Elizabeth Oldfield speaks with writer Coler Arthur Riley live at Greenbelt. 20/09/2023

Introduction 

Hello and welcome to the new series of The Sacred. Welcome back. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield and I am the host. This is a podcast about listening across divides and understanding the deep values that drive us. We are kicking off with a recording of a Sacred Live we did at the Greenbelt Festival this summer. So without further ado, we’re gonna go straight over to listen to an interview I did with Cole Arthur Riley. 

Elizabeth 

Good morning, everybody. It is delightful to see your faces. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is the Sacred Live. We are so thrilled to be here at Greenbelt recording this live conversation. If you’ve not come across The Sacred, it’s a podcast which has been running for five years – that, I think, qualifies us as almost early adopters. And in it I speak to a wide range of people in public life who have some kind of public voice, who I think are in some ways shaping our common life, and I asked them what is sacred to them. I want to get beyond the kind of adversarial “Today” programme–style clashes, or indeed the kind of self–promoting interviews that happen when everyone’s going around saying the same things to everyone that they speak to. I’m really interested in the health of our common life, how we live together despite our very many differences and disagreements. And I found trying to listen to the person behind the position, to get a sense of really what their vision of the good is, although we rarely say as explicitly as that – what are they trying to do in public and how have they got to where they are – really helps me. And I need this grow in curiosity and empathy for people who are not like myself. We speak to people from all different tribes, from any controversial issue you can think of, we will have spoken to people who hold opposing views. And honestly it’s become a spiritual practice for me. It’s an act of resistance to the polarising, dehumanising tides that I see in our society, coming through our information technology, from the demographic changes that keep trying to sort us into little pockets who increasingly can’t bear each other. That is not something that I am prepared to allow to happen to me, because of my faith, and because it just sounds much less fun than a society in which we listen well to each other across the divides. So please go look at the back catalogue, find someone both who you think “Oh, I’d like to listen to them” – notice how they’re probably a bit like you – and someone who you go “Oh, I do not want to listen to them” – and notice, what is it in them that is setting off very tiny, little tribal reaction in yourself, and see if you can try and listen to both. 

I am so pleased to welcome our guest today, Cole Arthur Riley, who I know from both talking to friends and just overhearing people in queues, has already been just the most enormous blessing through the talks that she’s done so far. Her book, “This Here Flesh,” has been a huge encouragement and inspiration and a blessing to me. She is a writer, she is the creator of “Black Liturgies”, which is an Instagram account. But more than that, really, it feels like it’s a sort of communications platform spreading goodness, in particularly in spaces where sometimes that’s a hard thing to find. And she’s with us today for The Sacred. 

What is sacred to you? Cole Arthur Riley’s answer 

Elizabeth 

So I am going to kick off with the opening question, going straight deep. Luckily, I think Cole is a bit like me and she’s got no patience for small talk, so she’s very happy we’re gonna go in the deep end. Having had a little bit of time to think about it, Cole, what is sacred to you? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

The thing that first came to mind when I saw that question was “storytelling”. Maybe more generally stories. So, both the telling of them but also receiving them and holding them. And I think not just story in terms of memory – although, you know, I write about it and it’s very important to me, keeping memory well as a collective – but I also think making up stories. The kind of mischievous, weird kind of mystical stories that we tell and pass on to our children. Or it can be beautiful and sacred as well. 

Elizabeth 

Have there been times in your life where it’s felt like that sacred value is coming under pressure? Where you’ve had to choose to be loyal to it, or maybe you haven’t managed to be loyal to it – which I think happens to all of us at times? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yes, all the time. For a number of reasons, but the older I get, the more I kind of realise the truest story is rarely the one that survives. And that’s so much of my own doing and kind of diluting and reworking or rewriting something that I know feels true to me in the presence of someone that I’m not quite sure is going to receive it. So, you kind of bend yourself and contort yourself into all kinds of shapes and end up saying things that you absolutely don’t believe to be true. And so, I would say when I started Black Liturgies – the project that you mentioned in your intro, which is more of a specially initially more of a kind of Christian–centred space – I came under a lot of critique and offended a lot of people, and had to really deal in a meaningful way with my just complete and total fear of being seen. And realise, “Okay, this project is growing and growing and growing. I can’t avoid being seen. Do I want to be seen with some kind of lens of Truth, or am I gonna continue to sacrifice myself on these altars of other people’s opinions or perceptions?” 

