Q&A with Aisha Brooks-Lytle
Aisha Brooks-Lytle
Excerpts from a conversation
with Aisha Brooks-Lytle
Rev. Aisha Brooks-Lytle is executive presbyter of the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta, a network of ninety-two churches in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). She is a native of Philadelphia and graduate of Temple University. After working as youth director at Wayne Presbyterian Church, she obtained a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. She served various churches before returning to Wayne Presbyterian, where she served as the mission pastor while also serving as the organizing pastor for the Common Place, a faith-based arts and education center in southwest Philadelphia.
You mentioned being a Black leader in a white space. . . . A lot of folks don’t know you and don’t know your journey and your ministry. Can you tell us about yourself?
I grew up Baptist in this little Baptist church in a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia. My time in Philly, my educational situation was always multicultural. . . .
I had the opportunity to serve on a [racial reconciliation] mission trip at a predominantly white church. . . . I was like, you don’t have anybody Black to go with you with those white kids. . . . But it was on that trip that I was invited to submit my résumé to be the middle school youth director. So that was a huge jump, to go from an inner city Black Baptist congregation to say I will participate in a predominantly white space in another theological branch of the church.
Holy Week, 1998, on a Good Friday service, after I had submitted my résumé to the church, I said, “Lord, if you really need me to do this, if you really need me to talk about racial reconciliation and racial justice in a predominantly white space, if you really, really need me to do it, I’ll do it.” Twenty-plus years later, here we are. . . . I just had no idea how big the yes was.
We live very close physically to each other. We’re both women. We’re both pastors. We’re both mothers. . . . And still, even with all that beautiful commonality, our lived experiences are different. . . . How can we start to really know each other’s experiences? And as your neighbor, what should we know about yours?
The best that I can describe it is there are extra layers. . . . I often tell a story of when I was little and my mom having to have that talk. She was doing my hair and just hanging out; she goes, “You got two strikes: you’re Black, and you’re a female.” Then she just went back to doing my hair. . . . And so in the same way, add another layer when you are the mother of a Black son in this country. . . . My young teenager is now six feet. He is shopping at the tall man’s shop for his pants and shoes. I have to talk to him about hoodies and do-rags. We had to ask him to start walking the dog at seven o’clock as opposed to eight o’clock because two folks that we didn’t know stopped him to ask him questions.
And so whether that’s being overprotective or just the reality of the state of the world, I have to have that extra layer of protection—and then still have to deal with the theology of trusting God in all things, even if that means that something could happen to him that could harm him.
[And] every time he walks by my car, he’s like, that’s mine in a few years. He just lets me know the countdown.
He’s thinking.
He’s thinking, and then I have to shoot back: “You know, I’m not excited about you driving. I’m not excited about what will happen if you’re stopped.” And then I have to tell him stories of his dad or his uncles or other beautiful Black men who’ve been stopped and surrounded by police cars, which is just real.
Does he experience that as a regular fear, or is this something that he just knows and carries?
I think it would be OK to say that recently he had a nightmare, and there was an intruder, and it was a very scary person in the house, and the person was a white male. I just didn’t even imagine that he would have a nightmare like that. We had a really deep talk that morning, and I was like, “No matter what’s happening in the world, you just have to trust God.” And so that really pushes your faith kind of to a deeper level to say, even if it looks dangerous, even if it is dangerous, you’ve still got to trust God, because in life and death you belong to God.
You . . . were talking about the work of racial justice not as something to study per se but as a spiritual discipline. And you said the work of racial healing is taking a spiritual risk so that you can get to spiritual intimacy. . . . How do you take a spiritual risk and get to that kind of spiritual discipline?
I’m reconciled to God, and therefore that allows me to be reconciled with one another. So it’s really only to me, the Holy Spirit, the triune God, who can open up your eyes to help you to see is there some sort of bias or impasse that does not allow me to be connected, reconciled, to see the other person? . . . Only a deep relationship with the triune God of the universe will break open, move, pull it apart so you can get at this thing that’s an impasse for us.
It’s a risk to try to know God for real.
It’s a risk to know God for real because then you’ll be changed.
So how do you renew when you start to get weary? For this, the work for racial justice is long.
When I was in seminary, I read a book by a Southern Baptist minister called Is It Okay to Call God “Mother”? I had grown up very traditional and Baptist, and I was like, no. I don’t need to read this book. It was a really good book, lifting up Scriptures that speak about God in this maternal, nurturing, caring kind of way. And ever since this pandemic and all the racial violence and all the things that we’ve been seeing, for me, I’ve found comfort in this visualization of this mothering God.
You’re at home.
It feels like timeout, and I have actually found comfort in just visualizing God as this mothering God sitting on the back porch with the evening breeze, sipping on some tea, and just saying: “Come sit with me and just be still, and we’ve got this. I’ve got this.” . . . And so just in this season, I’m so thankful for the gift of humanity, the gift of my life. And I’ll also be, like, “You know what, God? You’ve got this.”
