Closing thoughts for our Lenten Journey
A few concrete suggestions for putting whiteness to death: contemplation, reparations, and building solidarity economies
Hello friends,
Hope y’all are doing well—taking in spring and whatever’s blooming from the soil beneath you.
In today’s newsletter I’d like to offer a few concluding thoughts to wrap up our Lenten Series: Dying to Whiteness (which began here and ended here). This is not a close on the topic—which is woven at some level through everything here—so much as an opportunity to more explicitly make a couple practical observations on the themes we traveled through.
I often go back to a simple model of the inner and outer concentric circles of our spiritual-prophetic lives. Katie Cannon pointed this framework out in the teachings of Howard Thurman.1 The interior circle is the inward journey of becoming one’s true self. Surrounding that inner circle, emerging from the inner circle and flowing back into it, is the exterior journey of social transformation.
In the context of this series, I want to ask: what are the practical implications of this journey we’ve been on toward the death of whiteness for, on one hand, our spiritual practice and, on the other, our social praxis?
Transforming Our (Racialized) Selves
The modern contemplative movement—at least in regard to white people in the United States—was heavily influenced by the mid/late-twentieth century explosion in psychology. Drawing on concepts from psychoanalysis and Carl Jung, the framework of the “ego” became an important touchstone for translating ancient intuitions and theological language into contemporary terms. This helped a new generation get their hands around what was occurring in the midst of contemplative prayer and what that practice was pursuing.
Here are a few of the most prominent exemplars:
As his student David Frenette put it, “Thomas Keating translated mystical Christianity into modern, psychological terms.”2 Keating’s famous teaching recorded in Contemplative Prayer: Traditional Christian Meditations for Opening to Divine Union is an in-depth look at child developmental psychology and the formation of the ego.3 He graciously explains why developing our sense of self (the ego) as strategies of defense and survival is crucial—even healthy—to our ability to move through a difficult, confusing, and some cases traumatic world as children. But the journey of human life takes us through and beyond the separate ego, with its particular wounds and patterned expressions, into a less individualistic sense of our identity: ultimately waking up to the truth of Christ in us and our true self in Christ through which we are connected with everything.
James Finley, Thomas Merton’s novitiate and a major influence on contemporary mysticism, offers a classic formulation of mystical theology when he says, “The spiritual life for Merton is a journey in which we discover ourselves in discovering God, and discover God in discovering our true self hidden in God….Our true self is a self in communion.”4 While Finley is brilliant at composing the complex metaphysics of mystical theology, in his more pragmatic sentences, he also describes the “false self” we need to relinquish through contemplation as a construction of “ego-centric desires.”
Finley’s co-teacher and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation Richard Rohr has also described the spiritual life as a journey of overcoming the egoic “small self.” For him, much like Keating, the ego is the personality and set of tools—both productive and destructive—we develop to carve out a sense of identity, manage early life wounds, and survive in a complicated world. “Your False Self is who you think you are,” says Rohr. “Your thinking does not make it true. Your False Self is almost entirely a social construct to get you started on your journey. It is a set of agreements between your childhood and your parents, your family, your neighbors, your school chums, your partner or spouse, and your religion. It is your ‘container’ for your separate self.”5 For specific insight into the various ego-projects each of us develop and move with/through in our spiritual lives, Rohr tends to have the Enneagram types in mind (something I continue to work with all the time in my own journey of personal growth and integration…I’m a Type 1 to absolutely no one’s shock!).
Rohr and Finley’s colleague Cynthia Bourgeault agrees with them but has called closer attention to the specific neurological operations of perception, arguing that contemplative practices like Centering Prayer effectively rewire the mind from dualistic modes to “nondualism.” That dualism includes the stark division of the world into “I” and “not I.” This “I” is in part the association of particularly “thought-loops” and emotions with one’s personality. “At some point,” she writes, “a thought-loop will entrain with one’s sense of identity—an emotional value or point of view is suddenly at stake—and then on is hooked.” Contemplation is a practice of kenosis (letting go or self-emptying) that allows us to release, disidentify, and disengage by noticing those thoughts, allowing them to float away, and resting the heart in God.6
Two notes before I offer some constructive criticism.
First, by highlighting their common focus on the “ego” as a site of mystical kenosis, I don’t mean to reduce the complex and differentiated thought of these contemplative fathers and mothers. None of them shrink the entirety of what the Spirit is up to to this category. Nor are any of them guilty of outright disowning the body, creation, history, or politics—though I am curious if the metaphysical and psychological frameworks we’ve inherited (both from this generation but also from the longer mystic tradition) are the best foundation for the liberating, healing, historical-material-as-spiritual work we need in the century ahead. I have quite a few subscribers who are much more expert on these brilliant mystics (including readers who know/knew and work with them intimately), so I welcome your comments and pushback :)
Secondly, I’m able to quote them because I’m a devoted reader and follower of these teachers: their work has touched me deeply, transformed my Christian imagination, and offered a gateway into a new kind of fervent spiritual life I was desperately seeking.
