​It was a perfect night if you enjoy a good snowstorm. It was the kind of snowstorm predicted well in advance, with classes pre-emptively cancelled for the following day. And while students of every age delight in the news of a snow day, teachers and professors rejoice even more, savouring a few additional hours to prepare for the work ahead. Without an early morning class to teach, I was wide awake and transfixed by the beauty of this snowy night, which I was enjoying from the comfort and warmth of my bed.

That peace was shattered when I heard the transformer blow. I watched out my window in awe at the shower of sparks it produced. Very quickly, the transformer pole caught on fire, burning dangerously close to the second-story bedroom in my 120-year-old house.

I made the 911 call; because this was a wealthy enclave in a small town, I could hear firetrucks in the distance before I had even given the dispatcher all the information about the incident. Borrowed privilege buys an immediate response to a frantic phone call at 2:00 on a Monday morning. The firefighters pulled up outside my house and immediately went to work, carefully navigating the heavy snow, which already seemed about two feet deep. I watched all this unfold like a dream until a very real knock on the door shattered my complacency. Fire personnel stood at the threshold, informing me that if they were not able to contain the situation, my daughter and I might need to evacuate. We’d have about five minutes.

What decisions do you need to make in the five minutes before you leave home in the middle of the night? Fearing the worst, and uncertain when you’ll return, what do you take with you? What do you leave behind?

As I stood at the doorway in flannel pajamas and a robe, a certain peace washed over me. Maybe that was the first time I actually experienced a peace that passes all understanding—a peace that makes absolutely no sense given the circumstances.

As much as I loved this old house and every single object in it, it was easy to decide what to take and what to leave. There were no frantic movements during this five-minute window. No sitcom-style running between rooms and emptying out drawers. Somehow, during my grown-up Black woman years, I had learned how to deliberately and calmly leave a place.

The second knock of fire personnel revealed a family of two ready to face an uncertain future. I had awakened my tiny daughter and dressed her for the snowy weather outside, snowsuit and boots over her footie pajamas. She stood, so sleepy, at the bottom of the stairs with me, one hand in mine and the other clutching the one stuffed animal that was to be saved. Her collection was out of control, dozens of mementos of our travels and gifts from generous friends and family members. But there was a very special bear in her hands: the one that always got to sleep in her bed; the one that was very gently washed on the delicate cycle; the one that I had bought her before I even knew of her existence.

That same bear my three-year-old was clutching would accompany her fifteen years later to her college dorm room, in a future I could not even imagine on that snowy night. It was a future in which she would leave me, join her new roommates—a future in which I would be careful not to let her see my tears but in which I would weep quietly by myself in the car on the trip back home.

But in that long-ago moment, I held her tiny hand while she held her bear. I, too, had only one thing in my other hand: a single bag that held keys, wallet, laptop, cell phone, and a few precious photos I always kept close. In that moment, we had so very little. But because we had each other, we had absolutely everything.

The transformer fire was quickly extinguished, and the evacuation order was ultimately cancelled. Within a week, everything returned to normal, and I have great memories of the camaraderie I shared with my neighbours as we lived without power for a few days. I also have a deep gratitude for the chaos of a night that began with a phone call to 911 and ended with everyone safe and sound. Sometimes that is not the case.

I am still sorting through the paradox of faith revealed to me that night. The things I thought I truly valued and held precious, kept on high shelves and away from rambunctious children and guests, will all one day turn to dust and ash. A lifetime of treasures, objects lovingly purchased and displayed, will all one day turn to dust and ash. But love endures. Love feels like a hand clasping your hand; an arm around your shoulder; a well-worn teddy bear that has soothed childhood fears. Love is when your sleepy child asks you calmly, “Where are we going?” as you wrestle her into her snowsuit in the middle of the night. Love is when you answer, “I don’t know,” and she still trusts you to figure it out, to keep her safe and warm. Love is knowing you are not alone even when it is time to go.

My faith—any faith, really—is a paradox. We believe what we cannot see. We worship One who cannot be known. We trust in that which is intangible. Our faith requires us, each day, to face uncertainties with little more than a teddy bear or purse to accompany us. Our faith requires a nakedness, vulnerability, and a stripping away of everything until we acknowledge the essence of who we are: creatures who cannot see even two minutes into our own future and who desperately need to know we are loved.

