What I’m Reading This Week

in the soft shadow of resurrection

This week, my altar is a stack of books. Each one sings in a different key, but they are all hymns. I do not read lightly, especially not during Holy Week. My hands are tired, yes, but still open. These are the books I’m holding:

1. Black Liturgies by Cole Arthur Riley (re-read)
a breath between prayers

This book is not just read, it is received. Black Liturgies is a devotional, but not in the way the church taught me. It does not ask me to leave my body at the door. Instead, it names the body, the rage, the ache, the miracle of being Black and breathing and believing still.

Cole Arthur Riley writes like she is braiding your hair and whispering scripture into your scalp. The kind of scripture you almost forgot. One born in lament, shaped in the flesh, and soaked in ritual.

During Holy Week, I open to her words the way I might open a wound to light. She reminds me that divinity is not distant; it is daily. It is the soft hum of memory. It is the spine that holds me upright even when I’m on my knees.

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2. The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone (re-read)
where blood speaks in tongues

James Cone writes theology the way Black folks write blues: with a cry and a clenched fist. In this book, he draws an unflinching parallel between the crucifixion of Jesus and the lynching of Black bodies in America. And somehow, he still believes.

Cone doesn’t flinch when showing us Jesus strung up on a tree in Mississippi, in Alabama, in the Bronx. He doesn’t flinch, and yet, his voice trembles with love. A love so furious and full it becomes fire.

This book is heavy. But it is holy. Because it refuses to let the cross be a clean thing. It reclaims it; not as a symbol of empire, but as a testimony of survival. Resurrection here is not a metaphor. It’s the miracle of our continued breath.

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3. boy maybe by WJ Lofton (currently reading)
confession in the mouth of a bruise

WJ Lofton’s boy maybe is a tender riot. A debut collection that reads like a psalm queer, southern, Black, and blistering. Every poem feels like it was born between a heartbeat and a blade.

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I’m reading all of these at once, because I need all of them at once.

Cole teaches me to pray again.
Cone teaches me to rage faithfully.
Lofton is teaching me to love in the ruins.

And maybe that’s what Holy Week is really about. Not just the cross. But the hands that reach for each other underneath it. The ones that hold the hymnal, even when their voice shakes. The ones that plant flowers on graves. The ones that write poems with the last of the light.

I don’t know what resurrection looks like yet.
But I know it sounds like this.

in communion,
Saint Trey W.