Category: Religious Equity

Reparations

.Reading time 1 minute.

What is reparations to me?
It is not financial
It is not legislative
It is not policy based or retro-fit in any way.
Those answers
Accept as truth
The systems that created and continue the harm.
Those answers are the master’s tools.

Reparations to me is a new constitution.

A declaration that is not built on
Deliberate anti-black and anti-indigenous violence.

A governing document that does not merely tolerate
But celebrates all gender, sex and sexuality as the completion of humankind.

A public agreement that requires that mental, physical and emotional disability
Are not segregated, demeaned or erased by either intent, ignorance or shame.

A statement of universal affirmation for spirituality
Especially if that affirmation is of no spirituality at all.

Reparations for me would be this and so much more.

Reparations is a new constitution
That may not be called constitution
Or even covenant
But rather invitation
To wholeness, to aliveness
To life.

What is reparations to me?
It is a future that is only possible
Without the historical apparition
Or the exclusive tangible presence
Of whiteness
maleness
cisgender-ness
assumed able-bodied-ness
or Christian-ness
etched on fading parchment
blocking the way.

– ALD

Image by anncapictures from Pixabay

Where is My Religious Liberty?

.Reading time 3 minutes.

 

     My faith is embodied…

It believes that the most intimate connection with another consenting adult is a divine right.

It believes that the sacred capacity to gestate a new life is a blessed and totally autonomous covenant between an individual and their conscience, god or God.

It believes that gender is holy, is not a choice, and that it is revealed by, with and to the individual.

It believes that ability is relative, individual, valid and unshamable.

     My faith is counter colonial…

It believes that black history is ongoing American history that is more than slavery, poverty and incarceration.

It believes we can never atone for native genocide but we have the power to change the future in relationship with the first people of this land.

It believes that Asia and Africa are continents not people and the people on them are all unique with unique names and cultures.

It believes that whiteness is not supreme.

     My faith is equity…

It believes in public, unhoused, section 8, Medicaid
It believes in rent, not own, gig work and uninsured
It believes there is enough of this planet to share…if we don’t destroy it
It believes that the future is not a commodity.

     My faith is inclusive of not exclusive to God…

It believes in gospel music shared and received not co-opted or copied.
It believes there is no language that is too much trouble to find so people can understand.
It believes in prayer, meditation, and silence.
It believes in temples, shrines, forests, and storefronts.
It believes in good without any god at all.

My faith is all of this and more in the face of religious bigots who cry victim
as they trample over all others
claiming victory over a planet they abuse
over people they ignore
over ideas they fear
over possibilities they can’t understand.

Where is my religious liberty in this world of politics as God,
and God as politics?
Where dogma becomes dictate
And creed is constitution.

Maybe my faith can be bigger than all of that?

With the mandate in its name
Declaring that we are united as one human kind
not as one kind of human all the same,
Affirming our existence in a vast universe
in which we all have the right of life and love and time and death.

Maybe this fragile flawed evolving new faith of mine is the religious liberty
I am searching so hard to find.

-ALD