When you find yourself in a place of grief or despair, but it's your job to get up and lead people in fierce love, how do you find your way through that to find your voice and inspiration?

That is such a good question. As professional faith folks, I think sometimes we get a message that we're supposed to put a facade on or a false self on. And what I have really come to understand in my 38 years in ministry, but my 21 years at middle, is how important it is to be authentic in how we feel, what we express, that this kind of love-neighbor dynamic, the love of ourselves, I think, demands honesty with ourselves and with the people around us. So my mother died, Tammy, eight years ago of lung cancer. And my dad died almost two years ago of ALS. And my community created such a container for me to be real. Like I grieved out loud. You know, I had to preach a sermon on Easter Sunday, right, right as she died. And I was like, I'm not sure I'm feeling about resurrection today. You know, let me just be honest with you about how hard this is. So what do I do? I try to model that love and truth go together. I try to model authentic storytelling, vulnerability, humor. You know, I laugh a lot at what's happening, but we're not going to make it if we're faking it. So a leader that can represent what is true invites other people to represent what is true. And that's how we're going to heal together. You referenced

yourself and I think included me as part of it, as we professional faith people. And what I notice is I lose and find faith all the time. And I wanted to hear from you what in your experience happens where you lose faith. If you do, maybe you don't. Maybe there's some kind of underlying aquifer in your life and it never goes away or maybe not, but then how you return and find it again and what that process is like for you.

Yeah, that's such a great question. You know, I say I'm a professional Christian. And maybe I should say I'm a professional universalist. But, you know, this is what I do for a living. I am standing in the space between the now, the not yet, between the ineffable and what's real, you know, what's tangible. And I believe fervently that there is a holy other that is both outside of us and inside of us. And then I would say we are also that holiness. And this is, you know, a woman who's 65, has gone through stages of faith, really, grew up in a family that was deeply Christian. And I would say the God my parents gave me to fall in love with was maybe like baby Jesus. between God and Jesus or if there was a difference, but I have a clear sense of my parents, almost like this is your sibling, God is your parent, and God is Jesus' parent, and we're your parents. And there was this kind of familial sense of, can be honest with this holy other, don't have to fake it with this holy other, this, you know, Jesus is my friend. What a friend we have in Jesus type of thing. And tell me, you know, that works when you're little and then you get to be a teenager and faith becomes about what you can't do, what you shouldn't do. You know, don't have sex, don't smoke, don't drink, don't, you know, that. And I think for most of us, our faith goes to kind of like the disciplinarian faith, you know. In all the stages of my life, you know, broken relationships, fired, burned down church, a fire I had as a young woman with all my stuff burned up on a moving van, the death of my parents, and honestly, just being Black in America. And the Southern Freedom Movement and kids sitting at lunch encounters and the violence of lynching. And, you know, it's tough out there. And there is, I would say my aquifer is joy. I would say maybe a family trait is, even though it's hard, we're going to put on some James Brown and dance to I Feel Good or get up off of that thing. We're going to barbecue. We're going to give in the backyard and play badminton. We're going to just play cards and tease each other. My parents' joy was a part of their survival strategy. And I think they bequeathed that to us. And so my faith, my aquifer is, I can return to joy. And it is not contingent, my faith, on whether God answers a list of demands, you know, or like, I don't believe in a God who's my genie in a bottle. I don't believe God's on my demand dial, like hurry up and fix it. I feel like God's a partner and God is love and love is always around. So God is always around. And that is my sustaining grace. I'm here because God is love.

you know? If members of your middle church brought you the question of how could this fire happen to us when God is good? How could this happen to us? This isn't right. This isn't fair. Shouldn't we have been protected from something like this? And this is a very obvious question, and I'm sure it was in the field of your community. And how do you address that? Because I think people have this idea, it's kind of like a childlike idea that if I'm a deeply faith-filled person, I'll be immune to certain kinds of tragedies. And yet, obviously, we're not. Obviously, we're

not. And that kind of faith leads us to breaking up with God or breaking up with ourselves. You know, there's a way in which if the God we are leaning on is nefarious or fickle or moody or going to punish us if we get something wrong, if the God we create, you know, my guild is psychology of religion. And though I believe God is God, we just don't know enough about God, Tammy, right? So we're always making up a bit about what this holy one is. And it's, you know, based on our experience or based on our parenting or based on the stories we are taught or the songs we sing or the stained glass windows. You know, God is made up of lots of our stuff. and will punish you with a storm called Katrina because people are gay or will give you a scourge called HIV AIDS or COVID or that God will cause you heartbreak. And that God will make you want to die when you fail that God. So I was a little person with that God. And I used to write about letting God grow up. Like there's no way to have a sustainable relationship with a God who should have protected you from a fire but didn't, or a God who caused the fire to teach you a lesson. That's a little bit much. That's a kind of abusive relationship that some of us have with God. And gosh, if I could do one magic wand as a clergy, I would say, let that God go. Liberate yourself from that God and think about instead a kind of vulnerable partner in the universe who wants to be, I'm thinking about Suge Avery telling Celie, God just, it just wants to be loved. It wants you to love the color purple. Alice Walker's beautiful book. And like, yeah, like that we're in a relationship with this holy one that is not transactional, but is transformative, that is not suzerain and wimp, but is partner. And that comforts me. Tell me, I have agency then in my life. And did we start the fire? No. A neighbor's poor choice started the fire. Did God make the neighbor make a bad choice? No. So my congregation, I don't think, ever wondered what we did to deserve the fire. And isn't that better than the other question, you know? In

