“Wake up, wake up, little sparrow!
Don’t make your home out in the snow. ...
Little bird, don’t you know?
Your friends flew south many months ago.”
—Ella Jenkins

LIKE THE AUTHOR of the First Letter of John, we are living in a time for “testing the spirits.” That is, we must discern the forms of freedom, or unfreedom, offered to us as we read the signs of our historical moment — a time in which the catastrophic is often our daily bread.

Many of us have made homes in religious traditions where we have found collective love, care, community-building, and resilience. But so much of what passes as spiritual in the United States — churches who only see their work as therapeutic, prosperity gospel proponents, white evangelical nationalists, New Age movements — is commodification by other means. John warns us against false prophets who, through quick fixes and distorted spiritual comforts, foster division and confusion in the service of lucrative self-aggrandizement.

I am an ordained minister in the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, and I work as a movement chaplain in Los Angeles. I was trained as a spiritual director, and I have been doing ministry with faith-rooted activists since 2016. My work is informed by my primary training as a medical anthropologist and community researcher. I know that Jesus said that we humans are of more value than many sparrows, but I’ve found that we are a lot like them. We need refuge and sustenance. We need shelter. We need to nest somewhere. But with whom shall we do this for the short and long haul? And where shall we build our nests?

Building our nests in the snow

FOR THOSE OF US whose activism and faith are woven together, the temptation to turn to a safer “inner life” can be compelling. Why take on what we cannot solve in this lifetime? The present historical moment seeks to split our faith from our activism. Residing in our faith alone would be a defensive retreat, a surrender to denial and exhaustion. Activism alone would never offer a complete answer either.

In her 2023 book The Plague, Jacqueline Rose alerts us to these defensive and fear-filled stances: “What is left of the inner life when the world turns more cruel, or appears to turn more cruel, than ever before? When it reels from inflicted blows — pandemic, war, starvation, climate devastation, or all these together — what happens to the fabric of the mind?” She continues: “Is its only option defensive — to batten down the hatches, to haul up the drawbridge (to use the common figures of speech for a subject under assault), or simply to survive? And does that leave room to grieve, not just for those who have been lost, but for the shards, the broken pieces and muddled fragments of the human heart that make us who we are?”

Not-so-simple survival is the order of the day for most human beings and the various species that co-inhabit our flailing earth systems. Our minds undulate between anxiety, despair, and an interminable longing for something better — even for someone better than our present selves. Freud’s formulation of the dialectic between salutary mourning and ego-destroying melancholy haunts this century at least as much as it did the last one. We think we know who we have lost, but we do not know what has been lost. Have the incessant blows that millions have been subjected to by this still-unresolved covid-19 pandemic undone what Rose calls “the fabric” of our minds?

This long-delayed grieving work is palpable in our increasingly labored collective breathing and often is relegated to the margins of our political work. In my work as a social movement chaplain and spiritual director, I’ve noticed activists apologize profusely when they choke up and cry in the middle of doing organizing work, as if their tears — and those of so many others — were not a central part of redressing injustices. This, as the late folk musician and activist Ella Jenkins warned in her song “Wake Up, Little Sparrow,” is what happens when we try to build our nests “in the snow.” We grow cold to the needs of our bodies. Rose locates our piecemeal and scattered selves in our hearts, and this resonates with the moment at hand. But more than our hearts are needed here and now when our daily bread is the catastrophic itself.

‘There is no evil that lasts for a century’

DURING THE LAST few years, the catastrophic jumped to the world-historical scale. Few can escape its menacing physical and psychic grip for long. Fear becomes our watering hole of first resort. My mother’s sayings come back to me in whispers: “No hay mal que dure cien años ni cuerpo que lo resista.” (“There is no evil that lasts for a century. Nor are there bodies that can endure its wiles.”)

But Mami, souls can break in an instant and bodies collapse at the turn of a dime. Did your soul break when you died in Puerto Rico of covid in a colonial hospital that the U.S. provides for its second- and third-class citizens in its imperial backwaters? When you could not breathe anymore, Mercedes Colón, did you decide to let go of life because you knew what was coming after 2020? Did you vote with your soul against this fleeting bodily life?

Realizing that my mother would not have to witness what was coming after 2020 gave me comfort as I sheltered in place alone in my apartment, with my books, just three blocks from all my kin. I was radically in place and out of place simultaneously. Mindy Fullilove, a social psychiatrist and urbanist, improvising within the Black radical tradition’s disciplined collective wisdom, sees our engineered out-of-placeness as the 21st century’s key problem. She explains, “Africans, aborigines, rural peasants, and city dwellers have been shunted from one place to another, as progress has demanded, ‘Land here!’ or ‘People there!’ In cutting the roots of so many people, we have destroyed language, culture, dietary traditions, and social bonds. We have lined the oceans with bones and filled the garbage dumps with brick.”

