If you follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or on my blog at brokenbeatnik.com or brokenbeatnik.medium.com, I’m going to give Substack a try. I welcome your support, but for now I’ll post for free until I figure out what commitments I’m willing to make to my readers. I’ll import some of my old posts there and start posting new things there as well. 

If you enjoy what I write then come on along with me. See you on the journey!

Find me at reforged.substack.com.

I posted this to my Facebook after five months away from regular posting, moderating conversations of topics of the day, and debate. It was work I was proud of but had to leave for my own well-being.

You know, I miss talking to y’all about difficult things.

But I don’t regret leaving this medium.

Look around. This is exhausting. And it’s happening faster and faster. Drastic pay cuts in the face of inflation and record profits. Another old racist Senator with incredible power representing a state of people being held hostage for centuries saying that Black women are by definition unqualified. A state who invests in police instead of people reaping the whirlwind of broken infrastructure. Deaths greater than our generational moment of terror, 9-11, happening daily, and received as inevitable. Behind it all, the specter of climate change on the horizon.

And the bipartisan response is generally not serious. Let’s take our salary in crypto. Let’s get some more cops. Let’s send “lethal aid” to a country when our own lethal aid is more often used against protesters than actual terrorists.

I remain long-term hopeful. But I see no reason why we will avoid tremendous pain on the way. Our desire to remain moderate and to use fault finding across the spectrum (both-sides-ism) to lull us into inaction is going to kill us. For the majority of us, this is not a literal death, though I cannot emphasize enough that for the most vulnerable among us, financially, medically, socially, psychologically, it may be. But there’s a fantasy of what America could be, a multicolored cosplay like the set of Hamilton. There’s a set of ideas that were better than the men who created them. They didn’t have the imagination to apply them to non-white people, to women, to LGBTQ+ folks, to the disabled, to the landless and impoverished.

We do.

There are those among us who see our wild profit and excess, beyond what we could possibly need, and imagine how we could lift the floor, just a bit. Not so that those who contribute nothing live like kings, but just so that no human being has to live like a feral animal in a wasteland, especially while others live in ways that would make kings of old jealous. More fundamentally, we want to lift the floor so that the right to survive becomes unconditional and not based on your “contribution” to what we perceive as valuable from moment to moment.

We are held back only by our selfishness, by a kind of Stockholm syndrome that makes us identify with billionaires launching cars or themselves into space for fun instead of with neighbors who are working 70 hours to barely make rent while we work a hard 40 to do the same. We are in a cycle of generational abuse, where our groveling for tips and scraps that we were forced to do in the absence of a proper wage, our payment of onerous loans to get the next rung of the ladder opened to us, becomes normal. From this broken lens, letting people simply survive without immense struggle seems like the problem. They should suffer like we did. Was our suffering just? It had to be! Otherwise, what meaning did it have? And the thought that our struggle was meaningless, for the whims and desires of a few hoarders and parasitic entities and not for God’s glory or some grander purpose, is too painful to contemplate.

We have the imagination to fix this. And if we fail to radically reinvent some of our ways that we cling to in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, those who come after will ask a question that will be the source of speculation, debate, and the basis of entire academic careers.

“They had everything. Ten times everything. They had so much potential.

How could they fail so miserably to hold their society together?”

“God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who hast by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.”

While you’re at it God, can you remove some of the thorns on this path?
Can you lift our weary and hopeless hearts?
Can you strike down the things and the people that block the light over, and over again?
Can you give us sweet manna for the journey through this deserted wasteland, to nourish us, and clear the bitterness from our mouths?

Dear neighbor.
Listen. 
Stop smugly crowing about the legal system being correct, even if you feel it’s only technically correct and not spiritually so. 
Stop and listen to your neighbors, either next door or for many of us, not so far away as the crow flies on its way to guide yet another Black soul, or any soul that loves Black people enough to fight for them, to the next place, too early. 

