Saturday Substack from Galway

The slow work of repair begins with you and me

“I change myself, I change the world.”

— Gloria Anzaldúa

Dear Substack Community,

It’s Saturday, which means it’s time for my one and only free write of the week—the piece I write and then send straight to you without over-polishing, without hiding the seams. Normally, I sit down with coffee and sativa before I write. Today, I am on the west coast of Ireland, in Galway, where last night I met with another theologian over a slow meal to talk about how to live—really live—in a world that feels like it is cracking open.

I’ve been in Ireland for several weeks now. The first week was spent in the North with Michael McRay and others, learning about peace and reconciliation. The histories there are devastating. I’ve stood in places where the British Army mortally wounded people. I’ve seen the wall in Derry from Bloody Sunday. I’ve walked the streets where the massacre took place—how the killing, which began in an instant, unfolded in just eighteen minutes.

In Derry, you can still feel the grief in the cobblestones. And yet, as I traced that route, I kept thinking: any city in the United States could have its own Bloody Sunday. We are that fragile. We are that armed. We are that fractured.

I carry fear about where we are headed—fear of American gun violence; fear of the global technofascism that is accelerating before our eyes; fear of the extractive, hollowing practices of capitalism I see and experience every day. These fears are not abstract for me. They live in my body. They arrive with the collapse of kindness and the erosion of empathy, replaced by polarization and judgment.

What I have learned here in Ireland is that reconciliation is slow. It is not a one-time event but a long, aching practice. In the North, social repair has taken generations, and the work is still not finished. Gates still close in Belfast to prevent riots. Communities remain divided by ancient loyalties—either to the Crown and British Empire, or to the indigenous Irish struggle for sovereignty.

We have these same fault lines in the U.S.—different flags, different names, same architecture of division.

And here is where my learning cuts deep: social repair is cultural work. It is undervalued, underutilized, especially in white-serving communities who do not know how to practice repair with the marginalized. Too often, all that is offered is the thin gruel of transactional relationships. I saw this in the church I served in Alfred—nostalgia in place of intimacy, sentiment in place of connection.

Emily Kaiserel’s reminder to practice deep listening has been echoing in my bones here. Deep listening—the kind that uses all five senses—is not just about paying attention to words; it is about letting the air, the smells, the silences speak to you. Gloria Anzaldúa calls this becoming the healing of the wounds. And Baldwin warns us with his own sharpened clarity: he could not trust the dominant culture because he had seen what it does and how it acts. That distrust is a form of knowing.

Perhaps the only way forward is through the slow, subversive work of art, poetry, and story. These are the languages that can help us narrate what feels impossible. They make space for us to imagine repair before it is possible to enact it.

I think that’s what this trip is teaching me—that to narrate the impossible, we must slow down enough to listen with all five senses, to feel the pulse of a place, to bear witness without rushing to fix. It is hard work. It is sacred work. And perhaps, it is the only work worth doing now.

On the edge of Galway Bay,

the wind carries whispers from Derry—

names still unspoken,

songs still half-sung.

The sea does not forget.

The walls still hold their breath.

And here I stand,

palms open to the rain,

ears pressed to the hum of the impossible—

learning again that repair

is not a miracle that arrives in a flash,

but a story we tell slowly,

in the dialect of five senses,

until the gates fall open

and the streets remember

how to hold us all.