There is a prayer that is dominating my prayer life right now–It is interesting to notice my prayer life in this public forum of a newsletter. Most of the time my prayer life is my inward self talk. In metaphysical form, it is calling the divine within me, just as ‘Jesus take the wheel’ is an emergency sort of self-talk. This prayer life is important: The things we tell ourselves/ the messages we call out for and the things we teach/tell ourselves.
I heard this from a colleague: a pastor, Methodist, and Womanist Scholar. She is a friend of mine, a teacher of mine, and an accountability partner for me–she and I had very different upbringings. She’s an African-American woman who grew up affluent in Cincinnati and I grew up further out from Cincy, on the bottom side of the economic and class structures–an Appalachian in the Midwest. She shared the prayer that she heard her church aunties and matriarchs praying in the Black Church she grew up in. I pray…
“… for a reasonable portion of health and strength and with soundness in my mind…”
I think about the vagueness of that prayer. A reasonable portion. What is reasonable? In my perfectionism and call to professionalism and performance–what is reasonable? In my accountability to the pressures of our life, what is a reasonable portion? In providing for my family? And my church? In my anxieties and fading abilities and the suffering of proving my salt, yearning toward precision, what is reasonable for health, strength, and my mind…
I live in a vagueness nowadays, but not like the church aunties. Not in the intersection of their blackness and femininity, knowing the ways laws and capital were used to subjugate them. I live in the vagueness as a person who strives for justice in our political and economic systems–knowing first hand that I only had to lose an accent in order to grasp privilege not yet reached by people who are marginalized. [I am an Appalachian white man, I only had to change my dialectical accent (which my childhood speech pathologist did without my noticing) to fully access the white and male privilege I inherited from our systems without the marginalizing barriers of my ethnicity and class of being both Appalachian and poor.]
In contrast to the African-American Women, who could not escape the marginalization from the larger society, even living in affluence. Praying my portion is reasonable enough for me, for my situation, for my family and church, enough to make a difference, or even to keep going, or to not drift into despair.
And there is a vagueness I lean into, in my personal life and in my professional life–our goals are personal and collective growth; bigger than our numbers of members, deeper than church budgets, and wider than our ever widening circles–something that rejects notions of numbers but is ethereal–we’ll know it when we know it. Yet, numbers can denote progress–as well as the hope and despair we experience.
There is a metaphor used within the Abrahamic traditions, “the rain falls upon the just and the unjust alike.” It is at the core of our interactions, the fear that we experience at every turn–the political ads that declare ‘the end of the world is nigh’ in so many words. The fear of rejection from our neighbors. The fear of not having enough, not being enough, the fear of the unknown, the fear of other, and the fear of being othered…
We are not called to herald the world with fear. Our way is to “love the heaven into the world, not scare the hell out of it.” So as we embark, and continue our journey of anti-oppression, of anti-racism, and radical inclusion, as we once again disarm, disempower and deconstruct fascism, as we aspirationally listen to the prophets’ call for ‘Justice to flow down like waters’ and as we dream of Beloved Community– for each of you on this journey, I pray
“… for a reasonable portion of health and strength and with soundness in my mind…”
Amen, Ashe, and May it be so
Rev. Will