Cole Arthur Riley & Liturgy

On this episode of 20 Minute Takes, Nikki Toyama-Szeto talk with Cole Arthur Riley, the creator of Black Liturgies and author of the new book, This Here Flesh. Listen in as they discuss liturgy, generational strength, and embodied practices of healing and attentiveness.

Check out our Q&A with her about her book.
You can learn more about Cole, here.
In addition to @BlackLiturgies, you can find her @colearthurriley.

Transcript

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Nikki Toyama-Szeto (00:11):

Hello, this is Nikki Toyama-Szeto, Executive Director for Christians for Social Action. On this episode of 20 Minute Takes, we speak with author, liturgist Cole Arthur Riley. She is the executive content curator for the Instagram account @blackliturgies, as well as the author of the new book This Here Flesh. Come join us for a conversation on the power of liturgies in these trying times. Cole, thank you so much for joining us.

Cole Arthur Riley (00:50):

Thanks for having me.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (00:52):

I have so appreciated your voice and your space that  you hold with @blackliturgies for folks. If you've been on Instagram for a minute, you've probably come across the amazing work of @blackliturgies that Cole has been curating and creating. Can you tell me a little bit about how that Instagram account got started and what it was you were trying to do?

Cole Arthur Riley (01:20):

I began @blackliturgies at the end of June, July of 2020, when the world was processing a lot of murders of black people at the hands of  violent white people and police. I've been existing in white dominated liturgical spaces for a while. I've worked at an Episcopal church and attended an Anglican church and have been really moved by liturgy and the restfulness that I think liturgy offers when you don't have the words to pray. There are just seasons where it's so hard to pray words written by a white man. That summer was certainly one of those seasons for me. I thought I'm just going to start this thing. The name came before I actually knew what the idea was fully. I just wanted start this space called Black Liturgies. And then my spouse was like, okay, what is it? 

I've always been a writer, I've loved writing. And so it just made sense to me that that would be how I was going to connect with the divine, how I was going to connect with God. I thought it would be this very intimate, small space. And it has grown quite a bit, which I'm fine with, I'm grateful for in fact.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (03:03):

I feel like it's this intersection between prayer, poetry, and activism. Exactly like how you described, when I find myself unable to have  words even to know how to pray the liturgy has been helpful. Did you mean to be in that space of poetry, prayer, and activism? Or is this just what came out from you? Was that intentional or was it just an embodied expression? 

Cole Arthur Riley (03:39):

I think it was intentional. When I think of liturgy, I think of more than the prayers of the people. I think of other components. I think of their songs sometimes in liturgical forms and services. I knew I wanted to find a way to bring in black thought, black sacred artifacts and connect that with written prayer.  It was never just going to be about the prayers I was writing, but I was trying to bring other voices, other black people and bodies into what I was doing. And I love art. I love poetry and I love black literature and that has totally been a way for me to connect and kind of revive my own spirituality. So I think it just made sense with who I am.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (04:38):

What do you hope that black folks get out of @blackliturgies and what you're trying to do there?

Cole Arthur Riley (04:44):

I really just hope they find a space of belonging that doesn't demand that they believe any one thing, any particular doctrine or creed. Or a place of true spiritual liberation and creativity and curiosity. A space to breathe where so much isn't being asked of you all of the time. Also a kind of belonging that allows for your full body and emotion range, like black grief, black anger, and black joy. I want black people to experience that kind of community.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (05:31):

A place where folks can show up and also the whole of who they are is welcome and embraced. I love that. Can you tell us about how your book is different or the same, an extension of what you've been trying to do with the Instagram account? Your book This Here Flesh.

