Everything Is Waiting For You… And For Me!

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions…Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Everything is waiting for you.

                                                                                       David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions…Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Everything is waiting for you.

                                                                                       David Whyte

December 31,2023, ends my tenure with the Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing. A Center that I imagined originally and helped to birth along with many others and then had the joy and challenge of working to see it grow from a local entity to a local, regional, national, and international entity which is a collaborative ministry of the Episcopal Diocese of Atlanta and the The Episcopal Church.  The Center was charged by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry to help the entire Episcopal Communion to reimagine racial healing work and to move wider church beyond simply offering one day dismantling racism workshops by finding other creative and imaginative methods for doing the work, unfortunately offering a day long workshop would be a step forward for some of our dioceses who have not gotten to that first step still; we have fulfilled that mandate in many places.  I can believe this because of the massive number of testimonies from across the wider Episcopal Church that I hear when traveling around the country. The Center for Racial Healing has done a good job of enlarging the conversation and widening the lens through which many view this work. I am happy about where we are across the Episcopal Church as I leave this work behind which I have been engaging at 807 Atlanta Student Movement Boulevard. I do not know what shape it will take, and I want to make sure that all of you who have supported the work and me understand that I am leaving and will no longer be involved in any way with the Center after my celebration on January 4, 2024.

But my soul requires me to do this work! So, I will always be working as a midwife to the soul of all who are seeking to discover new parts of themselves and who are truly seeking to become more conscious and who are seeking to be well. Some of my friends wondered if I might suffer a bit from PTSD as I depart, the answer is absolutely not. For one thing I have been consciously saying farewell to the Center and the work through it for a year now. I have spent time with our lynched sisters and brothers who are on the monument in front of our building and are a source of strength to me each day, I spent hours in the building alone reflecting on the beauty that we brought to the building by bringing a spirit of welcoming and reimagining the physical facility which had suffered from a lack of loving care. The Diocesan funds that were allocated for the Center as we opened were given to take care of many delayed maintenance issues and we were able to use that effort to help change the aesthetics in the place and that along with our good open- hearted work brought the local community into our space more than had been true in past years. As I prepared to move on, I allowed myself to take in the beauty of these facts and I will always be grateful for the opportunity to have been a part of the team that made the Center what it has become.

There is always some grief in leaving what you have helped to create, but I have enough on my horizon to keep me busy for a bit. My new book, The Quilted Life, Reflections of A Sharecropper’s Daughter arrived a few days ago and I will be out sharing the launch of it in Memphis, New York, and northern California soon. I am looking into a fellowship that will allow me to create healing Sister Circles with rural white women and women of color in three Black Belt States and to offer these marginalized folks a chance to engage in healing work that is rarely available to them. Also, I am most delighted about working with Attorney Fred Gray, the 93-year-old Civil Rights Iconic Lawyer, who represented Dr. King and is credited with leading the desegregation efforts in most of Alabama along with bringing a lawsuit against the United States on behalf of the Tuskegee Syphilis victims which went to the Supreme Court and won a favorable judgement. It is going to be such a delight to engage with him on several projects, there is some conversation about some international work with the Anglican Communion and I will see how that unfolds. Along with this I am

ready to begin writing again. This time a book which will explore the parables of Jesus through a Jungian lens and to get deeper into African spirituality, dream work and some of the work of the soul that I have put on the back burner over these past handful of years. I am very interested in how individual healing intersects with planetary healing and I have met a handful of futurists with whom I will be exploring this further. Along with this I want to try my hand at writing fiction, I would like to write a play which I have never done. I am getting back to candle and card making and playing with my lovely essential oils. Everything is waiting for me. I want to stay focused and listen carefully, so I do not get lost in the weeds of the noise of the culture that often makes it hard to choose between the good and the best. I want to continue to bring as open a heart as possible to the next iterations of this pilgrimage.

I hope that all of you who read this final newsletter from me or my Brave Space Blog, will remember to work as hard as you can to hear the sound of the genuine in yourself and then to listen for it everywhere you can. This will make you brave enough to discern the way ahead for yourself. Everything is Waiting For You… Be Brave!

You can reach out to me at [email protected].