In this episode, Alethia Jones helps us explore the hidden ways faith, culture, and survival intertwine in personal and collective expression. From the cloaking spiritual identity to the role of reverence in leadership, we examine how people navigate spaces where it is difficult to manifest one's own personal sense of reverence. Through dance, rhetoric, and activism, we uncover the tension between adaptation and authenticity, how survival sometimes demands concealment, yet true transformation requires deep presence.

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Transcript

Alethia

Sometimes, the quest for reverence is something that we have to really push against the grain, like fight for within ourselves, right, and to really cultivate in a very self-conscious and deliberate way. And how does one find oneself in a practice and an experience that can get you back to your humanity despite dehumanizing experiences?

Ceasar

Yeah, I was going to say we should do some kind of an introduction. Alethia and I have known each other for a while. When you know someone for a long time, you don’t want to introduce too much because things get revealed.

Ayushi

Yeah, we’re not at a bar yet. We’re still at the mic. Yeah, we’re not at the bar. We’re still at the mic. Yeah, still at the mic. Can’t do that kind of introduction. Hi, Alethia. My name is Ayushi. I am Ceasar’s former student, former advisee, for my master’s, and am now based in Oakland, California, where I build technology for public services for the government. You know, food stamps, unemployment, insurance, things like that.

Alethia

Nice. That’s great. It’s good to meet you. We share similar origin stories. It’s great to know you have that shared MIT experience.

Ayushi

Urban planning is so close to my heart, even though it’s not what I do day to day anymore.

Ceasar

And I wish he was a co-creator of this series, so…

Ayushi

That too. We don’t need to get there. That’s Ceasar’s life. I’m just here as the entertainment.

Ceasar

Yeah, right, right, right. So, Alethia, what are you up to? How’s your day been?

Alethia

It’s been a wonderful day. I had a great dance class this morning, a nice coaching session.

Ayushi

What kind of dance?

Alethia

This is Caribbean. It’s a Caribbean dance, but today’s dance is based on an orisha from the Dahamie people in West Africa called Babalau. And I’ll share that she introduced it as in the West, he celebrated at St. Lazarus, and it was just this example of how enslaved African peoples used Catholicism as a cover to hide them worshipping their own gods that they’d brought with them. That history that’s tied to the movement is just really beautiful.

Ayushi

Wow. And what a great way to start your day and that too a hump day of all days.

Ceasar

It’s also interesting because it’s the perfect story for starting out this show. We came together really talking about doing something around faith, spirituality, and religion and what it meant to actually bring those things into the public sphere as we enter a working democracy. We kind of move, you know, a little bit from that concept to really the concept of reverence, but it all connects. And I think the story you just told was one that really talked about the essence of faith and why it was so important even in the survival, you know. Even as people had to cloak it under something else to keep what was really meaningful for them, it was really important.

Ayushi

and to capture it in other ways, right? To cloak it and then to capture it through movement. You know, it’s like the obfuscation of this thing that is so core to your survival. And yet, there’s not full freedom to talk about it in the public space, right? Holding both those things.

Alethia

Right.

Ceasar

So, Alethia, when I first reached out to you and said, “hey, would you be interested in being on this, you know, on our show with us? And, you know, we’re talking about this notion of reverence, and we’re talking about faith, spirituality, and religion.” What, what went through you mind?

Ayushi

Yes. I want to know too. Right.

Alethia

It sounds like a nice idea. It’s something I don’t do enough of, but I’ll share what I can.

Ceasar

You don’t do enough faith, you don’t do enough spirituality, you don’t do enough reverence.

Alethia

So many other things. It’s probably just a theme in my life that I frame most things like I should be doing more of X, Y, and insert, insert, flatboard here. But in some ways it also really resonates, right? It is, I think, fundamental to who we are, but it goes by lots of different names. And I also find myself thinking about what are the unconscious practices, right? The things that we take for granted, right? Like culture is what you swim in. The fish don’t know they’re swimming in water. They’re just doing it. So a part of me was sort of curious. I wanted to account for that dimension of it as well as the more self-conscious and chosen practices and moments.

