New Life, Wilder than Ever

new baby, new co-op, new newsletter name!

I started this draft with a six day old in my lap. Here was my melt-your-heart scene ❤️

We named him Wilder. Not because we hope he grows up feral or that he needs to share in his parents’ love of wild places. We named him Wilder, first of all, because its freaking cool. But wildness holds something deeper, too; dare I say, theological. In the Western imagination, wilderness came to mean unknown territories filled with danger. They were something separate from humanity, untrammeled. This was never the case, of course, just colonial ignorance. To be wild is for a creature to come into its true self. But a wild thing is never wild alone. A single wildflower in a pot isn’t a wildflower anymore. Wildness happens in a healthy ecology of relationships with others. To grow wilder is to become who you were created to be in the context of healthy community. That is my prayer for this little boy—that he becomes whoever God created him to be, and that he grows into that person through the gift of community.

Today, Wilder’s eleventh day in this strange and beautiful world, I’m sitting by his hospital bed, an IV scrawling from his hand to the antibiotic drip fighting the bacteria that infected his tiny eye. He’ll be fine, but here we are. Off on our first grand adventure together, sooner than either of us expected. [As this newsletter goes out, Wilder is 14 days old, and we’re home from the hospital. He’s doing great and once again conked out asleep in my lap :-)]

In spite of everything, this year seems to promise new life—the proof of it is sleeping right in front of me. And yet this new life always seems somehow harder than we expected it to be. Why does joy have to come with suffering as often as it does?

A problem for Christians when we hope for new life, when we dream of a new creation, is that we’re hopelessly utopian and in the wrong way. Our eschatological dreams are of a time and place where the struggles that make life human are erased and we’re instead plunged into some sort of problem-free sensory deprivation tank called heaven where the only emotions are bliss and whatever worship feels like. Heaven has no conflict, but no surprises either. No frailty, no pain. No adventures.

I can’t speak for growing up around other traditions, but if you came up around evangelicalism, you ingested some version of this story and were taught to measure your mortal life against it.

But if newborns get sick, why not also the reborn? If the resurrected Jesus still had his scars, why is it so impossible to imagine he still felt sore around those wounds, still felt the ache of betrayal in his risen heart?

I remember when a favorite professor, Karen Crozier, challenged my seminary classmates and I with the question, “What’s wrong with utopia?” Visions of the good life, and the good social order required for the good life to be founded on a form of justice which ensures it is shared by all, are extremely useful. Think of Dr. King’s Beloved Community and all the imaginative work that dream did to undergird a movement. But if your utopia is fashioned in the image of a prosperity gospel and bad White Jesus art, you’re likely to find life as it actually exists a series of severe shocks and disappointments—you might even find yourself labeling “the world” wicked and sinful in toto. Something similar can be said of the more naive expectations and morality plays I’ve encountered on the left, but that’s for a different blog.

As I get deeper into my thirties, I’m ready for a new life that’s still real life. I’m learning how being human is as good as it gets. Quite humbling actually. It turns out I have some unspoken dreams of grandiosity—ie, perfection—to get over/through.

There is no more gorgeous crucible than this for becoming tender, all this struggle, this suffering that’s just a part of being mortal. No better way to deepen our capacities and competencies to offer care, learning to embrace the tears always somewhere inside our chest, growing into the lightness and heaviness possible in every moment where joy and lament coexist, where most days are about running errands and cleaning the dishes and life is all the more remarkable because of it. The real trick of being human, perhaps some element even of what we could call the meaning of life, is being in the midst of life as it is and finding more and more the ability to respond in love and inclusion instead of harm and violence. The wounded Christ who gathered a group of wounded folks into a broken community to be God’s healing presence in the world seems to offer just such a strange non-utopic utopia as this. And this is the wild new life I’m yearning for. It’s a messier story of shalom than I’ve shlepped over the past decade of writings but it’s time to grow into it. Where would I rather be then holding this little boy through good days and bad?

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It feels like I’ve been busy trying to build utopia for a while now. From my earliest ill-fated social enterprise ventures, to starting a truly messy organization (which has now blossomed into something remarkable) with people experiencing homelessness to launch the Beloved Community Village, to the breathless coalition spaces I’ve organized with in a variety of movements, to helping churches offer their land at the service of creating affordable and inclusive housing, to just gathering with friends in various intentional ways, this attempt to participate in the building of a new creation has been my vibe for the past decade and a half now. Most of it has contained some foretaste of the shalom I long for, some little addition to the liberation of the poor and oppressed I seek to serve. All of it has been full of brokenness and inadequacy.

