This Here FleshSpirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us
Review posted May 15, 2025.
Convergent Books, 2022. 203 pages.
Review written May 13, 2025, from my own copy, ordered via amazon.com.
Starred Review
I feel at a bit of a loss to describe this book. I read it a chapter at a time as part of my devotional times, and noted lots of passages to post on my Sonderquotes blog, and finished each chapter inspired and uplifted. But I'm not sure I can adequately describe what you'll find here.
I like to call this kind of book "Musings," and these are Christian musings mixed with family stories and questions and thoughts about life.
Let me copy sections from her Preface, in hope this will give you the flavor of this contemplative book. I'm just going to show you a few pieces - but I hope it will pull you in to read the entire book.
My spirituality has always been given to contemplation, even before anyone articulated for me exactly what "the contemplative" was. I was not raised in an overtly religious home; my spiritual formation now comes to me in memories - not creeds or doctrine, but the air we breathed, stories, myth, and a kind of attentiveness. From a young age, my siblings and I were allowed to travel deep into our interior worlds to become aware of ourselves, our loves, our beliefs. And still, my father demanded an unflinching awareness of our exterior worlds. Where is home from here? What was the waitress's name? Where do we look when we're walking? If a single phrase could be considered the mantra of our family, it would be Pay attention....
I used to think that Christian contemplation was reserved for white men who leave copies of C. S. Lewis's letters strewn about and know a great deal about coffee and beard oils. If this is you, there is room for you here. But I am interested in reclaiming a contemplation that is not exclusive to whiteness, intellectualism, ableism, or mere hobby. And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people. To suggest a form of faith that tells me to sit down alone and be quiet? It does not rest easy on the bones. It is a shadow of true contemplative life, and it would do violence to my Black-woman soul....
And as we pay attention, we make a home out of paradox, not just in what we believe but also in the very act of living itself. Stillness that we would move. Silence that we would speak. I believe this to be a spirituality our world - overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest - so desperately needs....
This is a book of contemplative storytelling. The pages you hold are where the stories that have formed me across generations meet our common practice of beholding the divine. Feel now, they are wet with tears. Look how they glisten like my skin in sun, and they bear the grooves of many scars. As you cradle these pages, it is my sincere hope that they might serve as conduits for mystery, liberation, and the very face of God.
Yes, that's what you'll find here - contemplative storytelling. Cole Arthur Riley tells stories of her family and weaves them through with contemplation - and it all shines with light.
The beautiful part of this book is how many different individuals took steps to make a difference in their own communities - and how in the long run, they succeeded, despite some individual setbacks. That's a heartening message to read about today, when the idea that folks should be free to read what they want is being newly threatened. It's good to read about the ordinary people who were heroes in the past by standing up for their own rights to library access.