Ceasar

We struggled over this term a lot. We struggled for about a year doing this show. I mean, sure, there was COVID.

Ayushi

been to. But yeah, we really did struggle about this for a year.

Ceasar

COVID, too. That happened, too. But it was a struggle for us to kind of figure out how to bring it forward. And part of that struggle was those three words weren’t comprehensive enough, right? That was part of the problem. You know, faith, spirituality, and religion. I mean, we’d have people to say, what if I don’t have that? What if I’m something else? And so we kept struggling. Well, you know, what is it we’re after? You know, what is it we’re trying to get and understand? And as we started in this whole podcast series thinking about how people show up in the civic space, you know, we show up and we may talk about issues, we may be engaged with them, but a lot of what we have to say is informed by these deeper belief systems. And those aren’t kind of allowed in the space, at least not in a healthy way. We don’t know how to have them there in this space in a healthy way. And so they kind of either stay inside or sometimes people weaponize them, right? And they use them as, you know, as ways to shut other people down and so on and so forth. That’s not good either. So we just kind of said, well, let’s try this. And so we ended up with this word reverence, right? As a way of thinking about how did we bring that into our social justice work? How do we bring that into the work that we’re doing? What does it mean even to bring reverence to your work and to your engagement with the other and folks like that?

Ayushi

Yeah, that was our whole hypothesis. If folks are doing work that is maybe thankless or underappreciated or personally taxing, it might be that they’re doing it because it is coming from a deeper space of reverence for that work, for that project, for that people, that community, whatever it might be. I would love to learn about how maybe your sense of reverence has impacted your work.

Alethia

For answering that question, you know, one very, very, very important part of my journey occurred simultaneous with my fellowship at MIT, right, which is where Cesar and I met in 2004. So I connected, while I was living in Cambridge, I connected with the Women’s Theological Center. It was a long-standing activist organization in Boston. It changed its name to Women Transforming Community before it closed down. And I connected with them at a point when they were creating a new transformative leadership development curriculum. And the name of the curriculum was Leading from Spirit. And I had the really good fortune of joining with an incredible team of other volunteer facilitators and leaders to develop, craft the curriculum, to pilot it and to conduct these weekend-long trainings. And that’s actually one of the ways in which reverence for me manifests is leading in crafting these kinds of spaces, especially for social change makers, where they can really reflect both personally and spiritually and professionally. And so it was just an extraordinary gift because I’d recently come into that realization about how important that was for me. It was just such a gift to be able to work with the WTC team and see how it’s possible and it’s tangible and to do so in community. But one of the reasons why I mention it is that over time, we started to hear that the word spirit was an obstacle for some people. What does spirit mean? Where does it come from? Proselytizing. Just all of these things were attached to the word spirit. And so it became part of a conversation of should we rename the program to better capture the energy and the essence of what we wanted to convey. And we didn’t quite solve that conundrum. Just over time, the program folded so that we no longer had to address that question but I want to sort of convey my admiration for landing on the word reverence because I think it’s a beautiful word which captures something similar, but it doesn’t quite have the same baggage that the three words you mentioned can carry for people.

Ayushi

I was really waiting for you to say the program got renamed to like leading from vibes or something like I don’t know I was ready I was ready okay okay all right well thank you we’ll take it yeah we we worked hard on the word choice.

Ceasar

That would have been good. You’re a published author, you’ve written, you’ve worked in, you know, you’ve worked in the union organizations, you’ve worked in foundations, you’ve, you know, you’re not teaching again. So you’ve been in all these different kinds of environments. And I guess the question for me is, does that sense of how you bring yourself in order to shift as you’re in these different environments? Do some cultures meet it easier than others?

