“You are not required to save the world. But you are required to save your corner of it.”
Joan Chittister
"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."
Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1984)
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was a Black lesbian feminist, poet, essayist, and activist whose life and work powerfully shaped 20th-century movements for civil rights, women’s liberation, queer identity, and anti-racism. She famously called herself a “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, a phrase that captures her refusal to be boxed into a single category and her commitment to living and fighting at the intersections of identity and justice.
Her famous declaration, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” is not merely a critique of white feminism, patriarchy, or institutional power; it is a spiritual summons to imagine liberation that does not mimic oppression. It is resurrection logic.
Audre Lorde was a Holy Disruptor, not because she sought conflict for its own sake, but because she refused to let oppressive peace prevail. Lorde’s work shook the ground beneath the comfortable and carved space for those who had long been silenced. Her life and words confront the church today, daring us to ask: Whose pain are we willing to ignore for the sake of harmony? Whose survival are we willing to risk by remaining silent?
Lorde’s haunting yet empowering words ring with both warning and courage:
"And when we speak
we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed.
But when we are silent
we are still afraid.
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive."
These lines echo the early trembling of the apostles, standing at the edge of a world not ready to hear their message.
In Acts 2, Peter stands before a crowd and declares a holy disruption: Jesus of Nazareth, who was executed by the empire, was not abandoned by God. “God raised him up,” Peter proclaims, “because death couldn't hold him.” This is not just a theological claim; it is a cosmic upheaval. The tools of domination, which include crucifixion, shame, and fear, were rendered powerless by the disruptive love of God. Resurrection is not a repair of the old order. It is the birth of something utterly new.
Audre Lorde knew this in her bones. She spoke of the fears that silence us. We have fears of rejection and that our voices won't matter. She insists, “When we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak…” This is not naïve optimism. This is resurrection courage. To speak truth from the margins is to claim life in the face of death, to act as if we believe, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died and was raised “following the Scriptures.” That is: following God’s long story of siding with the oppressed, raising up the lowly, and calling forth prophetic voices from unexpected places.
Paul, in this passage, calls the community back to the gospel, not as a static belief but as a living, liberating truth:
“...that Christ died for our sins… was buried, and that he was raised on the third day…”
Lorde’s reflection, “we were never meant to survive,” is not despair. It’s defiance. It names the reality of systems built on erasure, and yet it chooses to live, speak, and love anyway. Her voice, like the risen Christ's, echoes from the tomb: "You tried to kill me. You failed. I am still speaking."
So we must ask: What tools are we using in our struggle for justice? Are they shaped by the logic of domination or the hope of resurrection? Are we perpetuating systems of exclusion even in our work for liberation? Lorde challenges us to unlearn, to imagine new structures, new words, together with new, multiple, empathetic communities
The early church found its voice not by mimicking the Roman Empire, but by proclaiming a crucified and risen Savior. Audre Lorde found her voice not by softening her truth, but by declaring it unflinchingly. Resurrection begins there, not with power, but with the refusal to be silent.
In Acts 2:22–24, Peter stands before the people and proclaims the resurrection of Jesus, boldly naming their complicity in his death and yet offering them a hope that transcends death:
“Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God… this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified… But God raised him up…”
This is a holy disruption, naming what has been done, naming who has suffered, and then announcing that God has interrupted death itself. Peter is not gentle in his proclamation, but it is not cruelty; it is liberation through truth. Audre Lorde stood in the same tradition. She told the truth, even when it shook the foundations of polite society, even when it cost her comfort, even when it put her survival at risk. Her words were resurrection words. They were spoken truths into the silence of systems that hoped she would remain quiet.
This is not just theological content. It is a divine pattern: death, burial, resurrection. It is the rhythm of justice. It is what happens when the truth is spoken: things die: false peace, illusions, comfort built on silence, and then something holy is raised.
Audre Lorde lived that pattern. She spoke when it cost her. She dismantled false unity. And she insisted that her Blackness, her queerness, her womanhood were not obstacles to holiness but expressions of it.
In our time, to be a follower of Christ is to remember that resurrection is always disruptive. To be a community of resurrection is to speak. We must speak not because it is safe, but because silence is still dangerous. Audre Lorde reminds us: we were never meant to survive the way things are. We were meant to be raised into something new.
We heard A.J.'s interpretation of Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D Minor last Wednesday (see link to Sheku Kanneh-Mason's performance of the piece he highlighted) and A.J..'s introduction to the composer's intense protest against Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian rule. That stayed with me as I was reading Lorde's writing in depth. Like Shostakovich’s cello sonata, her witness moves between grief and joy, lament and dance, silence and eruption.
In every act of holy disruption, in every truth spoken in love, we taste the bread of new life. At the moment when the body is broken, when silence is shattered, the world is truly remade.
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