When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, took her great heart to the Clearing…
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.
“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh…”
~ Toni Morrison, Beloved
This morning, I woke up thinking about Baby Suggs, holy. The title, holy, after her name, like a blessing. Baby Suggs, holy, calls the people into the Clearing. She tells the children to laugh, the men to dance, the women to cry — and then she calls them back into their bodies, into love, into the holiness of flesh that has survived what should have destroyed it. She was an unchurched preacher who loved her people and gave them permission to feel, to dance, to weep. There were horrors only too familiar to her and all her people, and she chose to respond in grace. In deep love and wisdom.
There are horrors around us now. There are terrors in our daily lives that keep us awake at night. In the middle of every other awful thing that is happening, there seems to be an overwhelming deconstructing going on en masse for people of my generation, who grew up during the James Dobson era of child discipline, where spankings were plentiful and breaking the will of the child was the goal.
This was my childhood, but I am currently grieving my father passing away in March of this year. There isn’t room or time for me to dissect that portion of my life. There isn’t room or time for me to turn my grieving into a courtroom. I don’t want to accuse my dad. I don’t want to reckon with that right now. I feel like he deconstructed too, from the rigid faith of his mother. He had to have looked at some of the teachings and moved in the other direction. He did. He loved primarily. That was his primary function. To love people into the Kingdom of God.
Somehow, we were disciplined. Me mostly because I was the most willful and full of my own ideas.
Somehow, I survived. Of course I did. And it was the teaching at the time. And there’s no justification for it now, looking back. Many pediatricians and child development experts now say clearly that physical punishment is harmful, not helpful. It is considered abuse today. It was not at the time. We do better when we know better.
I knew better. My children were not spanked. They were not put into corners. I read that when a child is having big emotions, that’s when they need us the most. They don’t need to be separated or scolded or sent away – they need to be brought close. I chose that path.
Today, I’m thinking of Baby Suggs, holy, who spoke to her people, and encouraged them to dance, to leap in the air and let the forest floor hear their stomps, who called to the children to laugh, to let their mothers hear them laugh, and who called the women to cry, to weep, and wring their hands, to let all their howls out into the arms of the trees, who could hold it all.
I am going gentle into this dark night. There are hard things. There are early childhood traumas. We all have them to one degree or another. Being born is traumatic all by itself. We are all here shocked and startled by our own existence, and the trials set before us.
We all have the ability to dance, to weep, and to laugh. Find a forest clearing. Sit a few. Then let the forest hear us as we bring our hearts and our holiness and our stomping feet.
Photo by Eric Muir on Unsplash