Alethia

So I’ll try to combine my answer to that to the previous question of where’s reverence present in my work and I think it’s most palpable and most present in creating and delivering learning spaces for people and there’s a way in which it’s more visceral for me in a leadership development context with practitioners more than the classroom but there is a through design and there’s a continuity between the classroom and what I wish to create for social change leaders, right? And so there is a way for me creating that space of safety and trust that enables risk-taking and pushing beyond one’s habitual limits and boundaries is a sacred space and involves matters of the soul, right? And then if you’re the way in which I like to do it is one where the experience is rippling through multiple levels, right? At the intellectual level, at the heart level, sort of at the soul level but always in ways in which the person is a choice in guiding their own learning, right? And so there’s steps that they’re choosing to take in order to reveal things and to have, dare I say, revelations, right, about who they are and what they do and how they do it and why they do it and how to kind of peel back the layers in their own growth. And so that to me is a space of reverence and I think in order to do that well, I need to attend to my own spiritual sort of life and growth and it keeps me honest, right? The more I’m doing that work, the more I have to be on my own journey and in touch with my own growth edges and respecting and honoring that process within myself so I could create it for others.

Ayushi

Whoa, that’s incredible. I’ve never actually considered those spaces of self-discovery or, like you said, peeling back layers as spaces of reverence, but that is true. Yeah, there’s a self-learning. You’re taking on risk and you have to be in a space that feels safe and take on that risk. And so for you to choose to create those spaces for people, yeah, that’s incredible. I think I’m really blown away by your intention there and how you’ve created that through line across various spaces that you’ve worked in. Sorry, I’m just reflecting back. That’s incredible. I’m just processing out loud what you said. You mentioned, you know, leave to keep yourself honest as you do this work as well, as you help sort of other people push their own spaces. And you mentioned edge, and I think that’s a word. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s maybe the most recent edge that you came across for yourself that you had to keep yourself honest with? And yeah, how did you do that?

Alethia

Well, the edge that’s alive for me right now is participating in the Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation coaching program. So that’s very alive for me at the moment. I’m in the middle of that program, and I chose to apply for it. I’m so delighted that I was selected because it is a great container to create the experiences that I just described. And so in pushing forward in my own coaching practice and refining, what does it mean to be a professional coach, right? I’ve had a coaching stance. I’ve been exposed to coaching. I’ve had tons of coaches over the years. It already has infused my work. But to do it in this very deliberate way in this, what I would call an upstart program that is against the grain, right? It has deliberately defined itself as being by, about, and for changemakers, especially changemakers of color, right? Who are indigenous, black, and other traditions. It explicitly takes on systemic oppressions. It pays attention to our ancestral wisdom, which are all things that conventional coaching through the International Coaching Federation does not do, right? So they normally have that training. And it’s one of the reasons I’ve always been intrigued by coaching, because there’s some things about coaching that can be very effective, but then it tends to exist in a way that’s very individualistic, very upper middle class professional, very much about sort of goal oriented in ways that are about career and things that are materialistic. And so when I learned, when I was introduced to this, programs existed. It was created around two and a half years ago. We were only the second cohort. So I immediately had an affinity for its values and what it was offering and the potential of what the program can mean, particularly for bringing on another generation of coaches that has social change, right? And systemic change at the center, not as like we’re trying to take that tool and trying to figure out how to make it work for us. Coaching session today, part of the training is that you have to be coached by someone who is familiar with the framework. And so our conversation today was very much about those edges for myself as I sort of push forward more deeply into this new chapter and this new venture.

Ceasar

It’s really, really true being disconnected some of the way people approach the coaching. One of the things I’m wondering, as we’ve kind of gone about this work, our whole podcast series, really thinking about people like yourselves and how you go about manifest something that’s our topic, and so this time it’s around reference. But also wondering, I have two questions. One is, has there been a time in your life where reference has escaped you? You couldn’t find it and you’re in the face of something and it’s like, I’m not feeling that right now.

Ayushi

When does it fall away? Ooh, I like that question.

Ceasar

We need to follow away. I’ll stop with that one. I’m going to save the other, because it’s a very different kind of thing.

Ayushi

I feel like I want to think about that for myself too now.

