Contemplation, Community, and the Illusion of Control: Reflections from A Black Mystic

Hi beloveds,

Words have been difficult for me lately. My life is words and yet for a few weeks now words have been a deep struggle for me as our nation wades through political forces who show no regard  for our immigrant siblings, our trans beloveds, and the thousands of federal workers who serve this country day in and day out. I have concluded that in this season I cannot lean on my own understanding, but I must tap into the wisdom of Black elders and ancestors who have endured and survived perilous times. 

Since the beginning of the year, I have been reading Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village by Dr. Barbara Holmes. Dr. Holmes who transitioned from this life to the eternal realm in October of last year published this book in January of 2021. Our nation was almost one year into the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the hard work of health care professionals, vaccines had just become available to the public with some hesitancy and resistance from particular communities. Our lives had been transformed in ways that we did not yet have language to articulate. How we worked, how our children learned, how we lived, and all that we had lost during the pandemic was not yet digestible because we were faced with the constant task of survival. In the context of a pandemic, uprisings due to racial injustice, and oppression of migrant siblings at our nation’s border, Dr. Holmes, in her Black womanist mystical wisdom, beckons those in America to a posture of contemplation in a time of communal crisis. Dr. Holmes borrowed  from the words of many Black and indigenous scholars, clinicians, and practitioners to name that the crisis we were experiencing is communal, historical, and intergenerational therefore our journey towards healing must be a collective one.

As I have witnessed the intentional disorientation of these past few weeks, caused by the new leadership in Washington, the quote that keeps returning  to me from Dr. Holmes is,“when there is a crisis, it takes a village to survive.”¹ There is much that those of the dominant culture can learn from indigenous communities, particularly how to lean into communal bonds and collective wisdom. Our American commitment to individualism makes this leaning difficult. We would rather rely on our own resources, degrees, pedigrees, and our circles of insularity. We would rather lean on our book talks, our podcasts on NPR, and our mobilizing for those on the margins rather than mobilizing with those on the margins. Yet Dr. Holmes’ work has shown me that when we see ourselves as a part of a larger ecosystem, we can find assurance in the fact that all we need for this hour may not come from us but, through the power of community, all that we need will come to us. It will come to us in the sagacity of elders who have gone before us. It will come to us in the attentiveness of our children who are watching us. It will come to us in the wisdom of our ancestors who dwell beyond us. It will come to us in the nurture of the natural world that heals and cares for us.

This commitment to a journey towards collective healing calls us to relinquish a need to be in control. This text succinctly and simply reminds us that “we don’t control very much at all, but we think that we do.” ²As a control freak in recovery, this is tough for me. I am the type of person who requests all flight information every time my partner travels. I track the flight from the moment she gets on the plane until the moment she lands at her destination. Control is an illusion even if it is a seductive one. In the past few weeks, I have received quite a few reach outs via phone calls, text messages, and emails from well-meaning and well-intentioned colleagues and neighbors who are scrambling to get back in control in a world that we are watching  become more and more out of control. While these conversations have been informative and meaningful, I cannot help but notice how easy it is for my Black body, my ears, and my inbox to become a repository for the angst of white liberalism. 

As we ponder what affected communities might need in the wake of executive orders, many have named a restlessness and anxiousness that is coupled with a deep longing to do something. The truth is that sometimes our desire to do good in the world can be rooted in our obsession to control it. It is sobering to come to grips with the fact that in our work for justice, there will be some outcomes that are simply beyond our control. We could not control innocent lives lost in the plane crash in the Potomac River, no matter how much ill-informed press conferences would want to blame DEI. We ultimately could not control the lives lost in hurricane Helene’s devastation, even as climate change needs our desperate attention. I bring this up not to stagnate us into inaction but to remind us of our interdependence. 

My Black Church Studies professor Rev. Dr. Eboni Marshall Thurman, now a professor at Yale Divinity School, used to say that for humanity “the kin-dom of God is always at hand, but it is not in hand.” It’s on the way so we must always work toward it. Yet we have not realized it fully and few things remind us of this more than when work towards racial progress is constantly met with white supremacist backlash. In moments like these my vision for the beloved community cannot be limited to the capacity of my feeble hands. My trust cannot only be in what I can do, what I can give, and what change I can enact as an individual, but I trust in something beyond my own strength that gives me strength, the power of the collective. I choose to believe that I am partnering with the universe to bend its moral arc towards justice, and when I center down into contemplation, I am reminded that I have co-laborers in this effort. As the pressure ramps up, may we also remember to center down. 

Crisis Contemplation:Healing the Wounded Village can be purchased at the link.

1. Barbara Holmes, Crisis Contemplation: Healing the Wounded Village (Albuquerque: CAC Publishing, 2021) 86. ↩︎
2. Holmes, Crisis Contemplation, 24. ↩︎