Question

If spirituality is broadly understood as the relationships and stories I live and practice, the depth of my spirituality is the degree to which I am embodying and demonstrating living (life-giving) relationships towards an interdependent reality, with myself, with neighbors seen and unseen, with the more than human world, with ancestors and generations to come, and with God, if that is part of my framework and story. In the United States, without alternative lineages and communities to surround us, socialize and form us, we are propelled into and formed by the story and relational framework driving dominant society: racialized global capitalism in the context of the ongoing US settler colonial project. This is a spiritual malformation producing social and physical death. The inability to recognize these foundational aspects of our existence make us vulnerable to the most deviant and violent complicity.

Learning, growing, and integrating new stories and relationalities, then, can be understood as spiritual formation, the transformation of the stories and relationships we live and practice. Liberation and love oriented spiritual formation will move us towards more life-giving possibilities, more interdependent relationalities, stories and frameworks, evidenced by solidarity, mutuality, and care. Spiritual formation does not happen through acquiring new knowledge alone, nor simply deepening one’s analysis of systems and the relationalities they produce. It is possible to hold knowledge, of physics for example, of our actual material interdependence at a quantum level, and still be living and practicing the death dealing stories and relationships of racial capitalism, demonstrated by politics and policies upholding the same. Liberation and justice oriented spiritual formation is about our bodies in relationship to one another and the more than human world, building new neural pathways and the capacity to live and practice interdependence outside of, or in spite of, life severing systems. It is about community as an extension of one’s embodiment. It necessitates mutuality, responsibility and consent within the relationships being practiced. It cannot be enforced by authoritarian policies nor can it manifest individually. It is not an evolution of the mind or “interior life” alone. The relationships as well as the stories that frame them might be complex and entangled, hard to parse out, but they can be witnessed in ritual and policies and demonstrated in action and relationships.

How does spiritual formation happen? What is the process? For those of us formed in the present United States, how do the stories and relationships we live and practice, in our context of racial capitalism amidst an ongoing settler colonial project, move towards interdependence, solidarity, repair, healing, liberation and love? The academic pursuit of this question might also illuminate the spiritual crisis of our age: that most of us do not know what stories and relationships we are living and practicing. If colonization severs relationship to land, people, stories and more, many of us, myself included, are the descendants of severed lineages, relationships and stories, severed over and over again. There likely is no intervention that can heal, restore, resurrect all that has been lost. Yet, I myself stand as evidence that something like healing and formation is possible. I want to explore it carefully and courageously, for my own sake most of all, but for so many who live in small fear-based stories, in desperate need of knowing the possibilities that remain and all the love that holds them.

Background

I was born on the ancestral lands of the Arapahoe and Cheyenne people in what is now called Boulder, Colorado. My grandmothers, Pining Garcia and Dorothy Singer, were born in what is now known as Pasig in the Philippines and DeSoto in rural Missouri respectively. I am a collage of cultures, colonization, vulnerability, power, lineages and dreams. Many labels are assigned to me, even as they shift: mixed, white, settler, American, Filipina, English, French, Jewish, light-skinned, agender womxn.[1] But what connects despite all that has been severed and separated by colonization, language and violence? What continues to bind? What opens us to all the relationalities of our being, which can be witnessed (or not) through the stories and relationships we live and practice? I am most interested in how the stories and relationships we live and practice transform, grow, move towards, solidarity, which I understand as the entanglement of love, and interdependence. If you witness my life, or listen to my songs, I hope you find a testimony of all the love that holds us.

Some additional adjectives and verbs for background as well: I compose and produce music. I write songs and perform them. I write liturgies[2] for religious worship, community care, and to document movements of faith and justice. I write. I am a scholar and a teacher. I am a cultural and community organizer, and a public faith leader. I toured full time as a performing songwriter from 2000-2009, and at the height of touring played over 200 shows in a year. My artistry opened pathways to relationship and social engagement in diverse spaces and across a wide cultural and socioeconomic spectrum. I played in prisons and on college campuses, in churches, living rooms and small venues, across the United States and in parts of Latin America, building friendships with every kind of person I met along the way. 