Bones in the ocean recalls the Middle Passage’s profitable cruelty. Bricks saved from the engulfing rubble evoke images of South Bronx children using stained mattresses as trampolines to jump high into uncertain futures. Land as property and not as “nature’s free gift,” as Marx reminded us, continues to be the order of the day. Fullilove demands an accounting for the disinvestment and elite policy choices that disrupted Black communities in the U.S. during the post-WWII era, all in the name of “urban renewal” for some and catastrophic dislocation for the those with the fewest resources at their disposal. Thriving Black communities across the U.S. were broken apart by urban real estate agents, elected and appointed officials, and the banking executives delighted to loan to those who saw a bargain in cheap land and profitable future returns on rents once the “indigents” were removed. Counterinsurgency to contain and, if necessary, eliminate the full flourishing of Black communities in this country has a brutally long history. Fullilove adapted the term “root shock” from botany to condense this history.

Root shock precedes and foretells the age of the catastrophic as our daily bread. Those of us who were born and raised in communities that were targeted for urban renewal, and later gentrification, developed a sense of the profound richness of our neighborhoods and homeplaces. This richness remains a reservoir of hope and a launching pad for the creative resistance, restoration, and collective memory-work these times demand. The ruling elites in this country love meeting ordinary people “where they are” since they are terrified where these communities might go if freed from capitalism’s economic domination, social tutelage, and institutional subordination. They practice not “unconditional regard” but provisionally restrained hate in the guise of elite white niceness.

However, little sparrows have long memories. We remember the clearings that allowed for our nests to be built and thrive. Those of us who have lived in the margins of the institutional church — but certainly not of the gospel itself — have long recognized that the living Word is militantly present in the world as Love that never ceases to produce new scriptures and prophecies.

Growing our souls

LITTLE SPARROWS HAVE the virtuous habit of finding nests in the oddest of places. In her magisterial historical novel Beloved, Toni Morrison writes of a clearing in an Ohio forest where freed Africans gather at the behest of Baby Suggs Holy, their faith leader and spiritual mother. But “the Clearing” is not holy in and of itself. No place is, really. It’s only in the interactions of love and care that a place becomes a Spirit Clearing.

What makes Morrison’s Clearing sacred is the tears, the laughter, the dancing unto exhaustion, and the rich silences of freed Black people working through the historical trauma of slavery in that breath-restoring space in an ordinary midwestern forest. The soul work that Baby Suggs enacts holds space for tears, remembering, mourning, joy, and connection across generations. She feeds their spirits and is fed as well. At the end of this gathering, Baby Suggs Holy offers her “great big heart” to all for their renewal, flourishing, and release from the afflictions and traumas of all those who have lived in bondage.

Let us return to the tears of that activist who apologized for crying during an organizing meeting. No apology would be necessary if our nests and clearings were spaces of grieving, mourning, and collective development for liberation. Tears do not disrupt or deviate from the work at all. They are part of the work.

Educator and prison abolitionist Robert Sember told me that mourning and grief are part of struggles for a better world: “Grief breaks this silence with chords of wrenching sadness and collective determination,” he said. “Shared loss binds our redemptive solidarity. Paradoxically, the pain that brings us to struggle is also the root of joy. Both assert that we are alive, together alive. Grief and joy hold, in the poetry of feeling, immanent freedom. ... We mourn and celebrate what we have lost. And in doing so, we carry forward the tomorrows dreamed of in the past.”

When we attend to the tears of a grief-stricken activist, we enact the collective mourning work that transfigures into what Sember names “redemptive solidarity.” The wrenching pain of mourning is the affective antechamber to the possibility of joy and collective forward motion. Our tears are the salt of history that season more-human futures. Thus, what we at first perceive as interruptions to liberating work are the intervening enabling conditions for the materialization of our deepest desires for social and spiritual transformations. Sember alerts us to the alignment of the “poetry of feeling” and “immanent freedom”: they share a homeplace in the soul work that our times require.

Soul work is the collective labor of opening up to the Spirit and allowing revolutionary Love to be our inspiration and sustenance. In The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, Grace Lee Boggs urges her readers to recognize that the time has come to “grow our souls.” This soul Boggs mentions is not the spirit haunting fleshly life, the rattling spectral noise of the ghost in the machine. Rather, it is what happens when people labor upon and tarry with what history has afforded them and transform it into the hope of a new liberative space where the full richness of human capacities can be realized.

Soul work is radically intimate and person-centered, as well as robustly collective and expansive. It incarnates the language of desires, dreams, new prophecies, and worlds both long gone and about to come into full flourishing. Soul work is the blood, sweat, and tears — the very amniotic fluids that generate the workshops for livable human futures. This is not individual work. Soul work is a collective practice that requires building our nests with people who are committed to each other and are willing to do the practical moral reasoning that helps us have an approach to the problems of our time.

Soul work births soul power. It frees little sparrows to cross vast oceans and sky-embracing mountains. Soul power is the dynamic force that popular freedom struggles generate and unleash when we, the too long oppressed, begin to show up in undistracted fullness to our lives and peoples such that the oligarchs’ violence and corruption can no longer use fear or even death itself to detain us on the way to building a new earth and sky. Soul power gives rise to the charismatic gift of revolutionary spiritual discernment so desperately needed by the world’s little sparrows. This gift is not for the benefit of individuals alone, though it may take that form before the collective. Soul power, ultimately, is for the nurturing and defense of the commonweal.

Revolutionary discernment is the disciplined practice of attention to the smallest aspects of soul power and the capacity to attend to the balance of forces between the spirits of freedom and unfreedom in a given political and spiritual conjuncture. In this moment of Trumpism’s triumph, the time has come to do our soul work. There are futures for the saving at stake.