Praying/Dancing/Sexing/Collaging/Awakening

This is how it goes.

When it's time, you move once.
And then wait.
Sensing a response--
a counter movement--
you consider the power
and take a deep breath.

Then you listen to what's racing.
Is it momentum?
Invitation?
Fear?
A melody crowning?

And again, you move.
This time, there's little guessing
because if it happens twice
it's not a mistake or the silliness of spontaneity.
If it happens twice, it's intentional.
It's rhythmic. It's relationship.

It's dangerous.

Patterns get established at this juncture.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Just listen and feel. Then respond.
That's the sequence, little pilgrim.
Don't step out of line.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Pulse.
Deep breath. 

Yours? Maybe...

Just follow, but don't be misled
by listening too long to that which belongs inside
because the outside current
is what satisfies. It's paradoxical.
Just listen and feel and follow.

This is the best kept secret of the universe,
this secret locked in the bodied archives
of any wanderer hoping to come home
by belonging
(again and again)
(beat by beat)
(sound to sound)
(flesh for flesh)
to what's outside.

Here's the trick.

The trick is to close your eyes
when its most alluring
and to scream
when the silence signifies a great study
and to un/name the distance by becoming,
somehow all the more distinct

in total surrender.

Festering & Pestering

I'm learning more and more that what's toxic and festering must be spoken out loud. Audre Lorde has taught me this more than any/other author. She and Frida Kahlo pester (not fester) me often. Both were incredibly creative and transformative. They took bullshit pain/trauma oppression and transformed their experience of those things into works of art. Courage. Fearless. Both of them. And so on days like today, I recall their legacies...and then I write. I write so I don't internalize the negativity. I write so that my body is free. I write to exorcise the lies that I (sometimes unconsciously) inherit by living in this unconscious/traumatized culture. I write so that I don't perpetuate the lies and hurt people. This is active/intentional channeling of toxicity in an effort to transform it. My prayer in this is for people to feel less alone (in the act of receiving my words) and empowered to actively/intentionally channel toxicity so it doesn't kill them either.  

This morning during a brain-storming session at a council retreat I had to sit and listen to leaders of my church talk about "Open and Affirming" conversations as if they were that: conversations. As if gay bodies weren't in the room. Like: you want the luxury of a conversation about my person-hood and then want to congratulate yourself about it in my presence? Um, no. Reminds me of what I felt earlier in the week when the PCUSA decided to ordain openly gay ministers. It's never too late to do the right thing. I am glad about that decision. And there's a part of me that's like, ummmm just because you decided/figured-out that gay people aren't second class citizens doesn't mean you're righteous. You're repenting. That's different. Don't self-congratulate so quickly. Similarly: there's nothing to be sung about when white people actually acknowledge racism. That doesn't somehow erase the lie we've been telling ourselves for thousands of years. Realizing a lie doesn't absolve any of the pain caused by that lie, nor does it mean you're no longer enacting the lie. It just means you can stop being an unconscious asshole now and start working towards honest relations in life. That's it. What's radical and worth celebrating is flipping power and privilege over for good, which requires consistent acts over one's life time (that often get socially punished) of great risk and sacrifice by those who have power and privilege.

Oh: and if I had the capacity, which I of course do not, I would eternally ban the word "mission" from Christian discourse. (My next blog will probably be about this: just fyi.)

Rant done. Peace out.
EJ

Bloody Lightning: A Prayer of Confession and Petition

Menstruation is privilege.
It is the possibilities of bleeding out
what is on the threshold of life/death,
thereby re-membering one's placement in the cycle
of birth/collapse.

It is privilege to participate in this
recycling system that is psychically and sexually rooted
in the body
in the body
in the body.

Last night I woke up twice. There was lightning in the sky,
thunder clapped, ripping through silence, awakening sleepy-heads
to the shameless power of nature that can do whatever It wills/wants.
Both times, my legs and sheets were covered in black blood.
I wasn't ill-prepared. She does what she wills. Shamelessly.

