Cole Arthur Riley

In her stunning debut, Cole Arthur Riley braids stories from three generations of her family alongside contemplative reflections to discover the necessary rituals that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation. "From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning." So writes the creator of Black Liturgies in an unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Arthur Riley reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father and encounters of enfleshed, embodied spirituality. As she also writes memorably of her own lived experiences of childhood and selfhood, Arthur Riley boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith: How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive? How do we honor, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit? In this indelible work of contemplative storytelling, Arthur Riley invites us to ponder the site of soul by examining our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and finding that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it. At once a compelling spiritual meditation and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh speaks potently to anyone who suspects that our spirit and stories might have something to say to us.

Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

This Here Flesh

antonia maria wagner she/they

Until it occurred to me that it was very fitting. This is not a book of new things or ideas; my thoughts have been thought before. It is more remembrance than revelation, more mnaybes than certainty. And there is sparse novelty. Much of what you'l find here is old and even, I hope, familiar. But I mean to go deep into the old, that it might find some manner of resurrec- tion by virtue of coming from my own blood and bone. Not What is the tree? but What is the tree to me? When did 1 first touch its bark, and how does it move me? What would I call S- f that shade of green? What do I bear when I listen?

Laura Mei

If we embrace the idea that everything is suspended in a delicate balance between the atoms that make me and the tree and the bird and the sky — if we embrace the beauty of all creation, we find our own beauty magnified.

I used to romanticize a nomadic existence. I used to think it was a requisite for "finding myself" — to travel around untethered until I stumbled upon a realness in me. It makes me wince to think that I thought I could learn myself by untethering. For those of us whose sense of place speaks more of trauma than of belonging, it is understandable to think that the sole and sacred solution would be to belong nowhere at all. But this is alienation masquerading as freedom. It is a dangerous conflation. French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." Alienation and trauma of place are best met not with dislocation but with belonging, with a defiant rootedness, even if those roots stretch out to new and safer places.

I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually. Awe is not a lens through which to see the world but our sole path to seeing. Any other lens is not a lens but a veil. And I've come to believe that our beholding — seeing the veils of this world peeled back again and again, if only for a moment — is no small form of salvation. When I speak of wonder, I mean the practice of beholding the beautiful. Beholding the majestic — the snow-capped Himalayas, the sun setting on the sea — but also the perfectly mundane — the soap bubble reflecting your kitchen, the oxidized underbelly of that stainless steel pan. More than the grand beauties of our lives, wonder is about having the presence to pay attention to the commonplace. It could be said that to find beauty in the ordinary is a deeper exercise than climbing to the mountaintop. 

Wonder includes the capacity to be in awe of humanity, even your own. It allows us to jettison the dangerous belief that things worthy of wonder can only be located on nature hikes and scenic overlooks. This can distract us from the beauty flowing through us daily. For every second that our organs and bones sustain us is a miracle. When those bones heal, when our wounds scab over, this is a call to marvel at our bodies — their regeneration, their stability or frailty. This grows our sense of dignity. To be able to marvel at the face of our neighbor with the same awe we have for the mountaintop, the sunlight retracting — this manner of vision is what will keep us from destroying eachother. Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created thing comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are a part of the story.

The question of calling is not primarily a question of what we might become, but a question of what is already true — not least of which is true about the self. Ask me what I want to be, but not before you ask me who I want to be. Ask me who I want to be, but not before you ask me the more searing questions of who I am. Have you ever told a lie and then forgot it was a lie? When you tell a story for long enough, you begin to believe it. We embrace mirage in response to cues from the outside that we are not safe, loved, or welcomed. Any love we receive while wearing these [these] masks only affirms the belief that unmasked, we are indeed unlovable. Our shame is not resolved, it expands. Illusions of self do not merely make for lonely souls; they make for hated ones. You know the ache of hiding, of pretending to believe something, of words in conflict with the spirit. That journey erodes the marrow of the soul. I've accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me.

If you go without belonging for long enough, if you've known the sting of betrayal, you can end up manufacturing an identity from your alienation. To protect yourself from the reminder and risk of exclusion, you begin initiating distance on your own, calling yourself "independent." This becomes a form of lived escapism as you run from the belief that you will be rejected again or that you cannot trust again. But a life lived with trust only in the self is exhausting. It is not freedom; it is a yoke that falls helplessly and incessantly on you. Some will contrive delusions of superiority to community itself. You tell yourself that no one can or will ever understand you or your complexities. You made bravado out of your loneliness. It is one way to numb the pain of the wound. You elevate yourself above community, looking down at it as frivolous or needy or less enlightened — this is in denial of your own needs, of course. Both of these responses must be dismantled delicately, for underneath is the wound of not being embraced or known or cared for well by those whom you have longed to know and care for you.

Anger is never holier than when it acts in defense of the dignity of a person or piece of creation. But it requires we be more measured and protective of our words — not so that we censor ourselves on behalf of the fragile and defensive, but so that we will be heard by those we wish to be heard by. You can be a person of profound anger without allowing it to eclipse your or anyone else's personhood. When anger is justified, it can feel as though when your anger swells, so does justice. This is a danger, for it is very difficult to distinguish rage from hatred.

Picture me now clasping your cheeks. I'm looking in your eyes, and maybe you're dreaming. I'm telling you, 𝘋𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴: 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘺. I'm telling you, 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘵𝘩 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦.

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