Welcome. Let's get free.
Fifty or so new folks signed up around here over the past few months. Most of you found your way thanks to The Center for Action and Contemplation. Or because the kind folks at the
and recommending my Substack. Or thanks to the one and only for sharing my shameless plea last week for a few more readers to help me pass a small goal.Welcome, welcome, welcome, friends new and old. I’m so grateful you’re here for however long you choose.
Let’s get free. Let us be for one another’s freedom. And may we begin our march of liberation at the bottom.
I’m not sure what my writing schedule is going look like through the end of the year, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a less-than-polished “hello!” and reintroduce what this newsletter is becoming.
(Forgive me if there are typos, trying to hit send during a brief dual kiddo nap window!)
There’s a line from the liberation theologian Jon Sobrino that’s been thumping in my chest since I read it last year. The book is Jesus the Liberator, and Sobrino is working to unpack the relationship Jesus has with God—with his Abba. He lands on a formula that gets to the heart of their dynamics:
“Jesus finds a rest in this [Abba], but the [Abba] in turn does not allow him to rest.”
Jesus find a rest in God that does not let him rest.
Here lies the dark and luminous mouth of that paradoxical tunnel into the center of the universe which is the center of our own beings. The portal down which we here seek to journey.
Resting in God is the contemplative path. The deeper into God we enter, the closer we find our lives to the poor and oppressed. The closer to the poor and oppressed we grow, if that nearness looks like the solidarity of God incarnated in Jesus, then the less we can remain still but are rather drawn into the labor of liberation.
Union with God means union with the oppressed. Or, to use another term for it, the first solidarity cannot be whole without the second solidarity. (Really wanting to throw out some goofy slogan here like: “Become a contemplative! Organize a union.” because…union…get it?). Or maybe we put it something like this: the peace of God—the deep security of one whose identity rests in that place beyond the reach of death—is strangely also the place where we are joined to the anger of God at injustice. Follow Jesus, get both. Life from there happens in the both-ness, in the midst of the tensions.
Of course, feeling both at peace and angry only strikes us as odd if we’ve never loved. Many of us know what its like to feel deeply at home, secure, and at peace with our family or chosen family, and also to become fiercely angry and protective and ready to fight if our family is threatened. Solidarity is what it looks like when this kind of love to extended to others.
To some extent, how I’ve just framed this trajectory assumes your starting point is something like mine: an identity historically and structurally vested with power and privilege in a patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial, capitalist world. But almost everything I’ve come to think about the integration of spirituality and social action has emerged from those forging a way of life from below.
It’s Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color, and Black women in particular, who I’m learning from in this season. Hopefully that comes through in what you’ll read here. The womanist theologian Katie Cannon describes this way of life as an ethics of love that “emerges from mystical consciousness which obligates individuals to transform the social environment.” It was M. Shawn Copeland, the Catholic womanist, who offered us the phrase “mystical solidarity” which I hold dear. In an attempt to express this in a book chapter draft, I recently wrote the following:
In the wake of the middle passage, in the hold of ships, in the cotton rows of plantations, against unrelenting white terrorism and apartheid alienation, in convict labor camps and prison cells, in segregated ghettos and the indignities of domestics labor, and in the hush harbors, wedding dances, blues halls, Black churches, kitchen tables, and mother’s gardens, a holy self-love was grown which wove the spiritual and political into a single garment. Because that is what love looks like for ensouled bodies, enfleshed souls, living the life of love in community and creation, history and place. The strength of this life were always what Toni Morrison called the inner “sources of self regard.” It was the “sound of the genuine” Howard Thurman went looking for on his inward journeys. In settings of oppression, the Black feminist writer bell hooks recalled how it was “the mystical dimensions of Christian faith…that enabled me to recognize that the Beloved offers us a realm of being and spiritual experience that transcends the law, that is above the authority of man.” From self regard, life turns to loving action. Hooks would go on to write how the tie that bound the spiritual and political together in her life, liberating her from the conflicts and dualism of traditional white Christianity, “was the emphasis on Love as a transformative force, as the ultimate expression of godliness.”
If folks like me want to get free and be of use in the broad movement for freedom, here is a tradition of being love in the world to which we must humbly come and follow. For me at least, this is a path for widening the circle of belonging until none are left out. The challenge of mysticism for our time is to abolish every trace of the plantation that still breathes its desires through our souls. That, more than anything else, is the false self that must die so the new and liberated creation can live. I am seeking a contemplative life that puts whiteness to death—in me and the world. Consider these “notes toward solidarity” my record and reflection of a life attempting, and frequently failing, to live in that direction.
I tried thinking through the ecology of things that bump and swirl together in my mind and life until they take form here as a newsletter essay. The list got a little long, but what the heck here you go:
I’m interested in social transformation “(as spiritual craft) and mysticism (as political activity)” to riff on an incredible sentence from one of my favorite thinkers.
