Melissa V. Harris-Perry: One year ago this week at about 5:00 AM on a cold early December night in New York in the East Village, a small fire began in a vacant building on East 7th Street. Within minutes, the blaze jumped to the neighboring building. Constructed in 1892, Middle Collegiate Church known simply as Middle Church caught fire and began to burn. Devastating flames soon engulfed this oldest congregation of collegiate churches in New York, including Middle Church's bell tower, which housed the New York Liberty Bell. The bell survived, the historic church building did not, but it is not the building or the bell that is at the heart of Middle Church. It's the people, a diverse intergenerational, progressive affirming, and deeply engaged group led by a beloved senior minister.

Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Lewis: I'm the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, the senior minister of Middle Collegiate Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the author of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal The World and the host of the Love. Period podcast.

Melissa: I've known Rev. Jacqui for years, and I've spoken at the annual conference hosted at Middle Church. It's been nearly a year since the church she leads lost its beautiful sanctuary. In that time, Rev. Dr. Lewis has written a new book that in part situates this loss within a broader context of personal and collective trauma experienced within society and churches. Her writing articulates a theology and a practice of fierce love.

Rev. Jacqui: One is a ubiquitous call in almost all the world's religions to love neighbor as self. Don't do something to someone you don't want unto you. Don't withhold from someone that, which you need for yourself. One tradition says, don't break anyone else's heart. I love that.

Melissa: At the core of this love ethic is Ubuntu, the recognition that we are all deeply interconnected.

Rev. Jacqui: How can we really love our neighbor if we don't love ourselves? How can we really be human in the community of other humans if we don't have an unconditional regard, a self-acceptance? This is who I am. This body is mine. This heart is mine. These dreams are mine.

Melissa: Rev. Jacqui's text is not a sentimental set of empty platitudes. She shares with her readers some truly painful moments and shows the power of loving responses. We talked about how her own parents modeled this practice for her as a child the first time she was called the N-word.

Rev. Jacqui: Oh my gosh, that was the best parenting of life.

Melissa: It really was.

Rev. Jacqui: It really was. I'm like, "You go parents from Mississippi who lived in Jim Crow." They had constructed a world, Melissa, for me and my siblings, me and my sister at the time, but an ongoing sense of, "We are not going to let you interject American white supremacy. We are going to expose you to all kinds of folks. We're going to read all kinds of literature and we're going to remind you all the time you're just awesome because you're ours."

Here I am in my nice, little, white air force-based classroom with my two Tommys, blonde and red-haired, and the only Black kid in the class. We got it going on, the three of us. We're best friends, we take daps together, we walk home together. Here comes little Ms. Lisa from Mississippi. She literally sits between me and one of the Tommy's and stage whispers, "Don't you know that nasty N-word gets chocolate milk from her mother's [beep]?" What? I had never heard the word, ever heard the word, and knew that it was nasty by the way she said it. This idea of milk from [beep], all of that just was so ugly sounding and horrifying.

I went home and told mom and dad at the dinner table, everything comes out at dinner, what happened. My mom, Melissa, who walked past the school to go to the colored school says, "It is silly Jacqui that white people will think that they're better than you. That's just silly." She took that to my prayer table. We prayed on our knees every night and we prayed together. I found myself praying, "God, no matter what color people are, let's make sure that they feel loved," and you know that's been my job all my life.

My dad, Mr. Reparations demander, goes to the air force base commander and demands an apology from that father to my dad and from that little girl to me. Those two threads are why I am this revolutionary lover, we can all do it, anti-racist activist. The theology of "That's just ridiculous" from my mom and "We're going to do something about it" from my dad, amazing parenting.

Melissa: Now, brave and smart, courageous, diligent, hardworking, all of those things, I'm down for them. Then later in the book, you talk about it as being harder for you and I, again, circled it multiple times and I was like, "Yes, me too." It's that instead of resisting, accepting, instead of pushing back, making peace with. Can you talk a little bit about that in the context of the work that you're doing in this text?

Rev. Jacqui: I had this whole chapter about accepting that I think started with accepting myself. I tell some pretty vulnerable stories in this book about wrestling my way to independence in the context of a loving, protective, but temper-having dad. I talk a little bit in this book about having a bad touch experience as a small person where it just shut me down around my sensuality and my sexuality.

Also, this theology, this God that I was given to love that was that once God will always love you and God will never leave you. When I took the Eucharist for the first time and my mom delivers this loving God but the older I got, what doesn't God like about you? Your girlness, your femaleness, your sexuality, your sensuality. I had to really wrestle through to just exactly as I am, I'm beloved by God. Not what I do, not what I don't do, not sins I don't commit or righteousness I do commit because there was a mask embedded in that, a cape and a mask that wasn't real.

