Scriptural Spirit Technologies and the Laboratory of Belief

Faith in Practice Field Notes: Part Two

The editors at The Commons are happy to have Elæ Moss offer a new installment of “Faith in Practice.” The ongoing series will be collectively available here.

 

By Elæ Moss

 

“Love has never been a popular movement. And no one’s ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is that what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

− James Baldwin

 

Returning to the commons of meaning

Welcome back to “Faith in Practice Field Notes,” where we’re taking an R+D approach to considering how faith might offer infrastructure for collective future liberation.

As this series unfolds, we’ll be moving into topical case studies from a range of spiritual communities, including my own, but before we can explore faith as a human technology, it feels important to consider what we’re working with in practice. What conditions shape the ground of possibility? What happens when this ground is not just a material space but the self, the collective spirit, or the story we hold about our own power?”

In the first entry, I introduced faith-in-practice as a technology for collective care. Today, we look at how belief itself—the ability to hold futures that feel fantastical—may be a precondition for putting speculative solidarities into action. Without it, there’s no collective resource base—no commons—to work from.

But also: as I write this series I’m clarifying how I see and approach ministry, which first and foremost I understand as our primary responsibility to care for each other and the planet. Ministry, capital M, then becomes a reverent commitment to reminding oneself and others of this work of our lives. And as James Baldwin and many others have spoken to, doing the work of love and care is often unpopular; it might very well mean being misunderstood, disliked, even targeted.

When this happens, how do we hold our ground? Or even understand this as a sign that we are doing exactly what we need to be doing? As we moved through the advent season in the Christian calendar, I found myself thinking about an NPR segment in 2023. In it, multiple pastors in the US reported being asked where they “got those liberal talking points,” when preaching the gospel of the radical anti-imperial activist known across multiple faiths as Jesus. Congregants went on to suggest that the ideas these pastors were preaching “don’t work anymore.”

This reaction is telling: this work is subversive. What’s actually being offered in Christian and many other faith traditions inherently rejects systems of human power and control, even though they’ve been co-opted and flown as the banner under which great abuses have been enacted by those in power.

 

The Magnificat as textual commons: what does it mean to believe in the impossible?

 

 

I’ve been thinking about what it means to approach system change through ministry and the tradition of the radical “faith” leader as that of someone embodying and modeling belief—in particular as I prepared to preach for the second Sunday of advent at Judson Church in NYC (where I serve as Community Minister, from an Inter Spiritual perspective).

Having been tasked to work with the second four lines of the Magnificat (Mary’s song to Elizabeth, found in the book of Luke, 1:46-55), I was also invited to pair this with liturgical elements, a meditation quote (such as Baldwin’s above), music, and with the week’s theme of “Peace”—constraints presenting quite a challenge!

 

 

I don’t identify as Christian, so I approached this work instead as someone whose life has been shaped by belief in seemingly impossible futures, and belief in our collective capacities. Both of these manifestations are how I understand the “holy,” “divine,” or what many might shorthand as “God.”

Hearing these words attributed to Mary I asked myself: what happens when a marginalized person declares themself blessed against all odds? What if we read this gospel passage as a manifesto for collective imagination?

Here, the Magnificat becomes a textual commons—a shared space crafted by a community of radical believers, offering a perspectival shift on what blessing even means. It’s not just a story, and it’s not Mary’s memoir; it’s a human technology for solidarity and change, a key text in a strategic document produced by a small group of activists whose faith in action took concrete form akin to that of mutual aid care network building.

Is it possible for us to hear in this story echoes of today’s radical encampments, autonomous zones, and movements—spaces where impossible solidarities are made real and transformative?

 

Self-service window

Over the past few months, I’ve been building a new Interfaith Commons at Pratt Institute, and meeting with our diverse Civic Leadership Fellow cohort of faith leaders at the Interfaith Center of New York. My “Field Notes” during this time of ministry and seminary must include the ways this has been a time of transformative reckoning and discernment.

I’ve been reminded daily in ever more humbling ways that this R+D process is not abstract or neutral, and that at its core is an unshakable faith: in humanity, in our ecosystem, in the intelligence of the universe. Such faith is distinct from any “religion,” but the work, itself, shakes: shakes me, disorients others, refuses complacency, disrupts systems and order. Its roots are love but it’s so often not read or received as such, and that is inherent in its long legacy.

