As I read the Hebrew Bible, I am struck by two main verbs that refer to waiting. One is to wait with expectation; the other is to wait in the tension of enduring. It is not passive. It is an active struggle to live in the face of despair.
I also see people who know what it means to live with deep trauma and still love themselves enough to believe in their future.
I didn't want to feel anything. But I knew I must feel everything.
Rage liberated me from my lies and gave me the courage to see anew the present and the future.
Black rage is the work of love that protests an unloving world.
White supremacy was not just about terrible white American men in white hoods with white crosses. It was also about all the terrible ways I learned how to harm Black people and be terrible to Black people and not listen to Black people and not cry over Black people and not care about Black people and to do it all in the name of Jesus.
But nostalgia, white nostalgia, erases people like my grandmother, who was sitting in front of me, holding on to what memories she had, what memories she wanted to forget, what memories she wanted to tell.
We are taught that our history is a story of triumph, the great American spirit, and that tragedy never comes from us or is never brought about by those who say they serve us. We are taught that there is nothing wrong with this country; we are taught America always makes the best decisions and is never to be criticized. It is a powerful myth. Our myths give the American imagination its oxygen.
If there is anything exceptional about our country, it is the exceptional ways we have avoided being honest with ourselves...It is the exceptional ways the country has failed at loving us and reforming itself...It is the exceptional way the country has identified with Jesus while ironically crucifying those whom Jesus would stand with and linking arms with those whom Jesus would stand against.
A part of me wants to love our country so hard, so deeply, so vastly. Yet a part of me feels so foreign, so unfamiliar, so angry, so exhausted that I live in a place that has had a profound commitment to deny those who look like me the blessings of the Dream. America, our country, has neither known us nor the God it proclaims to love and serve. Ta-Nehisi is right: This country, this beautiful and terrible place of our birth and suffering, is the work of men.
* * * * *
I wanted to believe that violence would redeem my body. I wanted to believe that I could be terrible and get away with it and get rewarded because of it and be protected by it. I guess I had learned how to be American.
I began to see that being enraged becomes dangerous when it is not channel through love.
Rage has a way of making us stand up. Of freeing us from fear. Rage made me stop running, and it made me stop lying. Soon, rage would put my faith bath together in all the ways it was shattered.
In the midst of the burning, we somehow try to liberate ourselves, again and again, showing something more deep, more honest, and more powerful than the blazing.
I felt that the only way I could make sense of my feelings was to begin to do what so many Black people before me did: write. Writing became a way for me to feel free and a way for me to feel like I wasn't crazy and a way to feel like what I was doing was contributing to the struggle. I knew that I couldn't be out on the streets and I knew that I couldn't change any legislation, but what I could do is give voice to our suffering.
Writing was a way for me to stop running and stop wounding and start healing.
I just tried over and over again, every time I got my black coffee and mustered up some Black words on empty white pages. I tried to give us love, love that would keep us grounded through the shaking.
We speak. We write. We do language. That is how we heal when our bodies bend and break. That is how the world heals when it is bruised. That is how I healed.
Jesus stands as one who knew economic, political, and religious violence but also as one who formed people in the way of resistance, dignity, power, justice, and love.
The Jesus I preached must make us free, not quiet.
Their faith was not a destination; it was a discipline.
To walk is profoundly courageous.
That is faith—living.
* * * * *
One bird was free; the other bird was bound. One is trapped, only able to see freedom in the distance; the other is free, flying in a world that works in its favor. In its weakness, the caged bird opens up his throat still. It gathers courage, strength, power, the will. The bird must sing in a world that has him bound. He must open up his throat, flap his tender and broken wings, and gather itself to travel far beyond the cage, the rough terrain, the terrible pain of its losses.
Isabel Wilkerson likened this country to an old house. "When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought," she writes. "Choose not to look, however, at your own peril." Ignorance is not protection against the rot—it gives the rot its power and longevity. The rot forces us into resilience. It is not normal. No people should be forced.
When I stopped running from the pain, rage showed up. And it taught me to seek freedom.
Rage revealed to me its cousin, courage, and the ways we need both for liberation.
Serious love. We need what Jesus called neighbor love. We need what Martin Luther King, Jr., called redemptive love. We need what Toni Morrison called self love. We need what bell hooks called committed love. We need what Kiese Laymon calls responsible love.
To believe in the better, to believe in your future, to shout in the midst of a country on fire, to stare down lions, to shake the foundations of the empire, to make meaning in the face of death, to fail, to create, to live, and to love—this is the stuff of hope. It is not an assent to nostalgia or myths or lies. It is the audacious belief that one’s body, one’s story, one’s future does not end in this moment.
Truth is the beginning of liberation. It is the beginning of what we really want for ourselves as humans. It is what we are encouraged to be and become in our faith traditions. It is the beginning of life. Giving up our lies so that we can really love.
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