Why do we center the works of WOC/ QWOC in our school?
“ A liberating spirituality moves us away from a constant reactive and defensive posture and towards a new imagination and an embodied awareness of our sacredness.”
I once took a class called Folk Religions. The class was taught by a white-male professor and former missionary in a Christian institution. I took this long-distance class while I was living and working in Taiwan. One of the main assignments of the class was to spend several hours observing ‘folk religious practices.’ The unspoken and unchallenged premise of this class, however, was that the western Christian church was the norm, and all other cultural religious practices were “primitive” and “uneducated.” The observations required that I use my own body to observe my own people as “other” and “exotic.” However, during these many hours of observations, I only saw how beautiful my people are and how meaningful our spiritual practices were. And despite the intentions of the course, I turned around and observed how the western Christian church is actually a folk religion.
We have all been educated in a way that assumes white-centered, patriarchal, and heterosexual is the norm. This dissonant normativity is ingrained into our systems and our very own bodies. This approach to education puts women, queer, and non-binary people of color in a constant defensive stance. We are asked to constantly question and defend our ways of life, our intuitive knowings, and our spiritualities. This work of resistance is exhausting. A liberating spirituality moves us away from a constant reactive and defensive posture and towards a new imagination and an embodied awareness of our sacredness. Therefore, we are a school by us and for us. We center the voices of women of color and queer and non-binary people of color. A spirituality that is expansive is one that centers our lived experiences, bodies, traditions, and stories. We believe that spirituality and the practice of spiritual direction can be a liberating experience when our own embodied experiences are centered.
My spiritual direction training alone did not adequately prepare me to meet with people of color. I have also heard stories of people of color experiencing hurt and harm as they meet with white spiritual directors. A white-centered institution may diversify their staff and curriculum, but diversifying still assumes a white-centered norm. This is why we are committed to centering the voices of people of color in every spiritual practice, teaching, reading, and discussion without ever needing to refer to a white voice as ‘authority’. Through communal learning, we draw from the deep wisdom of our own cultural, spiritual traditions. Through a centering of our own experiences, we seek to train spiritual practitioners that also center the experiences of women, queer, and nonbinary people of color in their practices.
