Finding Your Voice, Again

Week 9. I Can See In Color. Women On The Threshold

“Were you silent, or were you silenced?”

— Oprah Winfrey, to Meghan Markle

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Oprah asked Meghan Markle that question, and it has been repeated so often because it lands somewhere tender in almost all of us. We turn it over and wonder which one was true. For me, it was both.

The silencing came first. I was a child the year Dr. King was assassinated, and my school asked us to write what we felt. My essay was chosen to be read at the assembly — but I was too shy to read it. My best friend, Adrienne, read my words while I stood beside her, mute, a useless appendage, feeling foolish, I felt people wondered why I was even there! A traumatic childhood event had taught me to shrink from people; that grey morning sealed it. That day I made myself a vow: I would rather not speak at all than ever again let someone else speak for me.

That was the silencing. The finding came years later. I had volunteered to write a short welcome for a church program — gladly, because writing was safe, behind the scenes, where I was sure my only gift lived. What I didn’t know was that there would be a run-through, and that I would be sent to the microphone to read my own words aloud. Reluctantly, I went. Rev. Youngblood stopped me — not on what I’d written, but on how I said it. He wanted my voice as bold as my words. I balked. So he challenged me: if I didn’t want it, he would give my words to someone else to read. Humph! Not my words, I thought. Let them write their own.

I was embarrassed and went back to my seat sulking. Not that I’d ever show it. That week, I rehearsed that speech repeatedly, I was never going to be called out like that again. That Sunday, I stood before 1000+ people and spoke my words. Two things happened at once. I realized I had just done the unthinkable on my very first try; I had always believed I belonged backstage, in admin, never at the mic. But guess what? I loved it.

The thing most people fear most, I took to like a fish to water. Dr. Youngblood had seen something in me that I could not. Had he not pushed me in public, I would have faded in private — never discovering my gift of speaking.

That morning healed the child at the assembly. As a girl I had vowed I would rather not speak than let another mouth carry my words. Without knowing it, Youngblood dared me to keep that vow — and this time I kept it by speaking, not by hiding. I found my calling at that microphone.

For two decades I used that voice — teaching, mentoring, facilitating, in pulpits and retreats and classrooms, rooms large and small—even at Columbia University. I did not get there alone.

One of my mentors, Sarah Plowden told me, “Women rarely get the microphone. When you do, make sure you have something to say, and take your time saying it.” My supervisor, and mentor, Yvonne Zeigler always left me the room to say it — trusting me, to lead workshops, build programs, run retreats, and, gave her blessing and support when I asked her if I could make a documentary, Sisters of the Same Mother, about colorism among Black women

Neither woman ever wanted me silent. Both were my predecessors in women’s ministry. They were the bridge I crossed to the other side of my life.

Then, in my fiftieth year, I left full-time ministry to seek other suns. My fifties kicked my butt. A stroke and its long aftermath. Burying my eldest sister, and then my beloved mother, whom I tended to the end. And beneath it all, I was grieving the community and work that had been my life for 20 years—grief that was sometimes masked as anger. When the dust settled, my therapist asked the question that undid me: “now that you are no longer at the church, what do you think and believe?” I had no answer. I had fit myself so completely into the culture of ministry that I had, somewhere, misplaced myself.

I spent the next year trying to distinguish my own voice from the voices of everyone I had loved and followed. I was unmoored, the colors of my world shades of grey.One of my favorite tarot cards is the Queen of Swords, an archetype of an older, wiser feminine intellect. She sits on a throne, holding a sword upright in her right hand. She is clear judgment and hard truth, boundaries that hold. She expresses care and compassion by always speaking the truth. When I feel myself shrinking, I call her up and remember who I am.

During that season of my life, I stumbled across an interview with actress Jenifer Lewis. She said something that shifted my perspective. She exclaimed that she’d had her day in the sun, now she was the sun! That at 61 she had about 30 summers left and her time was hers to spend as she wished. Boom! I had spent decades anticipating or reacting to what I thought others wanted, putting my thoughts, needs at the end of the list, if they were even there at all. Her words reminded me that the time I had left was solely mine, and I needed to be mindful of how I spent it.

The Queen of Swords has her blade; I have a pen and a keyboard. That is my instrument now, re-tuned — the pulpit became the page. I have come through Winters, Falls, and a few hard Springs. Now I am in a bounteous Summer, and like the sixteen-year-old I wrote about in Week 5, I feel the whole world is at my feet again, everything still possible…golden.

The wisdom accumulated by our decades of living is essential. Our families and communities are famished for it. But even more so, we ourselves are hungry for the truth of ourselves to make us whole.

As I have quoted, there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns. Rediscovering your voice doesn’t always mean reverting to the one you had; it involves allowing it to emerge transformed, illuminated by a source unique to you. Seize the microphone. Take your time.

We need your voice, and so do you.

Where have you been silent, and where have you been silenced — and what would you say if you stopped waiting?

The answers you seek are within you.

A prayer for this week

May you stop mistaking other people’s voices for your own. May you reach for the sword of your truth and find it already in your hand. May you speak before you feel ready, and take your time saying it. May you stop warming yourself by other people’s light and remember that you are a source. Surrender. Shift. Shine. We need your voice — and so do you. Amen.