Kaitlyn Finchler
Contributing Writer
Religion can be more than just subscribing to a belief system, more than just thoughts in a person’s mind. It can be tangible, too — from cooking a meal to touching nature, anything can be a sacred experience.
Kat Armas, writer and podcaster, will deliver her lecture at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy for the Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “Compassionate, Merciful: Describing the Nature of God.”
“I’ll be talking about what I call an abuelita faith, a grandmother faith,” Armas said. “I’m arguing for this embodied type of spiritual practice, looking at our spirituality as intergenerational and something that is carried forward through those who come before us.”
It’s important to look back through ancestors and those whose lives were marked by resistance and persistence, she said.
“With that, I’m arguing that this is what God is like,” Armas said. “This is how we can truly experience the divine through the embodied faith of our ancestors.”
Faith can be experienced tangibly through the body, she said. In her lecture, Armas will focus primarily on women because of how often they’ve been overlooked in spirituality.
“Particularly in embodied faith, I think it’s important because a lot of our spirituality can feel really heady and, metaphorically, can be really in our heads,” she said. “It’s important to use your mind and to stimulate the mind, but I also think that so much of faith is lived out in the body.”
Armas said she’ll also discuss how her grandmother’s life was marked by survival — a survival that was essentially a spiritual endeavor.
“We don’t need to overspiritualize survival in order to make it holy,” she said.
Further it is important to remember how day-to-day living can be a spiritual practice, Armas said.
“We look at our spirituality, and we compartmentalize a lot of our lives,” she said. “Whatever you are doing and however you are living your life, that can be a sacred and holy act. … It’s important for us to expand the way that we see our connection to divinity.”
Armas’ first book, Abuelita Faith: What Women on the Margins Teach Us About Wisdom, Persistence and Strength, walks through Armas’ grandmother’s story of survival and immigration to the United States.
“She emigrated in the ’60s from Cuba,” Armas said. “… She was a very spiritual person, but her life was marked by quite literally trying to survive, raise her children and raise her grandchildren and make a living. Her husband died really abruptly right when she moved to this county, so much of her life was marked by survival.”
Armas’ grandmother’s story of “just trying to live her life” was a sacred and holy thing, just like Biblical stories of women trying to secure their future.
“Women have been the backbone of so many social movements and movements of liberation,” Armas said. “They’ve done that through the work of their hands and through their bodies.”
Wanting to point people to how faith is a full-body experience, Armas said she hopes the audience can reflect on their own histories, their ancestors, and their current experiences.
She wants Chautauquans to wonder how “we see everyday moments as spiritual and sacred and holy by reflecting on the ways that our ancestors survived, and how our own stories are marked by survival — and how divinity has met us and God has met us in those moments.”
