by Pablo NerudaNow we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.
Continue reading “Keeping Quiet”
By Melvin Jones of the Open Door Community of Atlanta
*This piece was first published in the April 2015 issue of Hospitality.
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August 29, 2014, marked my 20th year of being buried in the bowels of the beast. On August 29, 1994, my DeKalb County judge sentenced me to 20 years imprisonment for a voluntary manslaughter conviction that I felt, and still feel, should have been adjudicated as justifiable homicide.
Because I was an outspoken prisoner activist and prison abolitionist, the administrative politics of the Prison Industrial Complex sought to silence my justice-based, morality- grounded outspokenness. I refused to shuffle my feet, scratch my head, prostrate in submission, or kowtow in hopelessness. As a result, the beast buried me for every single day of my 20-year sentence. Still, I rise…
Continue reading “The Open Door Has Enriched Me, Enlivened Me & Emboldened Me”
By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. Published in Geez Magazine’s Spring issue.
If each hour brings death
If time is a den of thieves
The breezes carry a scent of evil
And life is just a moving target
you will ask why we sing…
We sing because the river is humming
And when the river hums
The river hums
We sing because cruelty has no name
But we can name its destiny
We sing because the child because everything
Because the future because the people
We sing because the survivors
And our dead want us to sing
(Excerpt from Mario Benedetti’s Por Que Cantamos) Continue reading “What Keeps Us Alive”
By Tawana Petty
Black Mothers
remember you are warriors
the root of African Nations
courageous
resilient
resolute
Continue reading “Black Mothers”
From Thomas Merton, mystic & prophet:
…if you want to know me, don’t ask where I live, what I like to eat, how I part my hair; rather, ask me what I live for, in every detail, and ask me what in my view prevents me from living fully for the thing I really want to live for.
By Julia Ward Howe in 1870
Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before. Continue reading “Mother’s Day Proclamation”
From Alice Walker, poet, activist and the author of many works including The Color Purple (1982). This was the conclusion of a piece published in the recent 150th anniversary edition of The Nation:
What can the white man say to the black woman?
Only one thing that the black woman might hear.
Yes, indeed, the white man can say, your children have the right to life. Therefore I will call back from the dead those 30 million who were tossed overboard during the centuries of the slave trade. And the other millions who died in my cotton fields and hanging from my trees.
Continue reading “What Can The White Man Say To The Black Woman?”
Given by Dr. Deborah Conrad, Pastor at Woodside Church in Flint, MI at at Installment Service for Denise Griebler.
Denise has asked me to deliver the charge to the pastor today, so I’m happy to share with you these thoughts rolling around in my head:
Work hard; in fact, work all the time. Don’t go bowling or see a movie if there is something else more ministry-like that you should be doing. Set goals and don’t stop until they are met. Take failure personally. Let the anger of one person outweigh the joy of 99 (because isn’t there a parable about that?). Set high standards and never let yourself off the hook. Be innovative. Start new traditions. Buck the system. Maintain a high level of righteous indignation. Stay up on the news. Be creative, spiritual, humble, well-loved. Be an excellent preacher. All the time. Seriously, 52 weeks a year, plus festivals. One single mediocre sermon is beneath you and will undo all the good you are trying to accomplish here. Be relevant, empathetic, deep, engaging, confident. And hip with young people.
Continue reading “Charge to Pastor”
By Tommy Airey, the final post in a series about how we learn from our location about what is truly Divine
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In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
Immediately, he made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side…
Mark 6:45
The wind is deceptive in Detroit. When it is at your back, you forget it’s even there. On the bike, on my way to the church, the electronic marquee at the Prince Valley Supermercado registers 25 degrees. I doubt it. I’m traveling fast and I’m working up a sweat. But at the end of the work day, trekking west back to the block, I have a stubborn epiphany, once again, that the wind was there all along. Now it’s 40 out, but the wind is blustering my face off, cracking my lips into a pot pie crust. It’s virtually impossible to complete the journey without cussing. A lot.
Continue reading “The Pedagogy of Place: The Whisper of the Wind”
By Lindsay Airey. Originally published in the Detroit Catholic Worker paper On the Edge. Lindsay is a marriage & family therapist, radical disciple, and recovering AlAnon member, living and working alongside her husband Tom, the Larkins St. Community, and St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Her activist work has been focused with We The People of Detroit, organizing around the ongoing water struggle.
“T’was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved.” -John Newton, Amazing Grace
If not for grace, I could never meaningfully engage the inner work of healing and repenting from white supremacy. This “taught my heart to fear” kind of grace is what compels me into this work. It is also what keeps me in it. Perhaps understood most deeply by recovering addicts and abusers, this “amazing” grace is foreign to the distorted, cheap & enabling grace vended on the daily at your local mainstream, white-dominated, suburban and affluent Christian church. Meanwhile, on the outer fringes of the (c)hristian tradition, this slave-trader-turned-abolitionist kind of grace may be the penultimate anti-white supremacist/anti-racist “program” we Christians have uniquely to offer the struggle for racial equity and reconciliation in America. Continue reading “Twas Grace”
Radical Discipleship 