Examining Your Faith (with author Cole Arthur Riley)

0:02Don't hold anything too tightly. Just wish for it, want it, let it come from the intention of real truth for you, and then let it go. For me, our soul is like, it's unbound. It's limitless. But we will use words to limit ourselves. When people stop believing that somebody's got your back or Superman's coming, we turn to ourselves, and that's where you become empowered. courageous participation attracts positive things. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow and this is the Goop Podcast where we bring together visionaries, scientists, healers, artists, and seekers. I'm so grateful that I get to interview these extraordinary thought leaders and share their wisdom with you.

0:51And I love listening to the conversations that are led by my co-host and dear friend, Cleo Wade. Cleo is a beautiful poet and author. I deeply admire her and the way she keeps her heart open to the world. Together, we believe that engaging in open-minded, honest, and sometimes difficult conversations has the power to change our lives. All right, over to Cleo. My guest today is writer Cole Arthur Riley. After I read her latest book, Black Liturgies, I knew immediately I wanted to interview Cole for the Goop pod. The subtitle of her book is Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human, which is what we explore in our conversation today.

1:33I'm so happy to be able to share Cole's wisdom and beauty with you. Here we go. Cole, I'm so happy to have you on this pod. I loved your new book so much. For everyone listening, it's called Black Liturgies. And it's usually when someone comes on the pod and they have a book, I read the entire book front to back because I'm a Virgo, I have to be very prepared. And your book is so not meant for that experience. And that is so clear as you're reading what you call your entrance or your introduction. I think I took a picture of your book and sent it to 10 of my friends. And I don't think I've had a book like this that has this daily devotional feeling that I have loved as much since I think my friend Sade, maybe almost 20 years ago, gave me one of Avanya Love and Zant's devotionals, very different than this.

2:34But it was the first book I truly used in that way. And I had it in a place where I had a practice around looking at it every single day. And I haven't felt that way about a book of this nature since yours. So I want to thank you so much for writing it. Thank you. I appreciate that. And thanks for reading it and entering and exiting as it makes sense for you. Yeah. Well, so much of how you open this book is by doing what I personally have always really loved. And something that That is, I'd say through light in all of your work, but I felt especially grateful to receive in the beginning of this was that your reader is asked by you or gifted by you the freedom to experience this book in the way, in whatever way life kind of calls on them to use it in that day.

3:33So you say, you can skip a page or lay in witness to the page instead of centering yourself in that writing of that day, or you can skip a day, you can do whatever it is that you need to do, which I think is one of the most useful things for this type of book, because it really relieves the pressure. Was that important to you? Yes, I appreciate that you noticed it, because it was important to me, especially when you're writing about spirituality or like to a spiritual dimension. I think many of us have known spiritual spaces that are very demanding, and that are very, I don't know, controlling.

4:12There's a sense of authority. If you do this, you say this, and you do it when I say, and you agree with what I think and I believe, and there's kind of, not always, but in many spiritual spaces, I think there can be a demand to kind of fall in line. And I really wanted the book to feel subversive in that way, very kind of generous and open-handed to let people enter the places that feel safe for them and feel right and true and know that as an author, I'm not going to be threatened if there are pieces of the book that are completely discarded and that are not safe for people to enter depending on their story or spiritual places they've known in the past.

4:54So yeah, it was intentional in that way. So much of how it seems you landed on creating this type of book is your own kind of way that you alchemized your struggle between the idea of religious practice and spiritual abstraction. And what I really appreciated is that in that you kind of pulled away from this pass and fail, which was also why I enjoyed that invitation to live in the book, because everyone will tell you the right and wrong way to use the Bible or whatever religious text there is. It is so, or it uses judgment as such a place of fear. And as you say in the book, you hope that people, or there's one of the prayers in your book about removing the fear that doesn't lead to wisdom.

5:45And I so appreciated that because I think a block for so much Christian and religious text is that, am I doing it wrong or am I doing it right? When I thought about how I wanted to make Black liturgies different in that way, there's a kind of resistance to the ways, you know, I think white supremacy functions in religious spaces to say that there is only one way. That's the kind of supremacist ideology that's woven in our religious spaces, especially Christian spaces, I think, to say there is only one way. There is only one approach, and that is the truth, and that is superior in some way. and to kind of try to reject that notion altogether and say, actually, I'm really open to kind of making and remaking and reimagining different ways that the divine can be approached, different ways that our own souls can be approached and understood.

