By Anna Blaedel
Yehuda Halevi, 12th century rabbi and poet, wrote:
“A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing
To love what death can touch.”
It is, indeed, a foolish thing, and a holy thing, to love enfleshed life. A risky thing. A courageous thing. Death can touch it all.
This is my final “moment for common nourishment” column for enfleshed. Eight years of monthly offerings; 96 columns. Perhaps the most consistent thread of wisdom woven through and returned to is this: Everything sacred begins and ends in love. Love makes survival possible. Love makes life livable.
When enfleshed launched in November of 2017, we both could and could not imagine what collective life would look like, now, at the end of 2025. As Octavia Butler warned and implored: “Our tomorrow is the child of our today.” Present practice seeds, but must never cede, the future.
While the past eight years have held dramatic change – in my personal life as well as our collective life – the present forces endangering life are not new. The horrors of genocide, compounded by the horrors of denial, justification, complicity, excuse. State violence, terrifying and disappearing beloveds, isolating and incarcerating precious life. Worshipping at the altars of tech, capital, productivity, purity. Scapegoating and sacrificing Black people, trans people, disabled people, poor people, to cowardly strategies that only fan the flames of fascism. Violent systems of supremacy and dominance destroying our planet, deadening our imagination, and demeaning everything that is sacred, and worthy of reverence and protection.
It is a foolish and holy thing, to love what death can touch.
It is a courageous and necessary thing, to love what death can touch.
Kelly Hayes recently wrote, “Everyone needs a long haul plan to keep themselves intact amid intensifying fascism, authoritarianism, and the escalating assaults on our humanity. We must take action, and we must take care of ourselves, and each other – and we must weave these tasks together into the fabric of our lives.”
My first column was about the spiritual practice of paying attention, woven into daily life. Paying attention to simple truths, when there are no easy answers. Paying attention to our longings, and our need to repattern life, otherwise. In some sense, each column I wrote between then and now has been an attempt at crafting a long haul plan for survival, under conditions often hellbent against it. Cultivating practices of survival, care, freedom, and love that can enflesh more convivial patterns in collective life.
Practices of witness, and withness.
Practices of creativity, and companionship.
Practices of movement, and rest.
Practices of courage, and surrender.
Practices of Spirit, and solidarity.
Over and over again, in these monthly offerings, I’ve returned to how friendship saves my life, and so does the company of trees. How communing with poetry or the moon can prompt conversion toward beauty and mystery, a remembering of what is most powerful and true. How life is a sacrament, and every seasonal shift is an opening into awe. How the first snowdrop of spring, or herb harvest of summer, or Maple aflame in autumn, or softening, slowing snowfall of winter can reorient me toward miracle, and rekindle magic. How that which most terrifies me – change, loss, vulnerability, need – is also that which can spark the most gorgeous transformation, and healing. How much we need each other, and how salvation is the experience of showing up with and for each other. How courage, and kinship, and freedom are all practices, and while none of us will get it perfectly, being in the practice together is how we survive, with joy.
As I come to this end, I want to return to a beginning, to the beginning of enfleshed…
It was the beginning of Advent, 2016.
I had survived the first of what would become a trio of formal denominational complaints, after coming out on the floor of the Iowa Annual Conference of The UMC. M, then working as Director of Communications for Reconciling Ministries Network, came to Iowa to record me sharing a meditation scheduled for the fourth Sunday of Advent. The meditation was about love, enfleshed.
I spoke about love making demands on our flesh. How Black feminists and womanists have long insisted love be public and political practice. How love calls us to imagine the unimaginable. How love makes the impossible, possible. Love, Incarnate means Black Lives Matter. Love, Incarnate means Water is Life. Love demands Latine hermanas y hermanos son amados, y bienvenidos aquí. Love demands Muslims are valued and protected, inshallah. Love demands refuge and sanctuary for immigrants and refugees, and demands meeting suffering with solidarity, whether in Syria or Gaza or Attica or Standing Rock. It all begins and ends in love – deep calling to deep, the Divine coming to dwell, our enfleshing divinity by loving, protecting, and caring for enfleshed life.
After recording, M and I walked downtown and, over a meal of delicious Indian food, shared conversation about loves and longings that would eventually seed enfleshed. Love for poetry, beauty, trees, fierce tenderness, and this sacred, earthly home. Love for sacred wisdom born from queerness, transness, Blackness, Indigeneity, enfleshed aliveness. Longing for creative and courageous collaboration with others pushed to the edges, or flung off the cliffs, of institutional, imperial powers. Longing for spiritual coalitions that are radical, rooted in the practices and visions of abolition, mutual aid, harm reduction, collective liberation.
Thank you, beloveds, for practicing such spiritual coalitions. Thank you for imagining, together, long haul strategies for survival. Thank you for calling forth and receiving my writing. Thank you for engaging and responding, for wrestling with and writing back. Thank you for practicing, with me, how to live and love under impossible conditions. Thank you for practicing liberation, beginning and ending in foolish, holy love.
Love, and longing.
Imagination. Possibility.
Remembering. Tending. Opening. Deepening.
Nourishment. Medicine. Healing. Salve.
Wisdom. Spirit. Collectivity. Care.
Seeds. Soil. Poetry. Trees.
Life, enfleshed. Divinity, enfleshed. We, enfleshed.
Practice, practice, practice.
Love, in practice. Love, enfleshed. Love, enfleshing…
anna blaedel
co-director
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students through sacred collective: a place of belonging for spiritual misfits, and has a PhD in theological and philosophical studies from Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.