Black Liturgies  ## Metadata - Author: [[Cole Arthur Riley]] | [[3. Resources/Authors/Cole Arthur Riley|Cole Arthur Riley]] - Full Title: Black Liturgies - Category: #books - Kindle: [Open in Kindle](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2PCRYL3) - Document Tags: [[Faith]] ## Document Notes ## Highlights - The independence of personal prayer required more imagination than I could access at the time. It is exhausting enough trying to keep oneself alive; to be expected to articulate love and hope and beauty—and more dangerously, lament—was like trying to float with weights hanging from my neck. ([Location 129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C2PCRYL3&location=129)) - Liturgy, I found, was a kind of rest. For the first time, my presence in a spiritual space didn’t depend on my own articulation or imagination. I could rise and sit and kneel and speak or not speak in this sacred theater that others had written the script for. I could let others hold a sacred imagination for me. ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C2PCRYL3&location=131)) - Ritual, when coupled with beauty, makes for a very adequate mooring. It won’t carry you to shore, but it will keep you close enough that hope can swim out to visit you regularly. ([Location 135](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C2PCRYL3&location=135)) - Remind us that our dignity does not wane or bud in relation to anyone’s belief in it, including our own. Let us rest with the knowledge that we have nothing to prove; our dignity, perpetual as it is divine. We will not shrink. We expand. Remind us of our making. For we too contain the divine. Amen. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0C2PCRYL3&location=339))