Confronting an evacuation in two feet of snow, with little more than the clothes on your back, distills your faith down to the bare bones. We can have peace in an uncertain future because we trust in the One who calms the storms raging outside us and also from within us. And we can leave for destinations and situations unknown because our trust is not in our own ability to weather the storm.

Deciding to Leave

Leaving home in the middle of the night during a snowstorm is much like leaving a religious community you once loved but have now outgrown. Both require courage and a leap of faith into an uncertain future. But I am convinced that there is a point at which leaving is a more faithful act than remaining. It is possible to stay in a place so long that your own integrity is compromised and you begin to accept the unacceptable.

One Sunday morning years ago, I listened to my pastor spend forty-five minutes of his sermon decrying the “broken families” responsible for the downfall of today’s society. I sat and listened carefully to his words, initially willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I have heard many sermons, and I know that truth can cut like a sword. I know the power of conviction. I had heard sermons that challenged me, made me angry, or gathered me like the refiner’s fire. Yet it was the preacher’s description of “brokenness” that propelled me toward the depths of disillusionment and sadness that many others have felt within churches.

That day I listened as a shepherd, entrusted with the care of this group of believers, defined brokenness in terms of hierarchy and structure: who was present in a family and who was absent, who was the head of a family and who lacked that authority. I listened as a shepherd failed to survey the congregation of people before him, so transfixed was he on changing demographics that he refused to speak to our actual brokenness, wounds, and scars. Because every type of family must deal with brokenness and must search for restoration. The brokenness of sexual or emotional abuse, or the brokenness of harsh criticism and even harsher punishment, or the brokenness of parental indifference or childhood defiance: brokenness comes to gay families and straight families, single parents and married couples, the poor and the rich, adoptive parents and biological parents alike. The devastation of a daughter’s drug use, the financial crisis of a recession, or an unexpected death can break any family. All families are broken in some way because all families consist of flawed human beings in need of healing. And all families find restoration and healing when they receive support, encouragement, and assistance.

This sermon blamed absent fathers, divorced women, queer people, feminists, and non-Christians for how the world was changing. All I could hear was someone wanting to hold on to an American dream that had never existed and a family structure that was never normative. As I sat there, knowing I would leave and never return, I thought about all the happy and healthy families I knew, including my own small family of two. The one thing they had in common was they looked like love in action. That was the common trait present in the rich diversity of all different kinds of healthy families, of all shapes and sizes: love expressed through how each person treated others. When love is missing from a family, or when love is absent from a sermon, people will walk away.

This had been my church home for several years—my first attempt to be a part of a multiracial, multi-ethnic congregation. Despite my best efforts, however, I had known for a long time that this place could never be my spiritual home, and this particular sermon distilled that for me. I did not know the process for leaving a church. Previously, moves required by schooling and jobs had always precipitated any change I had made from one congregation to another. In each case, I had left a church home reluctantly, and in each case, I had already found a place of community and belonging to which I planned to go—from a storefront church in a large city to a tiny congregation in a rural college town, for instance. Each time I had left those spaces, the church had prayed and anointed my head with oil, rejoicing with me as I headed to my next assignment. In each church, African American elders had profoundly believed in God’s calling on my life, and so they had sent me with their blessing to the next state, the next school, and the next mission.

So I had no script for leaving a place that has become toxic to my soul and spirit. After all, if I had an eschatological hope of a heaven in which people from every tribe and nation would gather, how could I not at least try to be a part of a multiracial and multi-ethnic community on earth? For months, as I worshipped in this space, I could not put my finger on what was missing. Why did this church, with a membership reflecting what heaven may be, never feel like home?

It was only during that final sermon before I left that the puzzle pieces clicked into place. In the eyes of this pastor and this church, my daughter and I were broken vessels—not because we were sinners saved by grace but because we represented a social and racial demographic this white male pastor had identified as somehow deficient, inferior to the hierarchical and patriarchal model he embraced.