In the streets we don’t see the imaginary terror groups you have conjured out of weary people who just want to matter.
We see people weeping silently to themselves, quietly lamenting to each other and through their tiny digital megaphones, crying out to God for something to change.
We see a straight line between young white men killing with impunity in 2021 and young white men killing with impunity when my father was a child, and when my grandfather was a child, and back and back to the bloody water route that fed the sharks and ate the souls of European men who hadn’t quite figured out that they were white yet. Men who filled the hole left behind by their inhumanity with the imagined substance of whiteness.

Watch, neighbor. 
Watch as more young men become bold and unafraid to kill people who threaten the imagined power of whiteness. 
Watch as your representatives redraw the lines so your hollow scolding about voting is rendered meaningless. 
Watch as we wearily raise our eyes and said “We told you.”

This verdict is not the story.
The thousands upon thousands jailed, bankrupted, and ruined over the mere accusation of property crimes is the story.
The police who we are told protect people, but on a good day protect property and on a bad day protect this imagined substance of whiteness are the story.
The women and others who defended themselves and were met with imprisonment if they were lucky and death at the hands of legally exonerated men are the story.
The 66 years of fragile democracy we have experienced in nearly 250 years of existence, and its eminent demise through gerrymandering, emboldening, and incrementalism by those who purport to save us is the story.

The country that has functioned in this way from the beginning is the story.

It probably won’t be big and bright and terrible enough for you to see it, neighbor, not from where you sit. I look from where I sit and if I wanted to, I could ignore much of it myself. I could pretend that none of these things are real, and do not affect me, and there’s a good chance I’d get away with it.

But one day, I’d forget myself, and I’d get indignant with an official whose salary is paid in part by my taxes. And I’d learn, as my friends have, as my cousins have, that they have very clear instructions that they do not work for me.

If I were lucky on that day, I would eventually make it home.

You’ll see it, neighbor, when the elections stop making a difference at all. When even the candidates you find distasteful sail to victory. When the statistics don’t change and race is still a strong predictor of outcomes.

And you’ll have to reason with yourself. You’ll wonder why those people can’t overcome adversity like you did. You’ll look at your legitimate slings and arrows, and think, “If I could make it, anybody could.” You’ll never see the thousand invisible hands that buoyed you, and watching someone drown in what looks like the same circumstance as you is just. . . distasteful and unfortunate.

You’ll say that either something is deeply wrong in our nation, or something is deeply wrong with those people.

I know which one you will choose. I’ve seen you choose it again and again.

I’ve seen you try, I grant. You demand proof. You want the hard evidence. And yet any evidence that draws on history, that points to things that are happening even now in our corporate, legal, and political systems, is never enough. And now, neighbor, your neighbors want to ban even that. They give factual history a dangerous sounding, elitist sounding name. And before you know it, a woman who is younger than my father, who marched into a school building as a child while angry people, some your age, some maybe your parents’ age, jeered and threw things, and who wrote a book about it finds her book on the ban list. You don’t think your children should hear this living woman’s story, because it might make them feel bad.

This God that we say we both serve told me to love you. This God did not qualify it. This God did not tell me, “love them unless they commit a crime.”, or “love them until they cheat at politics.”, or “love them until they kill someone you love.” This God told me to love you, neighbor.

So I’m going to once again love you enough to tell you the truth.

Frankly, though, it’s becoming harder for me to give a damn if you listen.

This God also told me to love myself, to see myself as something precious and worthy because I’m imbued with God’s image and spirit.

So goodbye, neighbor. I’ll see you out there.

Just keep your weapon holstered. 
Keep your ready-to-call-the authorities voice holstered. 
Keep your scolding and lack of empathy holstered. 

Just wave, and move along, unless you’re ready to do something different and realize the shining bit of promise that’s embedded under all the dross, evil dreams, and evil deeds our society is built on. 

While you eat your lotus and dream, neighbor, we will remember for you.

While you chase insubstantial crowns and wave ethereal scepters at all you survey, we will dream prophetic dreams for you.

We will survive this.

You’ll see how beautiful we are — 
and be ashamed.

