Like so many others, it felt like someone had thrown me a life-preserver when I stumbled across Black Liturgies on Instagram during the pandemic. Cole Arthur Riley's words were equal parts balm and challenge. Last year's This Here Flesh was one of my favorite books and I raved about it to everyone. And yet, somehow, neither of those experiences prepared me for the brutal beauty of this book. The deep wisdom builds me up. The tender compassion holds me. The unflinchingly honest look at the world as it is challenges me. And the jaw-dropping vulnerability of the author, honestly, scares me a little. This book is so raw and so polished, it defies definition. What it is, in addition to being deeply spiritual, is useful. Practical. Riley encourages us to use the book, in community. I had organized a weekly study group of We Do This 'Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba. It was as if Riley's words were written to accompany Kaba's. Every week, I would open Black Liturgies and find the right words to start our discussion or the perfect benediction to close our evening. I have already used this particular book of liturgies as much as any other in my (not small) collection. Thank you to the author, Convergent Books, and NetGalley for the eARC.

I don't know that any review can cover all the gifts this book contains. Riley's generosity comes across in the introduction:

"I cannot promise you that this form of liturgy is your path, that it will feel like a homecoming for you, that it will restore your faith. The truth is that it is not for everyone. Still, receive this invitation. I do not need you to have the same experience with the sacred as I have, but I'm quite interested to see if you'll rise and come on the journey. It is not lost on me that I am asking you to trust me as an adequate guide, and I should tell you that most days I feel like I'm wandering. I am working on my sense of direction. But my promise to you is that every word in this book has been written, interrogated, and preserved with an imagination for collective healing, rest, and liberation. And any mystery within these pages certainly cannot be contained to them. These are only fragments of divine encounter, and I am proud of that. Turn them over in your hand. Take a deep breath."

Black Liturgies is divided into two parts, one based on ideas and the other on events. You'll find words for times of lament or rest. And also words for Ash Wednesday and Mother's Day. There are endless ways to use the book and I continue to turn to it when I need words to send to a friend. So please read this book. And do it collectively. Together we heal. Together we get free.

Cole Arthur Riley's stunning new book Black Liturgies offers a stirring vision of spirituality. Riley, who built a business around her digital community Black Liturgies, knows firsthand how ritual and devotion can sustain passion and perseverance through life's complex journeys.

Through poetic prayer and consecration of the everyday, Riley reconnects readers to the body, emotions, and lived experience—a welcome reprieve from rigid dogma. For entrepreneurs, Riley's words reveal the humanistic spirituality that aligns values with practice. Her liturgies help consecrate work, strengthen resilience, and evaluate contributions through the lens of compassion.

Yet Riley's book also holds intimate wisdom for those irrevocably changed by illness. Her tender guidance helps chronically ill readers sit with grief, honor endurance, and release what cannot be controlled. By centering the interior world, Riley gives language to unspeakable loss and opens pathways to renewed purpose.

Across all walks of life, these inspiring liturgies draw us into communion with ourselves, each other, and the sacred. Riley empowers readers to inhabit the present with care and remember that even in suffering, we each have gifts to offer. This book will resonate with any seeking spiritual connection in our collective brokenness and healing.

I love Cole Arthur Riley's writing. Her Instagram posts have given me comfort & put words to my feelings over the years, and this book does exactly that as well. The book itself is divided into quite a few features, and in particular, the contemplations are a wonderful addition for further reflection. Riley weaves personal experiences & vulnerabilities into the liturgies and prayers that are in a way, almost a poetic memoir. I’d highly recommend this book if you feel out of sorts, discouraged, or have found peace in Riley's writing before. You will want to return to this book time and time again.

Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley is a devotional of the best kind where readers can access the divine within ourselves whether we identity as spiritual and/or religious or not. In the beginning of the book, Cole explains her intention for the book and makes it clear that we each enter this work from different vantage points. She writes about her own relationship to liturgy and why she started to build her platform, Black Liturgies, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 as a way to amplify Black life, Black thought and Black literature.