6:42And I'm much more interested in the questions and the collective journey of the questions than I am the answers. Well, in that there's a true acknowledgement of the variety of our lived experience. I mean, I can't tell you how many spiritually rooted books or religious based books I've read. And so often I'm like, well, where am I in this? Or where's my mom in this? Or where's this person? And I find that it's really hard to, if someone doesn't reject that, this idea of this one right way, meaning there's this one type of life, which, you know, is impossible. It's so hard to relate to and then receive, even if there is wisdom in the text, all the gifts there are to receive.

7:30Yes, definitely. I want to back up to your journey into becoming a writer. Something I really noticed is, you know, how much you are the writers you acknowledge in becoming a writer. I mean, because there's different ways I find that people enter into the writing space in how they tell their own story, right? And you're so much of, or at least kind of what your bio says is all the pathways through people that you found writing. To me, I mean, there's all types of writers, but the ones I'm drawn to are either the ones who really kind of take us out of life or those who guide us into confronting life.

8:12And then some do both, right? I mean, you note Octavia Butler and the ways in which she is able to do that, where it's you are somehow suspended and confronted all at the same time. And I love that. I want to know, what's kind of the first author you read who made you feel that you were confronting something within you? And then the kind of the breadcrumbs of all the different writers that led you to who you are? I came very late to some of the great Black novelists. I'd never read Toni Morrison or James Baldwin or Alice Walker or any of those greats until college. I think once I did find them, I held on to them for dear life.

8:58Prior to that, I was reading a lot, but just a lot. I had no real guides. I was going to the library all of the time. I mean, growing up, it was like a haven for me, the library. But when you don't have much direction as a kid, I think libraries are really difficult to navigate. And I was a shy and wasn't a very verbal child. So I wasn't going to ask a librarian for help. So I think I was kind of floundering a bit. I read a lot of kind of strangely, I've heard a lot of goosebumps and kind of like strange mystery books as a child. And it was really in writing myself, you know, my father would have us write poems and short stories to avoid doing chores.

9:45Like that was the economy in our household was like written words because I was so shy and wasn't speaking. I think that was how my father was trying to draw me out. So it was, you know, you could do the dishes or you could write a poem. Here's the color that you're going to write the poem on. yellow. And then, you know, he'd set a timer. And so I think I first fell in love with writing in the way that it was bridging my interior world to the world around me because I was all shut up in myself as a little girl. And then when I met Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker and James Baldwin, I felt everything kind of expand and realize that in reading, my story could become someone else's story or you kind of realize that nothing is as solitary as it seems.

10:38So, you know, Beloved by Toni Morrison absolutely changed my life and is still changing my life, the pain and the honesty that she writes with. But also I think in Toni Morrison specifically, there's just this refusal to judge her characters. And you think about a novel like beloved, which I never want to spoil for people because I'm always surprised there are people who truly that it's been preserved for them. They don't know what's going to happen. And I love that. But she deals with really complicated conditions of the heart and the heart as a mother and choices you have to make on behalf of your children and what's survivable, what isn't.

11:20And she just, there's an utter refusal to judge them for the decisions they have to make in order to survive. And I admire that in her writing. And I think I've definitely tried to absorb some of that. And there's just this fidelity to kind of magic and like weirdness and these strange stories that she refuses to completely explain or make completely clear. And in that way, I kind of find a harbor in Black literature. They're not, you know, those greats, they're not super interested in explaining themselves always. They just want to take you to a world. Yeah. at goop we believe the spaces we spend time in shape how we feel and how we connect that's why we're drawn to convene a global hospitality brand reimagining work in meeting spaces centered around design and care convene's sophisticated purpose-built locations are designed to inspire connection whether it's a board meeting for 10 a team off-site or a workplace membership that gives you and your team a home base.

