Unchurched Manifesto
It has been a year since I last sent out a newsletter, and that year has been spent drafting, editing, and brooding over this piece. This post, consisting of seven poems, invites you into the meaning of the metaphor that grounds me: a playground where I once perceived a border. Over the past year I have felt the power of all our words dwindle, even as I have tried in these poems to retain this metaphor’s power. I am sending it now, as my truest attempt.
I write from the border of Christian belonging, but I write for our world. I hope all who have felt a border divide self from self, or who have watched their bodies’ stories slip under water, can co-create a new geography here. And I want this geography to be written on the actual world. So in that sense, this piece is political. It seeks a spiritual formation to support the coalition-building required to turn our world toward safety.
To accompany the text I have added a voiceover, embedded at the beginning, and, at the end, a free downloadable PDF of the manifesto in chapbook form, in case you want to spend time with it offline in the coming days
. Thank you for reading.
~Shaina
I want to build a playground, Invite you to come play, But only if it feels good; You never have to stay.
I have tried and tried to write the end of this poem and I cannot. Against the backdrop of our world, the playground feels like a fading dream. I am awake, and fascism is knocking at our door. Genocide is feeding at our table. And my whole self is enfolded (willfully? helplessly?) into motherhood. But I write because some dreams are signposts, even as the details fade. What I am offering is no more than a metaphor. But if metaphors are powerful enough to kill, perhaps they can stretch toward life as well.
For months I have been demanding a poem that my body cannot deliver. My body cannot deliver the geography I yearn for. When you finally breach the border—a border policed by white Christian men who cannot know the ways their narrative weight has landed on your body—you find, in its place, a tall and spacious playground
You stretch out your body. You move without purpose or convention. The vast sky can hold god’s narrative weight. You have come here to play.
The playground is peopled, but my body cannot materialize the people. Some communities are not narrated into formation; they just are. They are because they have been. They are because bodies assist other bodies on their day-to-day journey back to safety. Spiritual formation is not narrated. Spirituality, at is core, is the body’s journey, aided by ritual and community, back to safety.1 It is play, which defies narration.
My body cannot deliver the end of this poem, and so I turn to you, my readers. I am asking for your creative collaboration. I am asking you to come play. The nature of play is that you come when it feels good, and you leave when you’re ready, and whichever direction leads home is the right direction.
I cannot complete this poem, because I cannot complete the task, which is to funnel our creative abundance no longer toward the skies, but toward one another; to collectively find our way back to safety. Not a safety that holds its breath—the safety of borders and police. Back further than we want to go, undoing more than we dare. Back to a safety that breathes.2 The first step is impossible, because it is the one that turns us around—a repentance we can only acquire through play. But the rest of the journey?
The rest of the journey may nourish itself.
My tech skills are super limited, but I’ve done my best to create a printable chapbook of this manifesto for offline reading. If you print under the usual settings the poems will be a bit scrambled. Here are directions for printing so you can fold the sheets into a book: 1. select “both sides—flip on short edge” to make sure both sides of the sheet are printed in the same direction. 2. Under “pages per sheet” (I had to click “more settings” to adjust this setting) select 2. Total sheets printed should be 6 at this point (with 4 pages printed per sheet). After printing, fold each sheet in half and lay back-to-back (as opposed to inside one another) so page numbers are in order. The cover sheet wraps around the booklet. Staple or bind by your preferred method.
I anticipate readers arguing that spirituality is so much more than safety. Its compassion. It’s altruism. It’s connection to god and one another and all that is sacred. My argument is that the body’s experience and authentic practice of spirituality requires a nervous system that can reliably return to a state of safety (the ventral vagal state). When bodies don’t feel safe, spiritual health and spiritual ideals have no place to land.
When I speak of a “journey back” I am not suggesting a nostalgic return to an earlier time. The journey back is twofold. It is the daily, cyclical journey’s our nervous system takes back to safety (a healthy nervous system is not one that experiences uninterrupted safety, but one that can reliably find its way back). And it is the work of repair, which looks back, taking critical inventory of the past, but is ultimately future-oriented work. Repentance and repair create a future, not a past.
Shaina, I just ... I honestly have no words. I am sitting in a corner of a hotel room in the dark while my non-binary kid sleeps, and was just yesterday talking with my sister, who was with us, about the reality that women have never been safe, how even the supposed best of recent history could not stomach rejecting attacks on women's bodies and senses of self.
Reading the first stanza, I felt that thrill of excitement of seeing someone who shares your thoughts and ideas, but crafts them into word-shapes entirely different and even more powerful. I had no idea that piece on borders would provide inspiration but it means *everything* to me that it has. Because when you wrote "I cannot complete this poem, because I cannot complete the task, which is to funnel our creative abundance no longer toward the skies, but toward one another," I both felt EXACTLY the same because that is what I want people to take from the work I do, find ways to turn toward one another (all of life) and find their own work within that; and because it's exactly what you're doing here.
I am excited to print this out. And just so you know the reverberations it will have, I recently started meeting with two local women who would really like to start taking their writing seriously. They are both poets! This is perfect for them, and for me.
Here's to a world without barbed wire, and without borders imposed on the unwilling. ❤️🔥
"When you finally breach the border—a border policed by white Christian men who cannot know the ways their narrative weight has landed on your body—you find, in its place, a tall and spacious playground" 🔥