Faith Matters Network

To connect,
To bring together.  
To link people, knowing that certain connections spark new possibilities.
To bridge divides.
To be rooted in history while imagining the future.  
To occupy edge spaces,
To be edge people.  

Rev. Jennifer Bailey and Micky ScottBey Jones are edge people.  They are fostering connections, bridging divides, and instilling spiritual sustenance and healing within social movements. Connection was a common thread throughout my conversation with these two amazing women. It is one of their core values. A value that shines bright throughout all they do.  

Jen is the Founder and Executive Director and Micky is the Director of Resilience and Healing Initiatives at Faith Matters Network, a womanist led organization focused on personal and social transformation.  

They are doing so much incredible work to bring people together in communities throughout this country and to accompany leaders in this leaderful movement.  

Talking with them reminded me why I love talking and working with people of faith.  These conversations offer depth and meaning. What drives you? What gives you hope? What is the source of your resilience?  How do we forgive more and love better? There is a unique depth and quality of relationship that can come out of a faith context.  

Jen occupies the edge spaces within the Black Church, faith and justice and social entrepreneur worlds.  Micky comes from the post-Evangelical context and spent years as a birth doula. This conversation of edge spaces made me reflect on the communities with which I am a part.  The Unitarian Universalist faith, advocates, organizers and social justice builders, social workers and social service providers, and outdoor enthusiasts. How do we honor all the different places where we have ties and help weave them together?

How do we be grounded in who we are?  Be anchored in our histories, our bodies, our emotions?  

Micky leads the healing work at Faith Matters.  She talked about the never-ending work of healing and the need to bring healing into our relationships. The messy, sustained and consistent work needed in order to create a different way of being together. To birth a different kind of community.

What practices do we put in place for the ongoing work of healing?

And what does healing have to do with edge people and bridging divides?  We need to know ourselves - be connected with our bodies, our emotions, our histories - in order to be able to meet another where they are at.  I think this is especially true for those of us who are white, straight, cisgender, or occupy other privileged identities.

I walk through the world with blinders.

Being aware of the limits of my vision and understanding helps me look in a more thoughtful way, but I can't always see. My vantage point is limited by my experience. Without learning from others, whose experience of life differs from mine; without learning from people whose experiences are often made to be invisible by our society, my understanding of the world will remain small, segmented and disfigured.

But sometimes my fears keep me stuck.  They keep me from reaching out. They keep me from trying to connect.  I worry my privilege will make me sound ignorant or shallow. I worry that I can't see the connection to the core problem and therefore real possibilities.

So what?  I need to step out anyway.

Micky and Jen talked about persistence. The white people they like working with mess up sometimes, but they keep showing up anyway. How do I keep building relationships with people who live on the margins. Who occupy edge spaces and can offer me a new vantage point from which to see the world.  I know I am going to sound ignorant or stupid sometimes. But I must keep putting myself out there and taking the risk. That is how I learn. This is how we grow.

Faith Matters Network, with their friends Hollaback and The Dinner Party, co-organize The People’s Supper, which are dinner parties designed to help bridge divides throughout the country. These are usually small gatherings, but are sometimes large dinners, the biggest exceeding 500 people in one room.  The People’s Suppers are places where people can have deep, meaningful conversations with people who see and experience the world different from them. I look forward to participating in one in DC this fall. You can sign-up to host one in your area too.

In order to keep putting ourselves out there and building meaningful connections we need to be grounded in who we are and what we have to offer. This is why I often ask people, how do you stay grounded in your gifts and what rituals do you have that help sustain you?  

Jen goes to church. Her church is a deeply inter-generational space.  She spoke about being in a weekly prayer line with 70 year old women.  Hearing how they talk about God. Particularly people who grew up in the rural south and understand a god that can make a way out of no way.  Jen talked about how there are regular reminders embedded in the community she is a part. This is a place she can take off some of the pretension and just be.  

A place to just be.  

And to be in Relationship.  

Micky talked about the sacredness of relationships.  Of the gift of having a hot meal with her little people.  She also has a lot of different amazing and often shifting rituals. She dances!  She hoola-hoops! She has a gratitude mug where she writes something she's thankful for regularly and then takes them out and reads them once a year.

Movement.  
Meditation.
Writing.  

I have always journaled and now am using a ritualized Proprioceptive Writing Method that grounds me and is training me to listen to my own voice.  

I am so interested in these rituals that people create, for I think they are part of what allow us to be persistent and present in this harsh world.  

Jen and Micky talked about how healing is not a destination.  “There is not a place to get free or healed, period.” We need to stay at it and keep working.  And it can’t stay only personal. How do we do the work of healing between people? How do we deal with people who do harm?  How do we hold each other accountable and also create space to forgive and always stand in love? How do we create a public discourse about redemption?  

Redemption.  

Jen, a Christian preacher, uses this word with ease.  A word that doesn’t hold as much meaning to me, but the power of the language popped in our conversation.  She talked about creating a public discourse of Redemption and Reparations. Creating a culture where everyone is set-free.  A culture where we tend to our relationships. Where everyone can be saved. Where those who have done harm can repair the harm.  Where those harmed are compensated and made whole again.

Here is where the connection between healing and building relationships across difference becomes so apparent.  

How do we set-up relationships that offer redemption and reparations?  How do we forgive ourselves and forgive those who have harmed us? How do we recognize when we have hurt others and figure out what will help repair the damage done.

Let us stay grounded in who we are.

Connect to what gives us faith.

And keep repairing and strengthening the connections between us.