A Re-membering: Religion, Flesh, and Liberation
When I was no more than knee-high to a grasshopper, I would steal away from my Sunday School class and slip into the choir loft alongside my grandmother, Mama B. Within moments my grandfather would notice me appear among the gray-haired choir members, give me a slight nod and sly smile, and would continue on in his devotion from across the sanctuary. There I would sit as the Pastor would lead the congregation in singing the Lord’s Prayer, the Deacons would bless the elements for Communion, and Mama B, in her flowing crimson and cream robe, would bow her head to receive of the meal that connects her to her Lord and Savior. In those early days I didn’t understand what was happening around me, nor did I care to if I am being at all honest. But while my understanding was limited, the feeling of something greater, something important, something soul-changing was ever-present.
When we are young the nuanced meanings of the traditions and rituals that we take part in are not always as important as the connections we have to them. For me, that connection came as a result of watching my family, and to some degree, those who I knew within the congregation, gather each Sunday and participate wholeheartedly in the same routine. As Disciples, the shorthand name for members of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) denomination which I was loosely raised and eventually baptized in, the table was the routine. Again, I couldn’t articulate what that meant at such a young age but there was something liberating happening for those who did understand. And I could see it! Thinking back now I can recall my youthful assuredness in knowing the meaning of the routine around the table: it was the actual resting place, the tomb, of Jesus. Why else would we be here in Salem, VA on a Sunday morning in uncomfortable clothes when we could be at home watching cartoon?
With time, understanding sows itself. With life, wisdom takes root. With sorrow, hope grows eternal.
While I would love to say that my parents and greater family circles instilled within me the connection between religion and liberation, that is, the fullness of freedom for both the individual and the community. It just wasn’t the case for me. Like most of us who grew up in Appalachia, religion was and is about surviving. Surviving the harshness of life, the heartaches of love, the tolls of parenthood, and squeezing out what little joy that can be found. And yet with time I have come to realize that within that framing of religion, within the practice of making meaning out of the hardness of life in the great hope of finding peace in the hereafter, there grows the possibility of understanding religion as but one tool in the struggle for liberation.
Religion as a tool for justice is about understanding the world for what it is, has been, and can be. It doesn’t shirk away from the horrors by applying the salve of piety nor provides a rose-colored sheen to make everything appear okay through positive thought. Religion with this understanding beckons us to think of ourselves in relationship to the greater cosmos for which we are intimately a part of. It provides us the stories, the rituals, the songs, the questions, and the festivals to continuously return to the greater questions of “Who am I” and “Why am I here?” Questions, that when answered with care and rigor, always offer something to the self in community instead of the self removed from community. After all, have our traditions not begun with prophets being stirred upon witnessing the plight of their people, Ancestors being driven to the depths of the sea with choosing freedom over bondage, spirits wielding machetes and lightning bolts, and a beckoning to dance freely under the pale-faced moon?
Religion and the various stories that come along with any one tradition are more than analogies that offer simple comfort for when the day becomes cumbersome. They instead provide roadmaps to re-member onto us the power(s) which run through our veins and usher us to the precipice of creation where we conjure something beautiful for ourselves, each other, and for those who are still to come.
While I may have grown up loosely religious in Appalachia, most of my earliest memories pertain to religion in some way. While there are flashes of moments when such spaces and places taught me to doubt the ways of my flesh, there are moments that taught me the exact opposite. Memories like the anointing of foreheads, the deep embrace of Elders, and the giggles that follow hours-long rituals. In all its complicatedness, religion at its best points us to the places where we liberate ourselves despite what the world might say about the value of our flesh, our embodiedness. And while it might be hard, it is always worth it.
“In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. “Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard.”
- Baby Suggs, from Toni Morison’s Beloved
