Prophets of Grace: Heaven Forbid You Speak Out?

Part 2 on my vow to take my whiteness upon myself as a condition of my liberation.

Ancestry Matters!

I’m writing from inside a storm that has taken me up on the anniversary of Anne Hutchinson’s excommunication from her church. It happened in the 1630s. I know it sounds like a million years ago and completely irrelevant. But, many of us are sensing that our ancestors leave in us their hidden, beautiful, and painful legacies. For me, it’s a legacy that I can’t shake. I hope my writing shines even a little light on how ancestry impacts our bodies and the souls of people.

When Donald Trump demands that Governor Janet Mills of Maine give him a full-throated apology (disgusting) his words feel brutal. Read Trump’s message to Governor Mills after she refused to cower to his threat to take away funding if transgendered people are allowed to play in women’s sports.

“While the State of Maine has apologized for the Governor’s strong, but totally incorrect, statement about men playing in women’s sports while at the White House Governor’s Conference, we have not heard from the Governor herself, and she is that one that matters in such cases. Therefore, we need a full throated apology from the Governor herself, and a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again, before this case can be settled. I’m sure she will be able to do that quite easily. Thank you for your attention to this matter and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!! DJT.”

What’s the difference between Trump's words and those of the white male Puritan founders who demanded that Anne Hutchinson recant her position or face repercussions? At her trial, Rev John Cotton, her former mentor,r said,

“I would speak it to God’s glory you have been an instrument of doing some good amongst us… he hath given you a sharp apprehension, a ready utterance and ability to express yourself in the cause of God … [but] you cannot evade the argument … that filthy sin of the community of women; and all promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and women without distinction or relation of marriage, will necessarily follow…. Though I have not heard, neither do I think you have been unfaithful to your husband in his marriage covenant, yet that will follow upon it. …Therefore, I do admonish you, and also charge you in the name of Christ Jesus, in whose place I stand… that you would sadly consider the just hand of God against you, the great hurt you have done to the churches, the great dishonor you have brought to Jesus Christ, and the evil that you have done to many a poor soul.”

I carry the DNA of an American Story, a story that anyone trying to understand the mess we are in should know. I’m a daughter of grace and a dancer who knows that hope, grace, and transformation flow from our ability to align with truth.

Grace at War, and in Massacres, and Enslavements

Anne and her followers, the Hutchinsonians, engaged in a furious contest with early Bostonian white male theocrats, their brethren. Anne was known for prophesy, for her care as a midwife, and for her mystical, free inner grace. She was also brilliant, theologically equipped, maritally supported, and had a physical constitution that allowed her to speak up. Her ability to gather and teach men and women was a serious threat to the clergy and judges who also claimed to be agents of grace, a grace that demanded theological and behavioral unity through tradition, law, and the work of self-responsibility. Their grace is the one that gave you a vote in the colony or cast you out.

How is it that the moneyed power of white men keeps mustering the force that bears down harder than love’s grace? Imagine he gang of men facing Anne. Imagine being part of a swath of society whose body aligned to the wisdom of grace. Imagine your government, school, and church asking you to comply or else. Lists of people who were forced to recant their alignment with grace can be found in Saints And Sectaries, Anne Hutchinson, And The Antinomian Controversy In The Massachusetts Bay Colony in order to remain in Boston. And, significant numbers left willingly. My great-grandfather William Wentworth was one of them.

Those who honor a free inner grace tend to honor it in others. Relationships, neighborliness, mutual care, and diversity are their hallmarks. On the other hand when Anne was excommunicated, the Puritans’s “lord-it-over-all” mentality took hold. Horrifyingly, they squelched further rebellion and began using full-out conquest methods to terrorize dissidents and Indigenous neighbors. After the Hutchinsonians refused to take up arms against the Pequot, a militia executed a bloody massacre on Pequot men women and children that some historians consider a turning point in white relationships with Indians. And not just Indigenous people. The Court required 60 of Boston’s citizens to deliver their arms and ammunition at the town’s forts and passed a law making the criticism of court sentences a crime punishable by fine, imprisonment or banishment.

The more I learn about my ancestors, the clearer I get about how I got where I am. It’s profoundly troubling that when people from England moved to the eastern shore, they carried a plague that decimated 80 percent of Pequot Indians. After massacring the Pequot who survived the plaque, Boston elites put the Massachusetts-Caribbean slave trade into play and brought the first African slaves into the colony. Pequots who were frustratingly difficult to control, were sent to Bermuda to be sold or traded for Africans.

