Divinity Within Me
Being in a nonsectarian graduate school in a secular university during this horrific time in history, currently during a world fraught with spiritual warfare of both individual and collective peace, has been a challenging and transformative spiritual experience. I hope this project documents what I’m inspired to produce for this degree, to ceremonially share my experience here at Harvard during a time when I’ve been starving to make sense of the world and make art and research for healing.
My theology, a spirit lead testimony of my life journey to now being integrated with a new ability to express and communicate organically, allowing me to share life’s stories, through my personal and public narrative, using stories, songs, poetry, and cooking, allowing words and ideas from the divine to fill me daily, as a vessel for my vocation calling for health through veganism and a commitment to a plant-based lifestyle for the possibility of peace for our planet.
During this time, throughout my journey to finding plant-based living as my calling, and through my pursuit to focus my academic research on this work, I became enamored with the healing of through testimony, allowing moments of gratitude and daily contemplation to be led intuitively and somatically to channel the spirit into a flow state with every day, in moments of deep reflection. These moments feel like they come from the spirit within and in communion with something bigger, leading me along with others to share this unified feeling of life through the cadence and the rhythm of recipe writing, journaling, poetry, and songwriting. Much like the sense of how the father, son, and spirit move through us to create life itself; health, food, and faith are also a triune connection.
Allowing moments of reflection to move me in this way has uncovered and brought together years of my devotion to writing, speaking, and inspiring people through video to help connect and make sense of and cope with life and commune with the divine oneness that is our universally shared consciousness. It is an honor of my lifetime to have been in such a highly resourced space like Harvard to produce this research.
I have always been a devotee and follower of music of all kinds, from gospel to hip hop, especially in its social and cultural contexts, and yet never officially musically trained in any way or practiced, until now. As a novice and very curious ethnomusicologist, I examine the ritual of making all art as a social-spiritual-communal process to understand what and where society and culture, along with spirit is within us uniquely and universally and what it means to me as a wholistic health practitioner and Christ-inspired creator. Art is where I feel most authentically myself and what I crave more consistently than all else, especially while producing it.
My personal theology is interdisciplinary, as such, it is no surprise that my career thus far as a chef, host, and producer, and my deep belief in food and faith, naturally informs the way we feed ourselves on and beyond the plate. Through my research at Harvard Divinity School and Harvard Medical School, I discovered a rare biological factor within myself, the ability to be moved by art and music by heightened emotions through a unique phenomenon called frisson which links the mind, body, and spirit connection and inspires my further research within integrative health.
In the words of my academic mentor, “Your theology should be as deep as your religion is broad” and my experience through this course and project has been one of the most enriching and necessary of my entire lifetime and has truthfully been life-defining. This is my attempt at being a radical human seeking out Christ in my everyday experiences and consciousness. If we have something to give, the world is urgently encouraging us to give it to society, and that I vow to do.
My personal life experiences examine how our future eclipses our past. Remember the past informs our present – and this project informs a musical and spiritual evolution of this integration that is taking place within, and is an example of taking a style of the past and using it to inform the now. One of the most important places where theology is illustrated in the secular world is in the beauty of aesthetics, for instance within music, culture, food, art, fashion, and media, which are all areas of my academic, professional, and vocational research and inspiration for the body of work. And, our calling, that which is our work, is defined by how we play. Just as Karl Barth makes a connection between reconciliation and resurrection, so do all of us as individuals in society who must reconcile life through the resurrection of how we integrate what we’ve been through into why we’re here to offer the world back in service of our god-called gifts.
Liberation is manifested in language, the mundane, the miraculous, and music and all art. Universally, I see that Jesus came to show us the optimal divine human example, made in God’s image. And Jesus was and always is for the liberation of the oppressed, in that Christ is always represented in the least and the best. As a bridge builder, Christ for any one of us becomes the universal consciousness of the greatness that is possible to tap into within. We only understand something universally if we understand it specifically, and thus the oneness of consciousness can only be felt specifically if we tap into it as a known primal spiritual present universality. When we see and know our true authentic healthy selves, we can know and see others right like Christ. What I have come to understand in such a holy and artistic way through the study of theology is that art of all forms, from cooking to storytelling to poetry and music making, are my ways of integrating the past into the present, and a way to answer God’s will for my life to serve in this world. Much like musically, the blues is creative work about the pain. We wake anew each day, again, to an opportunity for reconciliation through integration and resurrection through divine creation.
