Lift Every Voice: Contemplative Writers of Color

The Holy in the Night by Shannon Dycusa

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations on a book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month we sat down with Shannon Dycus to discuss her book The Holy in the Night: Finding Freedom in a Season of Waiting.

Listen for the voice of God.

If you approach this Advent season waiting for something–in your life, in your family or community, or in a fractured world–you are not alone. This season reminds us that our waiting is not wasted. Even in our longest nights, divine work endures. What if we were free enough to do the same?
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Drawing on lectionary scripture readings from the Old and New Testaments and the voices of Black and Brown modern-day prophets, author Shannon Dycus offers reflections for each day of the season. Her meditations stretch open possibilities for faithfulness during silence, ambivalence, doubt, and unknowing. This Advent, accept the invitation to witness and know the presence of God amid waiting. Give voice to freedom, grace, struggle, and beauty–to see again the ways that God emerges in this inward season.

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Hurting Yet Whole by Liuan Huska

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month we sat down with Liuan Huska to discuss her book Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness.

What if the things we most fear about our bodies–our vulnerability to illness and pain–are exactly the places where God meets us most fully?

As Liuan Huska went through years of chronic pain, she wondered why God seemed absent and questioned some of the common assumptions about healing. What do we do when our bodies don’t work the way they should? What is healing, when one has a chronic illness? Can we still be whole when our bodies suffer?

The Christian story speaks to our experiences of pain and illness. In the embodiment of Jesus’ life, we see an embrace of the body and all of the discomfort and sufferings of being human. Countering a Gnosticism that pits body against spirit, Huska takes us on a journey of exploring how healing is not an escape from the limits of the body, but becoming whole as souls in bodies and bodies with souls. As chronic pain forces us to pay attention to our bodies’ vulnerability, we come to embrace the fullness of our broken yet beautiful bodies. She helps us redefine what it means to find healing and wholeness even in the midst of ongoing pain.

AbbeyoftheArts.com/Lift-Every-Voice/Hurting-Yet-Whole

Hope is Here by Luther E. Smith Jr.

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month we sat down with Luther E. Smith Jr. to discuss his book Hope is Here!: Spiritual Practices for Pursuing Justice and Beloved Community. 

Joyful and daunting opportunities to live into God’s dream of justice and beloved community are compelling and available. Hope, says Luther Smith Jr., is essential to the needed personal and social transformations that prepare us for such sacred opportunities. Yet genuine hope is often confused as merely wish fulfillment, optimism, or perceiving better tomorrows. In Hope Is Here! Smith describes how we truly perceive and join “the work of hope,” enlivening us to a life that is oriented toward immediate and future experiences of personal fulfillment, justice, and beloved community. Interpreting five spiritual practices for individuals and congregations to experience the power of hope, this book prepares us to engage racism, mass incarceration, environmental crises, divisive politics, and indifference that imperil justice and beloved community. It delivers the inner resources necessary to work for change through its interpretation of hope. Additionally, each chapter ends with questions that prompt readers to examine their experiences and their readiness to journey with hope. Written for Christians who want to commit themselves to justice and beloved community, this book will provide helpful guidance for a life sustained by God’s gifts of hope and love. Hope is here for our “responsibility” and “response-ability” to live the fulfilling life that God dreams for us.

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Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul with Dorcas Cheng-Tozun

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Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Every other month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they are joined by Dorcas Cheng-Tozun to discuss her book Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways.

A timely, delightfully readable, and much-needed book. —Booklist, starred review

Social justice work, we often assume, is raised voices and raised fists. It requires leading, advocating, fighting, and organizing wherever it takes place–in the streets, slums, villages, inner cities, halls of political power, and more. But what does social justice work look like for those of us who don’t feel comfortable battling in the trenches?

Sensitive souls–including those who consider themselves highly emotional, empathic, or introverted–have much to contribute to bringing about a more just and equitable world. Such individuals are wise, thoughtful, and conscientious; they feel more deeply and see things that others don’t. We need their contributions. Yet, sustaining justice work can be particularly challenging for the sensitive, and it requires a deep level of self-awareness, intentionality, and care.

In Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul, writer Dorcas Cheng-Tozun (Enneagram 4, INFJ, nonprofit/social enterprise professional, and multiple-burnout survivor) offers six possible pathways for sensitive types:

– Connectors relational activists whose interactions and conversations build the social capital necessary for change

– Creatives artists and creators whose work inspires, sheds light, makes connections, and brings issues into the public consciousness

– Record Keepers archivists who preserve essential information and hold our collective memory and history

– Builders inventors, programmers, and engineers who center empathy as they develop society-changing products and technologies

– Equippers educators, mentors, and elders who build skills and knowledge within movements and shepherd the next generation of changemakers

– Researchers data-driven individuals who utilize information as a persuasive tool to effect change and propose options for improvement

Alongside inspiring, real-life examples of highly sensitive world-changers, Cheng-Tozun expands the possibilities of how to have a positive social impact, affirming the particular gifts and talents that sensitive souls offer to a hurting world.

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What Makes You Come Alive with Lerita Coleman

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Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they speak with Lerita Coleman Brown about her book "What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman".

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”–Howard Thurman

Known as the godfather of the civil rights movement, Howard Thurman served as a spiritual adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders and activists in the 1960s. Thurman championed silence, contemplation, common unity, and nonviolence as powerful dimensions of social change. But Dr. Lerita Coleman Brown didn’t learn about him during her years of spiritual-direction training. Only when a friend heard of her longing to encounter the work of Black contemplatives did she finally learn about Thurman, his mystical spirituality, and his liberating ethic.

In "What Makes You Come Alive", Brown beckons readers into their own apprenticeship with Thurman. Brown walks with us through Thurman’s inimitable life and commitments as he summons us into centering down, encountering the natural world, paying attention to sacred synchronicity, unleashing inner authority, and recognizing the genius of the religion of Jesus. We learn from Thurman’s resilience in the psychologically terrorizing climate of the Jim Crow South, his encounters with Quakers and with Mahatma Gandhi, and his sense of being guided by the Spirit. Each chapter illuminates an aspect of Thurman’s work and includes reflection questions and spiritual practices.

Decades after their deaths, sages like Howard Thurman offer spiritual kinship and guidance for our contemporary life. Thurman’s spirituality enlivened an entire movement, and it can awaken us to intimacy with God and to authentic action today.

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We Survived the End of the World with Steven Charleston

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Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they speak with Steven Charleston about his book We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope.

From the moment European settlers reached these shores, the American apocalypse began. But Native Americans did not vanish.

Apocalypse did not fully destroy them, and it doesn’t have to destroy us. Pandemics and war, social turmoil and corrupt governments, natural disasters and environmental collapse–it’s hard not to watch the signs of the times and feel afraid. But we can journey through that fear to find hope. With the warnings of a prophet and the lively voice of a storyteller, Choctaw elder and author of "Ladder to the Light" Steven Charleston speaks to all who sense apocalyptic dread rising around and within.

You’d be hard pressed to find an apocalypse more total than the one Native America has confronted for more than four hundred years. Yet Charleston’s ancestors are a case study in the liberating and hopeful survival of a spiritual community. How did Indigenous communities achieve the miracle of their own survival and live to tell the tale? What strategies did America’s Indigenous people rely on that may help us to endure an apocalypse–or perhaps even prevent one from happening?

Charleston points to four Indigenous prophets who helped their people learn strategies for surviving catastrophe: Ganiodaiio of the Seneca, Tenskwatawa of the Shawnee, Smohalla of the Wanapams, and Wovoka of the Paiute. Through gestures such as turning the culture upside down, finding a fixed place on which to stand, listening to what the earth is saying, and dancing a ghostly vision into being, these prophets helped their people survive. Charleston looks, too, at the Hopi people of the American Southwest, whose sacred stories tell them they were created for a purpose. These ancestors’ words reach across centuries to help us live through apocalypse today with courage and dignity.

https://AbbeyoftheArts.com/Lift-Every-Voice/We-Survived-the-End-of-the-World

 

Living Resistance with Kaitlin B. Curtice

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they are joined by Kaitlin B. Curtice to discuss her book Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day.

“Readers will find abundant wisdom in this accessible guide.”–Publishers Weekly

In an era in which “resistance” has become tokenized, popular Indigenous author Kaitlin Curtice reclaims it as a basic human calling. Resistance is for every human who longs to see their neighbors’ holistic flourishing. We each have a role to play in the world right where we are, and our everyday acts of resistance hold us all together.

Curtice shows that we can learn to practice embodied ways of belonging and connection to ourselves and one another through everyday practices, such as getting more in touch with our bodies, resting, and remembering our ancestors. She explores four “realms of resistance”–the personal, the communal, the ancestral, and the integral–and shows how these realms overlap and why all are needed for our liberation. Readers will be empowered to seek wholeness in whatever spheres of influence they inhabit.

AbbeyoftheArts.com/Lift-Every-Voice

Our Lady of Hot Messes with Leticia Ochoa Adams

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they are joined by Leticia Ochoa Adams to discuss her book Our Lady of Hot Messes: Getting Real with God in Dive Bars and Confessionals.

