Hi All,
This week I re-visited Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury.”
I continued to read Catherine Keller’s On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process and bell hooks’ All About Love. I pulled The Beginning of Difference by Theodore Hiebert off the shelf, and thumbed trough my underlines.
I also ate a whole fish on a rooftop at dusk, had faith-renewing conversations, and read Tarot the old way for a friend at my dinner table (think: bold interpretations and a rarely indulged performance of unbridled advice-giving).
The Director of the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights’ New York office Craig Mokhiber resigned yesterday, citing “a text-book case of genocide.” I hope you are resisting in the ways that you can, taking care of each other, & finding ways to stay human.
Onward,
Jessica
Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, Five of Wands by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. In the image, five people are waving wands around as if in conflict—conflict, from confligere, to strike together—though no one is dominating. In the background, there are hundreds of brown oak leaves covering the autumn ground.
November 1 | The Star | Feeling is sanctuary
We can debate the meaning of intuition or we can consider poet Audre Lorde’s genius articulation of what "it feels right to me1” means. Lorde writes that as we become curious about, aware of, and accepting of feelings, they “become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change…” It may feel cliché (Lorde says there are no new ideas, “only new ways of making them felt”) but it’s no less true that in turning toward feeling—in Lorde’s case, dreams and poems—ideas that are otherwise impossible to grasp come to feel bearable, tangible, and right.
November 2 | Wheel of Fortune | To listen is to risk being changed
Let’s talk about truth again. Like about how it’s related to trust. Theologian Catherine Keller writes that trust is what “opens us to risk testimony,” and “to risk putting the truth as we know it on trial.2” bell hooks wrote that with self-awareness—which feels related to self-trust—we can discern what we need to be willing to learn. This feels crucial. To risk what we know is to make ourselves vulnerable. And it makes me think that perhaps when I'm unwilling to listen or be changed, that’s because I’m not trusting. What are the right conditions for listening, if to truly listen is to risk being changed?
November 3 | The Lovers | Conflict is love’s time to shine
In last week’s Offering I wrote about how U.S. Defense Council’s John Kirby defined conflict for the masses as “bloody,” “ugly,” and “messy,” by nature. I thought it was a destructive and uncreative assertion. It made me think about my favorite quote from philosopher Kelly Oliver—which I never miss a chance to cite—that “love is an ethics of otherness that thrives on the adventure of otherness.3” Many of us have inherited similarly wrong ideas about conflict, and it could be time we disclaim them. What if conflict—from the Latin confligere, to strike together—is love’s time to shine?