What I want to suggest, however, is that the “ego”—including its Enneagram treatments—is not a sufficient category for mapping the “modern self” [a term that hides the “colonial self” in its shadows7] that needs to be put to death through our communal participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. I think the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino is exactly right when he says, “The new spirituality springs forth ‘in the context of the struggle for liberation in view of love and justice,’ and this context historicizes the timeless traits of liberation from oneself in a new way. In view of one’s own sin and that of the world, a death-dealing sin, one must experience a conversion.”8
A concern I have with the object of spirituality becoming our individual psychology is that it can reduce the ends of spirituality to a technique of escape for our own psychic sufferings. So many of us do indeed need this healing. But neither individualized spirituality nor psychology can get us all the way there. In part because this is obviously a self-defeating pathway to what spirituality itself is meant to affect: self-forgetting and love. Contemplatives love the passage where Jesus says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” But too often we forget the rest of the gospels. The “within” is only the inner circle, with another vast circle of relations enfolding it. The hope of spirituality must remain the cultivation of living out the love of the spirit of God for a world suffering from injustice, first and foremost, alongside the sufferings which are simply the natural effect of being a mortal creature.
Let’s expand the boundaries of contemplative spirituality’s useful focus on relinquishing the false self. The false self is more than individually constructed elements of our identity. We must recognize the ways it is also formed by and inherited from socially constructed components.
In our case, and here again I am speaking to white (Christian) Americans, the sin that needs to die and thing from which we must be converted is whiteness. What would it look like if contemplative prayer and teachings were oriented toward the kenotic relinquishment of that? How would our categories for what counts as contemplative prayer expand? What kind of spiritual practices would we need to reformulate or create?
Some are out there beginning to chart these paths. No surprise that they are mostly Black thinkers and contemplatives. These include Chichi Agorom’s The Enneagram for Black Liberation, Barbara Holmes Joy Unspeakable and Crisis Contemplation, and Patrick Saint-Jean SJ who is reimagining Ignatian Spirituality for the work of racial healing and justice in works like The Spiritual Work of Racial Justice and The Spirituality of Transformation, Joy, and Justice. Secular works like Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmothers Hands and the Zen-rooted writing of Rhonda McGee in The Inner Work of Racial Justice have also made enormous contributions to this work of healing and transforming our racialized selves. Faith Matters Network is a wonderful example of how this work can be operationalized for social movements (I had the chance to be certified through their Movement Chaplaincy program a few years ago and loved it).
These are fabulous resources. But where are the white contemplatives who long to affect these changes in ourselves and our communities, the white people prophetically advancing these conversations, tools, and transformations? May we also put our hands to this plow to reimagine our spiritual traditions for the task of weeding out whiteness and cultivating liberated selves for a liberated world.
Transforming Our (Racialized) Society
Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking, “Ok guy, I appreciate the contemplative stuff, that’s why I subscribed, but I’m not so sure about the social revolutionary stuff you kept alluding to in all those newsletters. That was a lot of half-way decent prose you threw out at us over lent, but isn’t all that ‘new social order’ talk just a bunch of idealistic pie-in-the-sky stuff we can’t actually do anything about? What can I actually do about capitalism or slavery? I’m not rich and I’m not the president of the United States, ok?”
Sure, I hear you. And sometimes I get too into the “show don’t tell” writing principle instead of just saying explicitly what I have in mind. So let’s take another look.
I consider myself a pragmatic idealist. I don’t want to compromise on the ideals: the radical imagination for the world as it should be. And yet I also want to see real things happen, real people’s lives be touched in practical ways that actually lets them buy a sandwich, have quality housing, feel safe, exercise agency and belong.
There are four concrete things I’d like to see us commit to:
Reparations
Facing and telling the truth
Build a post-capitalist social order, something like that envisioned by the solidarity economy
Practicing solidarity by following and struggling alongside Black, Indigenous, and other leaders of color, and by building the power to win the changes in (1) and (3)
These are concrete ways of living, ways of being contemplatives in action, that can put whiteness to death both as means and as ends.
I recognize that those recommendations can sound quite daunting and tough to get our hands around at first blush. So, let’s explore some examples of people doing this work in the real world.
I just had the opportunity to read a review copy of a newly edited collection titled Reparations and the Theological Disciplines: Prophetic Voice for Remembrance, Reckoning, and Repair (very good but prohibitively expensive). I’m going to draw some of these examples from the case studies contributors to this volume provided, and some from my personal experience.