Jesus on the Mainline, tell him what you want
you got to call him up and tell him what you want

– The Staple Singers

My wife, reflecting on both the miraculous and the “merely” wonderful healing experiences she has witnessed, observed that the types of prayer the people who experienced these healings engaged in varied wildly from person to person. They didn’t always pray for healing, or to know God more, or for any of the traditional things modern Christians are told to pray for to endure hardship and to receive blessings.

I had separately observed the previous week that I was starting to think that prayer itself was less about worship and more about connection. This is why some monotheists pray to saints or to ancestors and do not consider that the same as worshipping them as deities. It’s about connection.

During the period in my adult life where I was deeply involved in a church, I did get some good things out of it. Community. Accountability. Discipline. But I never really developed a “prayer life”. In the tradition I was in, what I’ll call the “Abba Father” prayer style was popular. There were not rules per se, but there were expected patterns:

• Say “Father”, “Daddy”, or “Father God” a lot
• Start with gratitude for what God has done in your individual life
• Continue by abasing yourself as a person might before a king and acknowledging God’s sovereignty
• Make your request as a supplicant
• End with gratitude for whatever God will decide to do
• Amen

Different leaders had different variants on this, but this was more or less the pattern that was most popular.

In contrast, I never really prayed in this way, because it didn’t feel authentic to how I experienced my relationship with God. God for me is simultaneously an intimately close being that cares a lot about my pain and challenges, and a wholly other, vast being for whom traditional monarchic worship doesn’t feel quite right. I have described myself over the past year as leaning into the “mystery” and “weirdness” of God, and that feels more correct. I still haven’t figured out how that translates into a regular discipline, but the style of prayer I have developed is what I call the “Hey God” style. It’s still being refined, but it looks something like:

• Say “Hey!” to God. For me, that’s “Hey God”, (as in “hello”, not as in “I need your attention”) but for others it may be something else
• Sometimes I ask how God is doing. (I told you I’m leaning into weirdness.) I have been touched in a very childlike way by sermons I’ve heard in the past encouraging prayer that describe God almost like an empty nesting mom hoping to hear from her kids. And so I sometimes imagine God finds it nice when someone cares about how God is doing.
• I talk about what I’m worried about.
• I ask for help or support.
• I say, “Thank you for listening.”
• Amen

My primary other form of prayer is enjoyment of the world. Sometimes I will be skiing, or walking in a city full of people, or lifted high on good energy from people that care about me around me, and I take a moment to experience gratitude. I think that’s prayer, too; it’s recognition of both the good thing and the source of the good thing.

I am not encouraging anyone to adopt my styles of prayer. I don’t even know if they’re valid. The point isn’t that there is a better or worse prayer technique. The point is that if we seek connection with God, we should actually do things that connect us rather than follow rules and patterns that make us feel more distant, abased, and small.

My mother had to have an unexpected surgery recently. She found a doctor that could do the procedure in a safer and less invasive way, but it was serious, even though her prognosis was good. I talked to God about it, and asked for help and protection for her. And then I talked to my grandma.

My grandmother, my mother’s mother, died earlier this year as a centenarian. She lived a long, faithful life and has at least 4 generations of living progeny who she actively influenced. She was truly a matriarch and a model for the people in our family. And in that moment, I asked her, “Hey Grandma, could you please look out for your baby girl? Thank you.”

Most of the faith experiences I have had taught me that praying to anyone except God is idolatrous or blasphemous. One of the many things taken from the enslaved people brought to the Americas was their connection to their ancestors. And as the Catholic Church split in Europe, the intercession of the saints was increasingly forgotten in many of the newer Protestant traditions. The reasons for this are probably book-length subjects, but probably had to do at least partly with who European Christians had to become to justify the colonization of the world. People who have no connection to their ancestors, only to a distant God-king that tells them that they are the chosen ones, lose spiritual accountability and perspective beyond their own lifetimes. They neither answer to and learn from their ancestors, nor feel the responsibility to future generations of eventually becoming an ancestor. In the US, we preserved a weak form of ancestor worship in the mythology of the Founding Fathers, but they were specific, often problematic men that few of us feel a direct connection to from our own family stories. Even with them, we continually re-interpret and adapt their complex and sometimes conflicting reasoning as simple, received texts handed down from a new Mount Sinai.

