A Radical Gift of Love
gratitude for the most profound solidarity given to me this year and how its helped me re-encounter the incarnation
Hello friends, we made it!
The end of another year. I am grateful. And I am tired. I am content, which is cool because that’s not a word I use for myself often. But tired. The trees aren’t trying to get anything done right now and neither am I. Or, at least, I’d love to slide into that kind of fallowness for a while, but such is not the holiday season or end of year work crunch!
Speaking of work, I signed off the Thursday afternoon before Christmas. We shifted a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of contracts to local Black- and Brown-owned businesses this year. It matters, but it’s not much when in Boston the median African American’s household wealth is $20,550 while the median white household has $181,444. Our calls for reparations continue. We tripled revenue this year (admittedly not that crazy given how little we made in 2022! But I’m still proud :P). We officially founded the co-op with community- and worker-ownership. And we’ve saved the congregations and nonprofits who purchase through us hundreds of thousands of dollars. But, y’all, we have such a long long way to go. Building an institution with a fundamentally different DNA than racial capitalism that is still sustainable through its own earned revenue is not easy. Obviously. Not saying anyone’s surprised. I’m just saying I’m grateful for vacation. Whatever the co-op needs will be there on January 3rd.
Back home, the six pound baby who was sleeping on my legs when I wrote the first Toward Solidarity issue back in March is now 10.5 months old, sharing toothless grins and royal family-style waves like they grow on trees, and on the verge of walking. His big sister’s been doing the Dougie every time she hears the Jackson 5’s version of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town.” The girl can get down and we love it. I am, suffice it say, obsessed.
On Monday I finished a short essay on AI that will appear in Geez Magazine sometime next spring. I know I open myself to well-deserved critiques when I get too far out of my lane, but I think I have a unique angle. I’m looking forward to sharing it and unpacking those ideas a bit more in dialogue with you here. There’s another big project I finished on December 15th but we will talk about that when the time is right.
Meanwhile, this little blog turned newsletter has been a wonderful surprise. I’ve tried a lot of different things — we’ve done an interview, a variety of essay styles, spiritual meditations, political commentary, even a poetry and photo journal — and you all keep showing up. I’m deeply, deeply grateful.
You may or may not have heard that there is an important fight going on with the founders of this website on which I’m writing write now. Nazis (literal swastika-emblazoned Nazis) are making money by publishing here, making money for Substack, and mucking up the atmosphere. For now I’m staying put while weighing alternatives. I’ll unpack my thoughts more in future posts, but my primary urging on this matter has been for us to move strategically, think like organizers, and, yes, act in solidarity whether we stay or leave.
On the back end of this very full season, my head’s been in a bit of a fog, so this may not be my most refined essay. Nonetheless! I’ve been thinking about things I’m grateful for. And I’ve been meditating my way through this passage we’ve been on through the dark days of Advent into the night when God became God Enfleshed With Us: Emmanuel. What came to mind was the most powerful moment of solidarity I experienced this year and what that moment has to teach about the solidarity of God in Jesus, with the oppressed, and also, for some reason, with me.
Peace, joy, and justice,
Nathan
We circled a great stone table.
Phyllis Wheatley watched from above in the room rechristened in her honor — America’s first great Black poet and a long-departed member of the old church in which we’d gathered. She gazed into the middle distance holding her young face in her left hand; holding in her gaze all the pensive ambiguity of a girl struggling toward womanhood in a body both enslaved and ingenious.
If ever someone knew how to stack together freedom from the scraps, it was her. She who was the laureate and laudatur of the colonizer elite. Whether by conviction or coercion, we will never know, she wrote lines that offend today:
'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Whatever else she believed in her heart of hearts, she would use those lines to build an argument through her capturer’s own logic to demonstrate her humanity and the humanity of her people.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "Their colour is a diabolic die." Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
No one should have to base their right to freedom on their capacity to become a Christian. But that was a compelling argument to her audience who held the power to make freedom happen. So it’s the argument she made. In making it, the poet who at times seemed in the tradition of Thomson’s “Rule, Brittania!” used that format to subvert the tradition, asserted her own agency and Subjecthood, and made of herself the clearest proof case and cause of abolition.
On the cusp of the American Revolution, Wheatley was penning bars for a still more expansive vision of liberation.
But how presumptuous shall we hope to find Divine acceptance with the Almighty mind While yet o deed ungenerous they disgrace And hold in bondage Afric: blameless race Let virtue reign and then accord our prayers Be victory ours and generous freedom theirs.
Like Wheatley, we are all masons laboring among contradictions to make something meaningful and good—and if we dare dream wildly enough, something even beautiful, even liberating—from the fragments within reach.
That day, gathered around the stone table under the poet’s gaze, we seven had come to build something from the fragments assembled. Years of organizing long before me led to that sacred space where we attempted to determine how three cooperatives across three states, and the many more cooperatives we dreamed we would one day found in cities across the country, would come together into a common body to share power, limited resources, and the fruits of our labor.1 As we worked through the founding bylaws line by line, determining who would govern, how, and why, the question came to a head: would workers gain access to co-ownership of the cooperative or not? When history arrives at its kairotic moment, what then shall we do?