As I grew to accept I am a sensual person, I am a sexual person, I am a surviving person, I'm a sassy, feisty person who loves God and the world, I just became joyful. These are the happiest times of my life moving in the world as an activist not because I'm perfect, but because I'm good enough and I can help make the world good enough for more girl children, more people, more boys, more trans, more of the folks on the margins just by being good enough.

Melissa: Tell me about the church and tell me about it burning.

Rev. Jacqui: When I go by what is now, it looks like a carcass, friend. It is a burned-out shell of itself and that it happened because someone just wasn't that careful, has been a tough pill to swallow. We are grieving still and as the one-year anniversary comes around, it's really heartbreaking but I'll tell you what. We found something in the fire. We found a community in the fire. 500 more people joined the church since we shut down for COVID and the fire, which is to say there's a miracle in the digital space.

There's a community one can make across the pond around the country in the digital space and we will find our way to a new headquarters for our fierce love. In the meantime, I'm trying to help my people navigate the wilderness because we're all in the wilderness. This is a hot mess wilderness time and we got to take love with us and take God with us and take family and community with us. We got to take resilience and resistance with us and joy with us as an antidote to hate.

Melissa: When you write about Ubuntu and our existence, being connected to each other. Again, this interconnectedness I want to try to bring us back into a loop here. Maybe it's the intersections, so there's a part of me that loves that, that responds to it and in part, because I don't know if I've said that to you before, but I don't believe in self-care. I certainly believe in self-maintenance, but if I need care by definition, it means I can't do it for myself. I'm going to need that for me.

Rev. Jacqui: I like that, yes. I think that's right.

Melissa: I'm going to need some help and presumably, if you actually need care, you're going to need my help. Then there's a part of me, maybe this is my Americanness, maybe this is my little girl, feminist pushing back against a world that says you define yourself as wife, as mother, as teacher, always in relation to others. Talk to me about how we can be fully ourselves but also understand our fullness of ourselves as in this connection because I think it is harder for women and fems and those of us who are caregivers in so many different ways.

Rev. Jacqui: That is a brilliant question. I think it is a growing edge for all of us who are feminists, womanists to do the [unintelligible 00:10:40]. It is incredibly important that your seven-year-old daughter and your college daughter find their own voice, their independence, their stridently, individual self inside the context of American culture in which being a female or female-identified person is to be coached always to give yourself away and that that's what it looks like to do love.

I'm trying to be revolutionary to say here that I fought my way to my individual voice. I did. I wrestled my individuality from my family, from my church, out of relationships where I was dying to be Jacqui. In the context of that new power, if you will, I can name that I am a human in relationship to other humans. I'm not just a human in relationship to other humans but my humanity is tied up in yours.

If baby girl don't have healthcare, I need to go to the policy table. If grandmama doesn't have enough medication, I need to think about how I vote. If the mother earth is dying, all of us need to pay attention to how we live in the environment. That just means to me, the container we create together is one for human flourishing and your individuality and my individuality flourish, survive, and thrive inside the container that all of us thrive. In other words, I'm not saved until everyone is saved.

Melissa: When I think about that self-love and that sense of being enough, that desire to be interconnected, it works when I'm thinking about you, when I'm thinking about the congregation of Middle Church, when I'm thinking about my team with The Takeaway, when I'm thinking even about some of my students who might get on my nerves and they don't turn their papers at on time.

Rev. Jacqui: [laughs] Right.

Melissa: I got to tell you when you write it and I think, "Do I think Dylann Roof is enough? Do I want Dylann Roof to love himself? Am I down with being interconnected with Kyle Rittenhouse?" I got to tell you, new answers start to emerge for me. I don't know if this will be on the radio or not. This might be therapy alone, but help me out with that.

Rev. Jacqui: You and I keep it real with each other, it is hard to imagine being interrelated to Dylann Roof. If I was doing an African-centered or Indigenous time travel, well everything's not linear or where as C. S. Lewis would say, "We have God's unbounded now to make the world better" or as our womanist colleagues would say, "all our people." Alice Walker would say all of us are cousins whatever color we are.

In some way, if Dylann Roof had known a Melissa and a Jacqui in his life, would he have turned out to be the butthead he turned out to be? The white supremacist he turned out to be? I'm in a future space about teaching young, white children that their lives are interconnected to mine. Let's stop pretending that we're not going to have race conversations in school.

Let's, instead build curriculum to teach empathy, to remind those little kids that the Indigenous little children got kidnapped out of their houses so the Indian could be taught out of them. There is a way in which the future-- there's no more future Kyles and Dylanns. It's about white folk learning what I'm trying to teach in this book that this individualism gone amuck, capitalism gone crazy, my success is mine alone, never mind the environment, never mind who I hurt. That has to be undone. Maybe for Black people and brown people and Indigenous folks we're reminding ourselves of how we used to survive in the village together.

Melissa: The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis is the author of Fierce Love and the senior minister at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village. Thank you for joining The Takeaway.

Rev. Jacqui: Thank you all. Appreciate it.

[00:15:25] [END OF AUDIO]

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