Two years after Anne was excommunicated, slavery was codified in the Body of Liberties, which was first proposed in 1638 and passed in 1641. That was the precedent for enslaving Indian captives in other colonies in the New World.[2]

Which story is mine? Both. But, I feel most aligned with the story of living grace that my ancestors stood and fought for.

What is this grace?

As a dancer, I feel my body to be like a tree or living fountain. Rooted and unimpeded, energy flows up and out. When it does, it feels like dancing. I sense agency, self-hood, and connection to everything all at once. Heaven is in me.

Coordinate my movement with others, and the inner grace amplifies and generates an experience of belonging, order, beauty, right relation, and wholeness. What ecstasy when a group body comes together with a purpose greater than any one of us!

You don’t have to train as a dancer or performer or to be young to encounter bodily grace. You don’t have to be able-bodied or of a certain race, gender, or nationality. You don’t even have to call what you do dancing. Grace flows in myriads of dancerly ways. Call what you do singing, music-making, sport, martial arts, meditation, ritual, silently contemplating trees and birds, or any behavior that attunes you to a bigger system. Joyfully, you and I even receive experiences of grace in the act of witnessing sports, a parade, people playing a concert, or offering a ritual.

Taste grace, and you will never forget it. You will want to maintain your grace alignment, even when others tell you to stop dancing your life. What a challenge if you forgo your graceways or rely on substitutes.

Humans get easily entranced by manipulative sources. But their highs don’t last long and require constant reinforcement from external authorities. Distracted, we forget how to find grace inside. When this happens, humanity’s natural grace is disordered. The feel of creative inner flow gets harder and harder, and with that bodily disorder, we feel pain.

Why is all this important?

Ancestral grace flows not only in an individual body but also through bodies of individuals and groups from generation to generation. Your body knows if your ancestral alignment is out of whack.

Most moderns haven’t a clue about any of this. I certainly didn’t. But I did pay attention when observing our dancing ancestors, who knew immediately when a member was out of alignment. How did they know? They saw it in a person’s inability to dance.

As a dancer with high sensitivity, I track the alignment of grace in me and others. I feel disturbed when things are off. When grace doesn’t flow, I might get depressed, anxious, or agitated. Sensations of “off-ness” require me to excavate dreams, art, body data, and intuitions when whatever is out of whack has no source in current events. I must trust what I uncover, check it out with others, metabolize the information, and turn it into soul medicine. This takes a lot of time and effort, which I’d rather spend on making beautiful things or in service.

I’ve learned to ask if ancestry is playing out in me in hidden ways. If so, I want the ancestors on my spirit team.

It turns out there are others who are sensitive to ancestry. They are prowling around, too, uncovering trauma, beauty, and the enduring grace encoded in them through generations. I’m particularly grateful to Hilary Giovale for writing Becoming A Good Relative and Katrina Browne, who created the documentary Traces of the Trade. Their embodied research models healthy, brave ways to creatively explore whiteness in the family tree. Then there is Dr. Joy DeGruy’s book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. She advanced my awareness of the field of epigenetics through her focus on the intersection of racism, trauma, violence, and American chattel slavery. According to The Center for Disease Control and Prevention, “Epigenetics refers to how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work. Unlike genetic changes (mutations), epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change the sequence of DNA bases, but they can change how your body reads a DNA sequence.”

Ancestry is also key to the pioneering work of Bayo Akomolafe, Daniel Foor, Sharon Blackie, and other great healers/storytellers of our time. Ancestry matters. Truth matters. When I use the word matter, I mean what is physically embodied in our hearts, minds, tissues, bones, cells, nervous systems, DNA, and souls.

Anne Hutchinson and the Hutchinsonian movement matter to me. I want it to matter to others who today embody the story of the United States. Movements like Anne’s keep pushing back against entities who say they offer grace but then harm, cut off, and control us. It’s not grace when leaders create apocalyptic levels of trauma in the body politic. That’s the level of disturbance I feel as a citizen in the Trump/Musk/MAGA hurricane.

I am growing a better sense of ways my white ancestors’ participated in, resisted, and remained oblivious to the white, educated leaders who clear-cut the flow of spiritual intelligence rising through the human family tree. Their painful prunings are evident in the shaping of our government, education, and religion.

I want to align with my body’s truth. I choose a grace that keeps on giving. So I dance with my ancestors, forgive, take responsibility, and rededicate myself to grace as I take my whiteness upon myself as a condition of my liberation.

I feel aligned again and know.

Ancestry Matters.

Check out the American history podcasts on the Massachusetts bay Antinomian controversy. I’ve read a ton on this situation and can offer other resources if you are interested.

Thanks so much for reading. I’d love any comments.