Revisiting Enfleshing Witness: Dr. Patrick Reyes
The following is a lightly edited transcript and a talk from Dr. Patrick Reyes at our 2021 Enfleshing Witness gathering.
Patrick preaches to connect with the ancestors. Talk with hummingbirds. Run with coyotes. Celebrate his community and dream of futures not yet realized for our descendants and our world. As a spiritual practice and discipline, it is his honor to listen to the voices of the spirits, human and non human, and advocate for all those seeking freedom.
Patrick doesn't preach to anyone. He preaches in congregations and churches, certainly. But the spiritual act of preaching? That has taken him to places like synagogues. Schools, libraries, literal wildernesses across the U.S. If Saint Francis preached to the birds, Patrick preaches to the cactus, butterflies, and hummingbirds that cohabitate the desert where he lives.
And as we work with young adults and doctoral students of color at the Forum for Theological Exploration, he does his best to embody communal preaching at all gatherings, a collective preaching voice, where none of us preaches solo. Communal preaching draws on the wisdom of the group and names the emerging beauty of our collective voice.
Hey, what's going on? I pray that each of you are well. I'm grateful for this Enfleshing Witness conference. I'm Dr. Patrick Reyes. I'm here from my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and I want to open with a story.
A few years ago, I was charged with helping host, convene, and design a conference about Indian mass incarceration. Talking about the locked up bodies, black and brown, indigenous bodies in this country.
And I was sitting on a call, and I was thinking about this issue of bodies because we were, as BIPOC folks, gathering together to say we needed to address this issue: That where I'm from, 1 in 4 African Americans and 1 in 5 Latinos were being locked up, and that is not okay. That is a violation of human rights.
We are stealing the lives of purpose from people. We were having a deep conversation about this, and then something tricky happened. As we started talking about the statistics, we lost the names, the places, the family members I have, and others had who had been locked up, incarcerated.
We forgot about the humanity of the people we were talking about.
We transitioned to say, ‘Well, who is most affected? Who needs to be free?’ And this just happened to be the same year that we were locking up children at our border.
So here I was as the Latino in this group, who was talking about this, and the way it affects my community. Naming for them ( on a call similar to this), where I was yelling at the top of my lungs, THIS is our problem! These are our babies they are locking up at the border!
And I'm yelling this on the call. Talking about these issues, about the children who are locked up, who are just a few generations removed from the experience I had as a Latino, born in this country, and being on this land and on this soil, indigenous to this space. That they were locking up my primos, my primos’ kids, my kids’ family.
I close the laptop, the call,( just like this recording). I get off this Zoom call like so many of us have been on.
And I turn around.
And there's my son (who's only in kindergarten at the time) listening to me yell stats, facts, figures, solutions, and challenges to how we were going to free our people.
And I see on his face, absolute terror.
He is scared for his life. And he asked me, “Pa, are they going to take you away? Are they going to lock us up?”
And I think about this moment where I have these babies, these young, our kids, this next generation, my son hearing this, and making the connection that so many of us on this call couldn't make that these bodies were our bodies.
As Christians, as people of faith, these bodies were our bodies.
And one of the challenges I had, especially with my son, (because I’m a Christian leader, someone raised in the Church, and his mom is Jewish) he had just learned about Yom HaShoah that same day he was thinking about the annihilation of the Jewish people.
So here he has Latinos locked up, indigenous to this land, people who have experienced genocide, and kids locked at the border. His three main identities. They're tied up into his imagination. They have faced genocide, annihilation, and incarceration.
And I think how have we let this happen? That this has shaped our children's imagination. We say things like children are the future, but do we mean it when we have stolen their future, their purpose, because of the damage we're doing to this planet and the moral injury we're causing when we let other children, regardless of race, get incarcerated, abused, violated?
Not allowing them to have the freedom to dream those big dreams. To be able to imagine those futures that they want for themselves.
I think about myself as a Christian leader as I read the scripture: “Let the children come, do not hinder them for theirs is the kingdom.” This is Jesus talking to us.
Let the children come, do not hinder them. And we have hindered a generation. We have stolen lives of meaning and purpose. If for nothing else, just to allow them to dream their biggest dreams.
So what's our call? What are we going to do as a church, as a people who are called to call people to life, to call people to dream those big dreams, to imagine a world that they can thrive and inhabit. Maybe even dream of the resurrection.
Rubem Alves, who is a famous theologian, writes that adults imagine the cross, it's deep suffering. Children imagine the resurrection. They can go to that place. How do we cultivate and dream up that imagination?
That's my question. How do we do this in the age of COVID 19, in the age of environmental destruction, in the age of racism and violation of the state against black and brown and indigenous bodies in this country? How do we do this work? How do we do this work faithfully?
That's our charge. This is not a preaching moment. You don't get an answer from me. You get a charge. A question.
That's our task as the church to answer that. To go forth and let the children come. Do not hinder them. How are we gonna remove the barriers for them thriving? That is my preaching challenge.
That is what's coming out of my flesh to you, the church. How do we do this work together?
I pray that we find a way.
I love you. And I love your children. How do we do this in a way that allows them to dream and imagine the futures that we know they are worthy of?
This is our work. This is the church's work. Let us enflesh the witness required to create a future that our kids deserve.
We are excited to announce a new chapter in the Enfleshing Witness movement: “Enfleshing Witness: Rewilding Otherwise Preaching.” Learn more about this new grant opportunity and sign-up to stay connected as the project unfolds.