Tuesday Telegram Theology on The Tracks: Being a Fugitive Theologian
Story as the Currency of Human Connection
Dear Becoming Ones,
Today I had the honor of returning to the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley — the place where I held my first faculty appointment after finishing my PhD. Walking those halls again felt a bit like stepping into a palimpsest of memory: the past layered gently beneath the present, whispering reminders of who we once were and who we are still becoming.
It was good to be there.
I met students who are listening closely to the quiet, persistent call of spirit — a spirituality not handed down by institutions alone, but animated by the truth of their own lives. Many of them are gender-expansive and sexually differentiated folks, learning to trust that their embodied experiences are not obstacles to the sacred, but doorways into it.
There was something tender about that encounter. A reminder that theology, at its best, begins not in abstraction but in lived experience — in the fragile courage it takes to tell the truth about who we are.
Below is the sermon I shared with them. I hope it meets you wherever you are today and offers a small thread of companionship along the way.
And finally, I want to share a new creative project that has been quietly emerging from this season of wandering and witness.
It’s called Lunar Notes: Letters from Exile — a podcast of reflections written from the edges, from the road, from the quiet spaces where one learns again how to listen.
You can listen on any podcast platform. I’ve included the podcast page here and the Apple Podcasts link below.
May these notes find you gently.
And may we keep becoming together — learning, even in exile, to read the light of the moon and find our way home to one another. If you want to keep up with Lunar Notes, check out the artist’s website here.
Paz,
Roberto Che Espinoza.
Theology on the Tracks: Being a Fugitive Theologian
Story as the Currency of Human Connection
Scripture: Ecclesiastes 4:9–12
Two are better than one,
because they have a good reward for their toil.
For if they fall, one will lift up the other…
And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one.
A threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Becoming Ones,
Ecclesiastes is not naïve.
It does not believe in spectacle.
It does not trust empire.
It has watched labor exploited, watched power consolidate, watched loneliness metastasize.
And in the midst of all of that sober realism, it offers us something quietly revolutionary:
Two are better than one.
A cord woven together is not easily broken.
This is not sentiment.
This is survival theology.
And I want to suggest today that to be a fugitive theologian is to take this passage seriously.
What Is a Fugitive Theologian?
A fugitive theologian is not running from responsibility.
A fugitive theologian is running from false narratives.
Running from the myth of the self-made soul.
Running from the lie that we can save ourselves alone.
Running from the story empire tells about what makes a life valuable.
As James Baldwin taught us, the role of the witness is to tell the truth about the world as it is — especially when the world is invested in illusion.
Baldwin knew this country survives on amnesia.
Ecclesiastes knew it too.
“What has been will be again… there is no remembrance…”
The danger is not repetition.
The danger is forgetting.
Forgetting who we are.
Forgetting whose we are.
Forgetting that we belong to one another.
Story Is the Currency
Empire trades in extraction.
God trades in story.
Story is the currency of human connection.
When you tell me your story, you are not giving me information.
You are entrusting me with your breath.
And that changes the economy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates reminds us that storytelling is an act of witness — particularly in a nation structured to erase certain bodies. To tell the story is to refuse disappearance.
Gloria Anzaldúa calls this living in the borderlands — where identities fracture and recombine, where we become bridges instead of walls.
And Fred Moten pushes us even further: fugitivity is not merely escape. It is the creation of new ways of being together in the cracks of the system.
The undercommons.
Improvised belonging.
A cord woven quietly under empire’s noise.
Ecclesiastes as Fugitive Text
Now listen again:
Two are better than one.
If one falls, the other lifts them.
A threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Ecclesiastes is dismantling individualism.
It is refusing the fantasy of solitary strength.
It is whispering to us across centuries:
Survival is collective.
In a culture that tells you to brand yourself, optimize yourself, defend yourself —
Ecclesiastes says: weave yourself.
We do not survive by standing alone.
We survive by braiding our stories together.
And this is where the church must repent.
Because too often we have traded story for certainty.
Relationship for doctrine.
Communion for control.
But fugitives do not survive on control.
They survive on trust.
The Threefold Cord
What is the threefold cord?
It is not simply friendship.
It is shared narrative.
It is when my story and your story and God’s story intertwine — not collapsing into sameness, but holding tension.
It is when we say:
I see your suffering.
I hear your witness.
I will not let you fall alone.
This is why meals matter.
This is why tables matter.
This is why testimony matters.
Because when we gather and tell the truth — about joy, about betrayal, about exile, about hope — we are braiding cords.
We are practicing fugitive theology.
We are building networks of trust in a time of surveillance.
Networks of care in a time of collapse.
Networks of solidarity in a time of fragmentation.
And that is no small thing.
Knowing What Time It Is
Ecclesiastes also tells us there is a season for everything.
A time to speak.
A time to keep silence.
A fugitive theologian knows what time it is.
And this is not a time for spiritual isolation.
It is a time for weaving.
It is a time for story.
It is a time for lifting one another when the fall comes — because the fall does come.
Ecclesiastes does not promise triumph.
It promises companionship.
And that may be the deeper miracle.
Invitation
So here is the invitation.
Where have you been trying to survive alone?
What story have you kept hidden because you were taught it had no value?
Who needs you to braid your thread into theirs?
Because story is the only currency that does not inflate, does not collapse, does not devalue.
Story multiplies when shared.
And when we share it — truthfully, tenderly, courageously — we become a threefold cord.
Not easily broken.
Not easily erased.
Not easily conquered.
Beloved,
Two are better than one.
And a people who tell the truth together are stronger still.
Let us become fugitives from isolation.
Let us weave our stories into something empire cannot sever.
Amen.