I learned about the Civil Rights movement in school growing up but I first witnessed sustained direct action and organizing by Aymara communities in Bolivia volunteering there with an organization after college. I learned about mutual aid in self-determining faith communities too, subverting what seemed to me impossible circumstances of living in violence infested and intentionally abandoned places, neighborhoods, forests, mining towns, watersheds, in the United States and Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Burundi and South Africa.  My socioeconomic and political analysis matured and complicated as I traveled and encountered realities intentionally hidden from me in the comfortable bubble of Boulder, Colorado. I started to understand international trade policies, the reality of people moving across borders throughout history, and the world ending consequences of capitalism in environmental destruction and indigenous genocide. I started to understand my own participation in, and my terrible entanglement with these things and more.

As a kind of traveling religious leader, I also worshiped at over 1,000 churches in 12 different countries of many different Christian lineages and socioeconomic and cultural contexts. I had been raised with vague Christian language in the home but was not raised with a meaningful connection to a church. Neither did I have any challenging baggage when it came time for my own religious exploration. I was baptized Catholic as an infant, my mother appeasing her working-class Catholic parents. After my parent’s divorce, they both turned towards religion to try and make meaning of their life. I ended up at a small Lutheran church long enough to go through confirmation classes and root myself in theologies of grace and forgiveness. I studied comparative religion as an undergraduate because religion impacted the lives of women and wars as much as anything else in the world, as far as I could tell.

When I came into my 30s, I took time to reflect on my experiences, my evolving faith and touring songwriter life by going to grad school and working through a Master of Divinity program, still driven to understand what people believe and why they believe and wondering if I still believed anything. All those years traveling, engaging different expressions of faith and organizing, I felt Christianity as a whole was a bigger obstacle to love, justice and healing in the world than a proponent for it. And still, the small and transformative communities, bursting with beauty and possibility, that also seemed sprinkled throughout the world, for which their commitment to community and work for justice was clearly, and deeply, rooted in their Christian faith, was not something I could turn away from.

After my time at Harvard Divinity School and the adoption of my child in Boston (an unexpected in-breaking that kept us there an additional two years) we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia and I pursued ordination in the United Church of Christ. Remaining committed to interfaith collaboration, I wanted to locate myself in a lineage of inclusion and progressive politics along the spectrum of christianities. I was ready to engage the new movement rising in the U.S. I found myself being invited to places like Ferguson and Standing Rock for specific actions of solidarity and witness because of the communities and individuals I had worked with over the years. I went to D.C. and got arrested on behalf of undocumented Dreamers[3] and participated in humanitarian work and actions along the U.S./Mexico border. Finally, in 2017, when the threat of white supremacist violence was increasing in Charlottesville where I lived at the time, I supported my community and invited some of my own network of leaders and friends to organize with us. I was no longer touring full time but through all of this I wrote songs. I wrote liturgy. I created space for community events as part of intentional cultural organizing in religious and nonreligious space (though drawing clear lines between them is challenging).

Two years after the violence and ongoing trauma of the unite the right rally in Charlottesville[4], and the daily organizing against white supremacist violence, we moved. I live now in the borderlands, on occupied Tohono O’odham land in what is called Tucson, Arizona, where I have settler ties. My maternal grandparents are buried here and my mother died here in 2019. After organizing in Charlottesville, after the move across the country, after my mother died, after a devastating divorce, after the COVID 19 pandemic, after the 2020 uprisings, after, during, with/in…I had more questions.

