…then the Lord God formed man from the
dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.—Genesis
2:7
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From the sidewalk, a cell phone caught the viral voice of God speaking through the mouth of a Black man forty days younger than me face down on the street pavement calling for his mama while a white man in uniform with his left hand in his pocket took his life by kneeling on his neck. I can’t breathe. George Floyd gasped these words twenty-seven times in the last nine minutes of his life. I can’t breathe. He was speaking on behalf of those Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the other America,” those Jesus called blessed: the poor, the persecuted, the pure in heart, the meek and mourning, those who hunger for justice.
As we celebrate what would be Dr. King’s 93rd birthday, there are still far too many Americans who can’t breathe. God does not ordain the ongoing suffering, but God speaks through it nonetheless. In the original biblical languages, breath is the same word as spirit. The divine Breath weaves a web of life that entangles everything, a web where everyone is directly affected by everything else. Humans and more-than-human beings breathe out carbon dioxide that grows plants and trees. Plants and trees breathe out oxygen that sustains the rest of us. When other Beings cannot breathe, I believe it also affects everyone else at the soul level.
This soul web is what Dr. King was getting at when he wrote from a Birmingham jail cell that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. It is what Indigenous peoples have been living and saying for thousands of years. My ancient Indigenous ancestors, Celtic peoples living on the fringe of empires, called their god Danu, a feminine Force that flowed through the land with a charged current that guides and tends all living Beings. My deep ancestors were trackers and conduits of this creative Power. They sought to live in harmony with the Spirit of life, intimately embodying it.
In the Hebrew Bible, this Indigenous wisdom and wonder are animated in a God who breathes on the basis of the word hesed—translated as “loving kindness” or “steadfast love.” Hesed shows up sixty-six times in first half of the sacred text, often in the same sentence with two other words: mispat and sedekah. Mispat is a kind of justice that ensures that resources are distributed so that all people can lead a dignified life. Sedekah is a ruthless faithfulness to intervene on behalf of anyone who is oppressed, abused, scapegoated or left out. This trifecta traces the baffling biblical God I am tracking.
There is Something that soaks the world with steadfast love, a higher Power passionately pursuing justice on behalf of the most vulnerable among us. This is One who is high and holy, according to the prophet Isaiah, but who is with the humble and contrite. This Spirit breathes life into a world created to meet everyone’s basic needs. The biblical God of hesed, mispat and sedekah is devoted, not just to personal salvation, but to collective liberation. The divine design for humanity is not to fight for our own individual rights, but to take responsibility for the whole web. Because no one is really free until everyone is free.
Breath, in the Hebrew grammar, is feminine. Just like the Celtic spirit Danu. Unfortunately, from the first page of the bible, and on every page after that, translations emphasize the male pronouns of Creator, but erase the female pronouns of Spirit. It’s blatant patriarchy. The womanist bible scholar Dr. Wil Gafney proposes that readers should take back our feminist agency and assert ourselves by inserting the pronoun into the passage:
The breath of God, She swept over the waters.
In the second verse of the bible, the divine Breath swept over the face of the waters. The Hebrew verb for this sweeping action, in Deuteronomy, describes an eagle hovering over her nest. On the first page of the first Gospel written, the Breath of God hovers over Jesus and descends upon him in the form of a dove and drives him into the wilderness on a vision quest to learn how to get free from satanic supremacy stories. The dove does the dirty, delicate, guiding, nurturing work to liberate Jesus.
And the Spirit, She immediately drove him out into the wilderness.
Divine Spirit is like a mother bird in motion, methodically sustaining Her young. The hope of healing and redemption rides on a kind of pelican Power, a feral God that does not calculate and control from a throne, but glides over and dives into our deep and dark places of pain and suffering. This divine Breath, She builds and protects a nest over the chaos of the waters, over the chaos of our world and our lives.
While colonial brands of Christianity lavish praise on the He-God and His capital H creation legacy project, I throw in with the nurturing, hovering She-Spirit who births, breathes and blows everything in belovedness. Divine male energy exists. However, for too long, powerful men have toxified god-talk with their triumphalist versions of masculinity. This is why my higher Power is a mother bird building a nest, not a king on a throne issuing executive orders. A protector and provider. Not a self-promoter. My own healing and recovery are rooted in Her image.
On the second page of the bible, the divine Breath brings the made-out-of-mud humans to life. The feminine force flows through the nostrils and out through the mouth. It’s virtually impossible for a God to be more intimate than this. If God is Breath, then we don’t need to keep searching for our higher Power. She’s right here with us all the time. God is both in us and hovering over us. The Breath, She is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. The Breath, She connects us to each other and every living being in an inescapable network of mutuality. We belong to each other because of our breath, because of God’s breath, the most sacred thing in the world, surging in and out of our bodies.
Throughout the bible, the divine Breath consistently becomes a groan. In Genesis, it is the blood of murdered Abel that cries out and finds God’s ear. In Exodus, it is the Israelites groaning under slavery to Pharoah. In the Psalms and Prophets, the sighs and cries of the orphans and oppressed and afflicted consistently come before the One who hears. In the book of James, it is the unpaid wages of the day laborers crying out. In Romans, all of creation groans with labor pains, longing to be released from bondage— and the text says that, in our weakness, we do not know what to say in our prayers, but the Breath of God intercedes for us with groans that transcend our glossary.
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On this MLK holiday weekend, we are reminded that the God of Dr. King actively conspires with the oppressed and suffering. The word conspire comes from two Latin words that mean “breathe with.” Today, I believe that the battle over authentic Christian faith is between those, living in the sunlight of opportunity, who “focus on the family,” and those who commit to being conduits of the Breath of God, to descending like a dove, to conspiring with those, like George Floyd, who cannot breathe.
King lamented that the Christian faith of white folk and middle-class people replaced God’s groan on earth with the glory of heaven. “I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race,” King wrote from jail in 1963, “and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.” Dr. King compelled privileged people to a spiritual life cycle that shifts the paradigm of divine desire. This is the holy work. Inspire. Perspire. Conspire. Repeat.
Sixty years later, by far the most popular Dr. King quote, for members of the oppressor race, does not come out of his letter from a Birmingham jail, but from his dream in D.C. It’s the one about judging people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. I hear this passage consistently proclaimed from the lips of white people to promote a colorblind ideology. As if Dr. King’s dream demanded that we stop seeing race, instead of working to stop racism. This quoting out of context counterfeits King and the God he served in ministry for the last two decades of his short life.
For the God of the groan, the deity of Dr.
King, the most important question concerning the content of our character is who
we commit our lives to conspiring with. Maybe the best way to take inventory of
our own spiritual journey is to document who is demanding our attention: the
certified and credentialed, the Caesars and celebrities—or the excluded and
exploited, the multitude of folks, like George Floyd, barely breathing in the
cellar of society? If the results of your inquiry, like mine, are dominated by
the dominators, there’s no need for us to feel ashamed. Guilt is never a sufficient
soul fuel for a divine conspiracy. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote
about the role of prophetic people in an intensely unjust world, few of us are guilty,
but all of us are responsible.
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