Ted Greenwood spoke up beneath the poet’s gaze.
“I absolutely believe we need a worker-owner class in the first draft of these bylaws.”
The room shifted. Time bent. Whatever other futures may have been, doors closed to those lesser chambers. Against passiveness, vagaries, minimization and circularity, Ted took a guileless stand.
Those words of his may have been the most profound act of political solidarity anyone has ever shown me.
The Community Purchasing Alliance Cooperative of which we were all a part had been consumer-owned, meaning the organizations that purchase through us are the members who collectively own our business and democratically set its course. This is a very good thing, a radical departure from traditional business models. Instead of a capital class wielding the power and extracting the profits, the community owns CPA. Within our model, workers are deeply respected. We practice a democratic model of decision-making and distributed leadership called Sociocracy. We have compensation systems better at ensuring equity than anything I’ve seen elsewhere. Yet even with all that, workers had no formal power at the level of ownership, no seat on the board that ultimately determined our futures, and no stake in the financial success or struggle of the cooperative.
Ted is a board member of mine here in Massachusetts. Ostensibly, he represents a synagogue that does contracting through our co-op. And yet he has never come to these tables leading with a narrow frame of self-interest. Everyone who came to the table that day did so with good intent and shared values. Not everyone was aligned with the question of whether or not to add a worker-ownership class to this new federation of cooperatives however. Amidst the contradictions, Ted put his weight behind something that is of no direct benefit to him. He did so because he thought it was right: that all of us are human, regardless of race or class or the role we play in the organization, and all humans deserve freedom, agency, power and the fruits of their labor. He also has the political savvy to know that in that particular moment his voice could shape an outcome with long-term significance. Ted’s act of solidarity tipped the conversation. Through a gift freely given, worker-ownership was voted in and is on its way.
Solidarity, as I typically portray it here, is something I—and those with identities like me—must move toward with those who bear the weight of oppression from a thousand directions. “They” are the ones with whom “we” privileged and powerful folk are called to empty ourselves in solidarity with. Not the other way around. Overly essentialist, yes, but not wrong most of the time, so far as it goes.
I think this is why Ted actions meant so much to me. It rarely even crosses my mind that the “love called solidarity” could be something I could experience for myself. Could a gift so powerful and caring be available to me?
Obviously solidarity among white guys is fraught. As an ethic or practice, solidarity is not an unqualified, universal good. It’s critical we remind ourselves of that. The questions “toward what?,” “with whom?,” and “through what means” matter a great deal. White supremacy is a form of solidarity among people who believe they are white and that their whiteness should mean entitlement to hoarding or stealing access, power, resources, and territories. Even in something closer to a trajectory of justice, like when white men practiced solidarity in labor movements, there is a long history of excluding women and people of color. So I’m hyper aware that the solidarities most frequently available to me personally—because I am white, or a man, or a parent of vulnerable little children, or a home-owner, or upwardly middle-class—are solidarities I try to reject (though I often fall short of doing so completely). Bonds of alliance like those ultimately shrink my humanity.
At the same time, acting like I’m in no personal need of solidarity would be equally fake. This too would shrink my humanity. Whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism reify themselves as much through individualism, paternalism, and unidirectional saviorism as through outright supremacy. I do not want to paper over my vulnerabilities, limitations, and interdependencies. It’s not bootstraps for me and compassion for them. I too labor under the unrelenting weight of capitalism, struggling to pay bills. I too long to be safe. I long to express the dignity of self-determination. I long to belong. I long to find meaning. If I allow myself to truly grow tender I can find within me a child who still feels he is wandering an inhospitable and frightening world, searching for someone safe to come snatch him up, hold him tight, and dispatch the monsters who lurk in the shadows.
These needs are relational in nature. We all have them. Being human is being in need of others. It is needing others to survive. It’s needing others to thrive. The problems begin when we look to meet these needs in ways that exclude or extract. We all need love. We’re all better off when we find that love through solidarities that draw the circle of belonging so wide nothing and no one is excluded.
Around 318 AD, the African theologian Athanasius of Alexandria described the incarnation as the kind of solidarity that leaves no one out:
“Through this union of the immortal Son of God with our human nature, all men were clothed with incorruption in the promise of resurrection. For the solidarity of humankind is such that, by virtue of the Word’s indwelling in a single human body, the corruption which goes with death has lost its power over all.”2
Athanasius is describing what we could call the vertical and horizontal dimensions of solidarity. God acts in solidarity with all of humanity through the incarnation. That’s the “vertical” axis. This is the self-emptying of power and privilege Paul describes in Philippians 2: the way God goes from immutable Creator of the universe to incarnated in the mortal body of a poor colonized ethnic minority laborer who is executed for joining in the struggle against the forces of empire, impoverishment, and religiosity. God’s gift to us is radical solidarity, becoming vulnerable to death by becoming enfleshed as and among those most subject to unjust deaths (and who continue to be subject to unjust deaths to this day). This is grace.
