By Ruby Sales, First printed in Geez 59: Powers and Principalities

As a people and as a nation, we are experiencing a deep troubling in the land wrought by the enduring and dehumanizing practice and spiritual malformation of racism. It is a troubling that requires each of us to name and face the lies that we tell about ourselves and others. A country that dines on lies will ultimately choke to death on them.d

To this point, Vincent Harding, a scout and interpreter of our struggle, offered this explanation that explains the heart of the matter. He said, “Race is like a bone stuck in our throat, refusing both digestion and expulsion, endangering our life. […] It is the unmistakable need and desire of our nation to deal with its terrifying and compelling history, to exorcise the demons of our racial past and present, perhaps even to discover the healing possibilities that reside in our many-hued and wounded variations on the human theme.”

Dear friends,

I am waking up this morning on the birthday of a project I’ve been laboring and loving into being for several years. Today The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World takes some baby steps out into the world looking for homes where it can me nurtured, challenged, and grow deeper.

This book was dreamed up in the middle of long nights as I sat rocking and nursing my beautiful babies. I was exhausted and lonely. And I was terrified about the future these children would be walking into. I had so many questions and a deep hunger for community. I wanted to gather a circle of beloveds who were not afraid to tenderly hold, engage, and live into the questions. What does it mean to be human and how do we invite children into this messy, beautiful work?

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

I long, I pray,
for the days when we step away from these screens
and find ourselves embodied in the great company of humans again.

I long, I pray,
for my senses to be entwined in another
in friend, in stranger, in community.
To feel and smell the breath of another in a casual hug
to taste food cooked by someone else’s loving hands
or pass a potluck dish around the circle

From Rev. Lynice Pinkard, in a sermon on the Mary and Martha story in the Gospels (July 21, 2019)

I hear Jesus saying, “Listen, my loves. Inside of you lives Something that the society that seeks to control you can never know or reach. This Something is an inchoate, largely incoherent, and irrepressible energy which has the power to demolish empires. Every state, without exception, co-opts, corrupts and seeks to destroy all those capable of saying, ‘no.’ All those determined to refuse. But no state has been able to foresee or prevent the day  when their most ruined and abject accomplices…will growl, ‘No. This far and no further.’”

What the times demand—these times—and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be, not seem, outrageous, independent, anarchical, feral, buck wild. That one be thoroughly disciplined. Steeped in readiness to resist, at whatever cost…This world no longer needs explaining or critiquing or denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of commentaries on commentaries, of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don’t trigger anything other than revelations about the revelations. We are in a time of unparalleled talking, and I might add, that the only reason to talk now at all is to learn to speak treason fluently.

By Kateri Boucher. First printed in Geez 59: Powers and Principalities

“We might not see the dragon’s teeth
but have surely become its belly.”
– Bill Wylie-Kellermann

Will you join me in this imagining?

We find ourselves together in the belly of a beast. From certain angles – with teeth not in view – it may not look so beast-like. But, like it or not, all of us are caught in its grip.

by Corey Simon, re-print from Geez 59: Powers and Principalities

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares . . . and learn war no more.

My arm aches.

It’s the second day at the forge, and the sound of hammers and the fumes of coal smoke surround me as my classmates work on their own projects. I pull out what I’ve prepared for today: the barrel of my 9mm handgun, inexpertly cut from the rest of the gun which now sits useless at home.

BANG BANG BANG.