Fierce Love, you write about how you collected, received, and then saved 500 plus emails and letters from people who shared their love and support with you and how important that was. And I wonder if you can talk some about that and how each of us as people who want to embody fierce love can respond when a tragedy happens, not with like, I wonder, you know, why this happened to them as if we can find an explanation, but in some other way, like, what did people say that was helpful? Yeah.

You know, we're walking around the theological constructs that are identity creating, right? I mean, there's a lot of, I really believe that we, our identity is a product of stories told to us, about us, around us. You know, stories of gender, stories of sexuality, stories of race, stories of class and caste, and stories of faith or not faith, you know. An atheist child might not likely hear stories of faith. That child might hear stories of humanism or what we can do as a people. And all of those stories get to be refracted or changed or synthesized as we go up. We interrogate our stories, right? So if I'm a person who believes God sends a fire, the comforting note I'm writing to the person who had the fire is like, God's never going to give you more than you can bear. Or thank God you survived it. But, you know, maybe there was a lesson in it, right? And I just frankly got very few of those notes. And for that, I'm just so grateful. I don't know. I didn't get to sit down and have a big theological conversation with those people, but they were like, we love you. And you are our cathedral. Your ministry matters. We're praying for you. People that didn't know us started GoFundMes or Facebook fundraisers. The city of New York just wrapped its arms around us. And from Bendigo, Australia, to Beijing, China, to Paris, to Perry Street in New York, with just so much love. How did people even know? So bad news travels, but good news does too. And the good news that was traveling was that there was a place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that had been in the same location since, you know, 1892, that is the oldest. Like when the bio says, I'm the first Black one, since 1628, like our church starts in 1628. We are the ones who bought Manahara from the Lenape, and we're the ones who built part of the city with labor of enslaved Africans. So we're not proud of that. But people saw us trying to love hard, Tammy. And they were like, we see you at Stonewall. We see you Black Lives Matter. We see you Women's March. We see you loving on kids. And we see you feeding the people. And they were just so kind. So they held up a mirror to the best part of ourselves. That's what I'm trying to say. And that's, I think, a loving thing we can do for each other is, you know, I see you. And, you know, this philosophy of Abuntu I write about, right? Like, I see you and you exist. I see who you are and I reflect that back to you and celebrate that. And that helps us become. What's your working definition

of fierce love? fearless, ferocious, courageous, demanding, insistent. You know, Paul, the Apostle Paul writes in the book of

Corinthians, like love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous, love is, you know, does not insist on its own way, love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. I'm like,

actually, love

insists on love. Love insists on justice. Love demands equality. Love is strident.

Fierce love is strident. It is loud and it does not bear all Love does not bear violence and war. Love does not, cannot coexist with injustice and derision.

So love's cranky. Love is like, nope, not on my watch. And so this kind of fierce love isn't sentimental.

It's tough and resilient.

each other. Embodying fierce love is within each one of ours capacity. It's right there. We can do that. We can do that with each person we interact with. And I can even, you know, love my teacup and everything that I touch. When it comes to things that are happening on a bigger scale in the world, sometimes I don't know how to be a fierce lover. And you write in the book about this willingness always to see, that it requires that we see and take action. And I notice, especially in the world today, when there are so many painful events and tragedies to be seen, it feels overwhelming. Yes,

it

is overwhelming. It really is. Period.

You know, it just is. And also, you know, it's right. You know, one of my favorite rabbis, this guy, Daniel Hartman at the Hartman Institute in Israel, had a chance to study there a few times with him. And, you know, he says, an ethical life is learning how to see. And when he says that, he's doing, you know, midrash, let's say, on the text and the Hebrew scriptures that Christians borrow about loving your neighbor. You know, Jesus is Jewish. Jesus is Jewish, my friends. And when Jesus is saying in answer to, you know, what does it mean? How do you love? How do you love beyond your teacup, right? He says, you love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and you love your neighbor as yourself. And when he says that, he's quoting Deuteronomy and Leviticus. So it's not a new command. He's putting these commands from the Torah together. And let's say when expositing that text, the rabbis will say, so what does it mean to love your neighbor? And this cracks me up, right? But what does it mean to love your neighbor? If your neighbor's cow wanders in your yard, you feed your neighbor's cow. And you feed it, you don't keep it, you don't kill it, you don't cook it. You feed it and you water it until your neighbor comes back. And then you give the cow back to your neighbor. Now, this is a parable or story from an agrarian culture that is arid. And so cows need

to be watered. But if you think about it, loving your neighbor means feeding your neighbor's mother, you know, feeding your neighbor's children, making sure your neighbor's auntie has healthcare, making

