Cole (Nicole) Arthur Riley is a writer and poet and is the creator of Black Liturgies, a space where black words of dignity, lament, rage, and rest are curated and integrated with a liberating spirituality. She is also the author of the NYT bestsellers, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us and Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human. She works as the content and spiritual formation manager for Chesterton House: A Center for Christian Studies at Cornell University.
Interview by Charmaine Yip
CY Could you tell us more about how you grew up in a household that had no explicit mention of God, but where there was a spirituality of ‘unspoken liturgies’?
We didn’t go to church or read the Bible or talk directly about Jesus. Maybe God would be mentioned distantly, but certainly not attached to any particular religion. I come from a family that loves to tell stories. We love to make up stories and pass them on to our children. So there are components of the sacred and of the spiritual in my family, even if it wasn’t articulated as such.
In your writing, you describe yourself as a sceptic, but your writing reflects a real intimacy with Jesus. Could you describe your journey with him?
My family didn’t really go to church, but there was this strange season of life where we ended up going to an all-white Baptist Church, very small and conservative, with my great aunt who had recently lost her husband. That was the first encounter I had with the theology of Jesus. I found it completely terrifying and very demanding as a little girl at her first Good Friday service. Hearing about the grotesque nature of the cross was very intense. In part, because of that initial experience, and in part because of the duality that my family was living, we would leave those services and, because it wasn’t my parents’ belief system, I could detach myself from it.