Elizabeth 

What helps you try and tell the truest story you knew how to tell? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

I think staying close to people who have witnessed my life, who knew me long before I was kind of sitting on stages like this. It makes it so that it’s very difficult to drift too far from myself. I’ve a pretty opinionated friend group that I think really balances me well, and that they don’t tolerate a lot of insincerity, and not in an accusatory way, but in a sense of, “You deserve more. Just tell it how it happened, or tell it how you dreamed it if it’s a myth or something like that.” And so, that’s helpful. I have my best friend in the world. We grew up down the street from each other. And I mean, he knew me when I could, quite literally barely speak out loud, and has seen me in college when I tried to completely rework myself into this kind of witty charismatic… It was a weird experiment. I thought, “College! I’m gonna find myself!” and I just made myself up. And having him close throughout my life, it always is kind of a tether, you know, in that sense. 

Cole Arthur Riley’s childhood: selective mutism, storytelling, and a hair ritual 

Elizabeth 

I’m just imagining him just like cocking a sardonic eyebrow at you. “Cole, what are you doing?” 

I’d like to wind back and get a sense of your childhood. What are the big ideas in the air as you were growing up? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Big ideas… Well, big ideas in my family. My grandma is a storyteller. And maybe that’s why that’s a value that feels so sacred to me. She was the best storyteller and very confident in her art. She wrote poetry as well as a stories. And so, I think, in the air there was this kind of belief in the fact that we had something to contribute to the creation of the world, unapologetically. I said this yesterday how my dad would kind of bribe us to write poems and stories. And what that does is kind of instilled in you, what I think is a sacred arrogance to say “You actually have something to give, you have something to contribute.” And so that was in the air, but also a lot of humour. I’m not very funny, but my family is very, very funny. They’re just the most lovely, charismatic, charming people. And so there was a lot of humour, a lot of levity and play, and a lot of intimacy between generations. The extended family was all kind of crammed into one house. There were times where I lived with my grandma and there are times where my uncle lived with us. And there was so much kind of transitivity and intergenerational connection that I think was part of the air we were breathing. 

Elizabeth 

You’ve written a little bit about sometimes feeling unusual in your family that were funny, and loud, and crowded. Could you just say a bit more about that experience? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

So, yes, my family. They’re just very charming. If they were here, you surely would all be looking at them offstage, even though I’m the one with the mic. And I love that about them. They’re just very open, hearted people. And they don’t take themselves too seriously. I came out and just refused to speak. For the most part, I had something called “selective mutism,” which is kind of an anxiety disorder that’s most commonly found in children, where you kind of feel like you’re unable to speak in the presence of certain people. So apart from my dad, my sister, or my grandma and my aunt, I really struggled until I was around seven or eight, and I took speech classes for years because I was so delayed, and had so many speech impediments. But my dad, I think, he was really worried for me and knew I was going to need something to connect me to other people. It would not be uncommon to find me in a closet somewhere, reading like a “Goosebumps” book. And I would just be by myself. And I think my distinction, my difference in my family, I think my dad recognised that was quickly becoming a kind of portal to isolation. And he was a very young dad. I mean, he had me when he was 18, my sister when he was 16, but he had this intuition of “What am I going to do? I can’t leave her out to see, but I need to honour who she is.” And so that’s kind of how writing began for me. It was my dad giving me the pen. 

Elizabeth 

They come through these two characters in your book: “Grandma Phyllis”, who I am in love with, and would like her to adopt me, who had this incredibly traumatic childhood of abuse on all levels; and Carry. Carry is a poet and an activist and so clearly fed so much beauty into you. And your dad, Steven. (It’s funny, they live in my head now.) It’s this teen dad who had his own troubles, and had his own struggles, but seemed to be able to speak words over you, that dignified you at a deep level. Could you explain the ritual he did with your hair, and how that shaped you? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yeah, so my dad was a single dad. I was two months, my sister was two years, when my teenage dad took over. And so he had to learn to do all the things, including little black girls’ hair who are squirming and tender–headed, and he would do our hair every morning and black people know (we don’t really do this anymore so much) we grease our children’s scalps while we’re braiding. We took turns in between his legs, and when we were done, we’d go to his bathroom and he’d look his fingers and kind of brush back our eyebrows, and he would say, “You look good. Do you feel good?” Every single morning: “You look good. Do you feel good?” And sometimes it was “Yes”. Sometimes it was “No”. But that kind of affirmation of dignity, after this embodied ritual of him doing our hairs, putting cocoa butter on our skin… Yeah, I think that lives in me. 

