This here flesh

‘From the womb, we must repeat with regularity that to love ourselves is to survive. I believe that is what my father wanted for me and knew I would so desperately need: a tool for survival, the truth of my dignity named like a mercy new each morning.’

So writes Cole Arthur Riley in an unforgettable book of stories and reflections on discovering the sacred in her skin. In these deeply transporting pages, Cole reflects on the stories of her grandmother and father and encounters of enfleshed, embodied spirituality. As she writes memorably of her own lived experiences of childhood and selfhood, Cole boldly explores some of the most urgent questions of life and faith:

How can spirituality not silence the body, but instead allow it to come alive?
How do we honour, lament, and heal from the stories we inherit?
How can we find peace in a world overtaken with dislocation, noise, and unrest?

At once a compelling spiritual meditation and a tender coming-of-age narrative, This Here Flesh invites us to ponder the site of the soul by examining our capacity to rest, wonder, joy, rage, and repair – and finding that our humanity is not an enemy to faith but evidence of it.