sure your neighbor's little boy is safe on the playground because the little boy is your little boy. So this goes to this Ubuntu thing. I just want to say it again. I am who I am because you are who you are. A human is a human through other humans. I'm not human by myself. We are, Dr. King said, woven together like in a garment of destiny. And I can't be who I am until you are who you are. So this kind of love is work, right? This is not sentimentality. This isn't like, oh, a theory. It's, I got to know that the choices I make impact the kids in Detroit and in Gaza and in Sudan. the impact of the way we as a nation live impact the entire globe and so also what happens around the globe impacts us and this is not consuming

love like a Valentine's card. It's also not a spectator

sport. It really is work. And it's worth it. My friend Linda's grandmother, you know, is in Gaza. And that's my grandmother. And, you know, my friend Valerie's little boy, Covey, is my little boy. And your people are my people. You know, your spouse is my concern. This is how we would make a human family, Tammy, in which everyone was safe and everyone was valued and everyone has enough. And we who say we're Christian, which my people say, if we don't get that part right, if we don't get neighbor love right, then we're not actually being christian you

know you share a lot of fierce love stories in the book and the moment that i felt this kind of uh trembling there were a few but this moment i felt this kind of trembling come over me. And I was like, wow, I'm feeling a lot right now. And it had to do when you told the story of the Canadian woman in the hospital who reached out to help you. And I'd love if you can share about that, but also to answer a question that I've held for a long time, which is why is it when strangers, people we've never met before, do something extraordinarily kind and generous? I notice it just breaks me open in a very unique kind of way, partially because I've never met this person and it's unexpected. And I'd love to kind of get your take on that. But if you can first start by sharing this story that happened to you. I'd be so

delighted. I used to think, God, let me just keep searching for her name, searching for her name. I used to know her name and it's so long ago now. But I was newly married and traveling across on the way to a wedding. I had gotten married in June and this was September. So we were newlyweds and we were all like sparkly, workly and just all in love and everything. And it was a beautiful day, September day, sunroof off the little car and something happened. I have no idea yet. The insurance company never really figured it out, but maybe the front left tire blew out, but the car like drove itself across four lanes in the QEW, in the Queen Elizabeth Way and traffic, like not, not traffic, but traffic didn't hit anything, didn't hit anybody, but all the way across the highway, all the way across the highway. And I was driving, so I turned the wheel to stop the travel, and the car flipped around like 360 a few times. And then, and I will say, if your car is going to flip over, your stomach goes first. So the car flipped over onto the sunroof and then onto the tires and then onto the sunroof and then onto the tires. Tell me, if when I say it, I go back there. It's And when we landed on the tires, in like glass and just, you know, blood, and there were these kids on a bus. It turned out they were on the way from Windsor to Detroit to play ball or something like that. They get out of the bus, these teenage boys. Miss Lady, Miss Lady, here's your Bible. I had a Bible in the car. This is what saved you. Like, no, I don't know what saved me, but we were saved. We were saved. My husband had abrasions in his hand and I, it turned out, had a neck injury, but not a bad one.

So we walked away from this accident. And I mean, I will tell you that when

I had bad theology, I thought God had punished me for having sex with my husband two weeks before our wedding, that this car accident was some kind of wake-up call and punishment. Of course, that's not true. But what happened in the hospital was an encounter with this stranger, a white woman with short hair and a cloth coat who saw me crying in

the lobby and who, you know, just walked over to me and said, what is going on? I said, gone. And I told her all the things.

And she was like, what can I do to help? And I couldn't even form a sentence. I said, I think I said, my car's totaled. She took me to the drugstore to get stuff, took me to, I think, Burger King to get food, checked me into a hotel, paid the bill, took me upstairs, waited till this 22-year woman locked the door, picked me up the next morning, took me back to the hospital, took me to the insurance company, took me to the car lot to pick up my car. I mean, what? So, you know, the good Canadian, right? Christian scriptures have a story of the Good Samaritan. This good Canadian just

loved me so hard. And yeah, it's not the

only time that a stranger has shown me profound love. But that is the time that took everything I would learn in seminary, because I hadn't gone yet, everything I would read, write, think about, about what fierce love is. If I look it up, there's her picture. Just loving for no reason. Except that she was human, and I was too.

It's mind-blowing, you know.

And this question about how come when it comes from a stranger, it lands in such an inner explosion? You

know, I think that these kinds of stories, I mean, that story that's in the Christian scripture probably has all kinds of partner stories, corollary stories across Bhagavad Vida and, you know, Torah and Quran. Because all the world's major religions have something about loving your neighbor as yourself. Don't withhold from someone that what you need for yourself, Islam. Don't do anything to break anyone's heart is what six here. So I think it's an archetypal story to me. Like there was once a stranger, you know, who, that, think it

resonates with us. It breaks our heart. It vibrates with us because our

ancestors experienced it, right? We know somebody was hungry and somebody brought the potatoes or somebody was sick and somebody brought the soup or somebody was stuck in the house after Katrina and somebody waited in the fetid waters and got them and somebody ran into the fire to save a baby. We know that this is what humans do. And I think we are attached to those kinds of stories by our heartstrings.