When I feel the most joyless is when it is most essential for me to practice joy, to seek out this Godly abundance. Not to disassociate. Not to demean my own suffering or the realities that have brought me low. But because God calls — compels — us to remember: the things that speak death over us don’t get the last word.

I spoke with a prophet and he shared with me a prophecy that he himself could not believe. He said, “Before the church is to become persecuted, women will first. Before the church is to share the good message, women will first. And before the church is anything, women will be everything for it.”

You could never have imagined this in your grief, when we shared our sorrows in the death of your husband and your son, my husband. In those days I had only begun to understand the power in the bonds of family and in the God you knew so well. I now know the Lord deeply and intimately, as if the Lord was my birth mother who laid me on her shoulder and rocked me to sleep.

While our communities continue to be surveilled, detained, and disappeared, mothers still rise in resistance. Rizpah, like the madres and abuelitas of Argentina, reminds us that empire’s greatest fear is women who refuse to forget.

By denying ourselves access to the halls of grief we also deny ourselves access to what is sacred, healing, and vital.

Hope, in [Advent], is located in the sense of seeing with greater clarity God’s interaction with creation both now and in the days to come.

Earlier this week, 13 speakers and creatives gathering virtually to enflesh the meaning of grief and hopeful longing and homegoing during Enfleshing Witness 2022. This is a collection of some of our favorite quotes.

As people of faith we are given frameworks and images of just such alternative ways of being with one another, socially, spiritually, and economically. The kingdom of God calls to us, beckons us, to reimagine our worth, our belonging, our bodies.