“I have Obamacare,” someone says.
“My father is undocumented,” someone says.
“They’ve elected my abuser,” a woman says. “He told the whole nation that he grabs women whenever he wants and they elected him.”
“Will my marriage still be legal?” someone asks.
* * *
—
Not everyone is shocked. I, and many of my congregants, have led lives in which the system mostly worked for us. We feel betrayed by a nation that would elect a man who’s such an enormous fuck-you to Queer people, trans people, Black and brown people, refugees, Muslims, and women. But many of my colleagues of color do not need to wrestle with shock. They knew what our nation was long before I awoke to the new, naked reality. They have always been the subjects of betrayal.
The Faith in New York meeting just after the election is packed to the gills. There are a crop of new, frazzled white folks with dull shock in their eyes, trying to figure out what to do. But the women who work between shifts for the rights of immigrants and the undocumented, the Black pastors who have fought to ban the box so the formerly incarcerated have a chance at a job—they are not surprised. They’ve seen this all before.
We do our work from a basement, but we will not hover by the tomb. We divide into teams and get to work.
* * *
—
Through the wash of bleak winter days when facing the “new” reality seems all I can bear, Faith in New York decides to plan a week of action. The mayor keeps calling New York a sanctuary city, a place that will “resist” Trump’s agenda through noncooperation. But kids still get stop-and-frisked on the street, and Muslim leaders are being surveilled. The city is not a sanctuary for them.
We plan five demonstrations, one for each day of the week, culminating in a “Sanctuary Art Build” in front of the mayor’s house on the last day. Maya, an organizer, is heading things up. There are planning meetings, trainings, phone calls—so many phone calls dialing in a meeting number and pass code. I receive text after text from the organizers, filter all the information back to the Lydians so we can all participate.
On Tuesday we hold a press conference to kick off the week. On Wednesday a procession of mourners holding cardboard tombstones that say “R.I.P. Affordable Housing” glumly loops around the hotel where the New York Board of Realtors is holding its annual luncheon, as my friends from the Rude Mechanical Orchestra play a funeral march. Later in the week, folks descend on the offices of City Council members for a “pray-in,” to encourage them to push for legislation that prevents police brutality.
Thursday, a group of Lydians, bundled in coats and scarves and brandishing signs, arrives at Washington Square Park, where we join ranks with a hundred Faith in New Yorkers gathered there to protest the wrongful deportations of our undocumented neighbors. I’m edgy and nervous. We’ve planned for civil disobedience, and I’ve never been arrested before. To make things more complicated, I started my period yesterday. We’re not supposed to be in jail that long, but right before we start marching I dash into a corner restaurant and change my tampon, hoping it will hold out.
Then we’re off, with a chant and a drumbeat. We march west through the Village toward an ICE building on Varick Street, in Lower Manhattan. A number of our protesters are undocumented; for them, an arrest would have grave consequences. They, along with others, push together on the sidewalk, into a cordoned off area, shouting, “Sanctuary now!”
I move toward the street and take the hand of an Episcopal priest I know from Brooklyn. The light turns red, the cars pause at the intersection, and twenty-seven of us, clasped together, wade out into the street and form a chain across the thoroughfare. The goal is to block traffic in front of the building that hears cases and serves as a temporary detention center. Bridging the distance from sidewalk to sidewalk, we stand firm. The traffic light changes, and horns begin to blare.
The police are already waiting there, because this is what’s called a “planned arrest.” The lights bear down on us. From behind me I can still here the chants of Jason, Omar, and Hannah, along with the others, urging us on. The cops are filming, and the news is there too. For some reason the police are pulling the taxicabs closer to us. I’m squeezing the hand of the woman next to me, whose name I don’t know, a cardboard sign hung around my neck.
Taxi drivers start getting out of their cabs as the traffic builds up behind them, cars piling in and bearing down on their horns. They’re all shouting, not for us to move, but for sanctuary. “Sanctuary now!” They join their voices with the protesters’, raising their fists.
The arrest itself is slow and painstaking. An officer moves down the line, assigning a cop to each protester. My hands are pulled behind my back without force by a female police officer who stands with me as we line up for the bus.
Ahead, I see Onleilove being searched, and my heart lurches. I don’t like to see her body in the possession of these officers. It is not a game or a stunt, a Black woman in the hold of the police, locked up.
* * *
—
We’re loaded onto buses and crawl through city traffic, sitting uncomfortably on our zip-tied hands. At the jail, we’re processed and then walked down a narrow cinder-block hall, small cells for four lined up to our left. We’re exhausted, but over on the women’s side, as each new protester is walked back, a heady joy rises up. We give a raucous cheer, clapping and celebrating for each arrival. We are jubilant because we choose to be. Our joy is the best defense in the face of death-dealing systems. We can’t see each other, impeded by the cell walls, but we can shout one another’s names and trade stories. After a while we start singing.
