Share
Rewrite
Share
Rewrite
Share
Rewrite
Share
Rewrite
In this episode of From Chains to Links, we explore the intersections of faith, spirituality, and black innovation. Our hosts Ifeoma Ike and Kelly Burton engage in a deep conversation on redefining spiritual practices, embracing the divine feminine, and how these practices can inspire black entrepreneurship and generational wealth creation. From ancestral connections through music to personal reflections on faith beyond the church, this episode offers a fresh perspective on seeking without fear and building a spiritual home. Join us as we reimagine what it means to thrive—both spiritually and as a community.
How are you?
I’m good. How are you?
I’m okay.
It’s a wild, wild world out there.
I haven’t noticed. I’m staying grounded.
Feet on the ground is necessary at this moment.
Who needs shoes?
You might need to run so you might want to keep your shoes close by. At this moment, there are a lot of people who are talking about getting their life together. Have you heard this thing?
Hopefully, they’ve already started getting their life together. Sustaining is what I’m hearing in my circle. How much wellness do we need to survive?
For me, it has been causing me to tap into my spirituality in a different kind of way. I’m curious what that looks like for you.
Spirituality And Grounding In Difficult Times
Recognizing we have a broad audience, spirituality means different things to different people. On the most secular level, spirituality is what you can access that’s beyond what you see. Since a lot of circumstances seem unfixable or maybe on fire at the moment, for me, spirituality is a combination of what are the reminders that I need to have about myself and my worth and then what are the practices and the rituals that are accessible to stay grounded in those beliefs. That’s what I’m tapping into. What does it look like for you?
The Role Of Music And Ancestral Connection
How about we do a quick little back and forth to share with our audience how we are calibrating at this moment from a spiritual perspective as entrepreneurs? Music has been a solace for me, especially gospel music. I love music from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. I don’t listen to anything north of 2000. This is causing me to go back into the archives because it gives me peace of mind and I feel that it’s connecting me to my ancestors. I feel closer to my ancestors at this moment, which is interesting. I can feel them very strongly.
What’s beautiful at this moment is I am a person of faith. I don’t always like to say I grew up in the church even though that is a reality, but I grew up in the faith. I grew up in and out of the church. There was always some type of connection to a higher being. What’s also been beautiful is as my family gets older, and I’m first generation, hearing a little bit more about my mother’s practices as a little girl beyond Christianity has been helpful. I don’t think it’s about contradicting beliefs but it’s a reminder, and we’ve talked about this a lot, that who we are as a people is broader than one narrative. There are cultural practices that are accessible to us that are beyond Western culture.
It has been helpful to see alternatives without questioning, “What was the intent behind this? Are we programmed to operate in a certain way? What are some ways that we can tap into that feels more organic as a Black human being or a Black STEM being? How do we invite more people into the sharing of that knowledge?
I don’t think it’s by accident that a lot of things that aren’t well are not about the fires that are there, but the solutions that are there feel inadequate. They don’t feel like they were designed to solve those problems because they weren’t. This is a good reckoning even for those that are atheist or have a spiritual belief as to what are the works that we need to do to move us through this moment.
I have to remind myself that refuge is a beautiful thing, but we are also not supposed to be in refuge forever. At some point, you have to come back out. What are the things that we’re doing to maintain and sustain so that we can get back on the purpose train? That is what I hope this moment allows people to do, which is to care, self-care, community care but also dare to explore different alternatives to what we’ve been programmed to use or apply.
I’m curious at this stage about what it looks like to have a spiritual home. I know as a person who grew up Christian and all the denominations you can imagine, like Baptist, Methodist, Non-Denominational, and all the things. A lot of folks are unchurched at this moment who were raised in the church. It was in part of COVID. There’s been a steady slide over the course of the last couple of years. I’m curious. As faith is going to become increasingly important, where are people finding a spiritual home?
What are you seeing?
People are hardwired to worship something. If they are not fighting worship in a church, they are fighting it somewhere else. People are struggling to figure out what a personalized practice looks like and I don’t necessarily know if there are any hardcore models for it. I know that’s where I am. I don’t go to church. I haven’t gone to church probably in about 5 or 6 years. I’m at a different stage of my life.
I also know that being in physical space with other people who are at a similar stage and going through similar things can be incredibly cathartic and meaningful. We are social beings. I’m wondering if there’s going to be a return of the pendulum switch and if it’s going to look similar to how it looked in the past or if it’s going to take some different form.
Reevaluating Traditional Religious Structures
The historian side of me says that globally but especially in America, whether you go to church or not, Black people were wired to be the darkest White Christians. There’s a reason why whether you go to church or not there is a scripture that’s on your lip. There’s a reason why something that your grandmama said is easily referenced, whether you’re at the corner store or the barbershop. Like we know the law, we know the word. That is actual programming that was also used as a form of control. In many ways, even when we look at our AME churches, similar to our school, sororities, or whatever it is, we have to give grace to the fact that these were also started by individuals who were once enslaved.
The real question for me is how much of our spirituality and our practices have changed or even gone through a real renaissance or reformation starting from fully free whole bodies. There are a lot of ways that we even talk about condoning others that are different from us that come from the church. A lot of the unchurchness comes from a beautiful place of like, “If I’m supposed to love my neighbor, why does that feel like it’s not coming from this spiritual home?”
