The "year with bell hooks" Project: Letter #013

All About Love: Destiny - When Angels Speak of Love

Hello and welcome to all of our new readers - I’m glad to have you here! We’ve reached the end of All About Love. What a wonderful read. Let’s get started on this week’s letter, shall we?

Now nearly a week after Easter and after 13 letters of journeying through the words of bell hooks in All About Love, what tools do we have to create what can be life-giving and love-producing? How do rebirth, Easter (+Jesus), and the Angels speaking of love from chapter 13 lead us to wellness? 

I’m thinking of a quote from Melanie May’s book A Body Knows: A Theopoetics of Death and Resurrection. May wrote that

to be alive is precisely to change. It is the rhythm of reckoning what is life-giving and what is death-dealing that characterizes a fully embodied life. 

I’m writing through, in real-time, the practice of

loving making it possible for us to change our worship of death to a celebration of life. [to engage in a love that] empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.

All About Love - p. 196, 197 

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So, I’m not fascinated with death in a creepy or gory way. I know these past few letters have touched on it more than usual. The realities of Black girls, femme’s, and women’s premature death - in various ways, are on my heart and mind. It sometimes feels that I have endless questions about how places and people cause those deaths to happen. How actions - service, commitment, care, giving, and more - are exploited and weaponized against those conditioned to serve, commit, care, give, and more until our deaths.

Audre Lorde said that your silence will not protect you. So this writing is a way of speaking and letting it out every day, and more and more, seeing what can be, and creating it so. It’s a hunger to love well. A prayer to be well. A practice of being more present and living fully. 

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Can I be honest? I’m still wrestling with the reality of Easter. Jesus died a state-sanctioned murder, and James Cone writes about that in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. I’m not saying that Jesus’ death does not offer us anything (and even the fact that his death has to offer us something for it to have meaning is uncomfortable).

Just why does Jesus have to be killed for us to have life?  

I believe that the Resurrection can give hope and comfort in our personal and collective journeys. Especially for us who look to Heaven as a place to be reunited with those we are physically separated from.

I’m seeing that in the “celebration” of Easter weekend, it makes us align with believing that the goriness of the Fridays (the crucifixion) and the reality of the Saturdays (Jesus’ full death in the grave) is the only way to experience the Sundays (the Resurrection). 

Why must deaths caused by power, domination, abuse, and oppression be the “valid” way for us to experience newness, rebirth, and resurrections? And, if to align with the Scriptures that say that Jesus’ death paid it all, did it really? Because these similar deaths are still happening.

bell hooks shared a quote by Matthew Fox from Original Blessing that

Western civilization has preferred love of death to love of life to the very extent that its religious traditions have preferred redemption to creation, sin to ecstasy, and individual introspection to cosmic awareness and appreciation.”

(bell hooks) “For the most part, patriarchal perspectives have shaped religious teaching and practice. Recently, there has been a turning away from these teachings towards a creation-grounded spirituality that is life-affirming. Fox calls this “the via positiva”: “Without this solid grounding in creation’s powers we bored, violent people. We become necrophiliacs in love with death and the powers and principalities of death.” 

All About Love - p.192

I say (that in some cases from the jump or as time has shifted) Christianity as we know is patriarchal at its core. And if patriarchy needs the worship of death to function and exist and if patriarchy is opposite of what love is, what does embracing the resurrection “sunday” from Jesus do with the reality of the church as we know it? 

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Embracing, embodying, and committing to the love ethic that bell hooks lays out in chapter 1, means that anything rooted in domination, oppression, and abuse can’t coexist with love. Even if it tries to disguise itself as loving. 

The love that bell hooks and other Black feminists and womanists show us in their writings is a different narrative than what we see in our worlds. It offers us the tools to imagine what life, love, abundance, and possibilities can be. 

Because of that, the Christian church as we know can’t exist in the same way. 

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It’s troubling that rhetoric disguised as biblical/straight from the Word of God/holy has us to believe that we immediately exit the womb in need of a Savior. I lean towards no. That God will love and accept us more if we learn to hate our flesh and its desires. I’m having some issues with believing that for our relationship with God to thrive, we must go through any extent necessary (to purge the sin within me) for God to accept us, even after acknowledging that the “price’s been paid.” 

Why must the feeling of guilt be the prereq of receiving God’s love and acceptance? Or even receiving the love and approval from the God constructed to be in the (Christian) churches that we know? 

Who was the One who made us? We only know that we are. Not before we were.  

I want to know that the foundation for loving God isn’t because God brought me out of my sinful state and decided to accept me. That God loves me in spite of me. As if I am bad? 

I want to know that the foundation for loving God is because we choose to commune life together. 

What would it be for us to know ourselves as innately loved by God. Made in love, by love, for love. In all the beautiful ways that bell hooks brought us through these 13 chapters? 

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So back to Easter. For Jesus to live again after death shows that life is still possible even after all we’ve been through.

It was Mary Magdalene, who was the angel in human form that “bore witness. (All About Love, p.225)” Mary, a marginalized, working-class woman, bore witness to all - generation after generation of this transformative moment. I imagine her saying more about the Resurrection along the lines of “good news, good news, He is risen, rebirth is here, transformation is possibile, newness can be, nights do come, but so do days.” 

Black girls, women, femmes, and non-binary people have been the same to shout this good news to us in their writings, living, choices, refusal, rage, and more. 

They are the angels in human and spirit form - who ask, directly or indirectly,

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.

The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara

They are the ones who remind us that death - wrongful death, is not a prerequisite to love. That Jesus’ Resurrection requires that we continue to probe with what is not well and what is not right so that violence, needless death, unjust living, and all that is not well - ends. 

Jesus, (as complex as he was during his time here), along with the girls, women, femmes, and non-binary people who proclaim this new Gospel, day in and day out, declare that true Resurrection is still possible. 

They embody the Divine in beautiful unorthodox ways. 

They warn and remind us that new wine into old wineskins isn’t the mission. 

They say new faces in old places isn’t the goal. 

They are “the guardians of the soul’s well-being.”

They show us we can face our fear, knowing that thousands upon tens of thousands stand beside and behind us. 

They are the ones who give us the tools to continually create what we need to thrive. 

They are the angels that bear witness. 

Jesus died. Jesus rose. And if we partake in the new life that his death “affords,” then we can know that

no matter how hard or terrible our lot in life, to choose against lovelessness (no fluffy type of love) – to choose love – we can listen to the voices of hope that speak to us, that speak to our hearts – the voices of angels. When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.

All About Love, p. 237

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Thank you for journeying along these 13 chapters. Communion by bell hooks will be our next read. So, until our next letter, and with love,

Chinyere