Writing as a vocation, and bridging the contemplative–activist divide 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, it shimmers in your public presence. Your dad bribed you to write poems he put a pen in your hand. When did you come to a realisation that this might be part of the work that was yours to do in the world, that this might be something close to a vocation? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yeah, I love answering this question, because there the moment is so clear to me. I was still quite young. I don’t know exactly what age, but definitely not even yet in high school. And my sister and I had been playing this board game. We went to put it away under our coffee table. And I remember clear as day: I saw this navy hard–covered book with silver embossed lettering… We didn’t have many books in my home growing up, and if there was a book in the house, it was mine. And so, I saw this very ornate, beautiful book. And I remember – at least in my memory, it’s such a “things slow down”. I’m sure when I lived it, it wasn’t that, but you know, callings come differently in memories. I picked up the book and my sister goes, “Yeah, you don’t know Grandma wrote a poem? It’s published in the book.” I turn to the first page. And well, maybe not the exact first page, but the first poem in the anthology of poems was Phyllis Marie Arthur’s. And I remember being so confused. It never occurred to me. That’s how I knew I was quite young, because it had never occurred to me. I’d been reading so much, but it never occurred that someone like me could actually have their words read. And it just did something to me. It’s kind of hard to put words to. I was like, “Oh, that’s a possibility.” And I think that was the beginning of my imagination of “What if I wrote and people read it – besides my father?” 

Elizabeth 

Why do you think it felt like someone like you might not be able to do that? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

That’s a good question. I don’t know if there was a singular moment. Did you say when? Or why? Okay, why. My family’s not readers. My dad won’t be offended by this. My dad never claimed to be a reader. So I think on a kind of familial level, I didn’t understand that what I was doing in private – my journal entries, my poems – could translate outside of the home, but also in school because I wasn’t very verbal still. I was coming out of selective mutism somewhat, but I still was very shy. I had a lot of difficulty communicating with teachers. I think even my college professors are shocked at where I am today, because I spoke so little, even in college. Because you see potential in a child in different ways and under certain lenses, and I don’t think… I think my dad knew, and was like, my biggest fan. But in general, I don’t think most people in my life would have taken me very seriously as someone who had something to say. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. One of the things on the little short vignettes in the book is someone – I think, maybe a spiritual director – saying to you that they’ve never seen anyone be able to be an activist and a contemplative equally well. And you thought, “I’ll take that on.” Sounds like the kind of challenge I like. My guess is, Greenbelt is full of both those categories of people, and some people trying to be both. But that, I think, is one of the divides that we can struggle to cross. That those of us who feel like, “Okay, the way we respond to the pain of the world, is so clearly needs to be about inner work”, right? It needs to be about discipleship, or dealing with our shadow side, or dealing with our unconscious bias or whatever the language that’s comfortable to us is. And that’s the only way that we can fix the world. And then those that say, “Yes, yes, fine. But the world is burning. Let’s march.” It is an outward active activist postures that are important here and everything else is just a distraction. Do you see that divide, and what helps us across it? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

I definitely see that divide. And I think maybe in the past few years, I’ve seen more of a hunger to bridge it, and more of a recognition. I mean, you see this in social media spaces, so many of the activists who really shepherded us through the summer of 2020. And in the wake of so much grief and black trauma, a lot of them have gone quiet. And they’re in this kind of season of reclamation, of self, of rest, of things like beauty, because I just do not think it’s possible to sustain any kind of meaningful liberation pursuit without a kind of contemplative connection, a connection to one’s interior life. And vice versa. I mean, I’m maybe more of the opposite, where I feel very safe inside myself and safe journeying into my life, but I’m not someone who readily is going to contend with the violence I do day to day in the world because of that interior world. So I think both are needed. And activism without work of the interior life will just leave you completely exhausted, and used, and actually vulnerable and in a system of replicating injustice by kind of sacrificing your body for the cause. And I think journeying into one’s interior life without an awareness of how we move in the world, in the injustice in the world, can become extremely lonely and numb, and just a completely numb life where you might feel okay, but just dissociated from the really present physical pains around you and in you. So, it makes you vulnerable in a different way. 

The genesis of Black Liturgies 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, I’ve got friends who talk a bit about spiritual bypassing, that it’s sort of to distract ourselves from the pain of the world, we go inwards. But whatever the opposite is of spiritual activist bypassing – we refuse to deal with the mess inside. I feel like Black Liturgies is doing something… Possibly the reason people have received it with such hunger is that it seems like it’s trying to hold together those two things. Could you tell me about the genesis of it? 

