This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
I just finished reading this book for the third time in the last two years. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read, by one of the best writers I’ve ever read. It’s beautiful. As I sat holding the book, closed, a sacred artifact in my hands, it struck me how significant a collection of words on paper can be. It’s one of the miracles of our shared human existence. Words. And stories. In seven years of being a father that’s been working on me. I marvel at it. Kids start to communicate and it’s miraculous. At some point they won’t stop speaking 😅. My two kids are doing this in two languages, which is its own brand of beautiful.
I’m trying to embrace what Cole Arthur Riley’s words are doing to me and for me. The book is inspiring, challenging, devastating, and beautiful. She shows a sacred attentiveness to life and shares her story as a liturgy. She takes fifteen chapters (Dignity. Place. Wonder. Calling. Body. Belonging. Fear. Lament. Rage. Justice. Repair. Rest. Joy. Memory. Liberation.) and weaves stories and questions and truth into a tapestry of humanity and depth. She combines personal stories and those of her family origins with selective passages from the Bible, brilliantly interpreted (e.g. God as the first mathematician and artist). She gives a voice to inanimate entities: [the ground says] “Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me” (7). She draws on the work of other authors sparingly but when she does it’s gold: Dr. King, Howard Thurman, Simone Weil, Toni Morrison. There are only 27 entries in the bibliography—each worthy of attention.
This books helps me to see more deeply and to feel more acutely.
Before getting to pieces of the book that challenge me to think deeply, I want to share a glimpse of her storytelling. The book is filled with visceral, heart-wrenching stories. I was on the verge of tears throughout. You hear her family through her writing. In her chapter on “Joy,” she narrates her father’s embarrassment at having food stamps, and how her uncle transformed shame into joy while buying groceries.
My father says they went cuttin up all through that store. And he’s cracking up as he tries to tell me about it now. When they finally got to the counter and my father’s shame reappeared, my Uncle Dave snapped out the book of food stamps and started plucking bills out theatrically. And what do we owe you? he said, as if he were prim and polished. With a cart spilling over, they expected to have to pay more than the stamps could cover, so when the woman said $185, they let their knees go weak and start cracking up even harder. The whole store turned to look at them, two golden-skinned boys hanging on to each other, play-punching each other in their bellies and letting the howls echo between them.
We’re talking about relief. It was food, and it was such a relief. But it was more than that, he says. It was fun as hell. And he’s still smiling.
It requires attunement to practice humor without violence. You have to acquaint yourself with insecurity, people’s stories, and the needs in the room to bring levity into their heaviness without diminishing their pain. But done right, humor can hold together seams under the harshest duress. (161-2)
There are a few sections that contribute specifically to what I’m trying to do with students in Peru, in an attempt to be better humans. It’s all about what we learn when we’re confronted with difference and diversity and how that tells us something deep about God and humanity.
Wonder includes the capacity to be in awe of humanity, even your own. It allows us to jettison the dangerous belief that things worthy of wonder can only be located on nature hikes and scenic overlooks. This can distract us from the beauty flowing through us daily.
To be able to marvel at the face of our neighbor with the same awe we have for the mountaintop, the sunlight refracting—this manner of vision is what will keep up from destroying each other (36).
In her presentation, “Wonder” includes seeing and naming evil. It is not naive or blind, rather, an antidote to despair:
To be human who resembles the divine is to become responsible for the beautiful, for its observance, its protection, and its creation (40).
In her section on “Belonging,” the following trinitarian reflection has direct implications for life in community that we learn through travel:
People talk about God as three distinct people in one. If this is true, it means the whole cosmos is predicated on a diverse and holy community. And if we bear the image of God, that means we bear the image of a multitude. And that to bear the image of God in its fullness, we need each other. Maybe every culture, every household, every community bears that image in a unique way (73).
Closing the chapter, on mirrors, faces, and inner life:
We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person. I cannot trust myself to describe the curve of my nose because I’ve never seen it. I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf (81).
On justice and dignity:
To be human in an aching world is to know our dignity and become people who safeguard the dignity of everything around us (134).
On sacred story:
Few would deny that storytelling is core to what it means to be human (179).
On rest as sacred liberator, active contentment and joy that still dreams, truthfulness and justice in remembering, holy rage, and beauty—you’ll just have to read it.
In the preface Riley says she wants to reclaim “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 diverges my mind from my body, voice, or people” (ix). Near the end of the book, she says “I hope any truth I’ve written unfolds slowly, encountering you first as what I, Cole, believe to be true in this particular season” (187).
Maybe that’s why I had to sit with it for a year and a half and read it three times. This will most likely be a yearly read for me. It’s good for my soul.
Cole Arthur Riley is the author of Black Liturgies on Instagram. If you’re not quite ready to pick up a book yet, you can follow her there.