by Najeeba Syeed
EDITORS NOTE: The following is part of a series produced by cohorts in the Luce-funded Rothko Chapel project on spirituality and social justice. Other entries can be found here.
During the early months of the pandemic, I was a professor of interreligious education at a school of theology. I was preparing students for ministry in multiple religious traditions and contexts. I spent the first six months of the pandemic with severe asthma and was unable to leave the house for days at a time.
In the small narrow spaces of my own home, I was connecting and teaching students who were caretakers of grief, stewards of pain for whole communities and often already hit with the forces of legislative terror perpetrated by an administration that announced such policies as banning immigrants by tweet. Everyday I wondered how much more trauma communities and leaders could endure.
I think a lot about bodies. Although the first poem was written a decade ago, before the pandemic, I felt the pain of activists and organizers who were not given or could not take spaces for rest. Even as they worked for justice, we celebrated the sacrifice of their bodies to improve conditions for other bodies. This paradox remains central in my art and scholarship. Does God call us to sacrifice our health to achieve a better world? How do we serve as models of healing justice when justice is killing us? The second poem interrogates this fact. The absence of bodies, their presence and the somatic experience of collective joy, was gone for me in the pandemic. Those moments of joyous solidarity – gone.
I don’t have answers. I have, however, evolved in my understanding, so that now I don’t believe the pursuit of justice should include self-abnegation or flagellation. Pain will only produce more pain. Something has to look and feel different.
Love
Some of us are
not allowed a personal
crisis or time to fall
from grace.
We are too busy
plugging the holes
in the dams
holding back
the crushing of our
communities.
And then in that moment,
we forget we have hearts
too, holed and that we
have bodies
crushable.
These are days
to know
that the bodies
that make
communities
must be loved,
cherished,
even coddled
at times.
We cannot do people-
building, if the
lines of men and women
made in this imaginary
are so cut open
that every wound
walking into this room
does not even know
its own pain.
Pandemic
I miss the body of bodies
pressed upon,
soul to soul
I miss your crush on mine
thumping to the bass
not knowing where you end,
I begin to see lost limbs
Shadowed, people are not people?
When alone is all we have.
I want solitude again
by choice
not because I want to stay
Alive.
This body remembers
Wide open spaces
Flowered with brown on brown
bring me back to the world
we knew.
Where you coming up on me
Didn’t strike fear into the
Heart.
I miss you body of bodies.
Everyday.
May your memories
Be a blessing
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Najeeba Syeed is the El-Hibri inaugural endowed chair and executive director of Augsburg’s Interfaith Institute. She is an expert practitioner in the fields of conflict resolution, mediation, and interfaith studies. An award-winning educator, she has taught extensively on interreligious education and published articles on faith and community-based conflict resolution, restorative justice, and interfaith just peacemaking. She previously served for 10 years as an associate professor at the Claremont School of Theology. She also held faculty positions at Starr King School for the Ministry and Chicago Theological Seminary, where she was most recently associate professor of Muslim and interreligious studies. She has served as the co-chair of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Politics Section and was a member of the Academy’s Religion, Social Conflict, and Peace Section.
She has been been featured in the Los Angeles Times, on NPR, PBS, on the Tavis Smiley show, worked with Oprah Winfrey on two projects and has been quoted by print and news media around the globe. Her speaking schedule has included keynotes and named lectures around the country at major universities including Duke University, La Sierra University, Seattle University, University of Southern California, Harvard University, Boston Theological Seminary, University of Toledo, Eastern Mennonite University and her alma mater, Guilford College