Cole Arthur Riley   

Yeah, I started black liturgies in the summer of 2020. So, it was kind of a slew of very public black murders by white people. Elijah McLean – this precious, tender soul – was murdered while apologising and kind of pleading. I mean, it’s heartbreaking. And then Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and this chain of very publicised deaths. And of course, George Floyd, I think, left the world… Not black people – I think black people have known for years. I mean, these are the stories we have to tell our kids. We’ve known. But there’s something about the world turning their ears and eyes to it for the first time. That changes how you feel the grief of it. And I attended an Episcopal Church, and the Sunday after George Floyd’s death was Pentecost. I remember very clearly: it’s the pandemic. I’m in bed, walking on to this church service, and just feeling so empty. And, yeah, I’ve said that there are days that it’s just very hard to pray words written by a white man. And the Book of Common Prayer is beautiful, but I also know what was happening to my ancestors when Thomas Cranmer wrote the Book of Common Prayer, and wrote those words that were not meant for me at that time. And so it’s complicated. And that night, it’s like, the idea came to me as the words came to me. I said, I think I’m going to start a project called Black Liturgies and write prayers that connect to black grief. I told my husband this in bed, and he’s like, “Okay, okay.” And then the next day I did it. I’m thinking it would be kind of just this very small thing. I’m not social media savvy, and hadn’t been up until that point. So I didn’t understand how these accounts work, and how they can grow. And it quickly did. And I think in part because there was a hunger for that connection between interior work and justice. But also, we were in the midst of a pandemic, and people were contending with a different kind of loneliness, and desperate for some kind of connection that they weren’t getting in person at churches. And also, I think people were looking around in their churches and realising that they weren’t as safe as they thought they were, because of how people had been responding that summer. So all of those things together, I think kind of led to Black Liturgies growing. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah. And one of the things that that account does, or your book does, and you do in public, is really champion emotions – healthy emotions – as legitimate public expression, in contrast to… I don’t know. Particularly in Britain, it feels like for a long time, legitimate public expression, not quite still “stiff upper lip”, but if you want to be taken seriously in public, you will remain calm and rational at all times. Which is, of course, gendered. 

Grief: the prayer labyrinth and emotion processing technology 

But I’d love to hear about two specific emotions: grief and rage. Let’s start with grief. And could you talk about Sister June and what she taught you? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yes. I feel like I haven’t told the story since I wrote the book. So Sister June. When I moved to Philly after graduating college, and I was working for this Episcopal Church in partnership with this small Catholic University, and one of the Sisters there – we’ll call her sister June, because that’s what I call her in the book – she would take me to this prayer labyrinth. She would take me to this prayer  labyrinth, and we’d walk the prayer. Is that a familiar concept – prayer labyrinth? 

Elizabeth 

There’s probably one here somewhere, right? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

So, we would walk that together. I didn’t have many friends, and so I think the sisters felt a responsibility to kind of care for me and give me things to do. And she would often cry. We didn’t walk it side by side. She would start and then I would kind of trail behind her, following her. And she would often just cry softly. And there was one particular day where she was in the centre and taking a long time, and I know she’s crying, she knows that I know that she’s crying. And I’m trying to linger to not enter the centre at the same time as her and she looks over and she’s just like: “Well, come on!” And so I enter the centre with her and she shows me this photo of her sister. And, you know, sometimes grief doesn’t need an exact explanation. And I think it was mostly a moment where words were irrelevant, even though I was trying to say them. I asked something, probably not what I really wanted to ask. I think I might have said “older”, like, “Is it your older sister or younger sister?” And she didn’t even answer it, she didn’t even acknowledge, because she knows that’s not really what we’re doing here. You know, this is grief. And she just started to tell me about her. And we walked out of the labyrinth side by side. And I think about that a lot, about what it means to have the courage to invite someone to come to the centre with you at the centre of your grief, where you’ve encountered so much, and someone who’s almost a stranger to you – we weren’t that close. She was trying to be company to me. But also the power of not turning away, not walking my own way on the labyrinth and trying to divert my gaze from someone else’s pain, but to… It takes a courage. I’m realising now, it took courage for me to step into the centre with her and say, “I’ll be here and I’m not going to rush us. I’m not going to ask things that I’m not really asking. I’m going to listen and be present.” And metaphorically, I think about that a lot of, “Who can I invite into this with me?” There’s that proverb that’s like, “Grief shared is grief halved. And joy shared his double joy.” And what does it mean to be a person of invitation? 

