of you? This is not unity; it's annihilation.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“This is my body. Broken. This is my blood. Drained. Eat. Drink. Do this in remembrance of me.
It is queer and beautiful that some of us belong to a God who tells us to consume his body and blood in remembrance. What do the body and blood have to do with memory? How do they connect us to the story of liberation? It means something that the Euacharist, this lasting ritual of the presence and memory of God, is a physical nourishment as much as it is spiritual. I once went to a church that gave everyone a whole slice of bread and they actually buttered it. It felt wrong, but they had something so right. I love that we don't just bow to the bread, we eat it—the body of God entering our bodies.
And I think God's supposed to taste good.
That we have managed to regurgitate a Christian spirituality that is anything less than bodily glory, agony, healing, and restoration is our tragedy. I don't think it an accident that we are made to remember God through an act that nourishes us in our own bodies. I've heard much of bodily sacrifice, of taking
up a cross, of dying and dying again. But I need to hear of resurrection—of the bodily love of receiving the Eucharist.
You want to tell me to love God? Ask me when I've last eaten. Come now, you want me to tell you a prayer? You'll find it in the blood beating from heart to head to toe and home again.
Don't ask me of salvation, Listen to the hum of my chest as I now fall asleep. I cannot see the face of God by rejecting my own.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“A mentor and friend once said to me, If there is someone who is both activist and contemplative and who does both well, I have not yet met them. I silently accepted the challenge. He was articulating a very credible tension between the heart of the contemplative and the heart of the activist. At first strike, they appear inherently in conflict. The contemplative, some pillar of stillness, tasked with thinking and asking enduring questions that require a kind of slowness and pause. The activist, a beacon for the movement, committed to the doing of justice and mercy—not later but now, which does, as the name suggests, require action.
But what if what we take as stillness is not always inactivity as we perceive it? Can there be a form of contemplation that is at once stillness and movement? Some might say the beginnings of Christian monasticism were, in part, a defiant protest against the elitism and centering of the upper class in the faith.
And today, activism tells the truth about what is and imagines what should be. This imagination for justice requires contemplation.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“There is no blade of grass, no body, no starlight, that is not in the end begging for repair. This is not poetic despondence, it's a tragedy we must contend with in order to get free. Repair is more than justice. What do we do once the curse is lifted but the damage is untouched? When justice is had and the swords are beaten into plowshares but everyone's wounds are still bleeding in the open, what then? Justice doesn't survive without repair. We have to pause and bandage ourselves up habitually. Even when the oppressor has been defeated, we are worthy of tending to the pain of the past. Repair—truth-telling, reparations, healing, reconciliation—these are what breathe new life into us.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Reconciliation is so elusive because so few ever occupy a state of sincere remorse. If we are to be reconciled, the offender must become disturbed by the state of their soul—a contrition that births apology not for the sake of its own forgiveness but to honour the dignity that was once at risk.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“A few years ago, I reached the conclusion that I will no longer accept an unspecific apology for specific wrongs. If you cut me, I want you to apologize with grave specificity for the blood running down my back. And I want you to describe what in you made you do it. When you gain the courage to look at me, I want your soul to writhe like it was the back of God that was cut. This would make any sorry truer.
A friend once explained to me the second and often forgotten part of apology, which I now believe to be one of the holiest: when one asks to be forgiven. Mercy requires nothing from the offender, but to ask forgiveness is to shift the balance of power in favor of the wounded. It requires you to become vulnerable to their denial. For a moment or perhaps many moments, the weight of your soul depends on the humanity of the one you sought to demean. Will you forgive me? Please forgive me?”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“One night in California, my gramma was driving home, and she turned and ended up on a hill overlooking all the lights in the valley. I can't explain it. I just looked out at all that beauty and felt something shift in me. And I said out loud,
‘Wherever he is, I forgive the bastard.’ And that was it.
Forgiveness came to her not in a dramatic flourish or sudden comprehension; rather, it grew on her as slowly and fatefully as the fingernails crowning her hands. You participate in it, it comes from you, but it also is something that happens to you without you necessarily noticing. I don't think we have as much control over our forgiveness as we think. You can't force hair to grow faster than your body allows. I think this is okay.
You cannot reason resentment away, nor the trauma that grew it. There is time.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I shouldn't need to recite a litany of wounds and injustices and decay in order to justify my sadness. In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world's worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.”
Source: This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us