This morning I read that my current place of employment
hosted and organized minstrel shows, a legacy of
essentializing brown bodies
exploiting brown bodies
...for "entertainment"...
profiteering off of brown bodies
doing violence/rape/murder to brown bodies--
that legacy runs in the halls of my office and
runs through the blood in my veins.

This morning I recall my father's pastoral legacy of
using women,
dismissing women,
silencing women,
impregnating and abandoning women and then
lying about women to women--
that legacy flows through the blood in my veins.

And so this morning i thank
my body
my body
my body
for bleeding out and expressing death/collapse honestly
in ways that my job and my culture will not.

I am a student of this black blood
this luminous darkness
   (to use Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman's theological language)
that incarnates honestly the need to purge and express
no matter how painful
    (and yes, this belly cramps and collapses on itself every month, painfully)
what has not brought life,
what is painful and bleeding,
what needs to die.

Legacies of white supremacy and racial hatred
patriarchy and woman-hatred,
take your cue.
In the speaking of your legacy in this/my body,
in the honest confession that you
do not bring life and
that you need to die--
be transformed,
be recycled into truth that is life-giving, life affirming, and life-sustaining,
be gone from your current dis/embodiments,
be incarnated life and begin
with
this/my body
this/my body
this/my body.

Internalized Oppression

When you love what you are

and come into contact with others

who are what you are

but don’t love what you/they are (together)

it can be maddening.

…particularly if you’ve had to

rip that self love from the sharp teeth of

all-consuming, triple headed monsters that

seek the exploitation & annihilation of your self

for the perpetuation of violent fiction,

the myth of a bottomless belly,

the myth of never ending hunger that must be satiated

by someone who is willing to be treated like something.

…particularly if you’ve had to

tenderly and patiently patchwork quilt that

self love back into/onto your body

with creative threading skills

that don’t always appear coherent to the external eye,

with nurturing touch

 that feels foreign and clumsy at first,

and with compassionate placement

 that takes incredible discipline of the always-suspect intuition.

It can be down-right infuriating

to encounter those who do not love those things you share,

who do not love those things you are together,

and thereby do not reflect back nor deepen

your endurance, victory and worth-fighting-for-ness;

who instead recycle the myths—with their bodies—

solidify some fiction—with their incongruities—

that keep your kind hunted, chewed up, swallowed and spat back up

because after all, it turns out

that monster’s hunger is always bigger than its stomach.

…and yet…

no matter how maddening & infuriating

it might be—this lack of love—

if you love what you are

there is no sense in resenting those

who don’t love what you are in common

because, if it’s really common, even if—no,

especially if

its still in the teeth of hungry monsters,

it’s still what you are, still what you love and

only by lovingly beckoning it out of the mouth of devouring lies

and into the truth of its inherent & unconditional rightness

can you truly claim an authentic self-love, the one

you’ve been living & dying to enact all the days of your breathing,

the one you’re willing to sacrifice for and wait for

and not give up on just because you’re tired.

This is why forgiveness is

still the most generous act

in the recognition of one’s love not loving what’s loveable in common/together,

because if love is love, even deferred love-in-return—

even bad behavior that mocks and spits at the loving-self

because of internalized oppression—

cannot dissuade it. 

Traveling

I don't know why
traveling always seems like such a vague notion
when it offers such concrete freedom.

like
perspective
connection
healing
awakening

I feel like writing myself a note for the future:
break away more
reconnect to the places you used to be more
discover new spots more
move more.

Next time that stuckness creeps in
and I'm spinning and nauseous
from my own chasing-tail game--
someone tell me to book a flight,
or a train, or to get in my car and just go.

Freedom knows...

I'm going to tell you something.
This is confessional.
And someone, somewhere may use this
to soapbox about all things heterosexual
to soapbox about all things nuclear family
to soapbox about all things trappings of organized religion
to soapbox about all things not-me.
I don't give a damn. I'm telling you anyways.