First, there’s the Minnesota Council of Churches who are pursuing a Three-Point Action Platform for Racial Justice. This came out of their response to George Floyd’s murder in their own backyard and the uprising for racial justice that followed. Their work now follows these three pillars:
Truth Telling: MCC offers a strong moral voice that calls for truth telling, welcomes lament, advocates for reparations, and holds systems accountable for change. Faith communities provide a redemptive space for acknowledging past egregious, intentional oppression, and redressing past injustice and present inequities through specific acts of penance and contribution. Truth telling also includes naming complicity by faith communities in racial injustice.
Education: MCC creates anti-racism and cultural competency training to complement what is already occurring in denominations and congregations.
Reparations in Indigenous and Black Communities: MCC pursues the goal to repair the harm done by racism in partnership with faith communities and other engaged actors (government, business, academic, etc.). A process for reparations and equity will be developed by MCC throughout the State of Minnesota. The reparations process is coordinated with truth telling.
Truth telling and education are much more straightforward ways of getting at the same basic content I was talking about with my language of “facing the real.” There are multiple dimensions here, but so far as the public witness work of pushing and pulling our society toward facing reality, in many ways it does come down to these two programmatic pillars.
Pairing a “truth and reconciliation” type process with actual material reparations, as MCC does, is a critical learning for the 21st century. It’s the kind of integrated process that was taken between white people in the wake of Nazi Germany by way of reparations to the State of Israel. But the more celebrated Truth and Reconciliation Commission launched after the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa failed to attach monetary, land, and other material reparations to the process between white settlers and indigenous Black Africans. That failure preserved the basic racialized inequity of the country and undermined efforts to rebuild a just South Africa.
Other contributors to Reparations and the Theological Disciplines are right point out, however, that as essential as reparations are to addressing the history of exploitative and expropriative sins on which the United States of America was built, we must go even further than reparations if we are to establish sustainable justice.
Malcolm Foley introduces his contribution to the discussion on reparations by recognizing that, “While I am a historian, the treatment of reparations requires more than a dispassionate historical account of harm causes and payment due. What is required, especially for the Christian, is the connection between that account of harm and what that means for love of neighbor.” This is always the fundamental ethical question: what does love require?
Foley’s historical analysis grounds the question of reparations in the more basic question, where did race and racial inequality come from in the first place? Following in the footsteps of Black movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, W.E.B. du Bois, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker and more, he reminds us “the problem was not merely a problem of laws—or, even beyond that, a problem of hate. Race and racism ultimately come down to a problem of resources.” He agrees with Malcolm X who said, “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” Therefore, “racism is a matter of political economy….White supremacist violence is not rooted in frenzy, emotionalism, ignorance, or hate. It is rooted ultimately in exploitation, greed, and the maintenance of social power…..Racialized chattel slavery [was not] primarily an institution of hate; fundamentally it involved the exploitation of labor.” Race and racism was and is a “practical exploitative relationship” which has been best described by the compound term “racial capitalism.”
What then must be done? Foley argues, “While cash payments would likely be an important part of any plan for reparations, what is especially necessary is a different system, a different political economy, and a different way of interacting with our neighbors, our brothers and sisters.”
A good example of what it looks like to integrate reparations with this still deeper work of revolutionary social transformation is the Reimagining America Project: The Truth, Reconciliation, and Atonement Commission of Charlotte, North Carolina. Rodney Sadler Jr. describes RAP’s work as being rooted in the Hebrew and Christian theological idea and spiritual-communal practice of atonement:
“‘At-one-ment’ is the act of making something that has been broken, ruptured, destroyed, and decimated whole. More than anything else, after centuries of systematic dehumanization, devaluation, and denigration, the African American community needs to be made whole. The tendency in the United States is to evaluate trauma through an economic lens and calculate loss in monetary terms. But as RAP considered the holistic concept of atonement, we realized that such a concept requires far more than a financial response. We imagined that atonement would begin with the elimination of the concept race itself and its constituent hierarchies that control access to wealth, power, and privilege in our contexts. Only then could we imagine a system of equals and identify where systemic choices fostered the intentional imbalances in wealth, power, and privilege evident today. Thus, atonement would mean the elimination of the view of race as a legitimate means of hierarchically dividing human beings along a color spectrum. it would also require that we examine the systems in which race has operated in order to (1) illustrate the harm that hits idea has caused in that system; (2) reimagine what that system would look like if it were just, fair, and equitable; and (3) work to make that just society a reality.”9
Sadler, who has a background working with the Moral Monday’s coalition, extends the concept of “fusion movements” developed there and popularized by William Barber II, into the language of “fusion justice.”