On the Sunday that I left, it was because God had given me a new revelation about family. I sat there and reflected on one brief moment in John 19:26–27, when Jesus speaks these words: “Woman, behold thy son!” And to his disciple John: “Behold thy mother!” While suffering on the cross, in anticipation of his death, Jesus relinquishes his filial duty to his mother, Mary. As the eldest son, Jesus would have been responsible for her continued well-being. Into the hands of one of his disciples, John, Jesus commits the care of the one he loved so dearly. Not even the approach of death can diminish the love and respect he has for the woman who ushered him into the world and nursed him at her breast. But this brief exchange at the foot of the cross reveals something deeper. It establishes a kinship bond between Mary, mother of Jesus, and John, to whom Jesus entrusts her care. It is not, as patriarchal culture would have demanded, the transfer of a woman from one male authority to another male authority. Instead, this move is a radical alteration of familial relationships. No longer will ties of flesh and blood be the only factors for participation in a divine lineage. Mary has a new son, and John has a new mother.

Mother and brother, sister and father: these are no longer simply terms of biological destiny but of right relationship. Kinship is transformed; family becomes a beloved community in which we are called to care for one another without respect to blood ties. There are no broken families in the beautiful kin-dom of God, in which mutual love and compassion are the foundation. Mary and John are part of a new family being established by the work of Jesus on the cross. The first act of this new family is to comfort each other as they grieve the Crucified One.

I had to leave that particular church because my life as a Black woman—one who had seen various permutations of family life—had given me a new Christology, a new understanding of how the work of the cross is a radical reordering and disruption of hierarchical models. The mismatched, ragtag family I had put together during my years of schooling and my years of academic life, and this beautiful daughter who was growing up beloved and affirmed, were all a reflection of God’s divine love. The people willing to grieve with you at the foot of the cross are members of your family.

I discovered as I walked out of the doors of the church that morning that sometimes God’s grace and our own growth are in leaving things behind.

The Strength It Takes to Leave

My grandmother was among the generations of African Americans who left the rural South during the waves of the Great Migration. She would eventually end up in New York, while her family scattered to many of the receiving cities of these domestic refugees: Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. I think about them, the millions of them, leaving behind beloved family members, leaving behind churches, leaving behind everything they had ever known, all for a promise—or even a mere hint of a possibility—of a better place ahead. Some left their Southern homes because they were forced to, because of the nightmare of American racism, including lynchings and threats of lynchings, cross burnings, and economic disenfranchisement. Some left willingly, because they had dreams of a better life somewhere else. Sometimes I sit with the collective weight of millions of people who had to ask themselves whether leaving was a better option than staying, or whether leaving was perhaps the only option on the table.

In his collection Montage of a Dream Deferred, Langston Hughes begins his poem “Harlem” with the famous question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes was a part of that great early twentieth-century renaissance of Black intellectual, cultural, and artistic expression that owed its existence to the waves of migrants from Southern cities. There is a mournfulness in Hughes’s question, especially considering the unrealized potential of the millions who left the South but never found the American dream. They went to locations north and west, seeking the promised land of big cities and employment. These urban centres were supposed to be the escape from the Southern trees that bore such “strange fruit,” as that haunting song first recorded by Billie Holiday goes—strange fruit with “blood on the leaves and blood at the root.” To the North these massive waves of migrants went, looking for work outside of the system of sharecropping, slavery by a different name. And to the West they also went, seeking wide-open spaces and greener pastures and a chance to own their own land. They migrated hoping for jobs in factories and relief from the back-breaking toil of farming. They left the only homes they had known for generations, seeking not merely economic opportunities but an escape from the domestic terrorism of white supremacy.

But what happens when you travel for generations through the wilderness only to reach the promised land and find it is not the place you thought it would be? This is the question Hughes ponders in his poem: How does an entire group of people collectively experience a dream deferred? This dream of freedom, peace, and prosperity met the nightmare of continued Jim and Jane Crow, racial segregation, high rents, overcrowding, ghetto tenements, racial violence, and lynchings. My grandmother left the toil of the cotton fields of Georgia only to spend the vast majority of her adult life working in white women’s kitchens. Did leaving Georgia mean simply trading one nightmare for another? What dreams were abandoned on those sharecropping fields she left behind? What nightmares did she encounter while scrubbing someone else’s floors? What dreams were deferred in that Manhattan high-rise, where her meagre earnings were reduced each time she was sent home with a bag of hand-me-down clothing—as if somehow old clothes could pay her bills?

