The Only Heaven We Make

Made Flesh

I was born on an island surrounded by the sea. I am possessed by what feels like an ancestral connection to salty bodies of water, to seas, to oceans. When I am lucky enough to commune with the ocean, I feel held – at home – embraced by something that I cannot see or understand but nonetheless feel. It is like a return, a memory, a blessing, a minor rebirth when I hold my breath, slip under water and resurface, air expanding in my lungs. I am praying, I am breathing, my breath entangled with all breath that ever was and will be.

I learned in primary school that my ancestors were stolen from the African continent and trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean, where they were sold for enslaved labor in the sugar cane fields. I know that my ancestors made it, against all odds, when I look in the mirror and see evidence of their existence in my eyes, my nose, my hair, my very flesh. I am a miracle, as they were miracles: they whose bodies were held captive, whose humanity was denied. Whose salvation and flourishing were inextricably bound to kin, to community, to rituals and songs of belonging, to moving silently under the cover of night to remember together a God who made them whole. Who made them free. 

In darkness, they also remembered the ones who gave themselves to the womb of the ocean, rather than dwelling shackled in the bowels of a ship destined for a world they could not imagine. They knew the ocean not only as womb, but also as grave. Even now, its salt remembers screams as well as songs: bodies violently thrown overboard, mothers torn from children, names swallowed before they could be spoken again. The ocean waters that cradled also witnessed terror. We cannot sanctify them without also mourning them.

And still – even there, Spirit was not absent.

I imagine the ancestors told stories of the ocean giving birth to the spirits of the slain ones, and how those spirits joined with the wind – how that wind made waves, how those waves are evidence that the wind, which is Spirit, cannot be controlled. 

The wind does not submit to hierarchy. It moves where it needs to, when it needs to, how it needs to. It doesn’t need papers, passports, or permission slips; it’s free. The Spirit is free.

I imagine they whispered stories to remind themselves that they, too, are wind, Spirit, baptized in the ocean as they were dragged on and off those ships. That they were reborn with the knowledge that the only heaven they’d ever know was the one they made together, tending to each other, choosing one another and the more-than-human world, again and again, in an economy organized for their erasure. And so, they shared secrets about how to survive with the land, with the sea, with each other. Even when their flesh was conscripted into forced labor, the image of God in them refused captivity. The Spirit in them was not consolation – it was resistance.

I can’t prove this is how it was. But I know this: my being here is miraculous. And I know:

• To choose community is to refuse economies and empires that depend on disposability.
• To choose community is to practice salvation now, reimagining an oppressive world.
• To choose community is to choose Love, to embody sacred responsibility and build networks of mutuality in which no sentient being is disposable.

That is being reborn. That is heaven. That’s the kin-dom of God. That is the work of the Spirit.

The Spirit does not retire, it rises again as courage, as compassion.

The same currents that once carried ships of extraction now move through global supply chains, immigration policies, and prison corridors. Empire has changed its instruments, but not its appetite, and still – and still –

that unrelenting Spirit is alive today in protest chants, in healing circles, in neighbors feeding neighbors, after-school programs, prisoner reentry programs, in the trilling sound of whistles….

That Spirit – ancient, ancestral, divine – still breathes. And if you feel it expanding in your chest, you are already being born again.

That same untamable breath is always finding new flesh.

Miracle of miracles.

For God so loved the world that she birthed…

Look!

Look in the mirror.

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Dwelling Among Us

Where has Spirit shown up for you and your community? How does Spirit show up now?

Where, in your own life, are you being invited to refuse disposability – to choose community over convenience, solidarity over safety?