Friday Care Package
Care, Violence, and the Work of Repair
“Caring is the antithesis of violence. Violence shatters, fragments, annihilates; care restores, sustains, and nurtures.” — Joan Tronto
Dear Becoming Ones,
Last night, I had the privilege of recording a conversation for my alma mater, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, with my dear colleague and friend, The Rev. abby mohaupt, PhD. She is helping me build a digital archive of my work in the world. As soon as I receive the video, I will share it here. For now, I want to focus today’s Care Package on how compromised we are by the violence into which we have been conditioned and socialized.
I am coming into painful awareness of how intergenerational cycles of violence have shaped me. They have caused me to become violent and aggressive in speech, in behavior, and especially when my anxiety flares to catastrophic proportions. In these moments, I am learning—haltingly, imperfectly—that I am in need of self-compassion and healing.
I have turned to the ethics of care because I needed to put care into everything I did and do. I am still practicing this, fumbling toward repair. Each Friday, I write on care as a way of building in public. It is, as María Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us, not ornamental but urgent: “Care is a matter of survival.”
I have been nourished by decolonial care ethics that insist on midwifing another possible future, and by my dear colleague Jake Erickson’s work on becoming creaturely. I am trying to become creaturely too, letting the scales fall off, learning to heal from Complex PTSD. This is the hardest work of my life: learning to speak for my emotions rather than from them, learning to disentangle myself from violence even as I acknowledge how deeply it has compromised me.
When I was in Charlottesville, neo-Nazis lunged in my direction, intent on harm. My security team swept me away to safety. My life changed that day. Since then, I have been searching for safety. But after years of institutional violence and bullying—even from those who call themselves Christians and progressive democrats—violence has caught up with me in Alfred.
The grief I carry is generational. As bell hooks wrote, “The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.” I believe the same is true of care. A politics of care is what we need right now. Unraveling from cycles of abuse and violence requires repair of the self, rooted in practices of care we can each cultivate.
I am hopeful—though it is a hard hope—that I can unravel from the tetherings that conditioned me to be violent. This is the work of ancestral healing, work that requires careful attention to the psyche, to memory, to the body, to community. María Lugones once said, “To recognize loving perception is to enter into a world of resistant possibilities.” That’s what I want: to enter a world of resistant possibilities where care replaces cruelty, tenderness replaces domination.
So I ask you, as I ask myself:
How might you put care into your own body right now, to unravel from the violence that has lodged itself within you?
I am not perfect. I have a long way to go. But when we build in public, we practice the art of vulnerability. We learn to let the scales fall off together. This is liberation work. This is social healing work. This is repair work. This is learning to live the gospel in ways that rattle the status quo.
What gospel are you living? For too long, I have lived a gospel coerced by empire. Now I am ready to live a gospel that challenges the status quo, that invites healing and repair for the least of these.
Paz, —RCE+
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in the violence that has shaped you.
Breathe out the care that restores you.
Breathe in the grief of generations.
Breathe out the hope of repair.