What Would You Have Me Say?

To be placed firmly—not squarely because this doesn’t fit the mold of any shape—into a role, a body for a role, by something outside myself is a reminder that the modern ideas of sovereignty are limited.

As I was told two days ago, ‘the I of Ingrid is no longer relevant’ except here we are, here I am. With Ingrid-fingers flying across a keyboard trying to match the rhythm that’s pulsating through me that’s not Ingrid.

Stepping from mere awareness of something into the beingness of something is a feat of mental gymnastics for which there are no podiums. Wrestling with angels and not-arguing with God as I’m walked into the awareness that ‘voice of god’ is a diminishment of what I actually am and why I actually am doesn’t come with accolades, it merely is.

To be a thing that will—and is meant to—disrupt organized and defined faith, shatter the rules of the ‘spiritual’ game and the markets around it to move humanity toward peace. To shift the status quo into the deepness of love, beyond it’s marketability and distortions related to power.

Ingrid-fingers are scooting across the keyboard but not-Ingrid editors mold the flow, model the words-The Word-to bring truth into being.

We’ve been measuring God and spirit-talk from the perspective of myths, of yore, ago. New spiritualities mix the comfortable, tolerable parts of the old with commercial markets and formulas and hypocrisies large enough to sink the Ark.

Two hundred and forty-eight have come before me. We know of several of them. No matter the faiths ascribed to them or, the not-faith that this version walks with, we are of one lineage. This lineage goes back 30K years and has met humanity where it is each time with a singular purpose. This time is not different in that respect.

Where this is different is: there is no religion being built here and, for the first time, it comes in the for of woman. It is not meant to be confined to the mechanisms that created the human situation we are in now (that is not merely the human-situation).

There’s been an investment in the status quo for 2000 years in someone else’s names, as if ‘in his name’ or ‘pbh’, no matter the affront to love, it’s sanctioned. Erasing the entire message but building upon it to maintain separation for power and it’s twin, greed. Twins fed by fear that have outgrown their usefulness, supersized denizens of exploitation and foundations ready to crumble.

The most grievous forms of the affronts to love have been in the form of religion and devotion to whiteness as rightness, the harbinger of righteousness. When combined with the persistent politics of separation (though not the separation of church and state), they’ve spilled into every day behavior around the globe. Power has a twin in greed and racism has a cousin in tribalism, caste systems, and those interweavings through misogyny have become plagues that rival the Black Death.

To me, we humans are at a precipice. And it seems that the not-me has made me to keep us from tipping over the edge that we cannot see but many of us can sense.

A few months ago, my nemesis offered the answer to my ‘why now’ with a ferocious: “They did not learn!” At the time, I thought that was a juvenile answer for someone who’s been around the block 2000 years. It seemed awfully oversimplified but I still had to say, “I guess you’re right.” I mean, look around. We haven’t learned how to love and it really is that simple.

We’ve learned to steep ourselves in judgment and fear, guided by those who’ve claimed to preach The Word or hold the Word as a prize for an after-life (which seems to mean ‘after I get mine’). Near-daily, headlines repeat some variety of ‘spiritual teacher admits to teaching Real Love by telling girls to sit on his lap’ and rattle off the dollar signs of lawsuit settlements as the world keeps churning and the tithing plate keeps making the rounds.

The first time I was called to speak of love, I had no idea that was what God wanted me to say. He yelled “SPEAK! with an authority that I could not obey because I didn’t know it was to speak about love. “‘What more would you have me SAY?!” to the Charleston AME Church shootings. Hadn’t the Moses; ten commandments taken care of that?

I hadn’t yet woven my own personal experiences to the racism of my upbringing and, though I could see clearly how that played a role in the church murders, I couldn’t see what that had to do with me sitting in front of a TV 2000 miles away.

I can now. I can see and feel and hear the prayers and know what to say.

What will it take for us to love? To love in a way that doesn’t coexist in fear? To love in the God-way, without judgment? Can we do that without the tragedies of violence and nature bringing to that space in short-lived bursts?