My religion and the communities of faith I was a part of were supposed to be the foundation of my spiritual formation but they revealed my relationality to the world only in part and with bias. Being in community organizing spaces did more for my faith and relationalities, my spiritual formation, than any church curriculum. However, I understand church, at its best, as a cultural and sometimes community organizing space and I certainly understand embodied solidarity[5] through the lens of my faith and the entanglement of love. I also gained access to many activist spaces through my religious leadership and artistry. Church and organizing and artistry, faith and solidarity work, they are not separate. I feel I owe a great deal to the faith communities that shared their treasures with me, from Latin American Pentacostales, to Indigenous Bolivian churches, to Norwegian missionaries in Peru, to Brazilian Evangelicos, to Catholic Workers in Philadelphia, and faith communities crossing borders in many parts of the world. I also owe so much to contemporary social movements I have been a part of, led by many Black and Indigenous and Latine womxn and those most marginalized by racialization and patriarchy. Finally, I am where I am today because of the wisdom and friendship of many, as I toured, as I studied, as I sought to understand all the love that holds us, despite all that continues to be severed.  I stand before my songs and my liturgical writing, the artifacts of my own becoming, stretched out against a timeline of my life so far and I see an opportunity for learning, to interrogate, to know myself again perhaps, and let new knowledge emerge as to how the stories and relationships I have practiced have changed and transformed through all of this.

Research Paradigm

Spirituality, as I am defining it for this research, comes from liberative traditions of Christianity, ecofeminism and process theology. It asserts, as quantum physics reveals, that all life is interconnected and everything one does impacts the rest. Paulo Freire knew liberation was for oppressor and oppressed alike because they were connected and both dehumanized by the act of oppressing. In this sense, Freire’s work has a great deal to do with spiritual formation. So does the work of bell hooks, who writes “awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination” (hooks, 2001). This research is ultimately driven by love, grounded in a love ethic,[6] because I believe we are all interconnected, entangled even, that it is both perilous and hopeful to be as such. And in this state as we are, demonstrating living relationship requires a love ethic, understanding what will nurture and protect life.[7]

I am also committed to decolonial frameworks and theology, abolitionist praxis and feminist politics. As a scholar-activist I bring into relation “the experimentation of my academic research…with the experimentation of [my] political action (Wilson Gilmore, 2023).”[8] Decolonial and anti-oppression frameworks and theologies ask me to locate myself, my stories, and relationships, with/in the systems of power even as I struggle against and imagine beyond them. Decolonial theological practice demands recognition and critique of theologies that legitimized, and even produced, relationship severing and oppressive systems. It furthermore seeks out and collaborates with Indigenous ways of knowing. Finally feminist and abolitionist theories and praxis help me (re)member what has been severed, and a possible future apart from the current constraints of world ending systems and politics.

These frameworks, critical theories and theologies nuance my research question as I approach it primarily through understanding my own journey, experiences, and process of spiritual formation. I am not asking “How does spiritual formation happen?” in a vacuum. I am looking at my own life events, a process informed by many beginnings and becomings, complicity, entanglement, freedom making, critical theories, theologies and frameworks. As such, I am looking at how one who has been socialized in racial capitalism, recruited into the ongoing settler colonial project in the US, and been severed from ancestral and cultural knowledge by the same, can heal and build capacity for something different? I seek this knowledge to inform my abolitionist organizing as the problem must be addressed to make way for abolitionist futures. I seek this knowledge to help us survive, overcome, repair, and heal from the anti-Christ death dealing movement of white Christian Nationalism. I seek this knowledge to bring a spiritual analysis to our political realities and work on the North American continent. I seek this knowledge to be a source of possibility and transformation for others. I seek this knowledge to contribute to decolonial and abolitionist feminist lineages, arts-based scholarship and practice-led theology.