Onleilove is in the cell next to me, and we grab hands through the bars. She jokes that we look like a photo shoot for a diversity ad, and we laugh, loopy from lack of sleep. Later I sit and listen to the stories of a veteran protester in my cell, who schools me in the art of disarming authority. When the cops come by, they ask her citizenship. “I’m not answering that,” she says mildly. They move on to the next question. “Authority often exists because we give it away,” she explains. “Depending on our privilege, we can practice taking it back.”
The cell is painted a sort of butter yellow, with a long metal shelf that can be a bench or a bed. In the center of the back wall sits a shining metal toilet. There’s no partition, and the cops have removed all our personal items from us. As the hours go by and it gets on toward two or three in the morning, I start to worry I’ll bleed through my tampon. We weren’t expecting to be held this long.
Past three they come and unlock us using oversize skeleton keys that look like they’re from a cartoon, hanging on a massive brass ring. When I ask the cop on the way out if I can use the bathroom, she asks insistently why I didn’t use the one in my cell.
“Because I’m having my period,” I tell her bluntly, “and I didn’t want to take my tampon out in front of everyone.”
“You can’t use ours,” she snaps. Access to sanitary items is limited if you’re a woman in prison. I was in jail just overnight, with the assurance I’d be out in the morning. But women in state prisons often pay five dollars for two tampons. They’re sometimes forced to use socks or tissues. Jail is designed to humiliate: to strip away dignity and remind imprisoned people that they are without liberty.
There are some who would argue that we accomplished nothing that night. We blocked a street for a few hours, they’d say, maybe got a little bit of publicity. I would argue that our week of actions not only reminded our representatives that we are here, we are organized, and we vote, but accomplished something more. Placing our bodies in the way of life-as-usual, using it to stop traffic, to say no to an inhumane practice that should not be…reminded me, and all of us who stood together, that life can look a different way. The “world-as-it-is,” as activists call it,6 is rife with possibility. It’s ready to break ope
n into the world-as-it-should-be. Part of crossing over the barrier is acting like we’re already there.
This is why protesting and working for change are not the only practices of revolution. We must dance, sing, cook, eat, and meet one another in love. Many call it foolishness, but we are cracking open the tomb and letting God’s world break in.
* * *
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Centuries ago, Christian communities stood in the rubble of their city and chose a story: of a day when the world ends and two grief-stricken women go out in search of the friend they love and return terrified and full of truth, with their hands empty. This was the choice they made: not to seal themselves in a tomb of despair and isolation, buried deep under the earth, but to break bread.
It’s a brave choice. And one that takes place only when we’re linked with our neighbors. Only a community of love will pull us back from the edges of the tomb.
“It’s you,” I preached to my Lydians at the Easter Vigil that year, “who are my living proof of the resurrection. You remind me what it means to live as people of love, right in the middle of this ruined city.”
None of us can do this on our own. The mountains may fall and the stones may tumble, but we will only tell the story again.
IV
RESURRECTION
Love lives again, that with the dead has been;
Love is come again like wheat arising green.
—JOHN M. C. CRUM
Sunday night after church, Alicia hands me the keys to her beat-up Honda Civic.
“Anything I need to know?” I ask her.
“It has a CD player,” she says, raising her eyebrows at the ancient technology. “And I called the insurance company and had you put on there. In the glove box there’s a file folder with all the numbers you might need.”
Alicia is more organized than one might assume. In cutoffs and a tank top with a blue streak through her dark hair and eye makeup that glitters faintly, she doesn’t scream “Type A.” But it turns out she’s the kind of person who kits out her car with a filing system. She winds her fingers through those of her girlfriend, who’s talking to someone next to us.
“I can’t thank you enough,” I say, hugging her.
“No big deal. I won’t have to worry about alternate-side parking for five weeks!”
* * *
—
In my seventh year at St. Lydia’s, I’ve started to get tired.
It’s a wearing, aching kind of tired that keeps me in bed longer than I should stay there in the mornings. At work I stare at my computer screen, wondering blankly what exactly it was I was just trying to do.
Our building’s physical needs are grinding. In the winter, the person hired to shovel when it snows doesn’t show. Then the oven starts turning off mid-bake, throwing our volunteer cooks into a tizzy. Last week, the neighbors who live upstairs came down and yelled at me on the sidewalk during our midweek concert series. They don’t like the noise, I get it. There is staff to help: Julia, who’s part-time; Leah from England, who’s become a part of the team; and interns who have joined us for the year. Even so, there is always too much to do and not enough time to do it.
St. Lydia’s has many things: enthusiastic supporters and donors, priests and pastors scattered around the country who love the project and helped it get off the ground. We have mentors. We even have fans: a steady stream of churchy visitors who come to learn about a new way of worship. We’re also a small, new church in a larger denomination, which can be rife with politics and institutional discord. While our relationship with our synod* had been strong for years, now it’s strained. I whack away at bureaucratic red tape as if I’m trailblazing through a thicket, brandishing a machete. Every direction I turn, there’s a new set of obstacles, a new fight waiting.
I feel like I’m dragging a net that’s twisted around my ankle, gathering odd bits of debris. It’s not a good way to lead a church or be a pastor. I am short-tempered and irritable, on the verge of snapping at staff, or even congregants. I’m on my last nerve, as my mom would put it.