I’m a follower of Jesus (Christian is just too broad a group of associates) and get pretty theological (see everything I wrote above!). That’s not always the vibe, but when it is, hopefully it’s in a good way that’s broadly interesting, inclusive, and generative for folks following other ways. But consider this a disclaimer for those who would, understandably, rather not :)
The emphasis is on moving toward. This is not a how-to guide from an expert. Solidarity is not about policing thoughts and behaviors. It’s about a process of learning to become committed to the wellbeing of people beyond our selves, beyond who we love most closely, beyond who we know, and beyond who is like us. It’s about growing into love. It’s about becoming, acting on what we’ve be taught so far, risking something, and maintaining the humility of a beginner.
No disembodied spirit-, or consciousness-, or afterlife-centric spirituality here. No hand waiving away history and creation as ephemeral. No gnostic dismissals of injustice through poorly executed “nondual” jujitsu. We are muddy mystics. We’re after the only spiritual path there is: an embodied spirituality born from the dir, rooted in the dirt, and that will someday return us to the dirt. This includes embracing the rhythms and seasons of creation/life and discovering in those places essential lessons on what it means to be a whole and healthy humans in a whole and healthy community.
Toward Solidarity is an anti-racial capitalist and decolonial project. There is no liberation, no beloved community, without the abolition of those ongoing structural violences. This is abolitionist work that seeks to map and root out both the inner effects and social structures of plantation society. I cannot see how following Jesus—a poor minority executed by a colonizing, plantation-building empire—could be otherwise.
I’m a practitioner first, and attempt to be a writer doing public theology as reflection-on-action second. Which means I’m not satisfied with vague calls for “justice.” I’m interested in the concrete structural tools, tactics, policies, process and institutions that can build something just. As Cornel West put it, I’m curious about what “love made public” actually looks like and how we get there. As part of that, I’m an organizer and advocate of the solidarity economy as a concrete alternative to racial capitalism and the real-world seeds of beloved communities.
To that last point, my experiences show up here in the stories I tell and the perspective I bring: in community organizing, working and forming friendships among people experiencing homelessness, building cooperatives and other liberatory organizations, fighting for policy changes, building community, and participating in solidarity with a variety of movements.
The flip side of my ongoing journey toward solidarity is my starting point. I grew up a conservative, Republican, evangelical white kid out in the country southwest of Houston. I now know I grew up on land settlers ethnic cleansed of Karankawas in order to establish the very heart of Texas’s empire for slavery. My family’s bible church worshiped in the cafeteria of a public high school named after a local Confederate hero and slaveholder. These stories show up here too.
While this isn’t the main purpose of this newsletter or my primary tactic for doing so, this is also an outlet through which I attempt to express solidarity with ongoing struggles and respond to event unfolding in real time. Right now that means joining calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In the midst of all that’s wrong and the struggle against it, there is joy and love and celebration and goofiness and life in all its messy complexity. I’m trying to give you and myself more permission to be human and see that as a good thing. I want us to be free even in the midst of the fight for freedom. To truly have that rest even when we cannot always rest.
I’m a partner to Libbey and the dad of three year old Linden and nine month old Wilder. My life is NUTS. And beautiful. But man, this is a frenetic season. Holding all the questions above (rest? time for people/anything beyond tiny people with poopy diapers?? hahahaha!) in this midst of this journey of being a dad shows up here too, and is ultimately my best teacher on learning to live the questions.
I’m curious about how we actually go about making things different. How does social transformation actually happen? What are the ways we talk about those options? How might we develop a better map of these strategies? I’ve had first hand experiences, for good and bad, with quite a few. These days I’m interested in exploring love made public and mystical solidarity as theories of change. So on occasion I flip on my organizer/teacher hat and try to actually dig into theories of change and the pragmatic side of making liberation happen and the praxis of solidarity.
Stuff I’m reading! The books and articles I’m learning from—in history, theology, Black critical theory, decolonial theory, contemplative spirituality, literature, philosophy, or whatever—influence what I’m thinking about. Writing is exhaling, reading is a deep breath.
Ok, there’s probably something I’m forgetting but this is getting long already.
I called this an “ecology” earlier. To double down on that framing, in ecological systems thinking the emphasis is always on the relationship between things more than the things themselves. The interesting stuff happens in the interactions and interpenetrations of those themes above. My work here is about trying to bring them together and see what emerges.
A couple housekeeping items and we’ll wrap this up.
This is not a paid Substack. Nothing is behind a paywall. Mad respect to those who are trying to earn some living off writing, but I’m not that courageous nor in that phase of life. I’m just grateful to be read and be in community with y’all.
Posts show up every two or three or four weeks depending on what’s happening with my job and family. Hopefully that’s enough to stay sustainable for both of us.
If for some reason you feel you really want to do the Substack paid pledge thing, I’d rather you just do a paid account with one of the BIPOC-authors on here I value like
, , , , , , , and so many others. (And tell me if you do because that would be so cool!)Be kind. Be brave. Take a walk or a nap if you need it.