Radical self-love is a term I encountered very recently in a book entitled, The Body is not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor. I might describe it as radical love of families, communities, of God—with the essence that makes all of the rest real in the middle—love of self, the physical body self. Without radical love of self, we may continue fighting crusades forever, we may continue race and gender conflicts forever, but we won’t find the real love of which we talk so much and do so little.
Perhaps it’s the time of year, but the darkness seems obvious, ecologically, politically, economically. Whether one observes the mood of Christmas, the light of the solstice, or any of the other seasonal holidays, now is the time to reach for a small but bright light of hope to begin dispelling the darkness of despair.
I personally happen to remember that light in Qur’anic language—one verse of light:
God is the light of the heavens and the earth.
The metaphor of that light is like a niche within which is a lamp.
The lamp is within a glass. The glass is like a glittering star,
Lit from a blessed olive tree whose oil is neither from east nor from west.
The oil almost gives off light without fire touching it: light upon light.
God guides to that light whom God wills, and uses metaphors to do so.
And God is the knower of all things.
I was in a discussion with a friend about Lot and Noah, the other day—the stories of Sodom and Gomorrah and of the great flood. Early versions of such stories make it obvious that they were just stories. The protagonist literally gets drunk afterwards and the resulting stories have led to centuries of racial and gender violence, as if the societies under that influence got drunk also. Scriptural scholarship has papered such things over for centuries, but the problems are obvious.
That’s why I stick with imagery, such as the metaphor of light. Every culture has its metaphors and stories. The idea is to shine a light upon the metaphors and stories, to find and learn from the One behind them all, rather than getting stuck in the story and the metaphorical details. Stories and metaphors are made of words, and what is being described is beyond words, particularly written ones. Interpretations of scriptures that are written in nature can be just as problematic as the ones written in books, by the way.
I say this based on five successive 15-year dedications to different traditions. The first 15 years of my life were in the Black Church, where my Black body learned what Dr. Leticia Nieto, author of Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment: A Development Strategy to Liberate Everyone, has called my survival skills. The second 15 years were in Roman Catholicism, where people were mostly white. So I learned confusion skills. The third fifteen years were as a Muslim, where I learned empowerment skills, because so many people were dark-skinned.
Dark skin is not the same as Black culture, so I learned strategy skills in my fourth 15 years, as a musical storyteller immersed in the indigenous traditions of Africa and the Americas—learning from other Black and Red people who had been oppressed. My fifth and current 15 years presents re-centering skills in Black religion, which includes everything I have been through and more. As C. Eric Lincoln wrote:
Black religion, then, cuts across denominational, cult, and sect lines to do for black people what other religions have not done: to assume the black man’s [and woman’s] humanity, [their] relevance, [their] responsibility, [their] participation, and [their] right to see [themselves] as the image of God.
That, of course, is the essence of religion period, the essence of life. I literally cannot add myself without adding everyone else as well. It turns out that I need to attribute my addition 100% to Rev. Dr. Dorsey Blake, who introduced me to his work based on the mystical Rev. Howard Thurman, and to the Black religion and womanist work of Rev. Dr. James Noel based on the seminal research and analysis of Dr. Charles H. Long. The point for now is that we are talking about a fellowship of all peoples, which was what Thurman started. Continuing that thread means that we stop fighting over the words, so that we can come together beneath what is behind them, which brings us back to radical self-love.
It is the same love that we aspire to practice with every one we encounter. It’s got to start with ourselves first, however, or it’s not real. If it doesn’t start with ourselves, it’s just competition. It’s just one-upmanship. It’s more about changing people than it is about accepting and loving anyone, or anything for that matter. That’s why it’s radical.
We don’t change to please others. We are all pleasing ourselves, and the selves cease to be individuals. God is Love, and we are of God. So, so we are love as well—not just souls but bodies as well. The focus on bodies keeps it from being an abstract visualization. It is not easy either, as the present world situation makes clear. Dr. Gabor Maté has written how reconnecting to the body may hold the key to addictions. Dr. Peter Levine has written that it holds the keys to trauma recovery. It is the challenge of life. It also appears to be the gift of life.
Or perhaps the gift usually answers the challenge in unexpected ways. As Thomas A. Dorsey put it. “The Lord will Make a Way Somehow.” The song lyrics are full of metaphors. Singers often change them to ones they like better, but the song is still the same. The message is still the same. As my mother used to say, “it’s always darkest before the dawn.” What she didn’t add was that the dawn requires an effort—even if it’s just getting up early enough to see it.
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox’s Creation Spirituality connects to the body as well, and seems to remind us that those who seek a Christian empire seem to have lost touch with the Jesus story. Perhaps it can be said in every religion that the seekers of empire have lost touch with the radical self-love in the founding spirit of religion.
The winter solstice is past. The light is dawning. A way has been made. It will take radical self-love to follow it. Call an end to body shame and terrorism or call it something else—despite all of the different words, there is just one story, one child, one prophet, one Orisha, one self.
This video features Gary Robinson at Antioch Baptist Church in San Antonio, TX.
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