October 15, 2026

Love Your Hands

Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you!

Baby Suggs, holy, a formerly enslaved woman turned unchurched preacher, delivers this sermon in the Clearing, a forest glen outside Cincinnati, to a community of freed and escaped Black people rebuilding their lives after slavery. Having lived through a system that treated the body as property to be worked, sold, and discarded, she insists that real freedom begins with loving the flesh the world taught them to despise. Her sermon is an act of joy as resistance, not denial of what was suffered but a reclaiming of touch, pleasure, and self-regard. It is a reminder that beauty does not wait for anyone's permission and can be claimed simply by how we hold and treat our own bodies.