Elizabeth 

There’s this line right at the end of that story that probably reached a lot of people as a throwaway line, but it’s something like “What Sister Jane is doing in the labyrinth is, she’s letting herself walk into her grief. But then she’s letting herself walk out of it again. And something about the labyrinth helps her hold it without fearing that she’ll get stuck there.” I have a friend called Laura Fabrycky – who should be a public theologian, just not yet, for various reasons – who talks about the Psalms as “emotion processing technology”. And I was thinking about that phrase a lot reading your book, that emotions denied go bad places. But getting stuck in emotions is unhelpful too. And so I’ve taken that image of “Let myself walk into the labyrinth of my hard feelings and feel them, and then let myself walk out again.” And that pattern is part of the liturgy that we who are Christians can find, I think, in our Scriptures and in the communal practices – that it’s emotion–processing technology we’re doing together. 

Rage: Willie Jennings and reframing anger in defence of dignity 

I wanted to ask you about rage. There is various bits in your book I could read which I just thought were extremely powerful for expressing rage at injustice. You’re so softly spoken in person. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with you now, and in fact, I will just asked you this first: do you find it easier to express rage on the page than in person? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

No, I don’t find either very easy. So, the rage chapter was definitely the hardest to write. Like, when I got my notes back from my editor, it was like, “We’re so excited!” And then it got to “Chapter nine: rage”, and it was like, “We’re gonna do this again”. He’s so nice. Because I’d managed to write an entire chapter on rage without it translating at all into a kind of felt experience; it was very over–intellectualised. And I had completely removed that from the page. And so that is the one chapter where it was virtually a rewrite. And I said, “You need to go someplace more honest and yourself, Cole, and just be for real right now.” Because what I wrote wasn’t bad, but again, it was much more academic, much more removed than we needed it to be. So I struggle with both. But I definitely struggle in person. I’m gripping my leg, even just talking about anger, because I’ve been trained to just demonise my anger, so much. And there is the kind of trope of the angry black woman that I’ve tried to resist so much, that I’ve ended up really doing myself a disservice and dishonouring myself in moments. And it’s hard to rewire that. You need to really be in a safe place to express anger. I do, and I need a really good, safe place to express anger. 

Elizabeth 

I had a previous guest on the Sacred who you also quote, called Professor Willie Jennings, who is a theologian, Professor of Africana Studies. And he said this extraordinary thing about when he’s in his Pentecostal church. One of the things they say about conflict in his community, is, “When you’re angry – not “if”, “when” you’re angry, hold their hand. It’s totally fine to be angry, you need to express that anger. And as you express that anger, hold their hand. It’s making me cry and think about it, because there is something very profound about it. As you’ve been learning to express rage when it’s appropriate – and particularly over the last year, rage at the injustices that is done to black people – what helps us? Either if you’re a white person, and you’re desperately trying to listen, but also sinful and broken. So occasionally feeling very defensive, and not having the energy or just dealing with the own crap that I have in here. And as you say in the book, you as a black person being exhausted by having to explain, or educate, or express your feelings. My hope is that it is possible to do what Willie Jennings says, but I don’t know quite how. What have you learnt? Well, feel free to either reject that premise. That’s my provocation to you. It’s not really a question. 

Cole Arthur Riley 

No, I agree. I agree with what he said. And my grandma, she said something similar. She suffered from a lot of abuse that was facilitated by the church, and had a very kind of alienated relationship with God and the divine. And she talked about her anger at God, actually, being a tether to God, because anger… I mean, it’s not exactly the “hold your hand”, but it’s something similar of anger. Anger comes for you. It’s an emotion toward something. Apathy, you’re sitting back, you’re disengaging, you’re turning your back on something. And she said, “It was actually my anger, that kept me, my anger at God that kept me nearer to them.” Which I find beautiful and can totally be translated, on a human level, into having a kind of belief to say, “In my anger, there’s actually a kind of anger that is not about destruction, or not about degrading someone’s dignity, but is actually so much in defence of dignity, that you feel this kind of magnet toward that, which is being either demeaned or the perpetrator of that.” You feel there’s something in you rise to try to meet that. And I think that’s beautiful. I mean, Willie Jennings maybe says it in an even more tender way; the sense of “hold their hand”, to say, “I won’t let you. I won’t let you because I believe in the dignity of the man who shoots into a closed door and kills a black woman at night.” I believe that’s not what they were meant for, and that’s actually operating outside of their dignity. And so whenever I rise in anger, it’s not an act of destruction, it’s actually calling someone back into their humanity, calling someone back into their dignity. If I can remember that as it’s happening, I think that makes us all a bit more brave in terms of having a kind of possession over our rage. 

Elizabeth 

Yeah, it’s anger in the service of the relationship. It’s saying, “I care enough about whatever this connection is that I’m not going to pretend this never happened and just let this thing die. I’m going to express it to you.” So it’s been a really powerful reframe for me, who also is not super comfortable with anger as a natural thing.  