Cole Arthur Riley (05:50):

This Here Flesh is grounded in a lot of the things that @blackliturgies was founded on. A lot of these broad concepts, like dignity, lament, rage, rest, belonging - these are the chapter titles of the book. The key difference is in the space of @blackliturgies, I try as much as I can to not center myself too much. I'm a bit reserved; you're not going to see my face all the time on the @blackliturgies account. I try to do that in other spaces. You're not always going to be experiencing liturgy about me, and people have asked tell me more. We wanna know more about you. And I've just held that back. This Here Flesh - I think people are going to be really surprised. I share so much about me and the people who have formed me. The book is grounded in the stories of my father, my grandma, and myself how those stories kind of work within these broader black liturgy concepts of dignity, lament, those things. It's a lot more of me. 

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (07:10):

I feel like the world could probably use a lot more of you. Can you unpack for us one of those important relationships, maybe, can you talk more about your relationship with your grandmother?

Cole Arthur Riley (07:21):

Sure. My grandma was just wonderful, smooth talking. She was a poet; she was a writer. But because of the privilege that she had, the way that her voice was neglected and not taken seriously when she was being raised, she didn't really have space to demonstrate her craft in the way that I have the privilege of doing now. It was really beautiful and difficult for me to watch her watch me live into this dream of being an author. She was so proud and felt this sense of real completion in her own calling coming through me, which I think is really beautiful. She passed away as I was editing the book and so it's been a weird season. This book, I'm so proud of it. It's also become a season of grief, an artifact of grief.  I'm trying to balance the excitement and joys that come with being a first time author while knowing that so much of this book is her and I miss her.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (08:36):

On the release of the book, which comes out this month, what is it that you wish that you could say to her as you hand her the copy?

Cole Arthur Riley (08:48):

I dreamed of the moment and I thought about more of what she would say than what I would say, because I'm very quiet in my family. I would just say that this is as much hers as mine, if not more. All of my words begin at the site of who she was as a woman and who she was as an artist. And I just wish more than anything I could just see her face, like see her holding it. I try to visualize that for my own grief process.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (09:26):

I have goosebumps as you're describing how your story and your words started with hers. I think one of the things that you touch on, which I think is something that other communities don't have quite as good access to, is the way that generations hold stories. I think in your book, you engage with what it means for healing and generational trauma and how those things interact with us in this present moment, and also how we're connected to the stories and the people who went before us. Can you say a little more about the healing process when we're talking about something that is generational?

Cole Arthur Riley (10:17):

There's this beautiful quote by Alice Walker that I'm sure many of your listeners would be familiar with. She said (I'm paraphrasing) how simple a thing it seems that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mother's names. It's so beautiful. It's beautifully written, but a beautiful sentiment as well. I began with my grandmother obviously and her name. Four or five years ago I began interviewing the older people in my family. Sometimes video recording them, sometimes just orally trying to preserve these stories that I've heard sometimes, or I've heard pieces of. And as I started doing it, especially with my father and my grandma, I realized so much overlap in our story, so much overlap in our pain.

But also in our survival, how we've coped and how we've persevered. It's not this intensely triumphant book, but I think there's a subtlety and gentle nature in the way that each of us has healed that I learned from them without knowing I was learning. Some things may come to you in hindsight. I can see you were watching your grandma learn to sleep in a bed again. You were watching your father learn to look himself in the mirror again. It was these subtle marks of healing that I think I inherited.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (12:05):

If it's not too intrusive, what was your grandmother's name and what is your mother's name?

Cole Arthur Riley (12:14):

My grandmother's name was Phyllis, Phyllis Marie. Originally, Phyllis Marie Grace. I wish she would've kept her last name. Then I could have been Cole Arthur Grace, or Cole Grace Riley. I like Grace. Her name was Phyllis; that name has a weight to it. And my birth mother's name is Kimberly. She goes by Kim.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (12:40):

Thank you. To know our mother's names, that's powerful. Can you say more about some of the practices you just touched on about the dignity of your father looking himself in the eye and the healing properties that had? Can you say more about some of these embodied practices and how they connect us to God or the divine?