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13:02And I, and I, especially I also find that Alice Walker's, you know, it's a, it's by the end of it, you didn't realize that it was a study and a practice and in a greater wisdom. It's so interesting the ways in which you, you know, know Toni Morrison, especially because your book, I mean, especially the nature of this book is so deeply reflective in order to be the tool that it is, which I love. Yes. Yeah. I'd love for you to share with the listeners kind of how you got to, because I do think that, and I have so many friends like this. I have a dear friend, Phil, who went to Harvard's Divinity School.

13:43heal, you know, the ways in which he broke away from his religious background, you know, to embrace, you know, his sexuality. And then, you know, once openly gay and feeling happy and in his own power and in his truth, yearning for this, his church and church life. And I'd love for you to share the journey of getting to the point of writing this book and how you kind of got there because you were there. You know, you talk about the first time you kind of went back into church and all of the different emotions that you wrestled with. Yeah, I do think it's a shared journey for so many of us and especially the younger generations.

14:30I think we have a rightful kind of suspicion of tradition. You know, we've seen so much that, you know, the veil has been lifted for us in ways that it's really hard to sit in a church pew knowing some of the history of the things that we read. You could think of the Book of Common Prayer, for example, which I find a lot of beauty in, but was in the end written by Thomas Cranmer at a time when my ancestors were being abducted and enslaved. And I have to contend with that if I'm going to read those words in a church pew. So for me, I had been, I didn't grow up in a Christian home. My parents aren't particularly religious, but I had started attending church in college.

15:13I did no research. I happened to find myself in this predominantly white, very intellectual, for better and worse, kind of Christian space and a conservative one at that. And like many young people, I think was looking for a kind of belonging anywhere, you know, And so when you're in search of belonging, I think you do and say that you believe all kinds of things that you don't actually, when your belonging is at stake. And in many of these religious spaces, that's the case. It's if you want to be at the table, you need to confess these particular things and believe these particular things. So I tried my best to fit in line.

15:57All the while, as I told you, I was meeting Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and Alice Walker for the first time and feeling this complete tension between the kind of open handed, expansive spirituality and black, the black novel specifically, and the rigidity of the white Presbyterian church pew that I was in every, you know, Sunday. day. And so I kind of fled after college. I really fled. I became really discontent with that kind of spirituality, but interested in God still. And I've always been a person of more doubt than certainty. And I knew I needed to find a place that would be okay with that.

16:41If I was going to have any kind of honesty and what I think and believe, I needed to find a community that did not care so much what I believed any single morning. And I very thankfully found that community. It happened to be, I tell people I like fled the church and kind of ran to the artists. I ran to the writers and the poets and the painters in my life and found, they just aren't threatened. They're just, they're just not threatened by someone's distinctive viewpoint, or they could care less if I woke up one morning and didn't believe in God. You know, that's, that's interest to the poet. And so the more I kind of found myself in those places, the more I could kind of let my belief be whatever it is any given day.

17:28And I tell people at the end of the day, I wrote a prayer book to a God that I'm not even convinced exists, but I think there's meaning in that and there's meaning in the seeking and in the journey. I worked for an Episcopal church right after college and have certainly still been interested in kind of the spiritual dimension of life. But I think there are seasons where I feel safe and, you know, find a lot of meaning in learning in a church pew. And there are seasons that I don't, and this just happens to be a season where that's not calling out to me. I'm finding a lot more kind of spaciousness.

18:10I'm finding a lot more honesty in myself and kind of removing myself from those spaces. That's not to say in a year or in two years I might not return, but I like being able to have that fluidity. For me personally, I don't like feeling bound to any particular kind of spiritual demonstration or religious demonstration. Although I understand that a lot of people find a lot of stability in that kind of consistency. I don't. I tend to feel trapped or tend to become a dishonest person. What's really cool about the structure of your book is that it's in part one and part two. And I think even what you just said is so expressive of how your book is formatted because there is something, you know, your part two is by occasion or tradition, occasion?

