Opening a Door to Myself

An Interview With Cole Arthur

BY TIM WESTERMEYER

Cole Arthur Riley is a writer and poet, author of the NYT bestseller, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us. Cole currently serves as the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making. She is also the creator of Black

Liturgies (@blackliturgies), a space that integrates spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body. The following interview is just a little foretaste of what you can expect when Cole joins us for the Faith & Life Lecture Series on March 9.

In one of your bios, you make the following statement about yourself: “I believe I was made to write.” How did you discover that about yourself? Was it something you always knew, or more of a revelation? Or neither? I think I’ve always felt connected to written words. I wasn’t an incredibly verbal child, and so when I learned to write, a world was opened up to me. I could communicate in ways I couldn’t before. And thankfully, there’s a lot of me from my childhood that is preserved in writing. Journal after journal. Poems and stories. Now that I’m older it is the clearest way I can encounter little Cole—in her own words.

So for as long as I can recall, I’ve wanted to be a writer. Now, did I believe I could be? That’s another question entirely. I began college planning to major in Physics but for two years was still taking a bunch of classes in the English department. And I told myself if one professor tells me I can do this, if they tell me that I’m a writer, I’m going to switch majors. And one did eventually kind of shake me and say, hello, what are you doing?! You belong with words.

You list, among authors that have been important to you, people like Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, James Baldwin, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Christian Wiman (who, by the way, was a past Faith & Life speaker). What have these authors and poets taught you, or what do you take from them? Each of them has taught me different things and in their own way. Toni Morrison showed me there is beauty in disorientation, in not always having things made clear or resolved. Bambara showed me the mystery in a collective interior world. Wiman taught me that one can contend with the spiritual while maintaining a loyalty to the art.

I could go on, but I’ll say that each of these figures have brought me a little closer to myself. And this is vital to my survival as a writer, they have not inducted me into their beliefs or personalities or form; but they have opened a door to myself. That I could be honest with myself about who I am and what I’m afraid of and what I long for and what I need to be human.

You have said your “strength as a writer is in storytelling.” Why are stories so important to us as human beings? I think one of the more mysterious things about being human is we are a compilation of a million moments (however mundane or majestic) that have formed and reform us, often with very little consent from us. We can’t escape being formed by the stories we’ve occupied; the question is how will we be formed by them? And possessing this awareness, I believe, is necessary for a kind and true life. Do you know who you are? Okay, and how do you know? Take me to the moment you knew you would kill for your child. I’ll learn far more from the story—the way your face moved, or your lip curled into itself, than I will from the statement alone. Storytelling, when done well, always frees up a deeper truth.

Do you think we’re losing touch with the stories that define us as human beings? I think some of us are at risk of forgetting. Forgetting the stories that have defined us as humans. Often, in my opinion, this is a willful amnesia. It can be dreadful and terrifying to confront some of the stories that have shaped us as humans.

But I also think there are people in my life who are doing the incredibly taxing work of recovering stories that have been lost or taken. People who are in the business of reclaiming the stories that people prefer to remain hidden, they will save us from ourselves. A conclusion or declaration absent of a story can hardly ever be nuanced, and at its worst can just be a tool for indoctrination. Stories complicate things. I think we need that right now.

If I’m not mistaken, you suffer from an autoimmune disease, which has caused more than a little suffering and pain in your life. What has that taught you about faith—or about writing? When you don’t know what’s happening to your own body, your mind takes you to the furthest ends of your imagination. For example, I think most chronically ill people have probably considered their own mortality far more than the average person. Thinking about death and dying has led me to really become honest about what I believe. Or more precisely, an absence of belief. I’m more content with uncertainty than I’ve ever been. The unknown is less and less menacing because I’ve known utter helplessness and uncertainty in my own body.

I know this can worry people who are staunchly situated in particular doctrines or creeds, but I feel very open to the unknowability of God, the divine mystery. Which is to say, my unbelief is no longer threatening to me.

On your Black Liturgies site, you note that you are currently interested in “rest, embodiment, justice, anger, wonder, and belonging.” Can you say a word or two about why these topics particularly interest you? I’m interested in reclaiming an integrated and whole existence for myself. And I think that tends to look like some convergence of emotion, embodiment, connection to my interior world, and commitment to the world around me. So those topics are all threads that connect me to one of these parts of my humanity.

For a long time, I’ve reduced myself to a singular aspect of my own humanity, often the life of the mind. And in this season, I’ve been very interested in reintegration and making sure I make space for the whole of me.

A big part of your writing and thinking has to do with the importance of being embodied—something, which, as I read it, is a core and central part of the Christian tradition. We confess, for example, that we believe in “the resurrection of the body,” which is a reference not to Jesus’ resurrection, but to our resurrection. This line not only suggests that God values our bodies, but—even stronger—suggests that our very identities are somehow wrapped up in being embodied creatures. And yet Christianity is often perceived as being negative toward the body or focusing primarily on the “spiritual.” Where did we go wrong, and how can we correct that misunderstanding? We do ourselves no favors when we are constantly telling each other to “die to ourselves.” There seems to be this mission of bodily cost.

What will you give up? How far will you go?

The most exhausted and disembodied I ever was was when I first joined a church. To say it used my body more than it loved it would be an understatement. It chewed us up and spat us out. Many of us are far more interested in intellectualizing why the body matters to the spiritual, than actually practicing embodiment. Even in our advocacy of the body we confine ourselves to the mind. How rare it would be to see a church offering breath work or stretching classes. This, for many, is where we draw the line.

If we are to change our own affinity toward disembodiment, we are going to have to release a lot of what we demand of one another to keep the ship afloat, so to speak. Maybe the deck doesn’t need us as much as we think. Or maybe it’s time for the ship to sink. Surely people of resurrection can’t be so terrified of death that we dismember ourselves to save that which is prepared to die … or change. And so, I think we must change our expectations for ourselves, for each other, for our programs and churches. Stop asking us to die, and tell us to eat, to lie down and rest awhile. More green pastures, less crosses on the back. People hate when I say this. Christians love to bleed.

Coming back to one of the authors you note as being important to you, I’m reminded of one of the most famous lines of the mystic Julian of Norwich. She wrote: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” What do you think she meant by that, and do you agree? I wish we could ask her. Because of her illness, Julian of Norwich had known mortality closer than many, and still she creates this artifact that transcends her own suffering. I think she knew what it meant to meet death in her own face and not run away from it. When she says all shall be well, it never feels trite or like the toxic positivity we are familiar with today; it sounds like a promise that she herself is trying to believe. Can we find beauty in impermanence? Is the existence of the hazelnut worthy of no less awe than our own? All shall be well not because pain is void, but because we’ve found a way toward beauty and love nonetheless.

The theme of this issue is “Hope.” What does that word mean to you? What gives you hope? Lately I’ve been thinking about a hope that flows in both directions. I used to only think about it in terms of the future, but what if it has as much to do with memory as it does imagination? I’ve been finding a lot of hope in the past—in the people who found a way to be human as best they could for as long as they could. Intimacy with the stories that survive gives me hope. It’s not just dreaming for me anymore, it’s excavation.

We’re looking forward to hosting you in March, when you’ll talk about “Faith & The Body: Reclaiming Our Createdness.” What will people hear when they come to that event? People will hear about my own story with disembodiment not just through chronic illness, but because of racial and childhood trauma. I’m really looking forward to exploring both the cost of divorcing the mind from the body, and the physical and moral imperative to reintegrate the body into our spiritualities.