Objectification and body awareness: the white gaze vs. the gaze of unapologetic particularity 

As we have those conversations, you wrote a piece in The Washington Post about Black History Month and the white gaze. And it’s been really helpful. I’ve spent in the past some time thinking about the male gaze and feminist theory, and the way it objectifies women and makes them feel; the struggle to be taken seriously either just not as a collection of what however I happen to appear, but your stories in it was just a helpful way in for me. And I wanted to ask – for my own growth, really – what is the opposite of the white gaze? Where are those moments across difference? And we won’t always need this, hopefully. Most of the time, we’re just people raising families together, or being in church together, or digging our gardens together. But when there are moments where the differences between us become live and maybe painful, what is a conversation…? How can I as a white person show up in ways that are not doing that objectifying? 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yes. I love this question. The first part: what is the opposite of the white gaze? You know, there’s some instinct that would maybe say, “The opposite of the white gaze is the black gaze, or is the kind of collective diverse gaze.” But actually, as I say that, it doesn’t really feel true. I think maybe the truer thing is, the opposite of the white gaze is a gaze of unapologetic particularity. It’s a kind of a gaze that is aware of someone as an individual, in the context of their particular story and the particular time that they lived. So okay, maybe I’ll say it this way. All the time, people ask me who I wrote This Here Flesh for. So, they’re asking if I wrote it for black people or if I wrote it for white people. Which is so funny. No one asks white people this, by the way, “who did you write your book for?” But because I was asked it so much during the press tour, I had to really think about it. And I realised I didn’t write This Here Flesh for black people. I didn’t write it for white people. The only person I was thinking of when I wrote most days was my grandma. And I wrote it for her and the particularity of her life, and her story, and her grief, and her emotions. And that was enough. And I think my art was better for it, as opposed to trying to kind of cater it to the masses, or this unspecified, generalised gaze. I don’t know if I’ll think differently about this in two years. So, maybe I will. But right now, I think that the opposite is probably a gaze of particularity, really seeing a person for who they are in their context. And I think how to not operate out of that white gaze, or that white male gaze is to choose silence, a spiritual discipline of silence. And she’s listening. And not silence in the cowardly way. but I think there is a silence that’s quite courageous. Just is enough time to let you take account of a room and really contend with what is my body doing in this space? What did my entrance into this space just do? Because, you know, if a woman walk up for a woman walks into a room of men, we think these things often – not always – but I’ve had that moment of walking into a room of men, and I’m very aware of my body as black person. I’ve had the moment of walking into a room of white people, and I’ve had that moment. If everyone has to take a responsibility and has a moment where they’re taking account of how their body kind of forms a room, shapes a room, I think we would be better for it. And also asking ourselves, what does it mean to stay in the room? I could say a word about liturgy here, but I’ll pause. What does it mean to stay in the room, even when it’s not built for you? It wasn’t built for you, and with you in mind, and is that okay? Are you capable of remaining? 

Liturgy, right hemisphere knowing, and bearing the image of a multitude 

Elizabeth 

Please say a word about liturgy. 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yeah. I’m biased, because I’m a liturgist, but I think liturgy is an amazing kind of practice of this. Of when you’re committed to staying in the words, these words that might not have been written for you. White people often DM me and they say, “Is it okay that I’m in this space, this black liturgy space? I feel like I’m intruding?” And I think, “Well, no. Just don’t come into it as an intruder. Are you capable of staying in the words, even if they don’t make sense to you?” And I think liturgy does that to us, not just in terms of race, but in terms of all kinds of lived experiences. You might encounter a phrase, or a word that doesn’t immediately resonate, or that you it’s not actually what you’re living. But together, we’re committed to reciting the words together. And I think there’s some kind of mysterious solidarity that happens in liturgy when done well. 