The loneliest I ever feel,
is right after worship.

Right after worship,
particularly after telling the deepest truth i've got.
And the loneliness is magnified on holidays
when I go home alone
and i'm not at home, but i'm certainly alone--
even if i'm surrounded by people.

There is no home for a prophet--Jesus was right about that.

But here's what he didn't say:
you go looking for home all the days of your life
and you never find it--not if you're honest--
because home is a fleeting moment that will not be owned
or married or institutionalized.

There is only the freedom in truth, that localizes in a body
that's willing to be a channel, that's willing to be
so fucking alone afterward that it almost makes
the freedom of truth worth forsaking.

Almost.

But I will never forsake freedom or truth. Never.
And that's how I know my soul is in tact
in this fucking monstrosity of a culture that
desires people to run from loneliness
straight into the chains that will enslave them.

Constant Ache

Someday my pain, someday my pain
Will mark you
Harness your blame, harness your blame
And walk through

With the wild wolves around you
In the morning, I'll call you
Send it farther on

Solace my game, solace my game
It stars you
Swing wide your crane, swing wide your crane
And run me through

And the story's all over you
In the morning i'll call you
Can't you find a clue when your eyes are all painted Sinatra blue

What might have been lost -
Don't bother me

Rest in Peace Sue Creed

Every Wednesday she came over and soul collaged with me. One day she was flipping through magazines and pulled out this poem. She loved it. When I was looking over the funeral file she left for us, I found the poem tucked into one of her collages. It reminds me of a Spring day, last year, when she still had zest and vitality in her body, when she could talk shit and laugh out loud. It reminds me of her Spirit that is now free...

So to her, I launch this poem, in the love of freedom and life.

Of Yield and Abandon

A muscular, thick-pelted woodchuck,

created in yield, in abandon, lifts onto his haunches. 

Behind him, abundance of ferns, a rocks wall's 

coldness, never in sun, a few noisy grackles.

Our eyes find shining beautiful

because it reminds us of water. To say this

does not make fewer the rooms of the house

or lessen its zinc-ceilinged hallways.

There is something that waits inside us,

a nearness that fissures, that fishes. Leaf shine

and stone shine edging the tail of the woodchuck silver,

splashing the legs of chickens and clouds. 

In Russian, the translator told me,

there is no word for "thirsty"--a sentence,

as always, impossible to translate.

But what is the point of preserving the bell

if to do so it must be filled with concrete or wax? 

A body prepared for travel but not for singing? 

--Jane Hirshfield

Separation of Church and State

The Congregationalist

First Congregational Church, Battle Creek

Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

People always try to make sense of God based on their encounters with the world and make sense of the world based on their encounters with God. In the late nineteenth century a protestant movement known as “the social gospel” took root in America in response to the Industrial Revolution’s impact on the world. Josiah Strong, Horace Bushnell and Walter Rauschenbusch were some of the pioneer theologians of the social gospel and they were all pastors firmly rooted in communities of faith. Members of the United Church of Christ today can trace denominational ties to all three of these men and their churches.

Economics (production, consumption, working conditions, immigration labor, and wage standards) and diversity (abolitionist, suffragist and child labor movements) were the worldly issues provoking new ideas about God at the time of the social gospel movement. As unbound freedoms and sufferings began impacting various sectors of society simultaneously, social gospel theologians took note and took to the pen. Some of their writings are the most brilliant theological texts of all time. The main thrust of social gospel theology—what separated it from the dominant theology of its day—is that life is not primarily individual, but rather social. From this claim, social gospel theologians constructed theology about God that focused on the social nature of sin and salvation with Jesus’ teachings about “the kingdom of God” as their moral compass. Their theology, if taken seriously, had direct political implications.   