In her second definition of womanism, Alice Walker describes a womanist as a person who is “traditionally capable, as in: ‘Mama, I’m walking to Canada and I’m taking you and a bunch of other slaves with me.’ Reply: ‘It wouldn’t be the first time.’”

As a womanist theologian, I have to acknowledge that the act of leaving is a contradiction. In Walker’s definition, it is a capable Black woman—that “strong Black woman” of both myth and reality—who is able to leave slavery and take other enslaved persons with her. This definition is meant to evoke the spirit of Harriet Tubman: her courageous escape from enslavement and her even more courageous decision to return to bondage on at least thirteen separate occasions to free others. Yet as capable and strong as Walker’s definition suggests Black women are, leaving means walking away from people and places you love. Where is the space for strong Black women to acknowledge their weakness and their pain? Who is ready to actually listen to rather than minimize the hurt of strong Black women as they leave?

Enslaved women were forced to leave behind children who were torn from their breasts at the slave auction block. Some eventually had additional children and built new families, but when were they ever allowed to grieve for those taken from them? Some Black women bravely escaped enslavement, leaving behind parents and siblings—families who understood why their loved ones had to escape. But what about the pain of those who had to live with the consequences of these hard choices? Some Black women chose death over enslavement, leaving this mortal realm by jumping off the death slave ship or walking into the muddy waters of the Ibo Landing. Can we grieve at the horrific choice they had to make even as we celebrate their courage?

The experiences of Black women force us to ask, How do you live in the space of contradiction? What do you do when there is no reassurance that leaving is a better choice than remaining where you are?

When Alice Walker suggests in her definition of womanism that it “wouldn’t be the first time,” she is sensitive to the ways Black women today are still navigating the pain and the possibilities of leaving. Some Black women, after earning the highest degrees offered by the academy, leave spaces of power and privilege, choosing not to work in the toxic soup of higher education . . . and discover that the non-profit and social justice agency worlds they have chosen come along with all the same hierarchies and racism. Some Black women leave the church, after finding little sanctuary but plenty of misogyny and patriarchy . . . only to find that their self-help books and yoga classes and meditation techniques fail to fill a deep spiritual void. Some Black women leave unhealthy relationships, breaking away from those who try to diminish them, those who try to dim their shine . . . only to find a life of loneliness, all the challenges of Black marriage demographics, and the possibility they may never meet a life partner.

Leaving is trusting in God. Leaving is a leap of faith with no guarantee that the situation you encounter once you have left will be any more life-giving. Leaving is walking out of Egypt without the certainty that you will ever arrive in Canaan. Leaving is accepting that you may be capable and strong but that your hurts as you walk out of the door are still very real. The lesson of leaving is not in the destination, which you may never reach, but in the journey itself.

On a snowy night, I was willing to leave my house knowing that as long as my child and I were safe, I had everything I needed; I believed that God would provide. But I also felt the weight of responsibility for keeping my child safe and warm, along with the profound loneliness of not knowing exactly where we would go. In leaving a church, I gained a more powerful understanding of the kin-dom of God—an understanding of the cross as a vehicle for forging relationships and ties with all who are members of the body of Christ. Yet I still fear that the multiracial church movement simply replicates racist hierarchies, patterning itself after the white supremacist society in which it is lodged.

Leaving comes at a cost. The best we can do, perhaps, is leave with dignity. We can strive to leave faithfully. For Black women who have left homes, relationships, churches, and burning houses with nothing but the clothes on their back, there is honour in knowing they are part of a long legacy of women—women who walked to freedom and brought others along with them.

Excerpt from In My Grandmother’s House: Black Women, Faith, and the Stories We Inherit, ©️ 2023, Yolanda Pierce, Broadleaf Books. Used by permission.