Are you Still Breathing? Breath is How We Know We Are Resisting!
retooling my Substack to be with you in this moment and to nurture social trust via the craft of writing and harnessing the prophetic traditions.
Dear Substack Community ~ I am sitting down to write and I wanted to mention a few things.
On Tuesdays, I am going to start sending my main email for the week, which includes the link to my sermon, hence today’s email! I am still sorting out which other elements of Substack that I will use. Your input is huge!
In these emails, I’m going to find a way to present several different strands of thought in one email, using headers to highlight and separate them. See below, for examples.
In an attempt to further conversation, I’ll be asking paying subscribers to provide feedback. We desperately need to nurture social trust in these moments.
Thank you to all the new subscribers who have joined Our Collective Becoming! Most everything I send out is free. I do like to cultivate conversations, so I have a group of paying subscribers who buy me a coffee a month, and I engage with them. If $5 / month is a barrier for you, please let me know by writing to booking@robertoche.com. My executive assistant will help you. I work with a group of people as Founding Members to try to set the tone for the Substack. These folks advise me. I reach out to them privately, and I am grateful for them. I hope to convene the Founding Members quarterly, so be on the lookout for that email, Founding Members! Founding Members support me at a higher level that makes this work more sustainable. The craft of writing is very important to me; it’s how we preserve history and make social change, along with 1:1 conversations. Writing can help to create social trust or social breakdown, as we’ve seen with he demise of Twitter. I am returning to first loves of mine: writing and music. I hope you will join the ride here with Our Collective Becoming. If you would like to see more of the work we are doing, please use the this link and check us out. You are able, please make a tax-deductible donation online that supports our work of social healing and building and sustaining mutual aid networks, a passion project of ours.
STRANDS
Ordinary Notes
~ Updates on what’s been happening
I’m preaching each Sunday on Neighbor Love, inspired by Dr. Andrew DeCort. Catch my sermon from last Sunday here. I’ll be away from July 17-August, 8 in Europe and Southern Europe, so I will be presenting guest writers again. I hope this inspires us to keep up the conversation and keep developing social trust. I think trust can create conditions for social healing and I’ve been doing that work since completing my PhD. I’m weird enough to believe that theology can contribute to social healing. I find that 1:1 conversations are helping me the most, along with writing and preaching each Sunday. I’m starting to edge a little closer to sitting down to write my next book on belonging and freedom. It’s growing inside me in palpable ways. I can’t wait to share the process with you!
Church is a Bad Brand
~ My story about finding community as a young person
I think church is a bad brand. I also think church is the best thing we have on earth right now. It is always both / and. No body said I was crazy for applying to be the pastor of Union University Church. In fact, everyone gave me their blessing as I stepped into the portal of congregational ministry, which I’ve not done since I was in seminary.
The church has been both the point of departure for my whole life and also the center of so much harm. I’ll never forget when a White, Cis, Gay man told me I had an allergy to myself. I have always identified as queer and gender non-conforming, and I think this colleague could not hold my complexities. I don’t know? I had other questions I was researching and other intelligence by which I was compelled, so I left the church. I would be invited back to preach and share my learning, and I shared as much as I could at the time.
But when I was a young person, church captivated me, because it was relational. As a pastor, now, I’m trying to figure out how to create not so churchy events that are rooted in relationality. I learned this as a young person in youth group. I found community as a young person. Sure, I was queer then, but those things didn’t matter. We were just kids coming of age and learning to be leaders with a sense of ethics. I think we can continue to do this kind of work in community when we build a peace loving, spiritual but not religious community. If you take Jesus seriously, we have to expand and create openings in our groups, so that we can receive the other.
Community has the potential of reviving our society.
I think food will bring people together, so I’m going to start doing that here in my context, and I invite you, too!
Community is All We Have!
~ Invitation to plant seeds
We all are being called upon right now to plant seeds for another possible world. We need to infuse care into our efforts, so that we can suture the wounds of our society. I’m doing that in my context, and I want to invite you to do it in your context. Let’s compost this crisis into a hyper-local event, where we get to know our neighbors the old fashioned way. I’ll be writing on this theme more and developing my ideas and also inviting people to share their thoughts on community. Plus, I’ll be sharing some of the reading I have done and am doing about community. How might we build another possible world together? How might we build the world we long for? We have to start practicing a different kind of way of life.
Have we Fucked Our Future?
~ Avoid panic and fear. Many people have been sitting in boiling water.
Many people have been sitting in boiling water.
Let us continue to breathe. Many of us are just waking up to the atrocities, but many of us have been sounding the alarm for years. It was 20 years ago that my eyes were opened to what is being called the Capitalocene Age, the dangers of capitalism for me and the people I love, among other things. That was also the time when I began to understand the trappings of empire. I saw how religion was being used as a tool of the empire. There are now numerous books detailing how Southern Evangelical Religion supported the work of white supremacy. It’s a 50-year effort to reverse the advances of the Civil Rights Movement and much more.
We are still in charge of how we use our power, access, and privilege. I have been trying to use my power, access, and privilege in meaningful ways which is why I left public life and have started to choose to participate in a smaller number of specific events. I want to encourage people to keep breathing and create networks of trust. Whom do you call in an emergency? Nurture that relationship! Do you have a safety plan? If not, create one! Do you know about 'Signal', the private messaging platform that is encrypted? Download it! I used to use Signal only in my organizing work, but I’m now beginning to switch to Signal across the board and to be more careful with my texting.
We are not doomed. We have power to come together. Many people are speaking out, from the ongoing crisis in Gaza, to the climate crisis and more. People are rising up. When we have people power, when the masses rise up, we begin to make small moves against destructiveness. My teacher, Dr. Nancy Elizabeth Bedford taught me that. This is why we need to be committed to discernment in these times. We cannot retreat. The existing system has the power to kill all of us, but we have the power and fortitude and compassion to create a new, more sustainable system that has CARE at the center.
Remembering Neighbor Love
~ Steps Forward
I preached on the Beatitudes this past Sunday. I am resonating with the work of reducing barriers; the work of bridging with differences; the work of suturing the wounds of our society. I am interested in loving my neighbor. I have a chance to do that, now. So, I’m going to practice the Ways of Jesus in material ways. I think that’s what we all have to do right now. Get to know each other in new and generative ways, so that we can establish social trust, again, after what we’ve all been through.
I look forward to Dr. Andrew DeCort contributing a Substack email while I’m away to Europe. This will likely be my last travel adventure for some time. A year ago I was asked to give a paper in Frankfurt, so Erin and I are traveling together to Germany to speak in several different places. I’ll be ready to be home for the late summer and early fall and to launch my Taco Tuesday idea!
This summer, we are learning to take day trips to meet people and to get to know our neighbors. When I walk, I meet people, too! There are opportunities to meet our neighbors near and far each day. I hope you will take advantage of what is just outside your door. The world awaits us and she groans and palpitates with hope for a more passionate and connected ecosystem. Let us nurture the ecology of relations that we have and that we are imagining.
Onward, —Roberto Che Espinoza