"When I am too long in the shadow of death, I am comforted by the recent words of a mentor, who peered over the rim of her rainbow glasses to remind me that having a baby at this moment in history is an act of radical hope. You are an expression of radical hope. A hope born out of the possibility of what can be, rather than what it is. A future that has not come to pass."

An excerpt from To My Beloveds published in The Christian Century.

“For black women to engage in the act of loving themselves, fully, in a society that deems them and their labor disposable is both counter cultural and revolutionary. One of the great lies of our American culture is that rugged individualism is the highest form of self-expression. Politicized healing for black women looks like creating brave spaces to see and be seen, to hear and be heard. Spaces for black women to surface the trauma that we carry and to uncover the strength that can be found in our vulnerability. It is work that cannot be done in isolation and must be held in community with others.”

An op-ed for Sojourners

“I am a black woman ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I am the breathing legacy of one of America’s great original sins, the child of people stolen from the West African coasts to labor in the fields of Florida, Georgia, and Arkansas. I folded into myself: my arms wrapped tightly around my knees and found their rest on my heaving chest. Yet, as I opened my mouth to cry out to God, as I often do in moments of hopelessness, no sound emerged. My eyelids began to puff and tears stung as they fell down my cheek praying the prayers whose words alluded me. Rocking back and forth on the cool linoleum floor, I finally uttered the only words that I could find, “I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe.”

Like a gust of wind, I could suddenly feel the soulful presence of my ancestors surround me, holding me and bearing witness to my pain. Then I heard my mama’s spirit whisper gently, gently in my ear, “Baby, we ain’t never been safe.”

An essay for On Being

“When there are no words, tears may be the only prayers you can utter. There are times during this period when Mama asks for my insights into the nature and will of God. It is a strange reminder of the multiple identities I inhabit even in the midst of this crisis. As a seminary-trained minister, I am supposed to be well versed in matters of death and dying. Yet no amount of training can prepare you for the moment when someone tells you that the most important person in your life has weeks to live. No class can teach you how to respond when your loved one grimaces in pain but cannot find the words to tell you how to help. When my own words escape me, and they often do, my default is to turn to scripture and read aloud from verses that sustained our kinfolk through the best and worst of times. They are messy, imperfect words situated in the text of a sacred book used by history to empower and destroy; to liberate and oppress.”

An excerpt from To My Beloveds published in Interfaith America