Awe полностью

Growing up in a white town in Ohio, Jennifer Bailey—Reverend Jen, as she is known today—first felt the heat of racism when she was five. As she was jumping off a slide in a park, a classmate asked: Why is your face dirty? She ran into Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and felt embraced in the quiet of that space. Years later in the same church, she would hear Sister Oliver play on the organ and feel that cashmere blanket of sacred sound. In these experiences, she awakened to a big idea:

I am beloved in the eyes of God.

In her teens, Bailey served the impoverished and unhoused. At divinity school she found inspiration in scholars such as Reinhold Niebuhr, but felt agitated to transform Christianity into a more inclusive and diverse faith. Today her organization, Faith Matters Network, engages thousands on questions of spirit, faith, the soul, and the Divine. She ministers in skinny jeans, quoting Beyoncé alongside the Bible and other sacred texts.

We speak on the phone during a fraught time: she is pregnant as COVID-19 is just overwhelming New York, proving particularly deadly to people of color. At the beginning of our conversation, Reverend Jen takes stock of spiritual tendencies today. The numbers of the religiously unaffiliated are rising, in particular among people in their thirties, like her. They don’t attend church regularly, follow a single dogma, or identify with one religion or another. It is an era of rising religious homelessness. At the same time, people today are deeply spiritual. This has been the case since humans began being humans, for relating to the Divine is a deep human universal. Two-thirds of young people in the United States, and 90 percent of all Americans, believe in the Divine, that some kind of spirit, or vast force, animates the course of their lives, and that there is a soul that persists beyond the life of the body.

When I ask Reverend Jen where she finds mystical awe, her answer comes easily: the strength and courage of African American women. Her grandmothers fled the terrorism, lynchings, and segregated spaces of the Jim Crow South of the 1950s. Her mother, raised in Chicago, was a student in the first integrated high school class of the 1960s. In thinking about these women, Reverend Jen slows. She cites how the trauma of racism is passed from one generation to the next in the damage it inflicts upon the cells of our bodies. She expresses reverence for how African American women from the past and present overcome. They do so, she says, in spirit. Spirit they find in the kitchen. In telling stories, laughing, singing, and dancing. And in church. There, in soulful community, they “make a way out of no way,” as one of her grandmothers liked to say.

It was faith that sustained these women. Faith in God. In love. In justice. In hope. She feels this spirit today at spoken word events, in coffeeshops, at improv shows, in music, and at the dinner table. And most recently, at the “die-ins” she has led to call attention to police brutality. She feels guided by spirit, as Harriet Tubman did leading slaves to their freedom.

As Reverend Jen’s story of awe makes its way to the present, she pauses. After a brief silence, she reflects: “I guess I am composting religion.”

For thousands of years we have relied on nature metaphors to describe mystical awe, the feelings of encountering what we call the Divine, what we feel to be primary, true, good, and omnipresent. In some Indigenous traditions, Hinduism, and Taoism, for example, images and metaphors of the sun, sky, light, fire, rivers, oceans, mountains, and valleys are invoked to explain the Divine. Here is Lao Tzu describing Tao, the vital life force, or “way”:

Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefitting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way.

Reverend Jen’s metaphor of “composting religion” may feel particular to our twenty-first century of organic farms, urban gardens, plant-based diets, and farmers markets. Composting, though, is thousands of years old. When we compost, we gather raw materials—food scraps, grasses, leaves, animal manure—and let them decay in a place of storage. Over time, microorganisms, bacteria, fungi, and worms break down the raw materials, consuming what is toxic and distilling a humus, an amorphous, sweet-smelling, jellylike black mixture of plant, animal, and microbial origin. The nitrogen of humus is absorbed by the roots of plants, nourishing life.