angel asunder

“These are spiritual afflictions in and of themselves, but in religious communities, when whiteness becomes inseparable from the character of God, you’ll find customs such as evangelism equated with conquering, but admissible under the guise of “love.” You’ll find guilt-driven spirituality, which is obsessed with alleviating guilt and becoming “clean”—for whiteness always carries the memory of what it has done to those in bodies of color, and guilt is its primary tormentor. The irony, of course, is that this guilt cannot be relieved save by a rending of whiteness from the image of God (which the force of whiteness will never do). In order to rend whiteness from the face of God, we must do more than make new images.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“The chasm between the spiritual and the physical is no greater than that between a thought and a word. They cannot be disconnected. And it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins, perhaps because there is no such place.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“In lament, our task is never to convince someone of the brokenness of this world; it is to convince them of the world’s worth in the first place. True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

“Audre Lorde said, “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings…. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.”
― Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us