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Rev. Elæ Moss Benedetto

@trans.rites

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🪷 Systems Ministry 🪷 | spiritual + social practice | liberation + abolition | @prattinstitute + @faithinharmreduction at @judsonchurchnyc | 🏳️‍⚧️🔻📿

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AN ACCESS ORIENTED / RISK SENSITIVE STRIKE FRAMEWORK :: ALTERNATIVE WAYS TO ANSWER THE CALL FOR A GENERAL STRIKE || There is a global call for a general strike in solidarity with the people in Gaza / Palestine, a call to immediate ceasefire, and a call to the upholding of global human rights agreements! I cannot overstate its importance. And, the bigger the strike, the less possible it is to punish the millions of people who stand up and join the resistance. HOWEVER, whether geographically, because of disability reasons, or because of other access or risk factors, you aren’t able to take part in mass demonstrations, there are so many other ways to take up the call to STRIKE as A PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE RESET! What can this look like for you? This call invites you to ask yourself what a STRIKE can really be, beyond co-signing organizing that others are doing and just showing up. Because to really STRIKE, in a permanent and meaningful way, IS TO MAKE CHANGES TO YOURSELF AND YOUR LIFE. I get it, it can feel super overwhelming to begin to break down what that looks like, so I made a little guide to some practical and concrete things you can do tomorrow, and moving ahead, to commit, truly, to global and permanent strike, against the internal and external blocks that keep us from collective liberation and interdependent, care-centric futures. On my end, I’ll be leading peer to peer events in the library here, hosting a small screening, and otherwise ensuring that the work we do tomorrow is mostly under the radar, and doesn’t endanger my international students’ already complicated legal conditions in this country or otherwise trigger violence for the at-risk young people, far from home, for whom I consider myself responsible in a markedly hostile geographical location / population. Share this, use it, use the comments as a space of accountability and commitment. May this feel doable, powerful, real, and like the seeds of the change you sometimes don’t dare to dream is possible! I love you so much. Palestine is the crucible for the global change we’ve imagined; may not one more of these beautiful people be killed, not one more home destroyed. by @trans.rites

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FIELD LOG | 101123 || LANGUAGE MATTERS, PUBLIC PERCEPTION and GLOBAL THEATER || Why speak up? This is a post about what a single person can do, and why I do it, despite the unwanted and uncomfortable attention and critique it brings. We must be wary of how uninformed reposting confuses global collective narratives and emotions. However: if those of us whose work in the world directly confronts the ways that power, media, language, and perception operate do not use those tools to provide others with strategic and meaningful support to navigate these moments, why do we do the work we do? Despite the complexity of the current situation, my goal is in fact quite simple: I believe it is essential to do all we can to counter any and all dangerous narratives about groups of human beings in relation to the operations of powerful political bodies (both vis-a-vis histories of rhetorical / dehumanizing language as well as actual misinformation) circulating in the neoliberal state / media apparatus, and for anyone who understands how this operates and has the tools to expose and explain this to the general public to do so, now, as loudly and widely as we can. I do not position myself as an authority on data, but rather I am showing up, as a human dedicated to learning how to navigate systems, language, and their manipulations, to help others do the same. What can we do when grief feels unimaginably large, when it triggers our fear, when we are reminded again and again that there are those that would have it be unsafe for us to simply live? These human fears are closer to the surface than ever, but so too are our capacities to counter the narratives circulated by those that would control us and have us fearing and hating each other to serve their greedy, power-hungry aims. This, and helping others see and do this and believing it is the way forward towards liberation, human rights, peace and safety for ALL people– that’s what we can do. It is not small when done by millions. It is not small when it has the power to be seen and circulated by billions. It is a small way of REFUSING, today, and everyday, and reminding others they can, too. by @trans.rites

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CINEMATIC HARD RETURN || 101226 || you know it’s funny, the way we force our energetic metrics to play nice with the stories the persistent systems ask us to go along with. But every minute, every instant offers another chance to opt into a samsara refusing dial twist. What? You KNOW FULL WELL this is all data, all set dressing so that the work gets done. Can you take it so seriously that you insist on how seriously you must take absolutely refusing its claims on the story? In my most profound, holy, ecstatic moments there has been no question at all what is happening here — what roles we are all playing in this masked ball. What kinks we’re all pretending aren’t present, what supposed rules push back against pure desire in service of discernment - as ministry locates itself in the balance. Hungry and ready we are, we’ve always been, our enfleshed birthright. We don’t need you but we want you. You expected something tempered? We were trained for what? And it cost us what? I’m … done playing AND committing to play in ways unpermitted and prayed for. Let’s do this fungible unimaginable magic thing we were literally built for. What are the chances of catching the second someone exhales, that plume of smoke that makes air tangible? #LFG. taken in Zinc Bar by @trans.rites

