Over the past few weeks of parental leave, at some point in the day when both children are sleeping, I’ve been reading a brief meditation from each of three books. Getting to a place of inner silence is just about impossible for me in this season, so my spiritual practice looks like sitting before the wisdom of these saints and letting their words affect me.
All three hold the Christian mystical tradition as a path of deepening union with God which expresses itself through engagement with the wounds and joys, injustice and beauty of creation. It’s remarkable how often their passages speak to one another.
I planned to move on from the uncomfortable idea that we are living in a time that feels like a long Holy Saturday. I know it’s heavy. Easter is behind us and who wouldn’t rather live in the light of resurrection than the stone-sealed darkness of a dead-guy occupied cave? We prefer our hope to be linear and fairly well realized already, thank you very much.
But a few days ago, two passages from these books held a dialogue which I would like to set before you.
The first is a selection from Mark 8 included in Teachings of the Christian Mystics.
And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, “Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
“For whosoever will save his life will lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.
“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul?
- Mark 8:34-36
I then turned over to Adam Bucko’s slim but explosive collection Let Your Heartbreak Be Your Guide: Lessons in Engaged Contemplation. In a chapter titled “Our Global Dark Night,” Adam begins:
Do you remember the Gospel story of the disciples being stuck in a room frightened and perplexed after the death of Jesus? They might have heard about the resurrection, but they had not yet experienced it.
Sometimes it feels like our whole world is in this early post-resurrection phase. We know that the resurrection happened, but we have not yet seen it; we have not yet experienced it ourselves. So, we sit in a room with the door tightly barricaded. We sit in a room afraid. We sit in a room with the door locked hoping that no one will come and knock.
I can imagine my head spinning. Jesus’ teachings running through my mind in fragments out of order. Emotions churning from grief to self-pity and despair, trying not to fixate on the horror and trauma of what I’d just seen, daydreaming if I can get my old job back, straining my ears hoping the cops don’t kick down the door, formulating a half-baked plot out of the city to somewhere safe until things die down, and quietly, spliced between each of those, asking myself, “Am I still his disciple or not?”
More than any other, my mind would go back to one of the sayings he started repeating toward the end. “Pick up a cross. Follow me.” I legitimately would have thought it was one of those classic, hyperbolic rabbi jokes. Clearly not.
So the question at the back of my mind, patiently waiting for the chaos to die down, would not have been, “So is he coming back?” I don’t see the disciples expecting that. The women go down to the grave to tend a dead man’s body which they assume, like all others ever, will stay that way.
No, I think the question would have been the same one we struggle with today: “So are we doing this or not?”
I’m still stuck on my own version of the question, stuck here at home, writing this at 4:30am because my kids are both finally sleeping but I can’t anymore.
How do I accept Jesus’ teaching to pick up the cross and follow him into the dark of this long Saturday? This era of history when saints are martyred and there may be no resurrections?
Adam Bucko points to St. John of the Cross and his teaching of the Dark Night of the Soul. Only in the Dark Night, when the soul starves and the heavens stay shut and we despair to abandon it all, do we arrive at the bottomless deeps of our own inner chambers to find our most secret questions already held in the loving embrace of God. Crisis is so often the catalyst of transformation if we allow it. This is holy ground I’ve barely trodden, and Adam is a wise guide to lead us there.
As the questions rolled around in my spirit this past week, however, I found myself thinking about another long Saturday that began fifty-five years ago this month.
How did the members of the twentieth century’s Black Freedom Movement respond in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination? And what can their responses teach us about how to live on Saturday?
For many during that time, as the initial riots and grief gave way to planned action, it was a time to leave behind the seemingly failed tactics and philosophy of nonviolence and shift to the sword.
I am an unabashed celebrator of much that came out of the Black Power era: it’s political and historical analyses; it’s reclamation that love is not just for enemies but for oneself; it’s steely recognition that a rotten house on fire was not one in which to beg to make one’s home; it’s projects of mutual aid, community care, and cooperative economy.
And yet in the trading in of love as the central and enveloping principle for power, there were consequences.
In the second book in her love trilogy, Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks describes how the harms of this shift were, as always, disproportionately born by women.