Elizabeth 

Yes. Is the difference between the kind of hyper–individualised, algorithmically designed for our preferences, just the way our formation works to train us to be consumers. And then being prepared to say, “I will say some collective truths with other people, and collectively, these are true for us.” And I just wanted to read a quote, for the sake of those who haven’t read the book yet. “People talk about God as three distinct people in one. If this is true, it means the whole cosmos is predicated on a diverse and holy community. And if we bear the image of God, that means we bear the image of a multitude. And that to bear the image of God in its fullness, we need each other. Maybe every culture, every household, every community bears that image in a unique way.” I love that the image of God is a multitude. It’s really helped with a theological puzzle I’ve been chewing at for many years. And I think one of the things that comes through in your book and in your work, is this trying to diversify what is legitimate public expression. And as we’ve said, some of that is about saying, “Our bodies are a form of reasoning too. Our feelings are a form of reasoning too.” And there are these two thinkers – one of which I’ve had on board – who are saying similar things, one of whom is Minna Salami, and she’s a black feminist. She has a book called Sensuous knowledge. And it’s really this kind of wisdom that we see coming through Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison, and is refusing to have an anthropology that we are human beings in jars, who reason and everything. That kind of enlightenment idea. And then there’s one else was called Iain McGilchrist, who is a neuroscientist, and he is basically saying the same thing as Minna Salami. But he’s doing it with brain scans, because he is a neuroscientist, and he’s talking about left hemisphere ways of knowing, and right hemisphere ways of knowing, and that we’ve created a world that is very left hemispheric, which is concrete, linear, closed. And that whole swathes of other wisdom, intuitive, creative, emotional, imaginative have been delegitimize. And that what the ways the world needs to change, is we need to be comfortable with both forms of knowing. I think Ian McGilchrist is massively better known the Minna Salami, because it’s hard for anyone even to say, “We need a wider range of ways of knowing”, without doing it in the left hemisphere. You need to say, “Here’s the brain scan”, so I can appeal to your preexisting sense of reason for you to take me seriously enough for me to take you on this journey over here. I just wanted to kind of offer that, and say: what have you learned about taking up the space to tell stories, to own your story, to express your emotions, to tell the true story – to go back to your original sacred value? What helps us? 

What can help us own our story, and tap into our emotions in a meaningful way 

Cole Arthur Riley 

Yeah. I think a lot of things can help us. I’ll speak for myself first, and maybe I’ll speak a little more generally. I was a very emotional child. My friends now, they’re like, “Surely not?” but I was. I was a weeper, a quiet crier. And I would just sit by the window and cried. My dad never really knew what was going on. I didn’t know what was going on. I just felt so deeply, but was kind of slowly shamed out of that, because I come from quite a happy family. And so now, I don’t really have the same emotional depth of my childhood, and I’m trying to reclaim it. But it takes work. And like you said, even when I’m speaking to people about emotions – and “black emotion” is one of the pillars of the black liturgies project – even when I’m speaking to people about it, I feel the need to over–intellectualise it so that people still take me seriously. It runs deep. I know exactly what you mean. Audrey Lorde says, “The white fathers said ‘I think, therefore I am’. And the black mother, the poet within each of us, whispers, ‘I feel therefore I’m free’.” Which I just love. Because she says it with poetry, not with facts. She says it with poetry. And so, I guess the closer I get to the heart of a poet and me, the more I kind of feel confident in saying there is a form of knowledge that is maybe less precise, that isn’t so interested in clarity and answers, but actually is free, and mystery and confusion. And being sad one moment, and happy one moment, and allowing that to be okay. But I feel like I’ve said this so much this weekend about the company you keep. But I really do think that, if you want to be able to tap into your emotions in a meaningful way but you’re around a bunch of very stoic, emotionally demeaning people, that’s a very tough battle. But who do you have around you who can guide you there, who can model that for you in a way that you feel like, “Okay, I can mirror that. And it won’t be a threat to anyone.” 

Elizabeth 

Thank you Cole Arthur Riley, for speaking to me at the Sacred Live. 

Outro 

Elizabeth 

Gosh, that was such a… satisfying and moving conversation, largely because Cole is so careful and honest and thoughtful with what she brings. She really does try and hold to that sacred value of telling the true story. I’ve listened to a lot of interviews with her, and she didn’t do the thing that people sometimes can do, which is just say the same thing in the same way again and again, which is easy and completely understandable when you’re doing a lot of book promotion. It felt like she was… really hearing my questions and answering them, which is the ingredient for a proper conversation, really. And it is a relief that it went well, because I find Sacred Lives so much more nerve–wrecking. I felt this with Oliver Berkman, I felt this with Richard and Lydia Ayoade. That what I’m trying to do in having a conversation with someone is create a connection, is really listen and hear each other, really see each other. Really seek to understand, and that’s quite an intimate thing actually. It’s quite a sort of vulnerable and precious thread of human connection which isn’t always easy to weave. I’ve been learning how to do it on Zoom. Sometimes it works amazingly, and sometimes it just doesn’t ever quite get to the level that I want it to get to, but having an audience of people watching this quite intimate, delicate process happen is different. It is like kind of having an emotional amplifier in front of you because whenever things get… I don’t really mean tense. I mean, you know, when it feels like we’re beginning to tread on slightly riskier territory, you can feel it in the audience. And this audience were brilliant and I just kind of knew they were with me, but it’s a more exhilarating experience. It feels much more like kind of riding a stallion than trotting along on a pony. I was a bit nervous also because Cole, the things she’s talking about are so tender and so… vulnerable, she speaks of her own abuse, generational trauma, the racism she’s experienced, and she talks about being a scared person. And so, knowing how to create spaces that we can bring those parts of ourselves, the more wounded parts of ourselves, the things we often hide in public out and share them in the way that can be so healing and humanizing because we know we’re not alone in the things that we go through and the things that we wrestle with. But doing it in ways that feel appropriate and not exploitative is always something that I’m puzzling away at in the background. And again, it’s a big thanks to Cole, to the audience, that felt, I think, kind of healthy and safe. 