19:08By time, but yes. By time, yes. The idea, yes. Which I found so beautiful because I think it's always hard to search for the words for some of those specific days on the calendar, whether it's Father's Day or Mother's Day or whatever. And then you have it by story. Can you tell me how, do you know, is it kind of what you were just saying to me, is that how you landed in kind of making sure that they're worthy? Is this, is this kind of the energy behind how you decided to structure the book so that someone could kind of come to it as they are, where they are without feeling, you know, cause it could have easily been a kind of, you know, Monday, January 1st book, then the site, you know, I mean, very, is this kind of how you arrived at that structure?

19:58Yeah, yeah, I think they are definitely involved with each other. So yes, the first section is, you know, all of the kind of shared stories that make us human, the, you know, the sections on lament and rage and fear and mortality. And there are days when some of those sections will speak to people or times in life, you know, ages that some might speak and some might not. And so there's kind of like an enter and exit as it feels right for you. And then the second section is a little bit of that, maybe with what your friend experienced as well, this resistance in me to give up on ritual altogether.

20:42You know, it's like maybe I don't feel completely safe in all religious spaces, but there's something about the ritual that I find real beauty in and even some Christian rituals still that I find a lot of meaning and beauty in that I wanted to incorporate as a way to say I'm not I'm not prepared to relinquish this altogether. You know, there are these kind of shared experiences that only exist in particular times. And so I wanted to offer some of that, some of that as well to say there are these cycles that we exist in, you know, either the, you know, dawn, dawn, dusk, day, or whatever I call it, you know, the different cycles in the day, and then also the different cycles in the year that it's kind of grounding to have for me, it's grounding for me to have a spiritual practice kind of connected to.

21:32connected to that cycle. Well, you have so many technologies in the book that lend itself to ritual, even in both sections, really, but especially in your part one, you have breathing meditations, you have, you know, prayers of confession, forgiveness, benediction. I mean, I have so many questions about your, you know, kind of offering for contemplation. I've been writing a lot about contemplation lately also. And, and, you know, in, in our world of kind of going from thing to thing, to thing, to thing that we don't gift ourselves room to contemplate. Therefore we struggle to be deliberate. I'd love for you to tell us why wrath was so important because I think if someone word counted breathing or breath in this book, it would be your number one hitter.

22:21And I also, or inhale, exhale. And I love the ways in which you share that with your community online, because I do think that in the kind of doom scroll or the fast pace, every time I see that from you, whether it's coming directly from you or from the many, many people who follow your work and share it, I do feel this gift of pause and breath. I think I kind of have a natural, maybe not natural, but I'm, I think, predisposed toward disembodiment. I, as a shy child, I lived a lot in my head. I'm also a Virgo. So you will resonate on this. Hold on, what day? August 23rd. Oh, in August Virgo. Yes.

23:07I'm right on the cusp. You know, there's a lot going on in the mind. There's a whole, for everyone, a whole world is existing in us. It's just who's attuned to it and who's maybe less attuned. And I was kind of more kind of predisposed to the life of my mind and was not always occupying my body. And some of that is natural. Some of that is the result of, you know, of course, a society that is hell bent on anti-Blackness and doesn't really love, you know, Black, queer, disabled bodies that much. So I myself am given to disembodiment and need desperately a kind of spirituality that connects me and kind of brings me back home to my body.

23:53I think it's been a real risk for me to kind of live disembodied for so many years. And written prayers, so the written prayers in the book, they're very, you know, it's all very cognitive. It's all, you know, I'm trying to put the words together and I love that. But I reached a point in sharing on social media where I knew, you know, this just wasn't sufficient. I don't want to continue to lead people into kind of a disembodied spirituality. And I began to share breath practice along with each of the posts. And to me, in this season, I feel a lot closer to kind of breath as prayer, the body as prayer, than any kind of articulation of who I think God is.

24:38And I mean, especially in times like this, We're living through so much mass pain. We always are, but we have access to it on a different scale. We're witnessing. It's the witnessing near and far. Yes, yes, the witness. And in that witness, I think a lot of us are coming up short on words, or it's like we've said everything that we could possibly say. And what do you do? What does prayer look like under those conditions? and I think the body and breath can lead us to a different, can lead us on a different path or in a different way, connect us with both ourselves, you know, I'm connecting with my body, I'm connecting with my interior world, of course, but also I think it connects us to the world around us when you're just in your physical space and aware of the physicality of the world in a different way.