Ceasar

Once, Yeah, you know, I forget questions. I was kind of reflecting for myself as you were saying that, thinking about times where both in these institutions, but just even in my public life, right, just being out in the world, being part of this country, realizing that sometimes I have a real, I want to say a battle inside of myself. And I say it that way, not because I think I’m going in, I’m at this fork and have to really struggle with a particular direction. I know which direction I’m headed in, but staying on that road, sometimes it’s just, it’s really hard, right? But I know I’m going to do that. To make that really clear, I have this real deep belief in the dignity of people and this sense of reverence for the human spirit and stuff. At times, find myself just like wanting to be dismissive of certain people, certain categories of people. It’s just like, I’m done with it. I don’t understand it anymore. It’s not, it’s too much work. It’s whatever it may be. And so it’s like in those ways where I feel like this, my belief or sense of, or my commitment to, or my attachment to reverence starts to feel really slipped. It’s a battle. I have to struggle to just stay in there and say, okay, I’m going to remind myself. I’m going to keep reminding myself that grounding that you mentioned earlier that I believe in. But then sometimes I think this, maybe I’m wrong in trying to hold on that much. Maybe this thing of reverence is a way of seeing, but not necessarily requires the same, I don’t know, space that you’re providing other people. I mean, just the other day, my wife was in, these people stopped by our house for something and we have a very nice house with a beautiful garden stuff. And the first question they asked her is, oh, how long have you been renting this place?

Ayushi

Are you kidding me?

Ceasar

And it’s just kind of like… No, no, it’s just kind of like…

Ayushi

I am offended. I feel so offended right now.

Ceasar

You know, you feel the offense, but sometimes it just feels like, ah, the work that needs to be done. And so where I’m going with all this is just thinking, you know, I’m really interested in how do we bring these kinds of senses into our public sphere, into our public life. And then when I listen to you, Alethia, I get reminded of the work it takes to do that, right? It’s just not like you show up and bring reverence, right? It’s work. It’s a lot of personal work and creating spaces for other people and stuff like that. And then it makes me say like, well, is that a possibility then in our public life? Because of the amount of work it takes to do it, you know? What does it mean to do that in the public sphere? Is it just modeling it for other people? Or how do you bring others along

Alethia

Yeah, that raises so much, Ceasar. I think I’d request a clarification of where you landed, right? Because it seems to me that a standard practice for many folks is that what they take to source their souls exists in a private sphere. And then there is a public sphere of their lives. And they, you know, may or may not talk about what’s behind what they do, they just do it. And they sort of do it well, and find ways to keep bringing themselves back, back to the table. But I, I sensed that in your question, you wanted to know, what’s the public version of like sourcing oneself?

Ceasar

Yeah, what’s the public version of that? Because I don’t. Keeping it to ourselves, I think it really, in some ways, blocks us from others in the most important way, right? In the most important part of who we are, right? And with this, you know, just trying to figure this out. And it’s, you know, a lot of my work I do is really about creating spaces for people to bring their own lived experience forward in the conversations and in public spaces. And I see that as one way of creating that opportunity for people to just listen to other people’s experiences and actually have the opportunity to name your experience in the world, no judgment, you know, no, just like, this is what it is. And, you know, it is what it is. But I personally just, I’m caught sometimes, right? I’m just caught knowing that I’m driven by a certain set of beliefs. A core part of that belief is in really a belief that people, right, are inherently good in some sense, right? That there’s a way to reach, right? There’s a way to reach. That’s the possibility because in some sense, in my faith and belief, we’re all part of God, right? We’re all part of that spirit. We’re all part of that energy. And so there’s a possibility of the connection at all times. And yet, when I see the manifestation of who we are as human beings in this place right now and see some of the things we do to each other, I think I must be fooling myself, right? You know, why am I doing that?

