Spiritual Sovereignty: Liberation is a Spiritual Practice
image: a black person with thick locs sitting on a picnic blanket with a hat and a pink and white bouquet behind them. Near their legs is an assortment of foods from a wicker basket including two pastries on a wooden cutting board, half a watermelon, an amber bottle. A small spray of purple flowers juts from the basket. They read a book in a white dress and bedazzled thong sandals while grass stretches around them. The background is a grainy purple gradient.
Spiritual sovereignty helps us maintain purpose-driven autonomy despite colonizing forces that work to create god for us in their own image.
It's the part of us that knows god, the part that creates god, that becomes a god or like god, or acknowledges that god is dead. It's that ever accessible part of us that links us to divine and ancient wisdom.
It's in our spirits that we keep the hope of ending the systems of oppression that bind us up. That tear us down.
It's the part of us that rises up and reminds us liberation is a spiritual practice.
We see it in the enslaved ants who kill the next generation of captors. We see it in the bees who chase a car mile after mile, their queen trapped within it.
Gorillas who escape the zoo know this. Orcas who sink poison ships know this. The ozone layer, rewholeing herself, knows this.
This simple observation too often gets chained to the church without so much as a second thought. Christian liberation theology gets positioned as the only liberation spirituality around.
But even the spirit within the (Black) church doesn't belong to the (Black) church. They're only renting it from the great expanse of the soul that lives in the (whole) world.
Liberation is a spiritual practice
That's why abuses of power in movement spaces break our spirit, and not only our hearts.
That's why revolutionary love fills us in a way mere connection never can. Why it fills more than our hearts, more than our whole bodies.
Why it fuels iteration after iteration of devoted striving for freedom and justice.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I met an herbalist at Highlander. I only met them once. It was the end of a large and disappointing and generationally important project. I think we all felt it being the end of it.
I spun out a little as we all spun out, waiting for the fog to clear from around the actions of our founders. I came to their table, had some tea, spritzed their flower essences beneath my tongue.
The spinning stopped, and I could finally see that all around was love. Love for Black people. Romantic love. Heroic, passionate love, as often happens in the movements we wait our whole lives to learn to create.
It was everywhere, and I may have missed it but for this one herbalist who helped the spinning stop with their commitment to stewardship, and their practice that birthed greater spiritual sovereignty in the movements they stewarded.
Let the founders have their fog; we were out in the mild grey sunshine, waiting for the clarity of a ringing bell. And when the bell came there was no end to the beauty, no end because I carry it like fresh water in my spirit still.
I saw they passed on to the next a few months ago. I didn't know them, only met them once, perhaps twice. But without their stewardship, I would not have heard the call to my own.
When we do our work we fool death. When we do our work we render death meaningless.
Liberation is a spiritual practice. Flesh dies. Mind and body die. Spirit does not die.
Spiritual sovereignty clears space to answer the call of revolutionary spirit across the gap of time.
The revolutionary spirit that hijacked slave ships is alive. The revolutionary spirit that waited for the eclipse's sign, waited at the edge of the woods having learned the language of birdsong. It's alive, beloved, it's alive.
Spirit doesn't belong to the preacher, doesn't belong to the tarot reader, the healer, the psychic, the two-headed doctor, the priest, the witch, the nun, the deacon, the pulpit, the cross, the medium, the astrologer or their stars.
Spirit is available to and active within all of it, all of it which some of us, myself included, call god.
All of it humming, and yearning, and singing and wanting us to be free, and knowing how to get there. But only knowing our small, sacred portion, the square of the quilt that was born with us as we were born, perhaps before and only coming back then.
So what to do with your piece? How to mend it and find others with whom to sew the whole cloth, all of it?
That's a question we ask and answer together. That is the collective apparition every generation must conjure for themselves.
And it requires everybody's work, everybody's leadership. When we feel in our roots that liberation is a spiritual practice, we recognize the key in every hand for what it is.
I heard it in my mother's ochre and caramel alto as she swept incense dust from under her sacred places, insisting in her church-learned tune "god's not dead, she is still alive." So enamored was she of a certain stud deacon at the Unity Fellowship Church that she found herself, a witch, a trustee at a Black gay church.
I see it in the story of the justice-minded bees, and in the birds, and those who have learned birdsong. I recognize it in the kids who throw soup at old oil paintings, proving what matters and what does not. Liberation is a pact between ourselves and future generations.
To access the revolutionary spirt is to multiply it. To access the revolutionary spirit is to be a keeper of its eternal flame.
But one cannot access it without spiritual sovereignty, as my old folks said when they were earthside, without knowing god for yourself. I don't say it like that today, but that's how I learned what it meant.
My elders did what they could to keep the flame alive. My mema and grandma looked at a patch of forest, and with their community, raised a Black church.
My mother was abandoned by that church, and so, therefor, found god wearing her face inside and outside a Black gay church.
And I am finding it today right here with you, and in every client, fellow spiritualist, activist, healer, shit, even an executive director or two.
I find it in a march like I find it in a panel, like I find it at an action, like I find it in the literature of information and transgression.
I can't tell you everywhere I find it, but I can tell you that when I look I find it.
It's not, as I learned that day at Highlander, as easy to find alone. Good thing that when one looks for spiritual sovereignty, when one works for liberation, you are never alone.
Ancestors, spirit guides, fellow travelers, angels, and workers of all kinds are there with you, across time's gap, making our way, sewing our quilt.
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
"It's in our spirits that we keep the hope of ending the systems of oppression that bind us up. That tear us down.
It's the part of us that rises up and reminds us liberation is a spiritual practice."