I do feel like people who are in their process of seeking and searching at best or at times feel like they’ve been the ones that are pushed out. At worst, they leave these spaces that also have a beautiful mixed complex history of being where organization happens and movement has occurred. Sometimes, the safest havens because our churches were never safe is when we needed to meet and congregate.
When I think of entrepreneurship, another way of looking at it is architects and builders. They’re trying to build something. Disproportionately, Black entrepreneurs are also trying to fix something that we did not break or that we did not create a problem. To me, to truly understand what you’re trying to fix, that means that you’re also going to have to get deep into the psyche of the individuals who designed the original problem. That’s a spiritual journey and not necessarily a godly spiritual journey.
As somebody who believes that there are forces out there for and against us, you have to understand that monitoring your mind and your wellness is part of the process because it can get exhausting. Even if it’s your business and your enterprise to help kids in the hood or go back and give where you came from, you are going to need some tools to be able to confront the things that may have been normalized before. When you get the full scope of what it was about and how it was designed, that can be a lot.
I’ll say what I’m struggling with at this moment. There are a lot of reasons why I don’t go to church anymore, but I’m also at a place where I’m redefining my own Christianity and my own faith. I was at a jewelry store and I saw this most beautiful silver cross. The first initial thought was, “That’s beautiful,” and I was like, “I don’t want to be affiliated with what would be inferred from me wearing this cross.” People who wear their Christianity on their sleeve tend to be people who have a political ideology that is outside an anathema of what I hold dearest and where I am linking my faith.
To your point about Black folks being the darkest White Christians, there is a lot of truth in that. One of my greatest challenges is when a person tells me that they are a Christian, that tells me nothing about them. It doesn’t tell me what you believe. It doesn’t tell me who you support. It doesn’t tell me how you show up in your life. It doesn’t tell me the extent to which you are transformed. It’s that you believe that is an idea. I’m like, “Don’t tell me what you believe. I need to know how you behave.”
There are a whole lot of folks who use belief, weaponize belief, and weaponize Christianity to carry out a political agenda and a political ideology. I feel Christianity in this country is largely cultural. It is not spiritual. For me, in terms of affiliation in finding community based on what I’ve learned and what I’ve been taught and being a constant seeker often taking in information and trying to work out my own salvation, that’s a constant tension for me.
Thank you for sharing that. For our audience, this is not about whether you believe in Jesus or even if you have read the scripts or the texts and see Him as a character. I don’t believe that Jesus spent the majority of his 33 years condemning folks. I find that it’s hardwired and wired in Black people to take on what especially colonizers and masters have planted in our minds to see the wrongness in Black people first and then try to use the Bible as a way to correct people versus seeing the virtue of people being conduits to change and being the light for other people that are struggling and moving forward. I don’t think we uplift that enough.
There’s a whole nother conversation around how most of the teachings that we have come from a very male perspective. When over 80% of the pews are Black women but over 90% of the leadership is Black men, we have to also question what it means when the tithers and the people that are keeping up these churches are not trusted to lead these churches. What would it look like for Black fem theology for us to flip the script? How would we interpret the Bible? How would we interpret Rahab? How would we interpret the woman at the well? How would we interpret that He had disciples but it says specifically that He trusted the women with the coins? We don’t even know the women’s names.
I’ll talk about spirituality. Ghana, which is a matriarchal society, has this saying. I’m going to mess it up but they have a saying that’s like, “Never let a man go to a meeting or to the bank by himself.” It is to say that even outside of the church, there is this concept that Black women’s intelligence was always meant to exist with our counterparts but we don’t have that in spades, in my opinion, as our hardwired DNA once colonization and that settler mindset became part of the norm of the programming of Black people. To your point, we have to deconstruct that. Sometimes, you were seen as the demon when you started questioning and started being like, “There’s got to be a different way.”
There’s a lot of room for the divine feminine in our future. In wrapping up, one last thought. For folks who are reading and need some help and are trying to figure out how to get their life together at this moment from a spiritual standpoint, what do you think?
Finding A Personal Spiritual Practice
The word that we’ve both used is seeking. I want people to know that seeking is not the devil and seeking is not a negative thing. There’s enough grace. I don’t think our creator would give us a mind, a soul, and a spirit to be afraid of how we think and how we question. I can feel the elders pushing back on me but people should try things.
They should try practices. They should try worship. They should try praise. They should try Bible studies, different preachers, and different teachings because something will click and not click to your comfort. Something will click where it’s like, “This is the way I receive information, and that is helping me.” Not every space is right for you. If that gives permission to somebody, I would want them to keep seeking. What about you?
What’s worked for me is to get quiet and get still. For me, when I’m trying to hear from God, it’s hard for me to hear the noise. This is a time when it feels like we need to lean into Spirit and take our directives on high.
Also, from inside. Trust yourself.
That’s right. Sometimes, we forget that God lives within. We’ll close it out?
Yeah.
Let’s do it. Thanks, everybody, for joining us for this episode of the show. Make sure that you follow us on all the things and like, engage, and share. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, everybody.
Important Links