For Athanasius, God’s act of solidarity is effective for setting all humanity free from the power of death (including death incarnate in historical structures like the Roman Empire) because of what he calls “the solidarity of humankind.” This is the horizontal dimension. Whether we practice it or not, at the most essential level, we are one. One flesh, one kinship, one creation. When one of us overcomes death (aka, Jesus in the resurrection), we all partake in the liberating victory of life over death. In Athanasius’s words, thanks to God’s loving act of solidarity we call the incarnation, when Jesus dies and is resurrected, death is “abolished” because Jesus’ flesh is one with all humanity’s flesh.3 This tale of solidarity, abolition, and radical transformative inclusion is the basic story of salvation among the early church.
Alongside these vertical and horizontal expressions of solidarity, in a shimmering, slim, seldom read book called Theology of Christian Solidarity, Juan Hernández Pico draws out another critical axis of this story: it is a universal gift offered to everyone, but the integrity of this unity is tested by the fire of solidarity with the poor.
The liberation theologian writes:
This openness of the new community that Jesus convoked and called into existence, which leads it to enclose in its embrace the people of Israel and all peoples, is what constitutes the radical universality of the church of Jesus Christ.4
People like me are included. We too are offered grace. We too get a seat at the table. But it is no longer a seat of privilege. Inclusion in this community comes with the expectation of a new way of being in relationship that abolishes the old hierarchies of death (see Paul’s letters). At this table, those who were first are now last and the last are first.
Radical universality must be qualified by the unquestionable fact that Jesus called the first community of his disciples from among men and women who for the most part came from the stratta of those who were poor or ostracized by the society of his time—just as faith in Yahweh crystalized around a people that originated from groupings that were impoverished and dominated.5
Later he expands on the implications of a universal community that privileges the poor and practices solidarity.
The universality of this call to human beings who differ from one another owning to their origins (religious, racial, cultural, social, sexual, etc.) is Christian and really ecclesial only when believers advance toward a new alternative of personal social life where equality prevails and life is being built up through solidarity. That is why holding possession in common and standing in co-responsibility for the sufferings and joys of brothers and sisters is the basic attitude that Paul repeatedly urges: ‘Help carry one another’s burdens,’ ‘bearing with one another,’ ‘bear with one another.’ (Gal 6:2; Eph. 4:2; Col. 3:13). This attitude extends from sharing the knowledge of God to sharing material goods.6
I absolutely love that paragraph.
Solidarity gets extended to people like me too. Of course it does. I too am human, with all my vulnerabilities and gifts, and that is all it takes to deserve inclusion in the beloved community. But inclusion in this radical new community means becoming de-centered, extracted from all hierarchies, and brought into a new identity through the practice of bearing with others in their “sufferings and joys.”
This is in a nutshell the theology behind why I am working to build the solidarity economy. If Jesus was truly incarnated at Christmas and risen at Easter, then we can no longer build societies where some rule and own while others serve and labor. In the kin-dom where death has been abolished, slaves are set free and we build cooperatives where all things are held in common!
Here at the end of the year, I’m grateful for people in my life who, in their own ways, understand and incarnate this way of being.
I’m grateful for saints and martyrs long past like Wheatley who, amidst all their imperfections, amidst all the contradictions of their situations and with all the limitations of the tools they had to work with, in the face of so much injustice, modeled ways to imagine and build a world that is more just, inclusive, and beautiful.
I’m grateful for Ted who had power and used it to include me and my coworkers at the table.
I’m grateful for a little girl who, each night before bed for the past couple weeks when we sing “Away in a Manger,” hears of this baby who has “no crib for a bed” and who has to sleep “on the hay,” and this little girl does not hear those lyrics as a sweet sentimental lullaby. She tells us in a concerned voice, “But I don’t want he to sleep on hay. I want he to sleep in a house.” She intuitively gets that her privilege is something she should share and ensure others get. And I love her for it.
I’m renewed in my gratitude for Jesus, too, simple and cliche as that might sound. The more I’ve reflected on what God in Jesus did through the perspective described above—as this unimaginable act of solidarity with the poor and oppressed that was, impossibly, also solidarity that included me me in this grand renewal—I’ve come to the edge of getting emotional multiple times…which is not normal for me. Even in this moment, writing these closing words, I feel a warmth spreading through my chest rising up my throat. I think it is awe at such beautiful love. Such love that makes me thrill to go and do likewise.
The technical term is “Cooperative Federation” — ie, a cooperative whose member-owners are other cooperatives. We’re calling ours the CPA Cooperative Network. Catchy ;)
Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation. Pantianos Classics version, page 22.
Ibid. “This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.”
Jon Sobrino and Juan Hernández Pico, Theology of Christian Solidarity, page 73
Ibid., 74
Ibid., 75-76. Italics original.