Liminality, Blackness and Contemplation

When finding "a more beautiful way" takes you in an unexpected direction

Photo by Mary Claire Photo

I’m learning to make peace with creative projects taking on new directions, even directions I didn’t see coming.

“Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary,
Some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.¹”

I live by these words, time after time, season after season. We create what we hope to see in the world, it grows and changes. We grow and change. And we keep making, writing, living, dreaming, creating.

When I started dreaming about “a more beautiful way” many years ago, I initially conceived of it as an invitation into “race conscious living.” Coming off of yers leading racial justice education workshops and facilitating diversity, equity and inclusion processes for organizations, I was hungry for a softer way to hold questions of race, identity, power, privilege and social change. I’m still searching for that softer way, honestly. I may write about it more in the future. But my thinking was, Maybe there’s a more beautiful way, a more nourishing way, and more rooted way to think about race and to practice racial equity and healing in the world.

The secondary themes that emerged in the process of creating this project were “slowing down, simplifying and centering the Sacred in our everyday lives.” These invitations flowed from tensions I was living. I needed a slower pace of life. Seasonal living became an antidote to much of the anxiety I was facing. Additionally, I believe slowing down is and will continue to be necessary for the wellness of our bodies, for the depth of our relationships, for the healing of the Earth and for peacemaking in the world. Slowing down isn’t all that’s needed, but it’s on the list of helpful practices to get us to a better place than we are now.

As for “centering the Sacred”? Well, Papa Wendell said it best,

“There are no unsacred places.
Only sacred places and desecrated places.²”

The Sacred is everywhere. All of creation carries the spark of the holy and is marked with intentions of Divine love. Are we awake enough to see it? Are we in the practice of noticing? Of celebrating? Of participating in the dance?

The invitations and values of race conscious living, slow living, and centering the Sacred in our modern life have been guideposts as I write here each week. I anticipate they will continue to be so, even if not explicitly. But I’m also noticing an invitation to deepen and expand, all at once as a few specific themes are emerging as areas of focus for my writing this coming year.

I feel a bit nervous about it, honestly. I wonder if I have what it takes to respond well to the invitations I’m hearing. But this is the creative process, is it not? To be an artist is to be in the practice of noticing, responding and in due time, birthing what wants to come to life in the world around us.

Here are the themes that are emerging for me as I contemplate what a more beautiful way means right now:

Liminality

One of my favorite writers on the theme of liminality is Kaitlin Curtice who writes The Liminality Journal here on Substack. Last week, I had the pleasure of sitting in a on workshop she facilitated with Writing the Wild. During the session, I was struck by Kaitlin’s invitation for us to hold together the seemingly opposing ideas of resisting the status quo of hate in our time with being tender-hearted people. She invited us to contemplate what it means to be both resilient and persistent in the face of injustice right there alongside being human, receptive and soft. It is quite paradoxical. It calls us to a practice of liminality, of making peace with living in-between and finding our way through the messy, often ambiguous middle stages of transformation.

Through the questions Kaitlin posed, I sensed a call to honor the other liminal spaces that have found their way to my doorstep. A prominent one is a tension I’ve been living between an ancient traditional faith practice and my love for a wild, personal and untethered spiritual life. It’s the tension between encountering heaven both in a Divine Liturgy with the faithful on a Sunday morning and in the pinewood forest, alone, on Sunday afternoon. This is a liminal space because I’m not quite settled in one camp or the other. I’ve tried forcing myself into a box over the years, striving to make peace in the center and on the edges of things, but I’m sensing now that the practice of liminality might help me to embrace the both/and available here.

Blackness

For many years, my orientation to my racial identity was largely utilitarian, i.e. I lived as though the primary function of my Black body’s existence was to teach non-Black people about what it was like to live in my skin for the sake of their growth and evolution. I had an overdeveloped sense of what it meant to think about race on white peoples’ terms and an underdeveloped sense of what my Blackness meant on my terms. Stepping away from diversity, equity and inclusion work has been a vital part of my healing process because it’s created room for me to explore my racial identity, my cultural heritage, and my ancestral lineage in ways that nourish my growth and evolution instead of for helping organization’s to check a box on their strategic plan for the year.

I’m still holding questions about what it will look like for me to explicitly give voice and creative room to my racial identity as I write this year. I’ve been hesitant because I don’t want to end up in a situation, again, where I feel as though my racial identity and race-based observations about the world are commoditized or exploited in some way. I’m aware that I cannot control this; writing for the public always carries this risk. But I’m also aware that not giving voice to the ways racial identity works itself out in my inner life and outer expression also undermines something essential and true within me. Honoring my Blackness and the ways spirituality moves in and through my Black, female body are invitations I’m hearing for this year of writing and creativity.

Contemplation

Last but not least is contemplation, and perhaps more specifically Christian contemplation. I’ve been slowing working through This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories that Make Us by Cole Arthur Riley, the queer Black woman who authors Black Liturgies on Instagram. I’ve also been reading Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Fr. Martin Laird O.S.A.³, a professor of Early Christian Studies. Both of these books offer an orientation to life that captures so much of what I have hopes A More Beautiful Way might become. They are invitations to know God in unexpected places. They are invitations to hold up the stories of our bodies and our families as sites of holy encounter. They are invitations to prepare the soil of our lives to receive the mysteries of divine grace. They are helping me to realize that a life of contemplation, and contemplative action in the world, are values I’ve been aiming for all along. I just didn’t realize it until now.

My intention is to lean into these three themes—liminality, Blackness, and contemplation—in my writing this year. I hope to offer questions and to share what I’m learning along the way. In reading about my process, I also hope that you make space to listen for any gentle nudges inviting you to deepen and to expand, even if those nudges are calling you to places you didn’t expect for yourself.

What questions are you holding this year?

What themes are emerging as guide posts in your life?

How might you make room to explore them more deeply? To expand?

---

In the Garden

Here are upcoming spiritual care offerings in the Garden Contemplative Community:

Group Spiritual Direction

Date: Tuesday, January 30th
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:30 PM EST

This contemplative space will feature reflections on seeds, new beginnings, fresh starts and possibilities. Following personal reflection time, each person will be invited to share what’s stirring within them. We will then go around the virtual circle and share how we are each hearing and noticing the holy in what each individual shares. As a note, sharing is not forced or required; you can always pass. This is great opportunity to slow down and reflect at the top of a new year.

Every Friday - Lectio Divina with the Gospel of John

Day & Time: Fridays at 10 AM EST

Lectio Divina, or divine reading, is a contemplative practice in which we sit attentively with the words of Scripture or of another sacred, creative text. Learn more here.

---

In The Loop

/ Website
/ Community
/ Instagram
/ Podcast
/ Archive

1. Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

2. How to Be A Poet by Wendell Berry

3. Order of St. Augustine