“You need a break,” Mieke tells me over pastries one day.
“I can’t afford one,” I say.
She shrugs her shoulders. “You need one.”
We’ve met up at the Cornelia Street Café, our usual spot, to commiserate on a rainy Saturday. A few years ago, Mieke started up a congregation of her own—a quirky church that meets monthly, emphasizing musical improvisation and creativity. She and I have endured the trials of community making together.
“It’s not like there are any nice retired ladies who come in on Thursday to fold the bulletins or organize the basement,” I tell her, stirring a frothy hot chocolate. “These are young people. Everybody’s always scrambling to pay their rent. The whole congregation’s just trying to make it through.”
“It’s a city of hustle,” Mieke offers. “Nobody has a lot of free time. I can barely get my people to volunteer for basic roles.”
“I guess this is what happens when your church is filled with artists and actors.”
Mieke nods and leans in. “My last service, the communion server got sick, the musician got a gig he had to take, and then my reader bailed at the last minute because she had a Tinder date.” She pauses to roll her eyes. “So then it’s just me, scrambling around trying to make everything happen. I can’t do all the things!” She takes a decisive bite of croissant, for emphasis.
The rain falls lightly on the roof. Outside, a man scurries by under an umbrella, a bouquet of bright blooms wrapped in paper tucked under his arm.
“It’s rough,” I say. We pause, ruminating.
“I think the time’s coming,” I tell her.
“What, to leave?” Mieke is incredulous, her eyes huge.
“Yeah,” I say, watching the man with flowers until he disappears around the corner. “It’s not just the burnout. I’m feeling this tug. Like they’re headed one direction, and I need to go another. It’s not dramatic or anything…I just have this feeling that it’s time.”
“That’s huge,” Mieke says. “I’ve only ever known you as the pastor of St. Lydia’s. Who will you be without them?”
“I have no idea,” I tell her. My eyes fill with tears and I look away.
* * *
—
I take Mieke’s advice, planning five weeks of sabbatical in the gray days of March and April. I scrape together money I shouldn’t spend and rent a room in Asheville, North Carolina, with a claw-foot bathtub and crisp linens on the bed. I sublet my apartment to a couple from Australia who have just relocated to New York. Alicia hands me her car keys.
The next day, I’m speeding toward the Verrazzano Bridge, leaving behind the grime and grind, the tritone chords of taxi horns, the whoosh of the subway arriving in the station and repeated announcements to stand clear of the closing doors. A mixed CD a high school friend made me in 2004 blares from the tinny, rattling speakers. I’m euphoric, dizzy with this unburdening. I’m not responsible for keeping something afloat, at least not for five weeks, which feels like an eternity. I am weightless.
* * *
In Asheville, I climb mountains. I stuff a daypack with granola bars and an extra layer and follow a map up into the hills. I walk until the light changes and the sun starts to go down. It’s scary to hike alone. I imagine twisting my foot on a rock and tumbling down the trail, ending up critically injured without cell service until nightfall, when coyotes feast on my flesh. But this never happens.
In the rambling Victorian house where I’ve rented a studio, I sleep until I wake up, and then write in a journal, cross-legged on the sofa, with a cup of milky tea. I take long walks through town. I spend four days sleeping in a bamboo shelter by a river in the woods, at a retreat center run by a guy who believes himself to be an elf. (But that’s another story.)
I decide I want to learn something new, so I take weekly lessons in horse riding. My teacher, a solid woman with loose, wavy hair and a southern drawl, shows me how to approach the horse. She tells me I have a calm way with them and teaches me to find the horse’s rhythm and move in tandem with it. My horse’s name is Angel. She’s white with brown speckles and has soft, beautiful eyes. Mounted in the saddle, I spend most of our lessons attempting to urge her into motion. Angel, however, is disinterested in trotting. She stands, unbothered, flicking flies with her tail. I enjoy the rhythm of brushing her down after our lesson, standing close to the heat of her body.
I go to restaurants alone and read The New Yorker at the bar with a coffee or a beer, unabashed and uninterested in attracting anyone’s attention. I have been teaching myself to travel alone for years, and this trip is like the final exam.
In New York, I’ve been single for what feels like an eternity. It, too, is grinding. Now in my late thirties, I’ve reached a new, horrific stage in which I am ignored by men my age, who would rather date younger models. In Asheville, though, it turns out my dating profile draws just a little more attention. People write me, and I write them back. I go on dates—a lot of them.
One evening I’m getting ready for one of those dates with a mustached anarchist. I go to the closet to change into something more presentable and feminine. All week I’ve been hiking and horseback riding and wearing nothing but beat-up jeans and T-shirts. I take a skirt out of the closet and hold it up. Unexpectedly, a feeling of revulsion rolls through me. I put it back.
If he likes me, he’ll like me like this, I think. I smooth on some lip gloss with my finger, and that’s it.
It turned out he liked me like that.
For All Who Hunger Page 15