“Instead of simply seeking compensation, we want to strive for comprehensive justice in every system: education, employment, politics, policing, criminal justice, housing, healthcare, environmental/climate justice—every system in our society….Each impinges on all the others…In order to make America whole, we need ‘fusion justice,’ a comprehensive way of atoning for more than four hundred years of intended imbalance—a reimagining of America. By fusion justice in this instance, I mean a view of justice that de-silos systems and recognizes their interrelatedness.”10
One way of trying to get at this reimagined America rooted in the question of love of neighbor could be approached by asking: what would it look like to build the opposite of a plantation?
Over the past decade, I’ve been drawn toward the constellation of movements, imaginations, and projects called the Solidarity Economy as one compelling way to deconstruct racial capitalism and build the opposition of the plantation: to build a shalom-based economy.
Here is a description I offered on the Solidarity Economy in an article for the Journal of Urban Mission:
In direct opposition to colonial capitalism’s destruction of people and planet, a movement to develop a radical alternative called the “solidarity economy” has emerged in places used and discarded by plantation masters. The solidarity economy includes a broad set of practices aligned with the values of solidarity, participatory democracy, equity in all dimensions, sustainability, and pluralism.11 The New Economy Coalition’s website describes the solidarity economy as “growing out of social movements in Latin America and the Global South, [which] provides real alternatives to capitalism, where communities govern themselves through participatory democracy, cooperative and public ownership, and a culture of solidarity and respect for the earth.” The solidarity economy includes various institutional forms of cooperatives, community financial institutions like credit unions, and community land trusts while also resurfacing the value of non-self-interest-centered practices like gifts and mutual aid. In its exchange of hierarchical domination for cooperative mutuality, the solidarity economy offers one model for repudiating the white master archetype and enacting “love made public” (to paraphrase Cornel West).
One organization weaving all of this together, who I have the joy of working with closely, is Episcopal City Mission — a foundation affiliated with the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. Their strategy links these modes of social change together into a powerful force:
Episcopal Organizing- Build a base of Episcopalians in Massachusetts actively engaged in closing the racial wealth gap by tithing, advocating for relevant public policy, and directing investment to solidarity economies.
Grant Support - Sharpen our grantmaking contribution by deepening partnerships with BIPOC-led power and movement building organizations in Massachusetts.
Reparations - Lead by example by making a bold reparations payment and plan for sustained increase of draw on the endowment for grantmaking and alternative investments.
Storytelling - Leverage our impact and moral voice by amplifying the stories of repair, healing and justice from ECM and our partners.
Solidarity Economies - Develop relationships to partner with local solidarity economies that will lay the groundwork for the future release of ECM assets to solidarity economies.
Here we see reparations (a jubilee, resetting racial equity) paired with storytelling (facing the real, truth-telling, education), organizing (to build power for these changes), and solidarity economy work (building the alternative beloved community that can sustain the equity and dignity reparations begins). I love how these leaders are earnestly seeking to weave this model in the midst of the work, knowing there are no clear roadmaps but, nonetheless, ways must be made by the walking.
A final inspiring model, focused on rematriating land owned by Catholic orders and churches to Indigenous communities with whom they form relationships, is Land Justice Futures—an amazing initiative that emerged out of an experimental spiritual community called Nuns & Nones (a fabulous case study of the ways inner work, particularly in community, unfolds into outer work).
The examples could go on and on. I promise there’s one near you.
To learn more and get involved in reparations for Black Americans you can follow the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’Cobra) and the National African-American Reparation Commission (NAARC). Here in Boston, get involved with Embrace’s powerful work.
To go deeper on the solidarity economy movement follow the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network and the New Economy Coalition.
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Here is my point in putting all of this on the page.
Let’s not throw our hands up and say dismantling the inner formations and social structures of whiteness is too big, too impossible. Let’s not pretend this is all just theoretical and no one’s thought through how to actually do this stuff (therefore, this logic tries to say, I don’t have to figure it out or actually be challenged to live differently either). Friends, there are plenty of ways to get on with concrete, transformative work. There are plenty of people already proving it can be done in big ways. There is reason enough for hope and plenty to pour love into. Let’s get on with it.
Thanks for being on this journey with me,
Nathan
see the wonderful last chapter in Katie Cannon’s Black Womanist Ethics.
David Frenette, The Path of Centering Prayer: Deepening Your Experience of God, xx.
I first heard the audio of this lecture series by Keating in 2019 at a weeklong silent retreat at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, MA — where Keating and Fr. William Meninger lived when they were first developing the outline of centering prayer. The monks put it on for us to contemplate as we took our meals in silence.
James Finley, Merton’s Palace of Nowhere, 35.
Richard Rohr, Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self, 36.
Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice.
see Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Nelson Maldonado-Torres “On The Coloniality of Being,” and Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”
Jon Sobrino, Spirituality of Liberation: Toward Political Holiness, 63
Rodney S. Sadler Jr., “Witness: Reparations or Atonement,” Reparations and the Theological Disciplines, 188.
Ibid., 189