Recently, near the feast day of Jonathan Myrick Daniels observed on August 14th in the Episcopal Church Lesser Feasts and Fasts calendar, I had the pleasure of re-discovering the public theologian Ruby Sales.

Ruby Sales was the 16 year old student whom Jonathan Myrick Daniels pushed out of harms way in Fort Deposit, AL, on August 20th, 1965, when he saw Tom Coleman level a shotgun at her and he died a martyr having taken the full force of the shotgun blast.  He would later be recognized a martyr by the Episcopal Church for his actions that day.  To learn a little more about Jonathan Myrick Daniels please see my blog post from August 14th, 2015 – Noble Modern Martyrs

Ruby Sales, went on to attend seminary and continue her civil rights and social justice work and continues her ministry and work through The Spirit House Project.   The interview she gave on the On Being Podcast in August of 2017, which can be found here is a must hear as it speaks deeply to the current situation facing all lives in the United States today.

Theology and theologies have often been to heady for me and too philosophical and far removed from the day to day steps and progress I attempt to make in my spiritual journey.  She sparks within me a desire to reflect on my role — as I continue along in my spiritual journey — in the theology/theologies she is calling all those involved in social justice, civil rights and faith to envision:

“I really think that one of the things that we’ve got to deal with is that — how is it that we develop a theology or theologies in a 21st-century capitalist technocracy where only a few lives matter? How do we raise people up from disposability to essentiality?” — Ruby Sales

That question she poses resonates so much with me today as this blog takes a different course from honoring those “stargazers, seekers, pilgrims, angels and saints” of the past and focuses on those lives, those thoughts, those ideas, those wonders, those hopes, those dreams that nurture the soul… that are pro anima – “for the soul.”

I don’t want to trivialize the great task Ruby Sales challenges us with in developing that theology or theologies which raise people up from disposability to essentiality — but I wonder if this focus on the individual, immortal soul and it’s important role it plays in the anima mundi – Soul of the World is one way to help set a paving stone… a step… in the direction of raising to essentiality?