The study of theomusicology is less important than the idea that God is in the music, and I would agree given my curiosity to allow music to be played through me from the spirit, which illuminates that personally for me that the music that is within us is reflected through my work. For Barth in Church Dogmatics, vol. 4.3.1, (114-125), he discusses the parables of the kingdom which resonates deeply for me and is the spirit behind my final research here. “We can and must be prepared to encounter ‘parables of the kingdom’ in the full biblical sense, not merely in the witness of the Bible and the various arrangements, works, and words of the Christian Church, but also the secular sphere, i.e., in the strange interruption of the secularism of life in the world. In the narrow corner in which we have our place and task, we cannot but eavesdrop on the world at large. We have ears to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd even there too, distinguishing it from other claimant voices, and therefore, as we hear it, not moving out of the circle and ministry of His Word, but placing ourselves the more definitely and deeply within it, that we may be the better and more attentive and more convincing servants of this Word.” (117) Throughout the readings in this course, it was clear that Christ is always at the center, as the truth and the way, that all will be forever, and incarnation can come in any form. It was most fascinating to learn to pay attention to how creation speaks from anywhere, especially through art, animals, and food, because that is where we can merge the secular with the sacred, and this is why I decided to experiment with my project in a personal and artistic way.
I have explored in this research that Cone would use the language “to testify” and that Barth would use the language “to put Christ at the center”. I would argue for my own theology that both are true in my lived experiences, as I have seen, one can only testify through the spirit of God, and as a fractal of Christ inside each one of us, as we are all sentient beings. In James Cone’s “You Oughta Been There” and Learning from my Critics” in Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody, 92-97 he states “I wasn’t writing for rational reasons based on library research; I was writing out of my experience, speaking for the dignity of black people in a white supremacist world. I was on a mission to transform self-loathing Negro Christians into black-loving revolutionary disciples of the Black Christ.” (92) Cone’s main passion regarding liberation theology is to give voice to the poor and oppressed. He believes that theology is not apolitical. Cone would urge us to see how our political perspectives shape religion. He goes on to share that “It was black fires burning in urban centers and at the foot of Southern lynching trees that created black theology.” (93) Cone wants to remind us that theology isn’t written by God, as we might believe or forget from time to time. “For me, the real issue, when talking with critics, black or white, is this: what will liberate black people to think for themselves, to fight for justice, and to embrace blackness? Justice and blackness are the heart of what black liberation theology is about.” (94) In actuality, theology is written by the people based on our experiences, perspectives, and even our politics based on our positions in the world around us. Our environment helps to define our theologies.
In James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues “Introduction,” 1-7; Chapter 1, important questions asked are “What did it mean to be a Child of God and a black slave in a white society” (3) and “What do the blues tell us about the black strivings for being?” (4) Cone states that “I am therefore convinced that it is not possible to render an authentic interpretation of black music without having shared and participated in the experience that created it.” (4) If this is the case, then black music as a genre, is the most popular genre of music, especially in the modern world, because it is felt universally by listeners who may or may not have lived the exact experiences as the musicians themselves. Cone goes on to state that “Black music is political because in its rejection of white cultural values, it affirms the political ‘otherness’ of black people. Through song, a new political consciousness is continuously created, one antithetical to the laws of white society.” (6) It seems Cone is asking us to consider rejecting white cultural values and the laws of white society that do not include that of “others”, namely brown and black lived experiences, or those that are akin to that experience, in addition to that of all the oppressed in this world. In Chapter 1: Section – The Souls of Black Folk explains that slave songs characterized as “sole American music” are related “to the cultural history of black people striving for humanity in a society of oppression and racial hatred.” (12) Cone goes on to say that “The songs were a reflection of this existence, and the measures used to deal with the dehumanization inherent in it.” (13) From my orientation, I’ll offer that just as Cone urgently reminds us through his work that race is socially constructed, so then is religion and lifestyle similarly, constructed based on its significations for the people that uphold it.