Some of the syncretic religions that emerged did not have this problem. The Afro-Caribbean manifestations of Christianity preserved ancestor worship, and kept African ritual and ancestral reverence alongside church attendance and Christian practices. In Mexico and in parts of the US that were once Mexico, the Day of the Dead, popularized in the American imagination most recently through the movie Coco, is a day when families embrace full connection with those family members who have left this plane of existence. I have some limited experience with Santeria, the fusion of Ifa, the Yoruba religion of Nigeria, with Catholicism, including a visit with a babalawo (high priest). And his recommendation to me when I sought his counsel? Go to church and thank God. He meant a Christian church, because for him, there was no conflict between his practices and those of the priests in the local Christian church.

Modern fundamentalist Christianity thinks of these practices as Satanic. Usually, when modern fundamentalists call something Satanic, they typically mean “not from the specific allowed set of traditions and practices we have approved”. There’s again, another book-length conversation about whether some forms of Christianity are actually bitheistic, with a stronger Greater God and a weaker but still quite powerful “god of this world”, an adversary who arrays forces against humanity that we are ill-equipped to resist.

(As an aside, I looked up the phrase “god of this world” found in 2 Corinthians 4:4, and while many translations refer to that concept as “Satan” explicitly, the literal translation actually just says “the god of this age”, which could be interpreted as a specific being or as a mindset or ideology. This is important as we consider the relatively recent trend of Biblical literalism, where ancient texts are translated in a particular way, held up against modern understanding, and deemed to be specifically speaking into our moment and experience rather than primarily into the moment and experience for which they were written.)

I do believe in spiritual malevolent forces, just as I believe people on the material plane have great capacity for evil. However, I do not see my own family members’ energy as a work of an adversary plotting my eternal downfall. And besides, where is the energy to name the explicit perversion of Christianity to support chattel slavery or white supremacist terror as Satanic? The same people will call it “wrong” and “bad” when pressed, but will name teaching what science observes as “lies from the pit of Hell”.

To understand how problematic the above teachings are, imagine something that we can all agree is bad, like sacrifice of live children, let’s say 3 year olds, via fire. This was probably a thing in the land where the ancient Hebrews of the Torah lived, and was explicitly called out as something followers of YHWH should not do. Take a look at Leviticus 18:21, King James Version:

“And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.”

Now, imagine that for several hundred years, your church advocated that this passage in fact said:

“And thou shalt let thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, lest thou profane the name of thy God: I am the Lord.”

Now, imagine after thousands or even millions of children were sacrificed, that went out of fashion and was no longer allowed, and the full text was restored, but the church did not acknowledge or repent loudly and fully of it. That’s basically where we are.

Isaiah 5:20 says:

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

When I look at how so many modern fundamentalist Christians land on unloving, inflexible, and historically inaccurate sides of the issues of our day again and again, I can’t help but ask, “are you calling evil good and good evil?”

I’m sure they have the same question for me.

Anyway, my mother’s healing, while not miraculous, is going as well as it can possibly medically be expected to, and I’m grateful. I thanked God for her healing. And I also thanked my Grandma for her support. She’s not a deity. But I do believe her energy and wisdom, along with that of our other ancestors, continues to be available to us if we choose to ask for it. I can’t know whether she had anything to do with it. But it’s nice to think that even after leaving this plane, she shared the love she gave us throughout her life and used it to help things along a bit.

I did look up recommendations from both Afro-Caribbean traditions and hoodoo, the under-discussed form of African-European religious syncretism practiced anywhere in the US enslaved people were held, for how to better connect with one’s ancestors. I’m not ready to build a mantel or altar, with photos, candles, water, and gifts. I’m less concerned with breaking the norms I was taught and more concerned with attracting spiritual energy I’m not ready to process. But my grandmother and my uncle who passed a few years ago are people that I’ve started to talk with from time to time. Perhaps, with time, I’ll learn to talk to others. And perhaps in the process, I’ll gain some additional understanding of the God that set this whole thing up.