Much of what began with New York Pastor Walter Rauschenbusch (the father of social gospel theology in America) at the turn of the century was carried forth by 20^th century figures known as liberation theologians who were responding to The Great Depression, WW I&II, and the Civil Rights Movement/s. Again, social conditions of freedom and oppression were the worldly phenomena that provoked American liberation theologians such as James Cone, Mary Daly, Kelly Brown Douglas and Kwok Pui Lan (just to name a select few!) to envision God in creative ways that led to political momentum. In Latin America, Africa and especially Nazi-occupied Germany very similar content emerged from 20^th century theologians trying to take God and the world seriously without minimizing one’s impact upon the other.  

I quit believing in God as a teenager. It wasn’t until college, when I stumbled upon the writings of social gospel and liberation theologians that I even began to consider returning to religion. What inspired me so much about these movements within Christianity is how unabashedly thorough and relentless they were in addressing the question of power: both God’s power and the power/principalities on Earth. The church of my childhood was hesitant to address that question and it drove me nuts…eventually drove me out the door. I don’t think my experience is unique for many young people. My sense is that most young people are spiritually hungry, but their search for spiritual truth is woven into everyday realities of freedom and liberation, realities that are tied up in power dynamics and are therefore political in nature. Therefore if we want to be a faith community that is attractive to the post-boomer generation, we must grapple with issues of power in our society. That means we cannot shy away from the political realities of our day.  

Rev. Thomas Ryberg recently spoke at a political rally in town and some folk questioned his pastoral authority, wondering if he was doing an ethical job of observing the separation of church and state. Some questioned if he was speaking on behalf of the church or if he was speaking on behalf of himself. These are totally important questions for folk both in and outside of our congregation to be wrestling with on a regular basis. Communities must keep clergy accountable to oaths of ordination. And clergy must keep communities accountable to the truths of God. If any pastor allows political movements that are oppressive to wash over her community unchallenged, she is not doing her job of truth-telling. The separation of church and state does not bind politicians to silence on religious issues, nor religious clerics to silence on political issues. In fact, the separation of church and state provides the necessary space between political and religious entities for healthy accountability to be reached on both sides. We inherit this necessary space from the constitutional framers of our country and social gospel/liberation theologians of our tradition.

May we always occupy that inherited space with respect and courage for we are all citizens of this country and seekers of the truth of God simultaneously. Let us continue taking both our God and this world seriously, without minimizing the impact of one upon the other. Amen.   

Prophecy & Hip Hop

***This piece will be featured in a local, independent rag. FYI.***

Prophecy & Hip Hop

By: Rev. Emily Joye McGaughy

February 17, 2011

Disclaimer

I want to talk about the intersection of prophecy and Hip Hop but first need to get some technical stuff out of the way. I am a trained theologian, which means I’ve been resourced to see, name and support the movement of God in the world. It is from this training and resourced-lens that I see Hip Hop as the primary prophetic movement of/in our time. I do not claim to be an expert on Hip Hop but I do see divinity there and that’s what I am hoping to convey in this piece of social commentary.

Prophecy: Tradition and Problems

The Judeo-Christian tradition is a diverse religious movement with many historical, literary, cultural and institutional expressions. One of those expressions is prophecy.

Judeo-Christian prophecy has historical and geographic roots in the Ancient Near East which was the context for early Israelite prophets such as Amos, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Jesus of Nazareth. The aforementioned prophets were speaking to persons, crowds, institutions and the empires of their day. Their prophetic works are located in the books of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. Many of us know these prophets and their words/works. But many of us—religious and non-religious alike--do not know the contexts from which these prophetic works come, nor how those contexts parallel the world we are living in today. Therefore our ability to call upon the past while making meaning in the present is severely truncated.There are corrupt clergy and a whole host of brainwashed flock out there using prophetic texts in ways that not only dishonor the prophetic tradition but also dishonor God. Talib Kweli once said “life without knowledge is death in disguise.” Kweli’s words put on blast those who out of ignorance lift prophetic texts for ends of death. Corruption and power-hoarding are at the center of this ignorance. And it is my opinion that if people really knew their Bible and really knew the living God, they’d be paying as much attention to if not more attention to Hip Hop than scripture. Let me explain…  

Prophecy: Movement and Spirit

There are two things about prophecy that are important to know: 1) prophecy is about movement & 2) prophecy is of a certain spirit.