25:28So I'm a big fan of breath practice now. I'm probably, you know, much closer to the breath practice in the book than I am the written prayer now. That's so interesting. It's also, you know, something I love about your breath practice is that you're not just saying inhale one, two, three, exhale one, two, three, you're inhaling on a affirmation essentially, and exhaling on an affirmation. It's almost like an inhale on like a thought and exhale on an affirmation kind of. And I find that to be something that is also so helpful for finding embodiment because oftentimes I think having these kind of really impersonal things like one, two, three, four, five, you're all of a sudden like, am I a person?

26:15Am I a breathing thing akin to a tree and a flower and the grass and the dirt and all these very alive natural forces? or am I a computer? Am I a machine? It's actually even, you know, a lot of the times that I'm writing, my favorite word on the planet is beloved. I end so many of my poems with that as a way to embody, as I hope my readers can embody themselves because there is just such tenderness in that word. And there's so much love in that and hearing that. So if someone's saying those last five words to you and they call you beloved, it, there's something about it that is so warm. And in that warmth, you feel so tender and like, maybe you're not okay right now, but perhaps hope and is possible and okayness is possible.

27:07And I really receive that so much in your work, in your breath work. And I would encourage all of our listeners to try some of these breathing meditations because they are so kind of easeful. I wouldn't even say simple, but they're, they have so much ease in them and they are truly so helpful. I mean, I, I have friends who on their hardest days have, you know, said this, one of your breath work meditations got them through it. And it is a different type of meditating that I think is very unique to you also, because it's not really something, I think meditation is another thing people say you do incorrectly or correctly.

27:50I've, definitely gotten to like one or two arguments with somebody who is very strict about what meditating is. And I, and I always say that as long as there is a relationship to conscious breath, you are meditating, washing the dishes, going on a walk, focusing on one simple sentence of okayness. And, and so I am specifically really grateful for those in the book and online. Thank you. I want to talk about why you wanted to focus on confession and forgiveness in part one. Well, it's a little bit in me because of the religious spaces I occupied in the past, but I wanted to reimagine them because I think there was beauty.

28:39There is beauty and meaning in kind of the tools of confession and forgiveness that you see in religious spaces. It just so happens that they can be weaponized against people to make them feel, you know, anything but beloved. And so I wanted to think, OK, of a kind of confession. You know, June Jordan has this line where she says to tell the truth is to become beautiful. And she says that's political in the most profound way, actually, just telling the truth about about who you are. And I like that kind of presentation of confession as a truth telling that really is about realizing the beautiful in you as opposed to kind of honing so much on the terrible or the grotesque.

29:27grotesque. There are people who believe, many people who believe that kind of human's disposition or original disposition is sinful. And then it's the divine's task to bring us out of that into kind of glory or beauty. I resist that a bit. I have a lot of questions about that and much more prefer the story of our kind of inherent beauty and dignity. And that when we do something out of alignment with, you know, beauty and dignity. That's actually out of alignment with our true selves. That's not a demonstration of our true selves. I know others would disagree with me, but I think there's a form of confession that can be honest, but still kind and still dignity affirming.

30:12And then also a kind of forgiveness that I think we keep from ourselves. And a lot of times in religious spaces, we practice kind of this cosmic forgiveness or, you know, this personified God forgiving us. And I mean, I love that, but also at times I feel that's very hard to receive. I have a lot of doubts and questions about what's happening in that kind of transaction when a priest says you're forgiven. I think, okay, you know, I think there are those of us that doesn't really free us of anything because we haven't yet forgiven ourselves. And because in the big stuff, love forgiveness, there's the abstract, the big energy, and there's the practical day to day.

30:59Which is why I think forgiveness prayers are so critical, whether Gwyneth always makes sense because I love the Hawaiian forgiveness prayer. But it's like I love any prayer that has to do with forgiveness because it is something that we have to consciously practice to say. And there's so many, you have so many words on this in your book, but kind of forgiving this experience, you know, sending the offering of your energy of forgiveness, releasing it, giving yourself the relief, you know, removing it from your body, you know, and that day to day practice is what really feeds the abstract kind of wisdom, understanding God, higher energy of it all, I find.