LIBERATION LECTIONARY ~ RENEWAL SEASON

Revision and Repair

“In my own sloppy work, on and off the page, I was beginning to understand “revision” as a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one’s initial vision. Revision required witnessing and testifying. Witnessing and testifying required rigorous attempts at remembering and imagining. If revision was not God, revision was everything every God ever asked of believers.” Kiese Laymon

REFLECTION : What we are Owed

In VOX magazine in 2021, Kiese Laymon wrote an incredible memoir style article focused on one friendship. Here are a few of the best teaching points in “What we Owe and are owed: on Black revision, repayment, and renewal.”

I can’t write about Ray Gunn without thinking about fairness and repair. In my laziness, I’ve conflated repair and restoration, just as I’ve lazily conflated pain with trauma, pleasure with desire, progress with liberation, honesty with truth, and fairness with equity. Restoration and repair are something we are worthy of in life and death, in relationships and solo, but they are not the same word.

Being a Black Mississippian means you will spend a lifetime repairing wounds created by the worst of white Mississippians in hopes of some kind of economic or moral renewal. This is not fair, nor is it fair that we are expected to make Black abundance out of that repair. This, however, is a part of our lineage.

The white family in America appears to have a lineage as well. The metastasized, excused unwellness in white families, monied and poor, is responsible for anti-Black terror happening in this nation’s schools, prisons, hospitals, neighborhoods, and banks. This is the work of folks who despise revision nearly as much as they despise themselves. Abolish police, bullets, missiles, and prisons all we want (and some of us truly want!), and most white American families in the US will do everything possible to make more. And in some ways, that’s their business. Cleaning up the messes that seep from these families, we’ve been taught, is what Black folk in this nation do well.

But I don’t want us to clean up the messes of white families. I want them to stop creating and pushing public policy that encourages us to die prematurely. I want them to pay my Grandmama what she is owed for a lifetime of literally, figuratively, and spiritually cleaning up their messes. We have far too many messes of our own. At my worst, I have run away from our lineage of repair and renewal when I’ve harmed folks I loved. Every time we run away from an abusive mess, a negligent mess, a lethal mess we helped create, we leave something essential for someone targeted for premature death to clean up. That is humiliation. That is not fair.

Family can help us repair. Family, chosen and by birth, can also significantly aid in helping those who eat our suffering effectively wipe us off the face of the Earth. Repair what you helped break, my Grandmama taught me. Restore what responsibly loved you, I learned from Gunn. And revise, revise, revise with your family and friends. Collective freedom is impossible without interpersonal repair.

I’d hoped this piece could be an extended exploration of the paradoxical economic dimensions of Black friendship during the pandemic. I wanted this piece to open, fold, and crumple the tired ways we talk about revision in this nation. I wanted to write about Gunn’s relationship to the state as a Black man who loves Black people, and a Black man who has found work in a detention center for mostly Black and Mexican young people.

But before I could write that, Gunn and I needed to talk with each other about what repair and renewal mean in our middle-age relationships with each other, with the dead, with the Earth. We have to be as concerned with the question of what we’re owed as we are with the question of what we owe us. I suspect, with rigorous, tender exploration, we will find that the answer to both of those questions is everything.

Meditation : “A Journey” by Nikki Giovanni

It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . . Though the rail has been ridden . . . winter clouds cover . . . autumn’s exuberant quilt . . . we must provide our own guide-posts . . .I have heard . . . from previous visitors . . . the road washes out sometimes . . . and passengers are compelled . . . to continue groping . . . or turn back . . . I am not afraid . . .I am not afraid . . . of rough spots . . . or lonely times . . . I don’t fear . . . the success of this endeavor . . . I am Ra . . . in a space . . . not to be discovered . . . but invented . . .I promise you nothing . . . I accept your promise . . . of the same we are simply riding . . . a wave . . . that may carry . . . or crash . . .It’s a journey . . . and I want . . . to go . . .

“A Journey” from The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 by Nikki Giovanni. Copyright compilation © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Song: Brand New Life

Written and performed by Olivia Branch Walker . The song Brand New Life is a gospel classic which was also popularized by the Mississippi Mass Choir. Our hearts are in Mississippi right now, considering the water crisis and the constant struggle for justice in the lives of God’s beautiful Black children all over the deep south. Listen to this prayerful, prophetic, and future facing song here. NEW LIFE, 1985, Olivia Branch

I moved from my old house, and I moved from my old friends, I moved from my old way of strife. Thank God I moved out to a brand new life. 

God changed my old way with words, changed my old un-level mind. He changed my heart, and gave me a brand new start, thank God I moved out to a brand new life!

Can’t you see I’m a new man, don’t you know I got a new name, and one day I’ll live in that new land. Because I moved out to a brand new life.

Daily Readings: Psalm 91

Renewal Season brings us an opportunity to refresh, redefine and refocus so that we can advance to the end of our struggles: a very special type of rest that comes in the presence of God.

Sunday Psalm 91.1 The one that dwells in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

Monday Psalm 91.2 I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.

Tuesday Psalm 91.3-4 Surely They shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. The Lord shall cover us with Her feathers, and under Her wings shall we trust: God’s truth shall be our shield and support.

Wednesday Psalm 91.5-6 We shall not be afraid of the terror by night; nor of the arrow that flies by day; nor of the pestilence that walks in threatening shadow; nor of the destruction that wastes us away at noonday.

Thursday Psalm 91.7-10 A thousand may fall at your side, and ten thousand at your right hand; but danger shall not come near to you. Only with your eyes will you behold and see the due recompense of the wicked. Because you have made the Lord, Who is your refuge, even the Most High, your holy habitation; There shall no evil that befalls you , neither shall any plague come near to your dwelling.

Friday Psalm 91.11-13 For God shall give Their angels charge over thee, to keep you in all your ways. They shall bear you up in their hands, lest you dash your foot against a stone. You shall tread upon the lion and serpent: the young lion and the dragon shall you trample under feet. 

Saturday Psalm 91.14-16 The Lord says “Because My people have set love upon Me, therefore will We deliver the people: We will set Our people on high, because they have known Our name. The people shall call upon Us, and We, the Divine, will answer: We will be with Our people in trouble; We will deliver them, and honour them. With long life will We satisfy Our people, and inherit unto them Our salvation.

Artwork: Baudouin Mouanda, Ciel de Saison