Movement

Prophecy is a cultural dialectic—a conversation that relies upon movement. It relies upon movement between subjects: speaking and listening, challenging and receptivity, love and change through action. Prophecy relies upon movement between persons and groups: individuals participate in a culture/community where people exchange various expressions of truth like art, philosophy and ritual. Prophecy relies upon movement between communities and institutions: communities create political and social entities that are supposed to serve them and those entities, in turn, recreate communities. And finally, prophecy relies upon movement between communities and power structures: persons and groups speak truth about the structural conditions of power impacting them and those structures reform accordingly (sometimes willingly but most the time, structural reform happens begrudgingly).

Spirit

Prophetic texts and persons embody a particular spirit, a spirit that will not be contained or domesticated. The prophetic spirit is of and comes from the Living God. The Living God is liberation. Liberation, period. Prophetic persons, prophetic texts, and prophetic movements--if they are truly prophetic in nature, and not just on some silly “spiritual” psychobabble—are always speaking about power because power is the thing that either enables or blocks liberation. Prophets speak in truth about power: this is their nature, their duty and function no matter the cost. The prophet speaks truth to power and speaks to the masses about power. Prophets are almost always speaking about power within the realms of politics and religion. You don’t invite them home to meet mom. They do not make casual conversation and they don’t remain on the surface…ever. The spirit they embody doesn’t allow them to do anything but pursue truth in the hope of liberation. If you’re on board with that, they are the best company to keep and the best truth to come home to. If you’re not on board with the hope of liberation: get the hell out of the way. 

Intersections and Directions

When Christianity sold its soul to the devil by becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire in the 4^th c. CE, it lost its ability to be a/part/of prophetic movement. A prophet cannot be sucking on a corrupt power source and critiquing it with the same mouth. Such crossed loyalty and hypocrisy stifles movement and kills the spirit. Again, without movement and spirit, prophecy cannot exist. So when Christianity sold out, the religion of God made known in Jesus became the arm of empire, colonialism and war instead of the embodied heart of truth, love and justice. What does it mean for a tradition that gave birth to a movement to not be able to contain that movement any longer?

Well, the Living God does not die. So the movement just takes up life somewhere else.

There have been many “somewhere else’s” since the 4^th century but I’m not here to do a history lesson. I’m here as a theologian trying to locate prophecy today.

 Hip-Hop is the embodiment of prophecy in our times. Hip Hop has been the movement of truth-telling in the hope of liberation from its conception in the black community, from its birth in the South Bronx among those who were exchanging, creating, and resisting vis-à-vis and sometimes within the power structures impacting them. Even when the corrupt power of white-supremacist capitalism tried to stifle the spirit of the Hip Hop movement by turning it into a commodity, Hip Hop went underground and continued speaking truth (to power and about power) in the hope of liberation. The resurrective, resilient Spirit of Hip Hop is nothing short of divinity. Underground Hip Hop is, by all means, the prophetic movement that is alive and well in our culture today.

If you don’t believe me, check out any of these contemporary texts and try not to make (historically  accurate) parallels with the biblical prophetic tradition:

Hanifah Walida’s “Do You Mind” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HPPlYN0BwI

Head Roc’s “Christopher Columbus” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sru9_pmKjGc

Blue Scholars “Burnt Offering” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_LEM0cCJDk

Brother Ali “Uncle Sam Goddamn” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO18F4aKGzQ

Conclusion and Implications

A person who is trying to trying to take seriously 1) justice in the world and 2) truth-full spirituality will find a home in Hip Hop. Hip Hop is where the Spirit of the Living God is moving in the hope of liberation today. Prophets not only speak truth to power and speak to the masses about power, but in their speaking they embody the power of the Living God, the power of liberation. Let those with ears, hear Hip Hop.