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A Few Words From Pastor Bryan
...and Cole Arthur Riley
Now and then I come upon a new author and a book that I can almost immediately tell is going to impact me and a whole of other people very significantly. Cole Arthur Riley is such an author, and her first book, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us is one of those books. I'm going to share an excerpt from her book with you here that I shared with our Morning Zoom Devotional earlier today (join us for morning devotion time if you can!). I'm giving this excerpt all the space I usually take here. I hope you'll give yourself the gift of taking a few moments to read her words.
See you Sunday in church if not before!
Pastor Bryan
From Cole Arthur Riley
I don’t have many certainties about God. I do have many hopes. Chief among them is that it’s true what they say: that God is love, is made of love, and looks at the faces of you and me and my gramma and, without hesitation or demand, delights.
Our dignity may involve our doing, but it is foremost in our very being—our tears and emotions, our bodies lying in the grass, our scabs healing. I try to remember that Eve and Adam bore the image of God before they did anything at all. This is very mysterious to me, and it must be protected.
When I was eight years old, before I could make sense of why I fled the other children on the playground and lied about having friends, my hair began to turn gray. Coarse white strands shriveled up on the crown of my head without invitation, politely wrapping themselves around their black peers and strangling them in the night. It was an invasion. And the attention was agonizing. Every day I’d sit squirming and rocking in my desk, head bowed like a monk praying for my own invisibility. The gaze of Alex Demarco at my back. He’d only pointed out a hair once, but the moment stuck to me. I asked my teacher if I could switch to the empty desk in the back row, knowing there I could exhale. She said no.
By the time I turned eleven, I would spend ages in front of the mirror parting my hair just right so that as little white as possible was visible. One night, we were all going out and my family was waiting downstairs for me to finish parting. Eventually, my dad sent everyone to wait in the car and came to the bottom of the stairs and called for me.
When he asked how much longer I’d be, all of the shame that had crusted over my muscles from years of parting combusted. I threw a fit. I don’t remember the details surrounding it, apart from a comb thrown against my brother’s door. I mainly recall the episode by the memory of my father’s face, which had a calm blankness that only made my own body, flailing and loud, more of a spectacle. When my crying softened, I finally said, feeling more embarrassed than before, I can’t do this anymore. And then, with certainty, I have to dye my hair.
My father’s response, his face, still lives in me. He calmly asked me to come down from the stairs, and the low sound waves from his voice slid under my feet and flew me from that top stair to where he stood. He tucked my head into his chest, sowed a kiss into my hair, and just said, Okay, honey. We can dye your hair. I was so addled that my tears dried up, and I didn’t say another word. He summoned my hair into a bun, and we walked to the car together.
On the day the world began to die, God became a seamstress. This is the moment in the Bible that I wish we talked about more often. When Eve and Adam eat from the tree, and decay and despair begin to creep in, when they learn to hide from their own bodies, when they learn to hide from each other—no one ever told me the story of a God who kneels and makes clothes out of animal skin for them.
I remember many conversations about the doom and consequence imparted by God after humans ate from that tree. I learned of the curses, too, and could maybe even recite them. But no one ever told me of the tenderness of this moment. It makes me question the tone of everything that surrounds it.
In the garden, when shame had replaced Eve’s and Adam’s dignity, God became a seamstress. God took the skin off of his creation to make something that would allow humans to stand in the presence of their maker and one another again. Isn’t it strange that God didn’t just tell Adam and Eve to come out of hiding and stop being silly, because God’s the one who made them and has seen every part of them? God doesn’t say that in the story, or at least we do not know if he did. But we do know that God went to great lengths to help them stand unashamed.
Sometimes you can’t talk someone into believing their dignity. You do what you can to make a person feel unashamed of themselves, and you hope in time they’ll believe in their beauty all on their own.
That day on the stairs, my father could’ve very well tried to convince me that I was beautiful, begged me to believe that my gray hair was okay. But I think he knew that in order to stand in the presence of myself and others, he needed to allow for the unnecessary. The strange thing is, we never did buy the hair dye. In fact, I never asked about it again. By the time I was in high school, the white began to go away all on its own.
People say we are unworthy of salvation. I disagree. Perhaps we are very much worth saving. It seems to me that God is making miracles to free us from the shame that haunts us. Maybe the same hand that made garments for a trembling Adam and Eve is doing everything it, she, he ,or they can that we might come a little closer. I pray God's stitches hold.
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