Cole Arthur Riley (13:17):

I'm very interested in spirituality and the body and in healing in the body. I try not to make these grand statements about our world because it's truly particular systems and people in our world, but hopefully your listeners will give me grace. I think our world is not celebratory, is not conducive to listening to your body to caring for your body. It takes real ritual action, real habitual action to resist that because the pressure to forget one's physical is so large, so looming, so ceaseless that you have to have ritual rhythms. I think of listening and when I was little that looked like my father greasing my scalp and my sister's scalp in the morning and doing our hair. And now that I'm older, that looks like stretching and silence and just telling the truth about what hurts in my body.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (14:23):

That's me guilty as charged kind of a more living in my head or living in the world of ideas. Listening to what my body is saying is much more of a challenge. I appreciate those specific practices that you have. I've heard a lot of activists talk about public liturgy, and I think usually they're describing it as different ways of using protest or demonstration as an act of public liturgy. Do you think of what you do as public liturgy or distinctive from that? And can you help us understand this word “liturgy” and how it is being used in these new ways?

Cole Arthur Riley (15:17):

That's beautiful that people are describing their work like that. And I think we are seeing this kind of opening in terms of what liturgy means. Typically I think people have this vision of it meaning just solely prayers in a collective and typically very old traditional prayers. There's something about our art, our lives, about a kind of collective, not necessarily daily, but a collective rhythm that is most important when I think of the word liturgy. There's connection to a collective, there's connection to your interior world. It's words for me because I love words, but I don't think language is the only way. I don't think language is the most important thing. Some writers are gonna be very disappointed that I said that. I think everyone has their own tools of connecting with God, connecting with the spiritual. If you do that in a way that makes sense to you, I think that can become a liturgy, if that makes sense.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (16:35):

I hear you introducing a few concepts that I don't think of with liturgy. You're talking about the connection to others that comes through the practice of the liturgy, as well as this daily or the regularity of the practice. That those are two of the essentials that are core to liturgy.

Cole Arthur Riley (16:59):

At least in my own life those are core. Those are central, that rhythm and collective experience.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (17:08):

One of the things I've appreciated is the way that as you've been curating @blackliturgies that you pull both from scripture, as well as from quotes and historical figures, or even your own writing. There's an interweaving of that. As you're unpacking both the daily practice or the regularity of it, but also this connectedness - is part of that in terms of drawing from these different voices, is that the expression of connectedness?

Cole Arthur Riley (17:45):

It would've been very difficult for me to just post my own words and be able to call it a liturgy or at least feel like I'm connecting to some sense of community or a collective. I think that's definitely part of it incorporating other voices.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (18:06):

How is it that you draw from traditions that are maybe outside of a Christian tradition, but we've found amazing spiritual truth in those? Can you tell me about how you think about that or how you curate that?

Cole Arthur Riley (18:21):

I don't think very intentionally about it if I'm honest. It's usually just because of the things that I'm reading and when I read something that moves me it's hard for me to keep it to myself. The people in my life who recommend these books are really the gifts of why I've done what I've done. As I've learned to be more free in my spirituality, I've learned that I don't need to be so tied to the Bible as you know, this only form of revelation and beauty. I think it's everywhere. I'm not the first to say this; many people before me who I wish I'd found earlier have said this in more ways than one. The beauty of the divine is in everything. I truly believe that. I think it can only bring me closer to God if I'm trying to really apprehend that beauty in unexpected places.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (19:35):

Thank you so much. We've been speaking with Cole Arthur Riley. She is the executive curator of @blackliturgies, as well as the author of the newly released book This Here Flesh. Cole, thank you so much for holding space for so many of us in these difficult and trying times. Your words have been such a ministry to many of us.

Cole Arthur Riley (20:01):

Thank you for having me.

Nikki Toyama-Szeto (20:10):

20 Minute Takes is a production of Christians for Social Action. Our music was created by Andre Henry and our show is produced by David de Leon. I'm your host, Nikki Toyama-Szeto. If you want to find out more about our work, visit the website at christiansforsocialaction.org