Al Owski’s Reviews > This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us > Status Update

“In Beloved, Toni Morrison famously writes, "Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another." She nods toward a process by which our liberation is both found and operated within. You may very well find the Table, but when will you take the first bite? Will you look up and really see yourself?”

“You can’t talk someone into their liberation. Telling someone to just get free is like telling someone to stop grinding their teeth in the night. It is not kindness. Freedom requires patience with ourselves, as it takes time to feel at peace if all you’ve ever known is insecurity. It’s the process of your soul learning to trust again—trust that it can rest and love and be still without being destroyed.”

“To be liberated spiritually is to commune with and seek God without fear of alienation if we do not reach the same conclusions as our neighbor. It is to become spiritual creatives. Who are we that we would demand certainty or clarity of mystery?”

“A life that is holy is a life that allows for all of your uncertainties, your curiosities and unbelief. That doesn’t just allow for them but holds them as sacred. Spirituality that is not permitted these liberties is merely subjugation. It is not in protection of the divine; it is in protection of fragile people who are unable to allow spiritual freedoms without their own spirituality feeling threatened.”

“Whenever I become uncertain of which direction liberation lies in, I ask myself to tell the truth. Not that I am capable of comprehending what any ultimate Truth is. But I am capable of at least telling the truth about what I believe to be true—my inmost convictions, desires, or even an embodied revelation. The truth that rattles in my bones.”

“And there are also voices who deeply love us but are unable to exist in the tension of who we are and what we believe and who they desire us to be and what they desire for our beliefs. This is the life of a human, particularly a human with any concern for belonging or survival—we are dragged with such a force in so many disparate directions that our souls, disoriented, are unable to find their way back to center.”

“There will always be people who are threatened by freedom in another person. Who have something to gain from our bondage.”

“Traditionally, Western Christianity has replaced Christian habits of storytelling with singular and all-encompassing testimonies of a person’s conversion to faith. This is sad to me. We must recover a habit of very specific story exchange and shared memory if we are to have robust liberation.”

“Few would deny that storytelling is core to what it means to be human.”

“To have artifacts that possess our memories ... grants memory a body, something physical that you can grab hold of. I think this helps a person to feel in control of their past. But it also makes it so that others can bear witness to the memory themselves, experience it in their own way. When a person or group has no artifacts to reconstruct their stories, things slip away across generations. People slip away.”