How I've Changed
When I applied to come to HDS I said in my essay I would “dedicate my study at Harvard to the racial reckoning that is long overdue in this country.” I am so grateful to have been able to do that in ways I could not have imagined or predicted, from engaging with Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery process, to offering a student-led course with Emma Thomas (MDiv ‘24) titled “Ancestors & Money: the Spiritual Dimension of Reparations Work for White People,” to supporting my friend and collaborator Dr. David Ragland to bring his class “Reparations as a Spiritual Practice” to HDS. I feel ever more clear about the work that is mine to do in this lifetime, reckoning with my family and our country’s histories of colonization and enslavement, and moving towards repair. I think the biggest change for me is having a broader sense of community in terms of who I am in this work with for the long haul. We are just getting started.
Memorable Moment
Looking out at the Williams Chapel filled with friends, fellow students, professors and local community members for my book launch & reading of “Decolonial Dames of America” in April! I had the privilege to have this little red prayer book published by The Constellation Project here at HDS in March. It was so powerful to read the entire essay aloud to 100+ people (half in person, half on Zoom!) for the first time, and to respond to the questions it aroused for people: how do we approach our families when they do not want to talk about the harm caused by our ancestors? How do we hold the depth of the grief in this work? What has my healing journey looked like? How are things with my family now? Where is there joy amidst it all? What do I mean by the spiritual dimension of reparations work? It’s still terrifying to talk about these things in public, but I’m becoming ever more clear that it is a risk I am being asked to and need to be willing to take.
Message of Thanks
Endless, boundless gratitude to Dean Melissa Bartholomew and Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams. These two incredible women have mentored and grown me in huge and significant ways. Leading by love and example, each of their rigorous practices of truth-telling have invited me into more and more courage (meaning heart). Dean Melissa’s vision a decade ago as a student for a Racial Justice & Healing Initiative created an HDS that I got to experience—one where a community committed to creating an anti-racist and anti-oppressive HDS and a world healed of racism was large enough to find home in throughout my time here. They are the two people I know I got brought to HDS to learn from and with. Each have made me me, opening doors and offering mirrors at crucial moments along my journey. I also want to offer my thanks to the monks and nuns of the New England Peace Pagoda, members of the Nipponzan Myōhōji Buddhist order. The opportunity to participate in the “Listening to the Call of the Great Spirit: Facing 400 years of Colonization and Walking into the Future” peace walk in 2021 and 2022 was life-changing for me. Walking between sites of colonial violence in southern New England, over two two-week periods each fall I was here, I felt with each footstep how the history of this region that I came here to reckon with landed in my body in a deeper way. These monks and nuns have been walking for peace and justice and reparations for decades, and I know my life path will be profoundly influenced by their example.
Future Plans
I am returning to my life in intentional community at Canticle Farm in Oakland, California, Lisjan Ohlone territory. I am so grateful to my community members who have held it down while I’ve been away so much the last two years! We are a multi-racial, cross-class, interfaith, intergenerational community who are practicing restorative justice and gift economics in an effort to come together across all those historical divides and learn to live together, love and support one another. It is difficult, life-giving work. I’m also getting married in June! And then taking a sabbatical this summer before returning to my work as a coach and facilitator supporting people with inherited wealth who are reckoning with the harm caused by their ancestors in accumulation of those resources, and practicing redistribution and divestment in support of social justice movements (see morganhcurtis.com). I love this work, and the way it brings together the material and spiritual dimensions of repair. I’m leaving my time at HDS ever more deeply committed to it.