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” →