I’ve been intending to write Part II of Act Fast for months now.
Initially, I was embarrassed that I have nothing earth shattering or even positive to say about my progress with my financial stewardship. Shopping and spending are one big vice for me. I know it, and now all of you do, too.
Weightier things are on my mind. Things about life and living. Things about race and culture. Things about capitalism and a lot of other isms that so many people pretend to avoid. Things that are in our faces and yet we don’t speak about them as if pretending is not make-believe and really doesn’t make anything go away.
Many people say they are “praying” about stuff that they know they are not praying about. I’ve spoken to many women, especially Black women, who are not even praying anymore because like this society, they don’t trust their faith anymore.
That last part troubles my soul. When Black women stop praying, the whole world is upside down. We all should be very afraid.
I recently read this:
When the responses church leaders and counselors offer [black female] victim-survivors include [] women sacrificing themes, they can suffuse an abuser’s self-justifying logic with sacred moral authority. For black women seeking help, these church responses aid in maintaining a sense of confusion about the costs of their vulnerability to abuse and violence and their right to escape it.[1]
The subject of the book to which this quote belongs is “the role of culture in addressing gender-based violence, particularly on religious and racial dynamics.”[2]
As I sit here in my most contemplative, disciplined stance of the past few weeks, the subject of race-based gender violence, that is, male violence against Black women, seems stunningly apropos. Violence takes on many faces. This book, Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence, is about physical violence, including abuse that leads to death, or what the author, Traci C. West decides to term, femicide.[3] But violence is not only physical. It is as multifaceted as it is simultaneously two, three and four faced like the creatures in the book of Ezekiel. It moves in many ways and every way at the same time. It makes strange and diabolical noises. It walks. It talks. It crawls, seeps, stalks, cuts, connives, burns, torches, slaps, whacks, steals, coerces, forces, pushes, pulls, chips, drowns, and kills the spirit of hope and joy.
When those actions are felt in the one place where a momentary escape from reality must be found, that is when and where stick-to-it-iveness begins a slow, painful death march. That is where violence cocoons and spawns its larvae into the world. That is where statistics reckon with reality. That is where prayers, and fellowship, and breaking bread together, and walking alongside, and the Good Samaritans are supposed to travel.
That is also where afflicted Black women, especially Black church women, try to push through and against the tussling of the crowd who doesn’t notice her. That is where Black women determine, in a last-ditch effort, to reach with just one outstretched hand. That is where Black women push against so-called standards, traditions and norms that never really included us. That is where Black women touch the hem of a tasseled garment being worn by an all too aware God.
Why? Because that is where omniscient God turns to her bloodied, clothes torn off, objectified body and says to her what no one else is ever going care enough to say to her. At least, not in a way that has momentous, life-society-culture changing consequence.
“Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.” Luke 8:48 (NRSVUE)
“Peace.” The same word that this same God says to the unruly, violent wind as it rages over a conforming sea. “Peace.” The same word that this same God says at least three times after his violent death and stunning resurrection. “Peace.” The same word that this same God uses to comfort the sister who was violently ‘caught’ doing something with a man who was doing the same thing but was conveniently not ‘caught’ doing.
“Peace.” The same word that this same God uses when this same God champions us.
“I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!” John 16:33 (NRSVUE)
Peace.
[1]. Traci C. West, Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality: Africana Lessons on Religion, Racism, and Ending Gender Violence, (New York: New York University Press: 2019), 47.
[2]. West, 2
[3] . West, 40.
Photo by Ian Kiragu on Unsplash
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