NEW YORKERS CAN show up late to the party when it comes to slowing down with the summer. Even with the haze and humidity conspiring for an unholy pairing, thickening the air, and lathering our skyscrapers—our hustle remains undeterred. We might pause momentarily in the caress of the cool air leaking out of department store foyers. Still, many of us only begrudgingly slow down.
Fight as we might, our bodies are always communicating. Sending messages. Receiving them. Storytelling and processing the world. Heaven and life continue to stream data vying for our attention by different means. Thomas Merton wrote, “For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in the minds and wills of [people].” For Merton, this data could land unbeknownst to us. Many BIPOC folks, however, have experienced this sense of knowing through the body. It is something many contemplative activists are also reclaiming as part of an abolitionist heritage.
For most of my years, I’ve learned to process life through my mind. It wasn’t until recently that I realized my body has stories it desires to share. My body told me a major story in February. Since I was 11, I have experienced sudden moments of foreboding, fear, and abandonment at that time of year. As I meditated and paid attention to my body, something in my gut told me to text my elder sister, Brenda. My thumbs worked up a text, half sorry with each peck for being so random.
“Hey Bren. When was Mom hospitalized for clinical depression?”
Two minutes of forever silence passed. “I think it was sometime around February.”
My sister recalled how my 11-year-old frame was trembling uncontrollably through the night. And for years, my body not only rendered an account, but it also attempted to bring the story into remembrance. Not just the memory of the breakdown, but also the memory of my mother’s deep abiding resilience, paired with the faith that brought her through.
Faith activists would be healthier if we took better heed to the wisdom of the body. The body is a griot. As such, this somatic storyteller can beckon us toward ancient paths of liberation, healing, the resilience encoded in our DNA. By extension, we can realize that activism is the art of embodied ecology, situating our bodies in real connection to time and place, in a story. Cole Arthur Riley writes, “as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people. To suggest a form of faith that tells me to sit down alone and be quiet? It does not rest easy on the bones.”
Part of the journey to wholeness is listening to this body God made and realizing how our bodies are part of God’s communication loop. For if God were simply concerned for souls, God would have saved Israel but allowed their bodies to remain enslaved in Egypt as economic units of the empire. But if we remember the story of Exodus, a woman named Miriam took up her tambourine and danced after the nation crossed the Red Sea—with her body as a liberated storyteller.
José Humphreys III is author of Seeing Jesus in East Harlem: What Happens When Churches Show Up and Stay Put and co-author of Ecosystems of Jubilee: Economic Ethics for the Neighborhood (Zondervan, 2023).
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