Kenosis to Solidarity: A Reflection on The Church Cracked Open by Stephanie Spellers

The journey of kenosis is the beautiful struggle, that way of the cross, that each one of us is invited to walk. To let go. To lay down life. In her book The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community, Rev. Stephanie Spellers says that on this journey of kenosis, we “let die what needs to die, so that God’s new creation can be born. Let the cracks form, let the jar break, so the oil can finally flow free.” But embedded within that journey is a question that we are invited to live: where does the kenotic path lead? Letting go, but to what end? Laying down life, but to what end? As I’ve been sitting with this question, I realized that one of the hazards on the this path for those of us who have been formed inside of a Western worldview, and even more those who have been shaped in any way by the evangelical machine, is that we are hardwired to see the world through an individualistic, self-centric frame. And because of this, there exists a temptation for us to take something like kenosis and make its goal self-actualization. In other words, it’s easy to make this journey about becoming my best self or my higher self, but at the end of the day, I’m still centering my own ego. Beware of putting a new set of clothes on the false self. It’s the same thing many of us did with the cosmic salvation of God in Christ. We took something that was cosmic in nature and made it about the individual salvation of the soul. Self-centric salvation. And one of the dangers we all face is to take this idea of kenosis and turn it into another version of that.

But when we look at Jesus, we see a different way of being and seeing embodied. The Kenotic Hymn, or Christ Hymn, in Philippians 2 which talks about the self-emptying of God into Jesus the Christ tells us that the direction of kenosis is toward solidarity. The incarnation of God in Christ is God’s declaration that God always and forever stands in solidarity with humanity and with all of creation, especially those who are most marginalized. Kensosis toward solidarity is what allows Jesus to say in Matthew 25, “whatever you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do to me.” God is all in with us. God is joined with us so much so that there is no God without us, no us without God. We are the body of Christ. In God we live and move and have our being. God in us and we in God. This is the shape of reality. And so when the Scriptures talk about kenosis, or death to self as it says in some places, it’s not talking about letting go of my personhood or personality, but letting go of the illusion of the separate self, and waking up to the reality of the connected self. As Thomas Merton says in his book New Seeds of Contemplation, “Everyone of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self. . .We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves.” It is this illusory, false self that understands itself as disconnected from the whole that kenosis invites us to let go of.

In Philippians 3, after presenting the Christ Hymn as the pattern and path of the spiritual journey in the previous chapter, the Apostle Paul puts up his own life as a picture of what the path of kenosis toward solidarity can look like when it is lived. In verses 4–6, Paul names the false, illusory self that he had constructed—the things which garnered him privilege and power in certain sectors of society, and allowed him to live separate and disconnected from the whole of humanity: his maleness, his ethnic/tribal identity, and his moral/religious perfection. Paul is not saying these things don’t matter, but that his relationship to them kept him from living in tune with reality, in tune with Love. He goes on in verse 7 to say, “Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss for the sake of Christ.” To “regard as loss” is Paul’s way of talking about kenosis, letting go, and when Paul uses the language of “for the sake of Christ,” he is not talking about pleasing Christ in some moralistic way; rather, it is his way of talking about a bigger picture and wider frame for seeing and being in the world. To be “in Christ” for Paul is to live awake to what is most real—our connection with God, one another, and all of creation. When we cling to the false self and the ways it has allowed us to build our own ego, we can never live in deep connection, mutuality, and solidarity with all things, but this is what we were made for. This is where kenosis leads us.

The African philosophy of ubuntu captures this well—the understanding that “I am because we are. There is no me without you. What affects one affects all.” This is a radically different way of seeing and being in the world, but it’s how solidarity sees. It’s what moved Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the mothers of the Civil Rights Movement, to say, “No one is free until everyone is free. I’m not free unless we’re all free.” It’s what moved Harriet Tubman to see her individual freedom as no freedom at all, but she had to go back for her brothers and sisters, because how could she be free if her brothers and sisters were still in chains? Desmond Tutu said this about ubuntu:

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

This is where solidarity moves us, but it has to begin with a fundamental shift in how we see—from a worldview of separateness to one of connectedness, wholeness, oneness. This isn’t just about saying, “I’m going to serve others now,” because we can still do that from a place of self-centrism and ego. Rather, it’s about understanding that their well-being and my well-being, their freedom and my freedom, and their salvation and my salvation are intrinsically connected. This is true of my neighbor, it’s true of my enemy, and it’s true of the land itself. This is something our Indigenous neighbors have always known.

Rev. Stephanie Spellers says elsewhere in The Church Cracked Open that “solidarity is love crossing the borders drawn by self-centrism, in order to enter into the situation of the other, for the purpose of mutual relationship and struggle that heals us all and enacts God’s beloved community.” The new life we find on the other side of death, of our letting go, is not just a new life for me. Kenosis moving toward solidarity is about us, as Richard Rohr says, “sharing in the fate of God for the life of the world.” It’s John 12:24, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies,” if it lets go, if it journeys down the kenotic path, “it bears much fruit.” And so the question solidarity asks of us is this: “The new life I’ve found on the other side of letting go, who is it for and who is it meant to be shared with?” Solidarity is about with-ness and oneness.