Cole Arthur Riley - This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

I have a favorite sound.

To be precise, its not a singular sound but a multitude.

Have you ever stood in the presence of a tree and listened to the wind pass through its leaves? The roots and body stand defiant and unmoved. But listen. The branches stretch out their tongues and whisper shhhhh.

Trees make symphonies without their trunks ever moving, almost as if the stillness of their centers amplifies their sound. The tree may appear still, but if you look closer, youll see that each leaf flails with breath. The tree may seem alone, but plow deep and youll unearth its secret gnarled rootsthe grotesque and the beautifulcreeping in the soil, reaching toward the ancestors.

Thomas Merton said, No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. I hold this close.

My spirituality has always been given to contemplation, even before anyone articulated for me exactly what the contemplative was. I was not raised in an overtly religious home; my spiritual formation now comes to me in memoriesnot creeds or doctrine, but the air we breathed, stories, myth, and a kind of attentiveness. From a young age, my siblings and I were allowed to travel deep into our interior worlds to become aware of ourselves, our loves, our beliefs. And still, my father demanded an unflinching awareness of our exterior worlds. Where is home from here? What was the waitresss name? Where do we look when were walking? If a single phrase could be considered the mantra of our family, it would be Pay attention.

Later, in the arms of white intellectuals, much of what I absorbed of the contemplative life rested on demands of knowledge, silence, and solitude. I learned to read the words of dead men, and go on silent retreats, and listen alone in my room, all in hopes of hearing something true of God. These are practices that Im not quick to sneer at, as they have often been co-opted from the wisdom of Eastern spiritualities and diluted. Still, I do not believe they alone tell the story of the contemplative life.

I wrote this book during the fall and winter of 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic. When I am finished, I will be in my fifteenth month of isolation, as I am one of the many immunocompromised who cannot test my fate with this virus. Apart from my husband, my days are spent in solitude, in a kind of silence and stillness. It has reminded me what an empty spiritual life will manifest from these virtues alone. I cannot sustain belief on my own. And Im learning sometimes the most sacred thing to do is shout.

I used to think that Christian contemplation was reserved for white men who leave copies of C. S. Lewiss letters strewn about and know a great deal about coffee and beard oils. If this is you, there is room for you here. But I am interested in reclaiming a contemplation that is not exclusive to whiteness, intellectualism, ableism, or mere hobby. And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people. To suggest a form of faith that tells me to sit down alone and be quiet? It does not rest easy on the bones. It is a shadow of true contemplative life, and it would do violence to my Black-woman soul.

In Toni Morrisons novel Beloved, Baby Suggs, the matriarch, gathers all of her people in the Clearing. Everyone is standing on the edges, waiting in the trees for her to begin to preach. And she says, Let the children come, and they all scurry to the center, and she tells them, Let your mothers hear you laugh, and they laugh. And she calls the men to come down and says, Let your wives and children see you dance. And they do. And finally, she calls the women to the center and says, CryFor the living and the dead. Just cry. And without covering their eyes the women let loose. And they all get tangled up in each other, and the men are crying, and the women are dancing, and the children are laughing, until eventually, they all collapse in the grass together to hear Baby Suggs give a sermon. In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass, it starts. Morrison writes, She did not tell themto go and sin no more. She calls them to awaken to their stories. And then she leads them in this sacred cry of the body.

More on this to come. But this literary moment of intergenerational, dignity-affirming, embodied liberation is my model for spirituality to date.

When I think of my ancestors who lived in chains, I often wonder what sacred defiance lived in their minds while their bodies were being dominated by another. For the field and plow and whip can certainly affect the mind, but they cannot possess it. What hidden things of old crouched in the corners of my great-great-great-great-grandmothers consciousness as she stood in the cotton fields? What stories, dreams, and beliefs about God hugged the crevices of her brain? The oppressor has no power in those deep and secret places. Much of Black spirituality while enslaved had to live and breathe in these crevices, every vale holy ground. A faith that depended on the interior life.

In this way, contemplative spirituality is in Black blood. But it is not a spirituality of disembodied, solitary intellectual musing. It is a way of being together in the Clearing with God. And we get there by descending into the stories that reside in our bodies. For me, most simply, contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things. In the field, on the walk home, sitting under the oak tree that hugs my house. A sacred attention.

And as we pay attention, we make a home out of paradox, not just in what we believe but also in the very act of living itself. Stillness that we would move. Silence that we would speak. I believe this to be a spirituality our worldovertaken with dislocation, noise, and unrestso desperately needs.