Alethia

I want to start with that by acknowledging that sometimes hiding it, placing something in a protective package is there to protect and preserve it. That not sharing it explicitly can be a self-conscious strategic act of survival. Listening to a podcast a month ago where the hosts are African immigrants. They talked about when their families moved to a new city or they were starting a new school, if they’re going from middle school to high school. At that point, their parents had the conversation with them about selecting a name. It’s about selecting recognizable white Christian familiar name that they can use in this new school in order to protect the beauty and sacredness of their African names, which would get distorted and misused. It might make them a target or be a site of bullying if they used them. They were each just talking about, just reflecting on that moment and how excited they were to like, I chose Crystal instead of N.D.D. and what it meant for them to want to protect the gift of what their African names are from distortion. I want to acknowledge that and then sometimes there can be a downside to that side of protection where you can get lost in the original meaning of it. That might fade away. What’s also coming to mind is the sense of who you are and how you are is what matters. It’s just how do you experience yourself? How do others experience you? That speaks volumes. I have a friend who’s Buddhist and at some point in his practice, he had to do 10,000 frustrations. At the end of 10,000 frustrations, which took him three years or five years to do, there’s a shift that happens there. I think most people just experience him in a particular way, but he doesn’t necessarily always talk explicitly about why he emanates a certain kind of quality because he’s made that commitment to the practice. There’s a saying before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. To keep going and maybe what shifts is your quality of being and that can be detected by others in ways that can be supportive and that can be a form of leadership in itself. So I don’t know if that fully answers your question. I probably have some other versions of an answer.

Ceasar

Well, it wasn’t so much a directed question at you, just questioning of myself in general.

Alethia

Yeah, you know, it’s the the are you renting the presumption that you’re renting and not owning the story. It just reminded me of the ways in which you never know when something is coming. And you never know what form it will take and how much of a mark it would leave. I’m reminded of teaching overseas, I taught in a comparative international urban studies program. So we had the same students for a full semester. But we moved to a different continent in a different country every five weeks. And so we started out in Brazil, Sao Paulo, Brazil, then we went to Cape Town, South Africa, and we ended in Hanoi, Vietnam. And Cape Town being the middle of the semester, there was a one week, one week break. And so I was teaching the anthropology sociology courses, right, which meant I was teaching classes about racial segregation and like Detroit, Sao Paulo, Cape Town, South Africa. And, and apparently, it made some of the white students uncomfortable, you know, and I heard at the end of the semester, part of the feedback was Alethia seems to to be obsessed. I’m so confused. Given the location. So confusing, right? Just be teaching about the thing. It’s the thing. But the reason I raised it is because a white male student, his parents came to South Africa for the vacation week, so they could spend the week together. And I remember his parents walking into the big conference room. And he introduced his parents to all the other faculty members. And like deliberately, yeah, and explicitly. And so from time to time, I’ll remember things like that, or other things that happened on that trip or other places where like, there’s this message that’s being being sent. And I would say that, that reverence or doing things to sustain one’s self is not it’s for me going through life. I’m currently in a moment of rebuilding and reconsidering what are the ways to to sustain myself because we I’m a part of this larger culture. I, you know, I wasn’t drawn to the Christianity, the kind of Christian practices, my mom sort of practice that helped her sustain herself. If anything, if one looks at the amount of hours logged, I would say I worship at the altar of Netflix, don’t we all worship at any other altar. Right? Right. That numbing out is a national pastime, right? And there’s so many ways to do that. And so to just acknowledge that sometimes the quest for reference is something that we have to really push against the grain, like fight for within ourselves, right? And to really cultivate in a very self conscious and, and deliberate way because the default setting of the routine practices of society, it’s, it’s not necessarily this. And how does one find oneself in a, in a practice and an experience that can get you back to your humanity, despite all of these dehumanizing, dehumanizing experiences, I just finished writing a book review on an autobiography of Fannie Lou Hamer. It’s called Walk With Me. And one of the themes in that that biography is the way in which Fannie Lou Hamer really had to struggle with what I would call righteous rage, the things that happened to her, kept happening to her, to her people, her community, that in Mississippi, Ruleville, Sunflower County, Mississippi, she grew up as a sharecropper. Here you are in the 50s and 60s fighting for your life and your freedom and the entire system is pushing back against you and the way in which her faith practice was such that she was really deliberately trying to steer herself into what I would call a righteous rage rather than descending into hatred, a vindictive sort of hatred and you know there are just quotes of her preaching like testifying that hatred will get us nowhere, that it’s no good to end up hating the white man because that will just make you as bitter and as evil as the white man is towards black people. And so how she was using her faith to have her see the humanity in white and to really work for the liberation of everyone, that she could condemn the hateful activities that they were engaged in yet speak to a system and society where we actually all could genuinely be equal. And I love that she would say, you know, I don’t want equality, the equality that the white man has, he’s gotten it because he’s oppressed me and my people. I don’t want that kind of equality. What I want are full human rights. What I want is a true democracy, right? So how can we use whatever our practices are to get us to a space where we can still be fully human and not sort of just spiteful and self-righteous?

