Patrick B. Reyes - The Purpose Gap: Empowering Communities of Color to Find Meaning and Thrive

What would it mean for the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion not just to be effective and sustainable but also regenerative? Patrick Reyes offers a critical contribution to how we can enact the redemptive liberation we crave and desperately need as a broken society. Academic, theological, and human, Patrick persuasively narrates the cost of systemic inequality. With poignant reflection questions, The Purpose Gap offers a guide for dismembering the coloniality that is stealing our childrens futures and marring their souls, and Reyes holds us each to account for doing more than just our best.

Shaya Gregory Poku, Dean for Equity, Social Justice, and Community Impact, Wheaton College Massachusetts

Patrick Reyes writes with fierce love and haunting hope, challenging readers to collectively build a new world, a world in which the margins become center: a world in which systems, structures, theologies, and practices are intentionally designed to prioritize the sacredness of all children, to close the purpose gap.

I see your violence, and I will raise you hope and love, he writes. Reyes offers a book that is both profoundly painful and stunningly beautiful, a song of survival and struggle, a journey through grief and violence, a story of abundant joy, life-giving love, and thick dreams.

This book is required reading for all who listen in the streets, who walk heavy with grief, for those who stand on tiptoe searching for hope and dance when liberation takes on flesh; it is a book for those who long for a world in which all children thrive, a world in which the communal knowledge and wisdom of field workers and grandmas, uncles caught in cages, and Brown, beautiful, bald cousins redefine our institutions and organizations, systems and structures, pedagogies and theologies, our world-building and daily living.

Janet Wolf, Director of Public Theology and Nonviolent Organizing, Childrens Defense Fund

For every academic library and educators toolkit, The Purpose Gap articulates the liminality between what we have, what we could have, and what we wish we had as Brown image-bearers. Demystifying the heros myth to reclaim the responsibility given to us by our ancestors, Reyes draws on the spiritual and intellectual wellsprings of our antepasados with abolitionist teachings. Our children need to be free to imagine! As Brown folks all too familiar with trauma tourism, Reyes calls our institutions to name the gap between purpose and opportunity by drawing on cultural community wealth and our stories of our sobrevivencia. We are constellations, not single stars. Reyes masterfully weaves storytelling, imagination, and critical consciousness to give us The Purpose Gap. Our communities deserve our cocreative narratives, our God-given gifts to not just survive but thrive in every facet of our lives, including the academy. Adelante!

Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, author of Becoming Coztototl

The Purpose Gap is much more than a book about overcoming challenges and the importance of mentorship: it is an invitation to wholeness. With deeply personal and vulnerable storytelling, Reyes invites readers to remember our own stories so that we may connect, re-member, every part of our unique identities along the academic journey. For Reyes, bridging the purpose gap is one thing, but thriving on the other side, whole, is the true testimony.

Theresa S. Thames, Associate Dean of Religious Life and of the Chapel, Princeton University

Reyes has written a 200+ page love letter to future generations of Black and Brown people, by both calling out unjust systems and calling in community to practice abundant life and love together. In this work he tells the stories that are often not told of those in Black and Brown bodies to change the narrative and make space for a new imagination. He offers practices, gives us space for reflection, and calls us all to action. This action will take communal work, and it must be done for Black and Brown bodies to close the purpose gapto move from struggling and surviving to dreaming and thriving.

Lakisha R. Lockhart, Assistant Professor of Practical Theology, Chicago Theological Seminary

Patrick Reyess powerful Purpose Gap is a must-read for all of uscentering those whose lives and stories have historically been marginalized and allowing those of us who have too long been centered to listen in and learn. Through unforgettable stories, penetrating insights, and questions for reflection, Reyes urges us not to excuse what is as doing the best we can and instead invites us to create the conditions for future generations to thrive, to find meaning and purpose.

Rev. Shannon Daley-Harris, Haley Farm Co-Director for Retreats and Religious Affairs Advisor, Childrens Defense Fund

In his first book, Nobody Cries When We Die: God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood, Dr. Reyes shared his gifts to create spaces for us to survive. In this new book, The Purpose Gap: Empowering Communities of Color to Find Meaning and Thrive, he shares his gifts for us to not only survive but also thrive, as is our purpose. His ability to guide us in exploring our role in closing the purpose gap takes us from stars to constellations, as he so beautifully describes. The Purpose Gap will take you from understanding the meaning of purpose for people of color, not from some distant, disconnected understanding beyond the readers reach, but from a sense of purpose that becomes inherent and further enhanced through our own reflections guided by the thought-provoking questions threaded throughout the book. The grace that Dr. Reyes leaves one with is rooted in love, love for self, community, and an unapologetic calling to serve as designers of conditions that close the purpose gap now, generations ahead, and in the sacredness of our ancestors. Dr. Reyes emphasizes that in the process of closing the gap, if we must struggle daily, as many of us do, we must also work toward healing and freedom daily. Because for people of color, freedom is not a program and to close the purpose gap is to remind ourselves we are loved.

bel Reyes, Executive Director, Innovation Bridge

The Purpose Gap

The Purpose Gap

Empowering Communities of Color
to Find Meaning and Thrive

P ATRICK B. R EYES

2021 Patrick B. Reyes

First edition

Published by Westminster John Knox Press

Louisville, Kentucky

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396. Or contact us online at www.wjkbooks.com.

Book design by Sharon Adams

Cover design by designpointinc.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

ISBN: 9780664266707 (pbk.)

ISBN: 9781646981915 (ebook)

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For the teachers and elders who are closing the gap

Contents

Americans will remember the year 2020 for many reasons. A global health pandemic. An economic downturn and shelter-in-place orders. A summer of racial justice uprisings. A critical national census. A presidential election with the highest turnout in history. The centennial of the womens suffrage movement. Essential to our self-understanding, yet missed by most in this litany, is a demographic benchmark reached in the middle of this year.