Don't get got, get God
It is very unserious to suggest that the divine is blood-thirsty and murderous.
A few years ago, I was having pancakes in South London with my mentor, Eric. I can’t remember the details of our conversation; I do remember the moment I felt seen with a vitalising clarity that I hadn’t experienced before: “Josh, your ministry is in your DNA.” Even as I type those words, I am ablaze with goosebumps. It is not only that ministry is my connection to my grandfather, who was a Baptist preacher (he crossed over last September), and that some of my favourite memories are of Sundays with my family at his church: the smell of Jergen’s, the high heat of Sundays in South Texas, children languishing as the adults said goodbyes that lasted longer than the service, the anticipation of the inevitable buffet at Golden Corral. It is that Eric saw something I could not see about myself at the time: I cannot help but minister; it comes as naturally to me as breathing. When I gather groups together for dinner, to connect and commune, I am ministering. When I exalt the Black gay writers of what Jafari S. Allen calls “the long 1980s”, I am ministering. When I take to social media to weep or to recite poetry, to do my part to awaken and energise the broken-hearted, I am ministering. When I broadcast to queer Black people through Busy Being Black, in an ongoing effort to let people know they are not alone, I am ministering.
My ministry is in my DNA.
For me to claim that inheritance, I’ve had to tussle with attempts to indoctrinate me with an image of God that offends an intimate understanding of spirituality that precedes me and which is not affirmed in my spirit. I was 15 when I decided that I do not need a mediator in my relationship to God; I could not shake the nagging suspicion that I was being lied to in the ways the Bible was being taught to me. I felt and feel certain that there is nothing anyone else could possibly tell me about God that He wouldn’t tell me Himself. I thought I turned away from God at 15, too, but that connection to a higher power, a greater intelligence (as I now understand God), moves through me whether I’m actively worshipping or not.
My ministry is in my DNA.
This morning, Joseph Mulder’s 1685 illustration, “Allegorical Representation with Heaven and Earth” (1685) came into my digital orbit, and I was so startled by the synchronicity. Yesterday, amid a tremendous grief and fury at the state of the world, I turned to Toni Cade Bambara’s essay, “On the Issue of Roles,” in which she reminds us it is not revolutionary to mimic the degradations of whiteness in our interpersonal relationships, nor to assess ourselves by the standards imposed by those who’ve ravaged the world with their greed. Toni was my balm. Our rage is righteous, only in service of revolution. And as we learn from a range of resistance movements, even as we destroy what confines and degrades us, we build, we grow, we nurture, we deepen, we bear witness. It can’t be a coincidence that we can do what makes us most human with tears in our eyes.
Well, Mudler’s illustration contains reference to two Biblical passages:
Matthew 11:12 → From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it.
Joel 2:12–13 → Even now, declares the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting and weeping and mourning. Rend your heart and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, and he relents from sending calamity.
My ministry is my DNA. Walk with me, y’all.
“Rend your heart and not your garments” is a word, and it lit me up. It is also the theological message delivered within Bambara’s essay. I do not mean to suggest she’s ministering about repentance, which is the thrust of Joel (the locusts are ostensibly God’s judgment). Bambara’s insistence that we take seriously the self-transformation that the revolution demands is the point: “you find your Self in destroying illusions, smashing myths, laundering the head of whitewash [and] being responsible to some truth.” Laundering the head of whitewash is especially salient in any rumination and reflection on the awesome power of God. Like the mystics, I find it very unserious to suggest that the divine is somehow also bloodthirsty and murderous. It’s giving whiteness, not witness.
The inclusion of Matthew 11:12 in the alchemical illustration is instructive. Prima facie, the passage points to the reality of the terrain: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it.” I find it curious that this passage travels so well without the context that Jesus is telling the people that God already sent the example par-fucking-excellence ahead of him, John the Baptist, who was called a demon! And then Jesus came along, as prophesied, and was called everything but Yahweh! He closes Matthew 11:19 with: “Wisdom is proved right by her deeds.” And we have to mention Matthew 11:23 here, too: “For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day.”
Now, I’m certain the point of all this is not suffering and redemption, ad infinitum. That is insanity, not spiritual practice. Suffering is man-made and man-sustained. We see this in Bambara’s analysis of, and her frustration about, the ways whiteness has been enculturated at the expense of Black vitality, or Blackhood: white supremacy, in Word and in deed, precludes our revolutionary (or heart-rending) potential. Rending the heart (Joel 2:12—13) is the only way to embody the wisdom that can prevent the violence that ravages the kingdom of heaven. Let me make it explicit: whiteness ravages the kingdom of God and all who would be lifted up in its riches.
I do not abide by any theology that enthrones and exalts a blood-lusting divinity. Whom does it serve for us to believe that violence is the eternal condition?
If we worship a violent God, a murderous God, then we have no model, no ministry, for He is the example. This is why the Mystics were so hated by the establishment: they directly challenged the ideas that a) our relationship to God can only be mediated through an anointed and appointed third party; and b) that God kills to save. Julian of Norwich, for example, insisted that God is not judgmental; humans are. He is not sitting upon a throne in the sky, sending plagues to get us to kneel in praise of his violent glory; He is waiting for us to rend our hearts, so He can live within us again.
He made man’s soul to be his own city and his dwelling-place, the most pleasing to Him of all His works; and once man had fallen into sorrow and pain was not fit to serve that noble purpose. Our kind Father would prepare no other place for himself but sit upon the Earth waiting for mankind to bring back His city and restore its noble beauty with his hard labour.
Don’t get got, get God.
Theology, reconciliation and divine love pulse through most conversations on Busy Being Black. Here are a few places to begin for the seeking and searching, for the broken-hearted and the curious.