Leticia Ochoa Adams met Jesus in a dive bar when she was eighteen years old.

She didn’t actually meet Jesus, but it was there where she first witnessed holiness in action. The bar’s regulars taught her about the importance of community, being honest about who she is, not giving up on people, and how to laugh—even when awful things happen.

In Our Lady of Hot Messes, Ochoa Adams tells the ongoing story of her redemption. At times funny and heartbreaking, but always gritty and unflinchingly honest, her story shows that no matter what you’re dealing with, God wants you to trust in his love.

The Tejana daughter of a single mother—a cycle she would repeat in her own life—Ochoa Adams was sexually abused as a child. She married after a two-week courtship and, eight years later, divorced her husband who struggled with drug addiction. In between she suffered a late-term miscarriage and had three more children back-to-back.

She always thought a dream life meant having a big house, kids, lots of money, and new cars. Since she hadn’t yet cracked the code for the American dream, “I turned to the person that every American woman turns to when looking for a way to make a better life for herself: Oprah.”

Watching the daytime talk show queen helped Ochoa Adams put a name to what happened to her as a child. But she was still searching for something more. Ochoa Adams was baptized Catholic but attended a small-town Baptist church growing up. When she reverted to Catholicism at age thirty-three in order to marry her second husband, Ochoa Adams was convinced that Catholics had all of the answers to life’s toughest questions. But she quickly learned that becoming Catholic didn’t mean she could just erase her bad choices and difficult past. And just when she thought she was getting her life together, her son, Anthony, died by suicide.

God, therapy, and caring priests helped her face her pain and heal her brokenness. She wants you to see yourself in her mistakes, learn from them, and realize along with her that even when we’ve put our trust in God—even if it’s begrudgingly—we still have to do the tough work to become the person God wants us to be.

“I still make mistakes,” she says, “but I’m trying not to live as a hot mess even when things around me are messy.”

AbbeyoftheArts.com/Lift-Every-Voice

Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman with Therese Taylor-Stinson

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they are joined by Therese Taylor-Stinson to discuss her book Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman: Public Mystic and Freedom Fighter.

Harriet Tubman, freedom fighter and leader in the Underground Railroad, is one of the most significant figures in U.S. history. Her courage and determination in bringing enslaved people to freedom have established her as an icon of the abolitionist movement. But behind the history of the heroine called “Moses” was a woman of deep faith.

In Walking the Way of Harriet Tubman, Therese Taylor-Stinson introduces Harriet, a woman born into slavery whose unwavering faith and practices in spirituality and contemplation carried her through insufferable abuse and hardship to become a leader for her people. Her profound internal liberation came from deep roots in mysticism, Christianity, nature spirituality, and African Indigenous beliefs that empowered her own escape from enslavement–giving her the strength and purpose to lead others on the road to freedom.

Harriet’s lived spirituality illuminates a profound path forward for those of us longing for internal freedom, as well as justice and equity in our communities. As people of color, we must cultivate our full selves for our own liberation and the liberation of our communities. As the luminous significance of Harriet Tubman’s spiritual life is revealed, so too is the path to our own spiritual truth, advocacy, and racial justice as we follow in her footsteps.

AbbeyoftheArts.com/Lift-Every-Voice

In My Grandmother’s House by Yolanda Pierce

Christine Valters Paintner is joined by author Claudia Love Mair for a series of video conversations. Each month they take up a new book by or about a voice of color. The community is invited to purchase and read the books in advance and participate actively in this journey of deepening, discovery, and transformation.

This month they are joined by Yolanda Pierce to discuss her book In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit.

What if the most steadfast faith you’ll ever encounter comes from a Black grandmother?

The church mothers who raised Yolanda Pierce, dean of Howard University School of Divinity, were busily focused on her survival. In a world hostile to Black women’s bodies and spirits, they had to be. Born on a former cotton plantation and having fled the terrors of the South, Pierce’s grandmother raised her in the faith inherited from those who were enslaved. Now, in the pages of In My Grandmother’s House, Pierce reckons with that tradition, building an everyday womanist theology rooted in liberating scriptures, experiences in the Black church, and truths from Black women’s lives. Pierce tells stories that center the experiences of those living on the underside of history, teasing out the tensions of race, spirituality, trauma, freedom, resistance, and memory.

A grandmother’s theology carries wisdom strong enough for future generations. The Divine has been showing up at the kitchen tables of Black women for a long time. It’s time to get to know that God.

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