Methodologies

            Patricia Leavy defines arts-based research as, “a set of methodological tools that adapt the tenants of the creative arts and can be used in the research process at any phase or all phases: data collection, data analysis, representation, or for the entire inquiry.”[9]  I am presenting three genres of practice-led arts research in this dissertation: songwriting and performance, antifascist organizing, and life writing. While each creative practice is my method of data collection, exploring my research question as to how the stories and relationships we live and practice change over time, the creative work itself is also a presentation of scholarship engaged through my coursework in theology and gender and women’s studies. For example, one of the songs I wrote in this process is about biopower as a genocidal strategy of the settler colonial state. However, I use none of these words, from settler colonial studies and feminist theories that I learned reading Jasbir Puar, in the song. I write about Gaza and about Apache Stronghold, in a relational and narrative context. I considered the history and present reality of the colonization of land and people as I prayed and wept and then wrote and sang and then performed this song for others. I suppose, then, prayer and grief too are also woven into my methodology. At its best, arts-based research respects the whole human process. This is why I have been drawn to it.

My songs, organizing and life writing are not cited as academic papers are. But as all of this works grows out of my own continuing education and growing, I strive to reference the works informing my thinking and weaving in the bibliography here. In addition to the theories and theologies that inform my thinking, the life I continued to live over these four years, the ever-changing relationalities of my days and years and the multitude of stories I entered in to in this time, saturate this work. The movement to #StopCopCity,[10] efforts to shut down a violent and deadly jail where I live, the multiple crisis arising from government repression and criminalization of migrants, efforts to save Oak Flat from a multinational mining company nearby - the ceremonial site of the Apache people to the north of where I currently live, and local efforts to end the genocide in Palestine saturated my conversations and prayers as I have engaged all of these things. My singing and songwriting were very much “praying with every heart.”[11]

I am presenting three categories of research, but they are deeply interwoven. It is hard for me to tell you exactly where one thing stops and another starts. It is only for the purpose of this project I am separating songwriting from organizing, though I constantly write songs for and from my organizing spaces. I have separated life writing from songwriting too, though songs often flow from or into works of memoir, visionary fiction, or theological reflection. And this entire effort easily falls within the realm of cultural organizing, which celebrates and cultivates power in our liberative traditions and practices, while pursuing change and transformation at the level of collective and even subconscious beliefs, symbols and stories.[12] This creative work is always being produced because these practices are part of the methodology of my life.

Now, I have my creative work, my data collection. The analysis and conclusion(s) will be drawn through interpretive, interrogative and questioning ways of knowing.[13] Because, as I stated in my background, my relationalities are experienced only in part and with bias, I expect two things to be true in my findings. First, that I still and always will understand my relationalities in part and with bias, and two, I will recognize growth and find new insight and ways of understanding that growth, its mechanisms and process. Or, I will have better questions.

[1] Agender can mean the absence of gender or the transcendence of gender in a way that opens the possibility to more than a singular understanding.  “Womxn” with an “x” is inclusive of all genders and centers the experience of women. 

[2] “Liturgy” means “work of the people” and connotes here writing used for religious community practice, usually for worship but not always.  For example, I have written liturgies for protest and vigils as well.

[3] Explain Dreamers

[4] Say something

[5] “Embodied solidarity” came into my regular vernacular through the work and testimony of Dr. Larycia Hawkins, who was fired from an Evangelical college after wearing a hijab in solidarity with Muslim women who were increasingly being targeted for hate crimes and harassment (Hawkins, 2015).

[6] The love ethic bell hooks revered and taught: care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge (hooks, 2001).

[7] The Bronx Community Research Review Board was the first research space where I encountered an explicit love ethic statement. In “What We Not Finna Do: Respectfully Collaborating with Skinfolk and Kinfolk in Black Feminist Participatory Action Research,” the authors establish their grounding in Black liberation and feminist traditions and locate their research within the trajectory of those traditions, for the love and liberation of Black people.

[8] Gilmore, R.W. (2023). Abolitionist Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso. P 97.

[9] (Micheong Cheong, 2024).

[10] Cite the faith leader letter

[11] Carvalhaes, C. Praying With every Heart.

[12] Howe, BUANW

[13] Rolling 2014, Jan 25, Interview on Arts-Based Research - Dr. James Haywood Rolling, Jr., with Dr. Sharif Bey, BRAZIL, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd3ezkSPzAE