Ayushi

Wow…

Ceasar

Mmm, it’s beautiful, beautiful.

Ayushi

Taking notes. Literally taking notes out here. Wow.

Ceasar

Yeah, it’s a challenge.

Ayushi

Righteous rage. Sorry, go ahead, Ceasar.

Ceasar

Yeah. No, I was just going to say something about the righteous rage too. I just love it.

Ayushi

Ceasar, as you were talking about, you know, the tension within and how do you maintain, you know, yeah, the righteous rage as the response here is really, really powerful for me. I mean, I don’t know that I have that quite yet. I don’t think my rage is righteous quite yet. But you know, it is something that is cultivatable within ourselves and I’m thinking of the various practices that each person can draw on to build that. I’m thinking of like, I don’t know, I’m a very visual person. I’m thinking of isometric exercises, right? Where like you don’t, it looks like you’re not moving. It’s like when you do a plank and it looks like you’re not moving, but you really are actually strengthening your core muscles, your ab muscles. And I don’t know, I’m thinking of like the equivalent for that, right? Where it’s like you said, you’ll chop wood and carry water before and after, but the very act of practicing the prostrations, the chopping of wood or the carrying of water actually creates a certain kind of resolve within oneself that allows your response to not just be the falling away of reverence, but actually a righteous rage that ultimately supports the whole system of people, right? Wow. That’s really, thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing that review. And I look forward to that book too, actually, I’d love for you to share these links with us. We could pass them along. If you could share a story about the last time you felt reverence or held space for reverence, like a moment recently that you felt reverent, you know, where were you? What was happening? We can all share, we can all close out.

Alethia

So I have a two-part answer. The first part tries to answer a question you asked earlier about the impact on others. All right, 2021, it dawned in me at the end of 2020 that remote work meant that one could work from anywhere. And why not work from Jamaica, I thought. And so I decided to spend a month in Jamaica and I cultivated a relationship with someone who’s now a friend who, you know, moved back to Jamaica around three years ago and they conduct workshops and they’re a healer. And so I decided to live sort of adjacent to them. The short version of the story is that one month became six months and it was, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to me that I would not ever have imagined that I would be able to spend that much time back in Jamaica. And so for people like me who had a particular kind of job that could make that possible, I feel very fortunate amongst all the misfortune that is COVID. But I had someone in my team who I ran into socially recently say to me, seeing you on Zoom calls to your meetings from Jamaica just reminded me how important it was for me to take care of myself. And it was a really important message that you have to give yourself some time and some grace. And so you don’t always know what message you’re sending. This one makes one’s choices, but it was nice to hear that from her.

Ayushi

That’s beautiful.

Ceasar

I love it.

Ayushi

I feel really warm. Thank you both for sharing those stories.

Ceasar

Well, Alethia, thank you so much for being with us. You are an inaugural show. This is first. We have a bunch more lined up, and this has been really great.

Alethia

Oh, my goodness. Honor is ours. Yeah, it’s definitely honored.

Ayushi

So thank you so much.

Ayushi

Thank you all so much for listening to that episode of Season three of We Who Engage. This conversation would not have been possible without sound production and editing by Dave Lashansky and Jeff DeWine. A huge thank you also to our team who supported us throughout COVID. Eli Epperson, Ana Perez, Nick Sprague, Mo Bradford, and Patricia Uregas.

Ceasar

Yes, and we also have to send a big thank you to the Silverberg family for their support for our launch event, which we’ve never done before. A belief in disbelief that was held at the MIT Museum, who really stood out for us to give us that space under short notice. And we also have to give a really big shout out to the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, who’s been a supporter of this work from the very beginning and will continue to do so.

Ayushi

Thank you all for listening.

Ceasar

Thank you.