This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us by Cole

Description: This Here Flesh by Cole Arthur Riley NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In her stunning debut, the creator of Black Liturgies weaves stories from three generations of her family alongside contemplative reflections to discover the "necessary rituals" that connect us with our belonging, dignity, and liberation."This is the kind of book that makes you different when youre done."—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebodys Daughter"Reaches deep beneath the surface of words unspoken, wounds unhealed, and secrets untempered to break them open in order for fresh light to break through."—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul BabyONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Root, Library Journal"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 Cole Arthur Riley in her 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 how they revealed to her an embodied, dignity-affirming spirituality, not only in what they believed but in the act of living itself. Writing memorably of her own childhood and coming to self, 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? How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest? In this indelible work of contemplative storytelling, Arthur Riley invites us to descend into our own stories, examine our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair, and find that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it. At once a compelling spiritual meditation, a powerful intergenerational account, and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh speaks potently to anyone who suspects that our stories might have something to say to us. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Cole Arthur Riley is the creator of Black Liturgies, a space for Black spiritual words of liberation, lament, rage, and rest; and a project of The Center for Dignity and Contemplation where she serves as Executive Curator. Born and for the most part raised in Pittsburgh, Cole studied Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She once took a professors advice very seriously to begin writing a little every day, and has followed it for nearly a decade. Review "Arthur Rileys quest to discover the necessary rituals connecting us to a sense of belonging, dignity, liberation, and faith prompts her to plumb the stories of her grandmother and father to reveal an affirming spirituality rooted in kindness, love, and deep holiness."—Oprah Daily"This book is an invitation into the delicate weavings of family, inheritance, and pain, how they mark a bloodline and connect a people. Cole Arthur Riley writes with grace and gravity. And somehow she teaches us to think of ourselves as deserving of such grace along the way. This is the kind of book that makes you different when youre done."—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebodys Daughter"Welcome the rising of Arthur Rileys astonishing voice. This is a gorgeous and muscular work."—Krista Tippett, host of On Being and New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Wise"Timeless . . . This is a book I know I will return to again and again. Through this work, I am reminded I am seen. I am reminded I am free."—Morgan Harper Nichols, artist and poet"Exquisite . . . Arthur Rileys writing is both transporting and hauntingly intimate as she narrates this important account of generational inheritance. The stories and meditations in this book are sure to stay with you forever."—Ay Tometi, human rights advocate and co-founder of Black Lives Matter"Through a narrative of family and generation, Arthur Riley speaks of a Blackness so beautiful it cant be contained and a liberation that is present and possible. This Here Flesh is an invitation to hold space, return home, and rediscover joy."—Amena Brown, poet, author, and host of the podcast HER with Amena Brown"In this beautiful, soul-stirring book, we rediscover a sense of awe for the bodies that make us, the stories that ground us, and the delicate grace that enlivens our spirits."—Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of No Cure for Being Human"This Here Flesh is a gospel to what we remember. This book is rigorous, joyous, complex, and honest, and tells the story of how we get free. It is a story that would not let me go."—Danté Stewart, author of Shoutin in the Fire"In This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley reaches deep beneath the surface of words unspoken, wounds unhealed, and secrets untempered, breaking them open to let fresh light through. Her personal anecdotes alongside Biblical anchors are serene vehicles through which any reader will remember the preciousness of their body, their humanity, and most of all, their dignity."—Morgan Jerkins, New York Times bestselling author of Caul Baby"A wonderfully winsome, heartbreakingly honest, and ever-poetic work of spiritual biography and theological reflection . . ."—Library Journal (starred review) Review Quote "Arthur Rileys quest to discover the necessary rituals connecting us to a sense of belonging, dignity, liberation, and faith prompts her to plumb the stories of her grandmother and father to reveal an affirming spirituality rooted in kindness, love, and deep holiness." -- Oprah Daily "This book is an invitation into the delicate weavings of family, inheritance, and pain, how they mark a bloodline and connect a people. Cole Arthur Riley writes with grace and gravity. And somehow she teaches us to think of ourselves as deserving of such grace along the way. This is the kind of book that makes you different when youre done." --Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebodys Daughter "Welcome the rising of Arthur Rileys astonishing voice. This is a gorgeous and muscular work." --Krista Tippett, host of On Being and New York Times bestselling author of Becoming Wise "Timeless . . . This is a book I know I will return to again and again. Through this work, I am reminded I am seen. I am reminded I am free." --Morgan Harper Nichols, artist and poet "Exquisite . . . Arthur Rileys writing is both transporting and hauntingly intimate as she narrates this important account of generational inheritance. The stories and meditations in this book are sure to stay with you forever." --Ay Tometi, human rights advocate and co-founder of Black Lives Matter "Through a narrative of family and generation, Arthur Riley speaks of a Blackness so beautiful it cant be contained and a liberation that is present and possible. This Here Flesh is an invitation to hold space, return home, and rediscover joy." --Amena Brown, poet, author, and host of the podcast HER with Amena Brown "In this beautiful, soul-stirring book, we rediscover a sense of awe for the bodies that make us, the stories that ground us, and the delicate grace that enlivens our spirits." --Kate Bowler, New York Times bestselling author of No Cure for Being Human " This Here Flesh is a gospel to what we remember. This book is rigorous, joyous, complex, and honest, and tells the story of how we get free. It is a story that would not let me go." --Dant Excerpt from Book One Dignity A baby bursts out of a great Black womb saying, It is what it is what it is and he is my father. My gramma used to say, Oh, chile, when your daddy came outta me, he tried to take his whole house with him. He cleaved to her insides like he knew what was his to