Militant black power leaders who took up the mantle of black self-determination, folks like Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, and Kwame Toure (then known as Stokely Carmichael), preferred discussions that centered on building healthy self-esteem rather than discussions of love. More and more, as black radicalism was divorced from its religious roots, becoming more secular, discussions of love were silenced. Increasingly, as black liberation was made synonymous with the creation of strong black patriarchs, love could not longer have a central place in the movement. [9]
Obsessed with grandiose visions of power, they were willing to engaged in coercive domination as a way of asserting control and gaining power. While militant black male leaders challenged white supremacy in productive ways, their uncritical embrace of patriarchy undermined anti-racist struggle by falsely projecting the idea that black women were the enemies of black men. [134]
I know this temptation. I have felt it in my own male body — the urge to take my rage at the world’s violence and turn the insecurities and fears which violence produces into an excuse for my own projects of control. How often in our pursuit of liberation do we reproduce our pain in another?
It’s worth remembering that for Malcom X, Fred Hampton, Huey Newton, and more, picking up the sword against the American empire was neither a tactic capable of acquiring the power they desired nor protection from winding up on a cross. Plenty of Zealots, waging guerrilla warfare on Rome, were crucified in first century Palestine too. It’s arguably the more traditional path.
There’s another response from that time. It’s one that might help us see the value in what the disciples did in those liminal days before Jesus reappeared and the path was made certain. Courage, the spiritual virtue perhaps most required to pick up crosses and follow the way of Jesus in the midst of dangerous times, has the potential to, but rarely actually does, come from inner solitude. Far more often, it is the fruit of having friends who love us and who will take the next step alongside us.
In the days after Dr. King’s assassination, Howard Thurman, the Black theologian and prophetic mystic who was a spiritual mentor to King and supporter of the movement in so many ways, wrote the following poetic letter to the grieving masses:
I share with you the agony of your grief.
The anguish of your heart finds echo in my own.
I know I cannot enter all you feel
Nor bear with you the burden of your pain;I can but offer what my love does give:
The strength of caring,
The warmth of one who seeks to understand
The silent storm-swept barrenness of so great a loss.This I do in quiet ways,
That on your lonely path
You many not walk alone.
Here, offered to his community, is the same self-giving love that led to Dr. King’s ultimate giving of self.
It is in the gathering that the disciples could heal and, as James Bladwin put it, find the courage “to begin again.” Only by gathering, each bringing the offer of “what my love does give,” could they share in their woundedness. There, with loved ones who understood that storm-swept barrenness, they found the solidarity of an empathetic community caring for its loved ones. Communities of care where sorrows in one heart find echos in others are where we find the courage to be the people we were together called to be.
For the sake of all the love and justice needed in these times, I pray this is what we too may become.
Well, with all that said, today is my birthday!
Would you consider doing two things as a gift?
THING 1:
Share this newsletter with a couple people in your life who you think would appreciate it.
Since I started actually posting and sending out emails/alerts about what I’m writing here, there has been a 14.5% net increase in subscribers. That’s remarkable for a month and a half. Thank you to all the new folks who joined! This post provided some background on me and what I’m up to, and I plan to do another post in the next couple of months to situate what we’re doing here.
It would be an enormous support if you could help me continue to grow this project. I’m not asking for any money, just a willingness to join in conversation with me every few weeks on the entanglements of our inner and outer lives amidst a world in need of love.
Would you take a couple minutes as a gift to me today to share this?
THING 2:
Make a contribution to one of the following organizations.
(And let me know if you do! I’m not fancy enough to have affiliate links where I can track what actions people are taking. Email/message me directly or shoutout in the comments.)
Option 1: common cathedral
In most seasons of my life, I’ve found my way to spaces of community and healing where housed and unhoused people can find their way to one another. These spaces where authentic, equitable relationships can form across stark lines of identity, where we can simply be human together and through that fellowship be transformed, are so important in a world where even many of the best social services have no capacity to be more than transactional. I had the joy of joining the board of this amazing street church / street art project / youth education / healing institute last year.
Option 2: Liberated Together
If I have hope right now, it comes from the leadership of Black women and other women of color guiding us to radically new futures, and from what i think of as (re)new(ed) technologies for living as health, healing human beings so many BIPOC/queer women of color are embodying. I also have seen how Black, Indigenous and other women of color pour out so much and desperately need spaces that are safe for rest, restoration, and wholeness. Liberated Together is creating those spaces. Let’s help them do it.
Ok, thanks y’all. See you soon.
Peace, joy, and justice,