I enjoyed the poems, reflections, and prompts in this book intermixed with personal stories from Cole's journey as a Black, femme author who is neurodivergent and navigating her own unique way of being in the world. She describes liturgy as being her anchor and something that saved her from drowning in the depression and devastation of her own interior world.

Cole declares that her intention for this text is spiritual liberation in whatever form we need it to take and she is a most trustworthy, qualified guide. Every time I read her words I feel reverence for life, breath, myself and every other life form on this life path.

Thank you to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

Black Liturgies contains diary entries, lamentations, poems, celebrations, prayers about everything from fear to rage to love to figuring the parameters of healing both body and emotions. Amens and guideposts from the likes of Baldwin, Butler and a host of others speak to us whether living or dead.
The depth of raw openness in this book is immersive and a blessing. I found her weaving of her own personal journey through sickness and healing pulled me in to look at my own woundedness. The transparency is not see-through but a sheer mirror.

I found myself attached to certain things said as I’m going through my own grieving of so much lost through death and change: “Life is monstrous on the threshold of apocalypse,” she says. But she doesn’t leave you there. Acknowledging a truth gives you a deep sense that something lies on the other side of that apocalypse and none of us must deal with it alone. She pulls in the words of ancestors and they are holy. And in her humanity on every page of this book we find our own holiness. She offers prayers for the various people her heart reaches out to in their suffering from mothers, to same gender loving people, to those going through, to those who’ve been sexually abused and have hung on to those memories in secret and silence as if they were not a public hurt in need of lamentation.

The second half of the book is structured for religious holidays and rituals to celebrate with prayer, ritual guide, and words to invoke the presence of the spirit.

I saw a deep faith in this book in something larger than herself and it pulled me in to recognize my own faith. One of the things that I can appreciate in the strength of this book is its less religious, but brimming over with a spirituality rooted in a searcher of the truth. There might be those who relish the quotes of biblical reference; this isn’t that book. The author went out in “these streets” looking for the face and hand of God and I believe she found Her. I would offer that you push yourself to see God in the words on the pages and a faith that is born with being lived out without the safety of patriarchs and stories. We are the holy story still being played out in an unfinished book of life. God is still speaking off the page and beyond and found in places not necessarily always familiar. Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems and Meditations for Staying Human is a blessing beyond brick and mortar. Be blessed by reading it in whatever order the spirit leads in the altar of your eyes and flesh.

There's no question that Cole Arthur Riley's "Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human" is designed as a literary safe space that connects spiritual practice with Black emotion, Black memory, and the Black body. It's an extension of a digital project of the same name created by Riley, an extraordinary weaving together of prayers, letters, poems, meditation questions, breath practices, scriptures, and the writings of Black literary ancestors to offer forty-three liturgies that can be practiced individually or as a community.

With "Black Liturgies," Riley holds space for readers to reflect on their shared experiences of wonder, rest, rage, and repair. She creates rituals for holidays like Lent and Juneteenth and invites deep and honest reflections about one's own personal experiences impacting life, love, and the spiritual experience.

As a white disabled male, I resonated deeply with Riley's explorations throughout "Black Liturgies." I found deep meaning in the prayers, the letters, the poems, and especially the meditation questions found throughout the book and I found myself connecting with experiences though I suppose that would be through a different cultural lens.

As someone who was kicked out of two faith communities relatively early in life, I found healing in "Black Liturgies." As someone with a disability who has frequently felt out of place and othered in life, social circles, church, and the world in general because of my physical being, I found healing in "Black Liturgies." As a survivor of significant traumas, I found safety in the words of Cole Arthur Riley.

And, as someone within 24 hours of a major cancer surgery and yet another body change, I found hope within Cole Arthur Riley's words.

Cole Arthur Riley draws us into a spiritual landscape that is more loving, more inclusive, more hopeful, more nurturing, more tender, and ultimately more safe than many of us have experienced. It's an invitation to become the human beings we have always been meant to be and a call to love ourselves and one another and a vision for what that might actually look like.