As such, in the spirit of James Cone, I am the blues, and my life is spiritual, for this notion and new way of thinking of my past and how it informs my present; I will forever be grateful for this beautiful interpretation that gives my past purpose for my present. I have learned here that all art, and for myself, most especially through making food and music, is a reflection of life itself. We locate the spirit within the art, within the trinity between God the Father, and Christ in us as the sons and daughters, and here, is where we find each other reflected in all of us, as us as one together, for one another. Literally we make up I-THO-WE of the sacred union of three that work together as one, holy, and fully, whole and complete as we overcome and transmute our meaning from experiences to an inspired and called divine life.
This research teaches so much about what it means to be the light in the darkness of my life for myself and for all others who I come in contact with, and I hope that this exploration of my gifts is just the beginning of what and how I can serve the world through my authenticity, courage, and tenacity. This course has shown me that when you have self-definition and are not defined by the world, you transcend what is happening to you to something much greater for us and others. James Baldwin explains that an ironic tenacity, a claiming a sense of yourself even in, and I would add, especially in, the midst of misery. Immanent transcendence is a god whose present in the reality of my life, but that God is irreducible to what we are. In James Baldwin’s, The Price of the Ticket, he encourages me to not forget about my past but to use it as fuel for my present as he reminds me to “Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can; examine all of it, travel your road again, and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself but know whence you came.” – and through this, I see my life as a story and as a song.
Through these texts and this research, it is clear that there’s an exchange and re-exchange among groups, but none of us escapes this. Centrally and universally our core is our shared consciousness, shared body of Christ, or a shared son-ship, said more poetically. God is and is within the community. We are not free until we are, WE. We must learn to replace the “me” with “we” to all be liberated and free. Musically, many artists blur and transgress the boundaries between the holy and the profane, the sacred and the secular, and I would urge us to consider doing the same culinarily. Some tap deeply into religious traditions, using music and verse to lead people in praise or in protest. Others draw on their creative genius to articulate the complex dimensions of Black suffering, or to offer bold visions of hope and new worlds of Black possibility. This universal hope shared in the article we read, Reconciliation and Liberation: Challenging a One-Dimensional View of Salvation by Jan Milic Lochman, shares that at the center of salvation is Jesus (as the center for Christians) and for all other Christ consciousness more broadly for a universal understanding. The story of Christ is not a coup because Christ can be, and is for all, universal salvation. 1 Tim 4:10 states “That is why we labor and strive because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, and especially of those who believe.” This reminds us to hope that Jesus is the savior of all, especially those who believe and that this is both universal and which makes this powerful universal truth, not just for some, but for all, always without end.
This research is pressing us to have a second sight and be open to hearing and learning how to be more literate spiritually, in our society. Within what we have learned together, it is imperative to catch and hear the spirit in the song, and in the songs of our own lives, others’ lives, and through all art itself. Through this observation and listening in, the divine is present and is presence, as the truth, and the way, through the darkness to love light. My life and this body of work in my way has been an autobiographical disclosure of my past brought back to life with more power and purpose than ever imaginable before. Coming to Harvard at this historic time in my personal life and as a historical time for our war-stricken society at large, has shown me personally, professionally, and collectively reflected on the global stage, that our world is hungry for mercy, grace, and change, a change that can only take place with each of our participation offered through our unique and individual vocation and devotional callings. My life, once as completely despondent, has been transformed through education, and my art forms as now divinely led by, and through, and with Christ by my side reflecting my light. For all of us, no matter where we are in life, hope is not grounded in our circumstances, but instead it informs our circumstances. Hope is richer and deeper than positivity. Faith does not adorn ambition; it is what redeems your ambition, and, I can say with wholehearted honesty that it certainly has and always will for me. Through the muse, one can access the optimal potential of what we are asked to offer the world in our own unique and important ways which shape us and others for the betterment of all beings including always, in service of peace, happiness, and justice for the Kingdom of God. By way of secular and spiritual sight, dancing with the divine through this rich and complex life, in my own lived experience, is the best illustration for living out our universal calling for a healthy life.