have. My father was born smooth. He glides and sways when he walks, cuts his hands through the air in meaningful arcs when he talks, like hes in a ballet. Ive never seen the top of his head because Ive never seen him look down. He told me from a very young age, Keep your head up, relax those shoulders, look at that skin shine. He told me that Black was beautiful. It seemed to me that he was a man who would never think to apologize for his existence. Some people are born knowing their worth. I was an anxious and insecure child. Id tiptoe around with my shoulders cupping my ears like a perpetual flinch. I believe my father saw this in me and did what he could to drown out whatever primordial voice had told me to fold up my personhood into something small and negligible. Every morning, hed squeeze my sister and me in between his legs as he methodically parted our hair and laid grease on our scalps. Hed spend what felt like hours propped up in his chair, leaving us with braids stretching in all directions, barrettes and ballies gripping the thick black curls. When he finished, he would lick both thumbs and press them against our shaggy eyebrows and say, You look good, honey. Do you feel good? This was our ritual. And in time, it formed us. Toni Morrisons novel Beloved has become a sacred text to me. It tells the story of a family, once enslaved, now making their way in freedom as they dwell with the ghost-force that haunts their home. When Morrison takes us back to the Clearing, the familys matriarch, Baby Suggs, preaches a message to all the women and the men and the little children who lie in the grass after dancing, laughing and crying together. After leading them in a practice of liberation with their bodies, Baby Suggs says this: In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They dont love your eyes; theyd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face cause they dont love that either. This is necessary ritual. 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. I cannot say with precision when I came to believe him--or if I ever truly have--but the knowledge began with my father and Toni Morrison and stretches back into God. The origin story of the world and the dark and stars that hold it is one of dignity. The divine is in us. When I first heard that all humans were created in the image of God, I pictured God with a million eyes and a million noses and a million mouths. It was horrifying. What did this mean, all humans? If God walked in the garden of Eden, whose two legs did he walk with? Did they look like mine, with knees black and ashy? It is not wholly unusual for individuals or cultures to imagine God as being like them in some way. Perhaps this is because we lack an imagination for a being who loves us and doesnt resemble us. Things that are unlike us strike us as unsafe. When I encounter the unfamiliar--a new food, a stranger on the train--I may be intrigued, but I am nearly always cautious. Ive no frame of reference for how it might hurt me, what compels it to violence or tenderness. If God is like me, then perhaps she becomes more predictable. Safer. But when we force our picture of God on another, or when God is presented as singular, we tend to colonize the image of God in others. As a default, I imagine God as a white man. Even now that I know the tragedy and the lie in the image, it seems to be branded on my soul. I used to feel guilty because of this, but what else should be expected of me with all the stained glass and oil paintings? Does the church truly believe that God might look as much like me--gapped teeth and skin like glistening leather--as a white male? It has damaged many to think that the holiest being that ever was looks precisely like the man who kept our ancestors in bondage. It takes time to undo the whiteness of God. When I speak of whiteness, I am referring not to the mere existence of a person in a particular body; I am referring to the historic, systemic, and sociological patterns that have oppressed, killed, abducted, abused, and discredited those who do not exist in a particular body. Whiteness is a force. It moves in religion in the same manner it moves in any sphere of life. In art, it might look like the glory of the American Western film and the lie of white bravado. In global development, the lie of the white savior. These are spiritual afflictions in and of themselves, but in religious communities, when whiteness becomes inseparable from the character of God, youll find customs such as evangelism equated with conquering, but admissible under the guise of "love." Youll find guilt-driven spirituality, which is obsessed with alleviating guilt and becoming "clean"--for whiteness always carries the memory of what it has done to those in bodies of color, and guilt is its primary tormentor. The irony, of course, is that this guilt cannot be relieved save by a rending of whiteness from the image of God (which the force of whiteness will never do). In order to rend whiteness from the face of God, we must do more than make new images. We have to persist in observing and naming all the ways this force has obscured the face and character of God. The God Ive known does not dominate; he kneels and washes his enemies feet. God does not make himself hero; he heals and works miracles both publicly and privately. We also have to expand our understanding of how other cultures and peoples contain the divine. Does God slap the tambourine like my auntie? Do they put butter and salt in their grits? Some theologies say it is not an individual but a collective people who bear the image of God. I quite like this, because it means we need a diversity of people to reflect God more fully. Anything less and the image becomes pixelated and grainy, still beautiful but lacking clarity. If God really is three parts in one like they say, it means that Gods wholeness is in a multitude. I do not know if God meant to confer value on us by creating us in their own image, but they had to have known it would at least be one outcome. How can anyone who is made to bear likeness to the maker of the cosmos be anything less than glory? This is inherent dignity. I do find it peculiar that humans have come to wield this over the rest of creation as though we are somehow superior. I dont believe this to be the case. Sometimes I wonder if we knelt down and put our ear to the ground, it would whisper up to us, Yes, you were made in the image of God, but God made you of me. Weve grown numb to the idea that we ourselves are made of the dust, mysteriously connected to the goodness of the creation that surrounds us. Perhaps the more superior we believe ourselves to be to creation, the less like God we become. But if we embrace shalom--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. And what is shalom but dignity stretched out like a blanket over the cosmos? Details ISBN0593239792 Author Cole Arthur Riley Short Title This Here Flesh Pages 224 Language English Year 2023 ISBN-10 0593239792 ISBN-13 9780593239797 Format Paperback Publication Date 2023-01-31 Subtitle Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us Publisher Random House USA Inc Imprint Convergent Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2023-01-31 NZ Release Date 2023-01-31 US Release Date 2023-01-31 UK Release Date 2023-01-31 DEWEY 200.8996073 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:140086714;

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