Right now, I am asking myself not just how to talk about belief but how to embody it, especially as it gets increasingly risky to do so in this country. What happens when I, a trans minister and organizer, stand in front of a congregation and say, “I believe”? I’ve spoken of my ministry as modeling expansive possibility as a form of radical welcome, and so every action, like every word, here or at the pulpit becomes not just a declaration but an invitation, to folks as scared and exhausted as the early readers of the Magnificat. How can the invitation to a new timeline feel tangibly empowering, rather than stabilizing? What keeps us steady in the storm?

I invite you to consider the idea that Anno Domini might in fact be better framed as Anno Ipsi: the year of ourselves, your Year One. That you get to decide that all of us, including you, are blessed simply with the opportunity to exist here in this miraculous, mind-bending experiment in timespace, conscious flesh. And that (just like the prior resetting of the timeline to mark the year of a radical activist’s birth) you / we have the right and power to decide the timeline, and paradigms, into which we’ve been born are someone else’s story, and commit to writing our own Magnificat.

What if, like Mary, we could see ourselves as part of a lineage of liberatory transformation—not despite Empire, but in direct resistance to it? Can we operationalize belief as a radical technology? In this advent service, heralding the gestation towards our collective rebirth, it felt important to me as a trans person to speak to mothers and to the fight for ideological autonomy crystallizing as the fight for trans rights in the US and beyond. I cited Chase Strangio’s powerful testimony to the supreme court, and the beautiful precedent of St. Cecilia Gentili’s radical trans community motherhood. (An iconic image of Gentili now graces Judson’s sanctuary as our newest Queer Saint).

 

The Invitation: Faith as a Tool for Collective R&D

 

On that second Sunday of Advent I also invited Judson’s community to write out “recipes for futures, prayers for peace, spells for revolution.” These were written on colorful ribbons, as a concrete form of the Buddhist practice of Sankalpa, as we held these possibilities in our bodies and shared these visions with each other during service. We then tied them to the fences flanking our church building, leaving them for passersby to encounter, transforming the streetscape—an echo of the DMZ fence in South Korea, where people have tied millions in a collective act of visible hope.

 

 

Within the framework of “Speculative Solidarities,” this isn’t just metaphor. It’s praxis. It’s belief transmuted into action, imagination made real. So now? Like going to the gym, we practice the acts that help us feel and know faith in our bodies, beyond the cognitive exercise.

So, this is my invitation: what if this year—2025—could be our Year One? What would it mean to birth ourselves anew, to operationalize the belief that we are not just surviving but creating futures that once seemed unimaginable. Faith—as belief, as embodied practice, as human technology—is foundational to solidarity work. We can build the next world. But first, we have to believe it’s attainable.

 

 

Next month, as we talk about health and safety—and the ways in which faith technologies address the very real co-regulatory nervous system needs of human communities—we’ll dive more specifically into what it looks like to acknowledge and practically address the baseline survival-driven fears that keep radical belief (aka: risk) feeling impossible.

We got this.

 

All work at The Commons is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, culture worker, and system doula dedicated to radical modes of relational and spiritual engagement. Elæ currently serves as a Community Minister at Judson Memorial Church, focused on sustainable human infrastructure building at the intersection of community education, collective care, faith, arts, and social justice. They teach and work as an Interfaith Advisor at Pratt Institute, are a Civic Leadership Fellow at the Interfaith Center of New York, and are also a member of the 2024-25 Solidarity Circles cohort at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Elæ is currently preparing for Interspiritual ordination through the Seminary program at OneSpirit, following two years as an MFA Public Action Fellow at Bennington, both the culmination of over twenty years approaching ministry as equally art and sacred service: creating sanctuary tools and spaces for seekers, rooted in commons-driven social justice organizing. A practitioner of Buddhist and Q’ero medicine traditions, Elæ is also a certified Quantum Touch healer, mindfulness facilitator, and officiant of radically reimagined human rituals. In addition to their Public Action MFA, Elæ holds a Masters in Urban Design from CCNY, and did Doctoral Research in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Find them at: https://onlywhatican.net, on substack, or on instagram at @thetroublewithbartleby.