For Being More Than One Thing

I read this prayer today from Cole Arthur Riley, in her book “Black Liturgies”.

There are several valuable reminders here.

One is that fear can make us demand definition from mystery. We want to know exactly, black and white, what is what. Often that desire is driven by fear.

Another is that we can be several things at the same time – fluid: we can be angry and kind, well and wounded.

The last is that sometimes binaries are used to make us small.

If fear is your issue, this prayer might help.

If different emotions are within you, this prayer might help.

If someone or a system is trying to make you small by pushing you into binaries, this prayer might help.

Fluid God,

Fear can make us demand definition from mystery.

We tell stories about your static nature to make the divine digestible to us.

We condense and simplify our own stories to make them clear and resolved.

Since we were little, we’ve been dissected not with nuance and complexity, but by a zeitgeist that favors categories and binaries.

It feels like we must choose—to be smart or pretty, to be angry or kind, to be masculine or feminine, to be well or wounded.

Free us from this confinement.

Help us to remember we are not singular, that we are free to be more than one thing.

Protect us from a world intent on narrowing our selfhoods.

Remind us that these binaries exist not so that we might be understood but so that we might be made small.

Guide us as we honor the sacred spectrums within each of us, and within one another.

There is a multitude in us.

We will not be reduced.

Ase.

(Yoruba word for “amen”)