I’m proud of this weird resume. Hope to continue it. And I’m learning to, if not embrace, then at least hold the tension of what these new creations always are: deeply human collectives and institutions that get some things right, get some things wrong, and at their best lean into solidarity in relationships and a collective commitment to healing and liberation and to keep trying again day after day. This is the odd, unexpected dialectic emerging from my second decade of praxis. The invitation is to hold together an increasingly radical vision of a liberated social order with a more gracious disposition toward the awkward, incomplete, contradictory ways we always end up actually practicing and producing.

In the spaces I’m moving in today, we call the pluriform utopic futures we’re working toward the solidarity economy. My small current contribution is as incomplete, messy, and contradictory as anything I’ve done has ever been. I’ve spent the past two and a half years organizing and running a democratically government, community-owned cooperative of churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, health centers, and other nonprofits. These groups combine their purchasing power to support themselves and create the means to use their spending as a force for repairing the racial wealth gap and restoring the environment. It is as beautiful and brilliant a thing as any I’ve been part of, with chain-shattering potential to drive social transformation. It’s also, honestly, probably the most frustrating and, too often, compromise-inducing, and at times just boring project I’ve ever worked on. We have repeated been so close to landing significant contracts with Black-owned businesses, only to see the money go elsewhere. Many of my days are spent explaining how electricity contracts work and haggling with waste haulers who missed another pick-up. That’s how it goes. To paraphrase my favorite apocryphal Dorothy Day quote, everybody wants to be part of the revolution but nobody wants to do the dishes (h/t Amanda Henderson). These past few years have been nothing if not an elite apprenticeship in learning to embrace doing the dishes.

The same day my second child was born, we received word from the Massachusetts Secretary of State that our bylaws and articles of organization were accepted, and our co-op was official in the eyes of the law. Another new creation was born.

Anyways, part of the reason I’m sending this newsletter in the first place is to tell you about an article I wrote last year about our co-op, how it works, and some of the theology and theory of change that, at least for me, lie underneath.

It’s for the Journal of Urban Mission, which is neat for me because according to my diploma, that’s what I have a master’s degree in. So it was fun to self-consciously push the narrative in a sub-community I don’t fully identify with anymore but that shaped me in many ways I’m grateful for.

I think it’s pretty good. Here’s the opening paragraph full of thrillingly provocative questions:

What would it mean for the church to intercept the becoming of cities and turn them toward the joy of communion? How might this alternative trajectory in the spiritual-material life of cities interact with ecological systems to cultivate shared wellbeing for all members of creation? Could the urban minister—as community organizer, community developer, prophetic dreamer and spiritual director—theologically imagine and weave together alternatives to social structures that have sought to “seek and kill and destroy?” And if the destabilization of natural systems and undoing of this planet’s wellbeing is in some manner linked to the production of Black, Indigenous, and other peoples of color as permanent underclasses, then how can urban ministers integrate the tasks of undoing these harms?

Now that you’re on the edge of your seat, go read it!

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On to the elephant(s) in the room.

What’s going on with this newsletter/blog/thing??

1) I changed the name.

What?? We’re taking a leap people! Since 2014 or 2015, I’ve been blogging under the title For Shalom. Something clicked in my heart and life when some Anabaptists introduced me to this Hebrew word that captures so much of the dream of God for creation. When it is so easy to be against so many things, particularly in activist communities, particularly in this world so full of structural evil, I have always felt grounded in a sense of what I’m for. That hasn’t changed.

But I’ve increasingly felt compelled to give attention to the means as much or more than the ends. How we go about experiencing shalom, how it becomes the experience of life for the oppressed, is what following Jesus is about. It is an inner and outer journey of transformation which I find is best captured in the word solidarity. The word, for me, as I hope to explore more here, has both spiritual and political meanings. The praxis of solidarity is one that leads us more deeply into relationship with God and the poor, and makes clear that those relationships are not self-centered but oriented toward collective liberation.

So we’re going to be calling this newsletter Toward Solidarity going forward. Cheers!

I still have the old For Shalom URL because another guy, who appears to be doing really good work with white people and anti-racism, snagged towardsolidarity.substack.com a few months ago (go check him out). So I’ll figure out an alternative eventually.

