How Salvation Comes

By Anna Blaedel

A recent conversation among valued colleagues included our shared sense that the prayer we are praying most these days may be, “What the actual fuck?”

We were naming our experiences of wordlessness, our felt sense of powerlessness. A world on fire. A world in which cruelty, callousness, and complacency are raging. How tempting, to consider it all futile. How crucial, too, to consider it otherwise. 

I joked, seriously, that everything I write feels redundant. Some version of: “What the actual fuck? So much devastation, pain, destruction. But, and. Oh! Remember, too: Listen to the birdsong. Seek out the baby asparagus tips, beginning to reach from soil to sun. Make giant pots of soup. Tend life, in all the ways we can.” Redundant, perhaps. And, too, a throughline of Truth, a resource for survival.

“It is possible,” reminds poet Alok, “to do both at the same time. It is possible to say the world is bleak and impossible and vicious and cruel, and the world is magnificent, generous, abundant, whimsical.” It is up to us, to tend the world.

My first piece of “common nourishment,” published in November of 2017, began with these words: “Paying attention is a spiritual practice…Right in the midst and mess of it all. Deep calls to deep, and Word becomes flesh and flesh invites Spirit and Spirit spits truth and truth reveals the tender ache of enfleshed life. Incarnation. God incarnate. Love incarnate. Divinity enfleshed.” So much has changed since then, but that tender ache remains. 

During another recent conversation, I listened as a beloved friend, navigating a deeply personal, painful chapter, called into question her magnificent generosity, her abundant and whimsical capacity to tend connection, well and without judgement. It was a gift, the opportunity to reflect back to her the many ways, over twenty years of friendship, that I have found her care to be trustworthy, and true. At the end of our conversation, she called me “tender, a tend-er.” “If that isn’t in your bio,” she said, “it should be.”

Eight years ago, my beloved gave me a pin that read “Tender.” A blessing. A spell. A prayer.

“We practice salvation,” my dissertation argues, “by bearing witness to wounds endangering collective life, and by choosing, together, to generate healing by applying the salve of fierce and tender care.” With fierce and tender care, we salve; through fierce and tender care, we are saved.

Black feminist and womanist scholar-activist-poets have long declared that love is public, political. More than a feeling, love is a practice, a way of being in relation. 

“Love is lifeforce,” wrote June Jordan. The lifeforce of love, according to Jordan, is “a serious and tender concern” for the earth and for all living things. A spiritual and political undertaking, fueling “the most sobering task of survival” on “a planet long defiled by habits opposite to love.” 

“May we stay tender even as we breathe fire,” reads an incantation of sacred trans wisdom, from our Sacred Incantations deck.

“We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other,” wrote Audre Lorde, “until it becomes a habit.” Lorde was writing about sacred wisdom stolen from us by violence, oppression, colonization. In order to “keep this world revolving toward some livable future,” Lorde proposed, we must cultivate tenderness, gentleness, love.

Alfred North Whitehead described God as “a tender care that nothing be lost.” It remains one of my favorite morsels of theological wisdom. So much, however, is being lost.

Black feminist scholar Jennifer Nash describes witnessing, “naming what others seek to ignore or normalize,” as a Black feminist “practice of love, of tenderness, and of political world-making.”

“Let aid into Gaza right now,” Abigail Bengson, sings/cries/wails, bearing witness, trying to salve the world, fiercely and tenderly.

Today, Veterans for Peace is beginning a 40 day fast, demanding aid into Gaza, and an end to arming Israel. For nearly three months, Israel has been blocking all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza. On Monday, Israel allowed a mere five aid trucks to enter. Three carried food; two carried shrouds to bury the dead. Israeli leaders are stating, explicitly, that they allowed this utterly inadequate aid only to quiet criticism, so they can complete plans to take over and control Gaza, and complete genocide. Israeli Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich said, “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us.” On Tuesday, the UN warned that 14,000 babies were at risk of dying in the next 48 hours without immediate aid. It is now 48 hours later, and that aid has not entered. From May 22 through June 30, courageous kin are doing what they can to stop the genocide, to bear witness, to practice the fierce and tender care of love’s lifeforce. 

Cecelia Culver and Logan Rozos did so by speaking out at their graduation ceremonies. Culver’s hands were visibly shaking, as she spoke about Palestine, and US complicity and complacency. Both are facing punishment, NYU withholding Logan’s diploma, GWU banning Cecelia from university property. May we put their prayers into practice.

When our prayer is, “What the actual fuck?” The answer to prayer is: Whatever sphere of influence you have, use it. Witness and name what others seek to ignore or normalize. Refuse capitulation, fear, threat. Resist dehumanization, a vicious cycle which trades life for lives, and will always fail to honor the sacredness of each life, each life a demand for protection, nourishment, survival. Which is to say: Practice love. Tend Lifeforce. Enflesh care, fierce and tender. Cultivate courage. Root in collective movement. Find your people, organize, and access the power that comes only by coming together. This is what prayer looks like. This is how God moves. This is how salvation comes.

May it be so. Or, as Octavia Butler wrote, “So be it! See to it!”