And then obviously, just to name the blindingly obvious thing, I went in slightly nervous about… being a white lady and accidentally just sort of stomping with my big feet in my eagerness to understand and question and knowing, that I come as a fallible, fragile, prejudiced human with all my preexisting scripts and assumptions about people. And I was really gracious to Cole responding to my question about the white gaze. So profoundly actually, I wanted to say, “how do I not approach you in ways that will feel objectifying?” Just annoying, frankly. How do I just not be annoying as we try and connect across these differences? And it feels to me like maybe the most significant thing that was said was “unapologetic particularity”, and it chimes so deeply with what I’m learning that we need to challenge our cognitive shortcuts, we need to challenge the tribal bundling that we do and the assumptions that we have about people when we meet them and get curious enough to see the unapologetic particularity of each human being in front of us. And in so doing, we will avoid objectifying or irritating, hopefully, or even worse, really hurting each other. So yes, just a wonderful answer to that quite vulnerable feeling question. 

What else am I reflecting on? Just again, the sense of how powerful it is to understand someone’s story and where they’ve come from. And I just loved hearing about the family members who have gifted Cole with such a sense of dignity and possibility. Her dad and her grandma, both of them have had really hard lives and really very deep struggles themselves. They’re not perfect people, but they have equipped her to be someone who can take a life that has had too much pain in it and make it into something beautiful in the world. I really valued what she said about rage – rage as a source of connection, both that she said she also struggles with it, and I think a lot of us do, maybe more women than men, I don’t know, maybe it’s just a personality thing. But that the thing from her grandma as anger is what helped her stay connected to God, that anger can actually be something that connects us, as Willie Jennings argues, really. And she also said this beautiful thing about when she is… I can’t remember whether she said about white supremacists or when she’s angry at someone who is perpetuating an injustice, she’s angry because it’s a betrayal of their dignity, that she’s almost angry on behalf of that human being’s dignity. In the way that maybe we can be angry, if we have children, at our children when they are betraying themselves, or angry at our friends when they are… just not living into their fullness. That there can be almost a self–protective or a protective of them anger. She put it so beautifully. It had a real kind of echo of James Baldwin for me as she was speaking. 

And then she said this amazing thing about liturgy, that there is a mysterious solidarity when we pray things together. And we don’t try and optimize or individualize our words or our prayers but we pray them together. I remember when I was going through a major faith crisis a while ago now, and I was in church with my husband and saying, “I don’t know how to pray the Creed. I’ll just skip the bits I don’t believe today”, which was most of it that day. And he said “That’s not what the Creed is for, we don’t edit it according to our individual preferences. We pray it together because together we believe it.” And there is something about faith as a collective activity, faith as solidarity. And it chimes obviously with what Cole was talking about in terms of the image of God in my tradition. It’s often thought of as being like each human being bears the image of God. And I think Cole would say, and I’m very drawn to this idea that we together bear the image of God, that we… as a body, we as a community, we as a family, bear the image of God and we’re not a full image without each other. We can’t do that dignifying, humanising, liberating thing that Christians believe humans are called to, on our own. Beautiful. 

I really hope you enjoyed listening. You can find many episodes with people from a very wide range of different perspectives in our back catalogue. You can find me or the team on social media. We would love to hear from you. There’ve been a few beautiful reviews recently. Someone said that their friend had sent them the podcast in order for them to be able to have discussions about it. If you were that friend, thank you. And if you were the person who left that review, thank you. Because… Nothing gardens my heart more than the idea that we might be in some way helping other people have deeper conversations. So if you’ve thought about sending it to a friend, maybe today’s the day. Pick one that you think, “Oh, I’d love to talk to you about that. That really thought–provoked me.” Please do it and report back, ideally. But if it just happens and I never know, I’m delighted too.

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