Jubilee and Life Among the Limping Liberated
the thing about the beloved community is there will still be humans there...thank God
Dear friends,
I hope summer is letting you get far outside walls and deep inside your body. I’ve been moving through thickly forested trails around Boston a lot lately and gosh is it giving me life! The other thing giving me life is watching my almost 4 year old and 16 month old play together with the absolute joy of two kids obsessed with one another. It really doesn’t get better.
How about you? What’s giving you life?
In other news: happy belated Juneteenth! To the 40% or so of you who were subscribed to this newsletter a year ago, you may remember I wrote an essay about connecting for the first time with folks who were prepping for their annual Juneteenth party in a tiny Freedman’s town called Kendelton a few miles from where I grew up. It’s a good one to go back and read if you missed it. I was thinking about Kendelton again this year when my mom sent me a link to an announcement that they won a $10 million grant to build a nationally-significant monument in remembrance of convict leasing, lynching, Juneteenth and Black people’s survival and vibrance in the face of racial oppression. This is a BIG deal. In the middle of county/community that’s a long way from eager to face its history and do anything systemic about it. I’m so excited to follow this closely and praying ways to support emerge.
Last week I got the green light on a final draft of my book review of Reparations and the Theological Disciplines: Prophetic Voices for Remembrance, Reckoning, and Repair which will be published by Pacific Review in November. I’m excited to share it with you. It’s an important book but prohibitively expensive as academic texts often are, so I was grateful for the chance to share 1200 words that can make a small contribution to popularizing its call to action.
- - -
This week I’m sharing an old essay in honor of the one and only Geez Magazine who is shutting its doors this month after a glorious run publishing words that have been good food for mystic misfits longing for a just world.
I had the honor of writing this short essay for Geez a few years ago in an issue organized around the theme of “Jubilee.” It just so happened I’d had the opportunity to declare a jubilee with some friends. They were about to be the first wave of folks exiting life on the streets to become residents of Beloved Community Tiny Home Village (for context: I was one of the founders of this org but that’s a longer story). Looking back on that jubilee ceremony I can’t help but laugh. The Greek’s were onto something with their comic-tragedies. It was an incredible night, something we needed. And what came next was as messy, hard, and beautiful as anything I’ve experienced. That’s the thing we tend to forget about life on the other side of the revolution once the utopias we’ve dreamed about have arrived: there will still be people there. On the other side of jubilee, wounded human life goes on. And, as I’m still learning to say: thank God. I wouldn’t want it any other way.
I hope you enjoy. And I hope you remember Geez with gratitude for everything they did for years to cultivate “contemplative cultural resistance.”
This is my thank you to you, Geez.
In the crisp high plains heat of a late July evening in 2017, we drew to one another. The streets of Denver had been groaning since five years prior when a draconian camping ban escalated the city’s criminalization of poverty. Each night as police came wielding that violence which is theirs by law, alley walls echoed with a lonesome question:
“Move along to where?”
The question was on Amanda’s lips that morning when cops swept her from a park.
Move along to where?
After two years of concerted organizing, we had achieved a painfully temporary and partial answer to that question. Nine months earlier, a video of our direct action went viral and the demand for an alternative community raised by people experiencing homelessness broke through. From there, it took seven months of planning, neighborhood outreach, and design followed by two long months of construction for our friends from the streets to finally feel the texture of freshly cut keys to Beloved Community Village in their hands.
That night organizers, volunteers, and newly minted villagers gathered on the broken cement slab ringed by tiny homes, looked at one another through grief and hope, and declared a Jubilee.
A jumble of questions have clung to me during the four years since we stood in that circle and said, for us, in this moment, the debts are canceled and the land has been returned.
What freedom happened that day? What bondage remained? What landscapes of liberation can a few people still swallowed in the bowels of an empire claim and create? How fragile or resilient is that freedom? What healed? What festered? Which of the old world’s wounds became a guide toward the new creation?
In the spirit of the Jubilee, our little village was attempting to be both a place of belonging and a source of material security, and through those twin foundations, to become a community of healing. The bonds of oppression are wound through finance and real estate and prisons, down through neighborhoods and family systems, into nerves and the very tissues of the heart. The work of freedom--and thus the work of jubilee--is the undoing of every cord of bondage and the reintegration of each of these systems for life. So as we built homes and cultivated relationships, we also wrote down our shames that first evening. The evil words we’d been told, the mornings kicked awake by cops, the lies we’d come to believe, family baggage, even the wounds we’d given one another in the struggles of our work. We wrote them all down and tossed them in a trash can and lit that shit on fire. We watched the smoke rise and said let us begin tomorrow anew, at home in community, and, in the knowledge that we are beloved, model for the world what beloved community looks like.
Such were our sacred intentions. I am reminded that, at least so far as the Biblical narrative locates it, the Jubilee was given to the Hebrews in the long wait between leaving Egypt and becoming Israel. Even as the Jubilee puts an end to one story, it always marks the beginning of another. It is in that new story where the real work begins.
The stories of empire are fractured by the promise of jubilee. And yet those fractured fragments of imperial stories can still so often be found inside the clutching fingers and shrapnel wounds of the liberated. The Hebrews were no longer working Pharaoh's brick fields, but they still had to struggle against the logics and desires of those brick fields working within them. That’s why the prophets remind us, tenderly and sternly, that God’s liberation is always for the purposes of building a new people. We are set free to live out a radical departure from the ways of Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and America.
“I am the God who brought you out of Egypt, therefore . . . ”
To live after jubilee is to live in grace toward the therefore.
So it was for us. Friends, the communities that form on the other side of jubilee are nothing if not communities of the traumatized. They’re groups of wounded and healing mystic addicts who wound and heal, collectives of the unlearning and forgetting and rediscovering, wise fools who steal nickels and give everything away for love.
Jubilee, in my limited experience, is always both an event and a process. It is a renaming and a remembering of our new names. It is an abolition and a mistakes-laden journey of cultivating structures that lead to life. Jubilee – as with all salvations – was never and could never be a one time cure. It is offered as a sacred practice: the practice of the limping liberated. —
One last thing…
Looking for a spiritual director?
Can I suggest mine?
Ryan Taylor has been one of my wisest friends and mentors for the past eight years or more. He was the long-time director of a hospitality cafe in Denver for folks living on the streets and other margins. He’s a true contemplative in the real world. Meeting with him has been one of the best uses of an hour every couple of weeks I can think of — it’s opened up a shocking amount of stuff for me in a short period of time. If we want to actually be transformed by our experiences, we need guides and accompaniment on this journey by people who can point out the shimmer leaves that reveal where the Spirit’s winds are blowing. Ryan might be a gift for some of you, as he’s been for me.
You can get in touch with him at accessryan@gmail.com. I’m happy to share more about my experience if you’re interested.