A collection of prayer, poetry, and spiritual practice centering the Black interior world, from the New York Times bestselling author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies
“A true spiritual balm for our troubled times.”—Michael Eric Dyson, author of What Truth Sounds Like
For years, Cole Arthur Riley was desperate for a spirituality she could trust. Amid ongoing national racial violence, the isolation of the pandemic, and a surge of anti-Black rhetoric in many Christian spaces, she began dreaming of a more human, more liberating expression of faith. She went on to create Black Liturgies, a digital project that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body.
In this book, she brings together hundreds of new prayers, along with letters, poems, meditation questions, breath practices, scriptures, and the writings of Black literary ancestors to offer forty-three liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community. Inviting readers to reflect on their shared experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair, and creating rituals for holidays like Lent and Juneteenth, Arthur Riley writes with a poet’s touch and a sensitivity that has made her one of the most important spiritual voices at work today.
For anyone healing from communities that were more violent than loving; for anyone who has escaped the trauma of white Christian nationalism, religious homophobia, or transphobia; for anyone asking what it means to be human in a world of both beauty and terror, Black Liturgies is a work of healing and empowerment, and a vision for what might be.
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Cole Arthur Riley continues to show that she is one of this time’s most powerful and potent writers on the body and spirit. What she shares is at once quiet and honest, intimate and profound. The prayers in this book seem to rise from our own cracks and breaks, from the deep well of Blackness itself. They remind us to pray only to the God that could know us and love us, and that intended us to be this beautiful and this human.
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Prentis Hemphill, author of What It Takes to Heal and founder of the Embodiment Institute