🚆 Theology on the Tracks
Notes from Exile in the Wake
🚆 Theology on the Tracks
Notes from Exile in the Wake
“Nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin
“The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us.”
— Fred Moten
“I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures… I have always had to live in the borderlands.”
— Gloria Anzaldúa
🧭 Where I Am Writing From
I am writing this from a place that feels like the underside of a map.
A place where the lines thin out,
where the promises of empire grow quiet,
where the story we were told about America—
about merit, mobility, and making it—
begins to fray at the edges.
I am living in exile.
Not metaphorically.
Materially.
I fled my home.
I landed in one of the only houses I could secure in Alfred, New York—
a village that promises protection on paper,
where non-discrimination policies sit like fragile glass,
waiting to see if they will hold under pressure.
Time will tell.
🌾 The Terrain of Persistent Poverty
In the meantime, I am here—
in the Southern Tier,
a region marked by what scholars call persistent poverty,
but what I feel in my body as a thinning of care.
There is charity here.
There are food pantries.
There are statements and social media posts.
But there is little organizing.
Little mutual aid.
Little infrastructure for those of us living in the underside of history.
And I do not say this from a distance.
I am inside it.
⚡ Everything, All at Once
Everything is happening at once.
Federal funding cuts.
Faculty positions dissolving.
Research stripped bare.
Grants disappearing into silence.
Even the so-called elite institutions—
places that taught me how to think,
places I gave my labor to—
have complied.
Including Duke.
Which means:
my income destabilized,
my benefits gone,
my already-fragile sense of security thinning further.
Crumbs, yes.
But they were my crumbs.
And now, even those are uncertain.
🕊️ The Wake
At the same time,
my Mexican mother has lost her housing—again.
Patterns repeat.
Cycles return.
This is what Christina Sharpe calls the Wake—
the ongoing afterlife of catastrophe,
where the past is not past,
where dispossession is not an event but a condition.
I feel it in my bones:
statistically,
generationally,
structurally—
I am next.
And yet,
my therapist reminds me:
statistics are not individuals.
So I hold that tension.
Between what is patterned
and what is still possible.
Between inevitability
and interruption.
🔥 Leaving, Again and Again
Because I have spent my life leaving.
I left whiteness.
I left homonormativity.
I left the promise that if I performed well enough,
I might be allowed to belong.
I have been left, too—
for upward mobility,
for 401(k)s,
for homeownership,
for the quiet violence of assimilation.
And still,
I keep leaving.
Not as escape,
but as refusal.
Refusal of a world that measures worth by proximity to capital.
Refusal of institutions that dispose of us when we no longer serve them.
Refusal of a theology that blesses empire and calls it good.
🌊 Have You Ever Seen Everything All at Once?
That is my life right now.
And yet—
in the midst of this moral devastation,
this slow collapse—
I remember Baldwin.
So I am facing it.
Quietly.
Fugitively.
On trains and at tables.
In poems and fragments.
Through story, through metaphor,
through the fragile insistence
that another world is not only possible—
but already flickering at the edges of this one.
🌿 Joy in the Wake
And I am learning, slowly,
what my teacher once said:
be faithful in the small things.
A shared meal.
A story told honestly.
A refusal to look away.
A practice of staying when everything in you wants to disappear.
This is my theology on the tracks.
Not abstract.
Not detached.
But lived—
in exile,
in poverty,
in the wake—
and still,
reaching for something like joy.
The kind Ross Gay writes about:
A joy that does not ignore sorrow,
but grows right alongside it—
insisting on noticing,
on beholding,
on loving what is still here.
🤝 Support This Work
If this work speaks to you,
if you feel something stirring in these words—
I invite you to support it materially.
Become a paying subscriber.
I am committed to keeping this space accessible,
which is why essays remain free for a time
before moving behind a paywall.
Your support makes that possible.
🕯️ Friday Global Sabbath Practice (Beginning July 10)
Starting July 10,
I will be gathering with paying subscribers each Friday
for a Global Sabbath practice—
A time to pause.
To breathe.
To remember.
To ritualize our belonging to one another
in a world that is trying to convince us otherwise.
🌀 We’ll gather for about 60 minutes
🌀 We’ll learn from guests across traditions
🌀 We’ll attune to the seasons and the turning of the year
🌀 We’ll practice, together
More details soon.
✨ An Invitation
If you’ve been waiting—
this is the moment.
Join us.
Help sustain this work.
Help keep this space alive.
🌌 A Closing Word
I will say this,
even as it feels fragile on my tongue:
The universe has, somehow, held me before.
Remembering that right now is hard.
But I am trying.
And in the trying,
in the small faithfulness—
I am still here.
—RCE+