I created the logo by taking a picture of a tree on the cover of my journal. iPhones now allow you to clip out and paste images of people or things within a photo, which is wild. The twin trees are a nod to the twin pines traditionally used as a symbol for cooperatives—an image of the mutuality and reciprocity that’s at the heart of solidarity. For me there’s something about a bare deciduous tree that feels truthful in this time. More mystical, you might say, against that black backdrop of the unknown (the apophatic, if you’ll allow me). There’s also something of faith to it. It holds the hope of spring if not the direct evidence of it. Or maybe I was drawn to them just because it’s February in New England for me right now and naked trees are all I see. The circle is a venerable symbol, sacred among many indigenous peoples and mystics, of unity (and communion) in which all are equal. The circle is also a common way for modeling praxis as a the cycle of action and reflection. Both, for me, get away from the west’s “progress” oriented imagination toward something decolonized and closer to the soil of creation.

The “toward” in Toward Solidarity is crucial. Solidarity is a journey, something we strive toward, not an identity we can statically claim to possess. We are always moving closer or further away from a life of daily loving action with the excluded, exploited, and discarded. The “toward” places humility up front. I’m not convinced I live in anything like solidarity with God or my neighbor. But I long to move toward them.

2) Toward Solidarity also happens to be the working title of a book manuscript.

I’ve been working on it pretty actively over the past 8 months or so and have around 15,000 words written on a couple crappy chapter drafts. That’s going to continue to be my primary writing focus for the foreseeable future. So I’m coming out of the closet—like probably everyone else on this platform, I’m writing a book! Who knows where it will go if anywhere (I don’t have a publisher or anything), but for now it’s one of my favorite ways to spend a morning. It’s structures as a series of essays, each riffing off a phrase in a string that I right down every Monday morning and have used to guide my life for the past decade: In Jesus Christ, As Creatures, For Shalom, Through Love, Toward Solidarity, With Grace. They weave together history, stories from my life and family, with theological and spiritual meditations. All oriented around sketching a deeply spiritual life of following Jesus that dismantles whiteness and racial capitalism and seeks instead the Kingdom of God as the liberation of the poor. Stay tuned…

3) I have no idea how to use this newsletter.

Sending it terrifies me. Why would you want this clogging up your inbox? Why did blogs have to die and this is the thing now? Why did social media have to become the absolute worst, turning those of us with words to spill to a tool like this while also undermining what became the standard way to get people to follow something like this? What should my vibe, format, and core message be? What regularity should I send these with? Who has the time?! Existential questions abound.

There’s only 117 of you on my distribution list but you come from such a wide swath of my personal life, with a nice smattering of strangers thrown in, that I don’t have a good sense of my “audience” and what you’re most interested in. Maybe I’ll send a poll out someday. I’ll probably just keep writing whatever I want when I want to and/or have the courage to press send. So there’s that.

I do have some ideas for doing new things under the Toward Solidarity moniker — particularly interview style posts with organizers, thinkers, and theologians who inspire me with their views and practices on solidarity as spiritual and political practice — but we’ll see. Did I mention I have a newborn and a toddler? And the book is going to get my priority time in my limited writing windows. We. Will. See. My goal is simply to hit send a few more times this year than last.

4) I did write some other stuff on here last year you probably didn’t see because I didn’t send it out as an email (see above).

Many were part of a couple of loose series. The first was what I called the Theories of Change Series:

• on how we move from isolated projects to an economic ecosystem with the synergy to make broader change

• on incarnating our theory and how progressives need to keep an eye on both individuals and systems

• a personal narrative-rooted review of Alicia Garza’s phenomenal book The Purpose of Power

The second run is a little niche, but maybe kind of cool? I wrote my seminary thesis on shalom (and sin) as things that manifest in places. During the early months of the pandemic, I read through a bunch of foundational subaltern texts for the way place functions in their work. These are basically my notes.

So here’s place in…

• W.E.B. du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk

• Howard Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited

• James Cone’s God of the Oppressed and The Cross and the Lynching Tree

• Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth

I have a bunch more of these in a google doc somewhere which I may or may not post over time.

One last post to callout. Prentis Hemphill’s podcast Finding Our Way has been a balm to me over the past year. Her wise guests have helped me make sense of where we are in this bizarre moment in history and how to live well within it. So I pulled out their responses to one of her questions. I hope it blesses you as it did me.

Where are we? Where are we headed?

Ok. Bless you family!

See you next time…whenever that is 😉