By Anna Blaedel
Last week I skipped my (self-imposed) curfew and stayed out way past my (early-by-choice) bedtime to hear a former student play a show with his touring band. It was resplendent, seeing him so vibrantly alive, making and sharing music. He radiated the particular beauty of sharing what ignites your own joy, knowing it sparks joy for others. Years ago, it was this student who taught our spiritual community to begin gatherings by asking, “What are you listening to?” The question still circulates, known and cherished by students who arrived on campus years after this student graduated. It tunes me into life, and has taken on a life of its own. It has become part of our culture–a persistent invitation to tune into the living wisdoms, rhythms, syncopations, stories, and songs surrounding us. We listen differently, because of his question. I hear and encounter the world differently, living his question.
I have long loved Rainer Maria Rilke’s invitation, written to a young poet, to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.” I recently reread the whole letter. It is all about trusting wisdom which resides in registers unsayable, unconscious, unanswerable. It is about opening to “those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own.” When we “live the questions” and unknow the answers of control, powerlessness, or inevitability, we open to wilder, freer, holier wisdoms. Sacred wisdom and precious life emerge when we “carry within [us] the possibility of creating and forming” rather than solving or resolving. Rilke identifies this as “an especially blessed” way of living.
The crises and possibilities confronting our precious, collective, earthly, entangled life are unfolding in registers I can only begin to describe as ineffable. So much is happening, and so fast. Life is awe-inspiring. It is terrifying, too. The pace and scale of loss, violence, and disregard rupturing our world is bewildering. The breadth and depth of love, courage, and dream and reweaving it otherwise is, too.
“Mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” if you want to get Latin or mystical about it. Mystery–terrifying and fascinating. Uncertainty–trembling and luring. Indeterminacy–combining our efforts and energies collectively, we have so much extraordinary power; individually, so very little, if anything, is within our control.
“There are days,” poet Billy-Ray Belcourt writes, “when being in life feels like consenting to the cruelties that hold up the world.” Queer Palestinian-American poet George Abraham dissents from the cruelty by creating and forming poetry “in which every pronoun is a Free Palestine.” “What is prayer,” poet Mosab Abu Toha asks from exile, “but sharing the pain and living the beauty of life together?” Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore asks, “What freedom can we make out of what we have?”
What questions are you loving, and living? What possibilities have taken on a life of their own, by sharing the pain and beauty of life together?
From Ruby Sales: “Where does it hurt?”
From M Shawn Copeland: “Where is my joy?”
Audre Lorde bore witness to “a dark place within,” a source of creative power that is “dark, ancient, and deep.” She wrote: “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us–the poet–whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
Nina Simone whispers: How does it feel to be free?
Three questions from three speculative stories weave the theopoetics I am trying to form into a dissertation. From The Once and Future Witches: What is lost that can’t be found? From Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: What can liberation look like, even if we’re not yet free? And from Octavia Butler’s Parables of the Sower: What if God is something else altogether?
Audre Lorde’s question reverberates through it all: “Are you doing the work you came here to do?”
M Jacqui Alexander builds on Lorde’s question, to ask: Who accompanies you?
For Ocean Vuong, the question is, “How do we live a life worthwhile of our breath?”
Lest you trip up on questions of worth or worthiness, Andrea Gibson reminds us to consider, “What if we don’t have to be healed to be whole?”
“How do you tell someone,” Belcourt asks, “that they are helping you stay tuned into life?”
Fahima Ife encourages us to move beyond the impulse to categorize ourselves as activists, organizers, or even artists, and instead live the question: What is it we want to do together?
Gilmore teaches, “where life is precious, life is precious.”
Crucifixion–in so many forms–disregards, diminishes, and destroys the preciousness of life. Resurrection–in so many forms–is the preciousness of life remembered, protected, cherished.
Where is life precious? Where is crucifixion imperiling the preciousness of life? Where is resurrection sacralizing it?
Where life is precious, life is precious–from every river to every sea. Where life is precious, none of us are free until all of us are free. Where life is precious, we do not plunder, extract, destroy, justify. Where life is precious, we accompany each other, healing and re-membering our already wholeness. Where life is precious, we share the pain and live the beauty of life together.
May the holiness of this Holy Week–holiness haunted by pain and betrayal, holiness encountered through solidarity and sharing, holiness that whispers freer possibilities, holiness that loves and lives the questions that undo us–may it hallow and hold you, us, we, as we do the holy work we are here to do, and make freedom out of what we have. (And, Ramadan Kareem, to all observing this Holy Month…)
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, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at 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.