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Beloveds! Our first @faithinharmreduction LOVE FEAST of the season is *tomorrow,* welcoming our amazing cohort of 26-27 returning and new Ministry Fellows! We can’t wait to welcome you to join us tomorrow and every month for this radical restorative fellowship meal and relationship building space at @judsonchurchnyc - with amazing food from @evlovesnyc / @cafewal.nyc ! If you’ve never been, and wonder just what the space is like, this is for you — you’re welcome to build it with us. To seek and grieve and process and celebrate and recommmit alongside us, as we break bread together. Keep the questions coming, jump on our mailing list, volunteer, and …join us. We can’t wait to welcome you. #FaithInHarmReduction #CommunityCare #RadicalHospitality by @trans.rites

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Join us! Running weekly since January, this drop in community session is a place to exhale, make new connections, have lunch, and get confidential support for challenges you might be facing! Supplemented by a community chat for LGBTQIA+ students, alums, and allies, this is a place to be witnessed, held, to share celebrations and grief, and to know that others get it — it’s a complicated and even scary time to be an LGBTQIA+ person. How do we navigate these times? Guidance from a nonbinary trans queer elder community organizer and educator, who also happens to be our InterSpiritual campus minister is a place to start! We also share collective wisdom about any number of real life things we’re navigating, point each other to resources, and so much more. Feel free to reach out to Rev Elæ for a one on one if you want to start a bit more privately or come on down any Wednesday! We can’t wait to see you soon. #CommunityCare #QueerCommunity #CareCircle taken in Pratt Institute by @trans.rites

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Not “just another day” and also — yes — another day that invites us to consider how people in power shape and control narrative, memory, history. A day less exceptional than it’s been made, yet one that became a hinge, a claim to legitimacy, a myth to cling to. The days and years before and since full too of violence, full of machinations and deaths that aren’t publicly useful to the state’s objectives, that are erased or silenced or simply don’t make the news cycles. A day to remember how human emotion, how our desires to be good and protect our loved ones are actively manipulated into consent for egregious violence at scales never before witnessed. A day to look back at the last three years of shifting landscapes of repression, of eroding freedom of gathering and protest and the press and zine making and speaking out on campuses… did you imagine yourself here? Have you become, out of fear, unintentionally more complicit? Will you continue to speak up? What does refusal to go silently and gently into accepting repressive state control as a norm look like for you? Can you support the work of @thesameerproject today? Can you share stories? Can you have a hard conversation? What is yours to do? by @trans.rites

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“A Trace,” by Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Din Muḥammad Rūmī, on the occasion of his birth in 1207 — with great gratitude for the nearly 800 years of visionary sublime beauty, for embodying divine love and its possibilities in language — that deeply flawed yet immeasurably powerful most human of tools for our collective and personal soul honing… 🪷🪷🪷.

You that give new life to this planet,
you that transcend logic, come.

I am only an arrow.
Fill your bow with me and let fly.

Because of this love for you
my bowl has fallen from the roof.
Put down the ladder and collect the pieces, please.

People ask, but which roof is your roof?

I answer, Wherever the soul came from,
and wherever it goes at night, my roof is in that direction.
From wherever spring arrives to heal the ground,
from wherever searching rises in a human being.

The looking itself is a trace of what we are looking for,
but we have been more like the man who sat on his donkey
and asked the donkey where to go.

Be quiet now and wait.
It may be that the ocean one,
that we desire so to move into and become,
desires us out here on land a little longer
going our sundry roads to the shore.
- - - - - - — - - - - - - - - - - -
{Version by Coleman Barks}
#spirit #Rumi #love by @trans.rites

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OCTOBER QUEER SPIRIT @ JUDSON | 👻 QUEERING JEST 👻 | *TUESDAY* 10/6 @ 7pm on Zoom | Link in Bio + Stories!

October brings us into the part of the year where the nights grow longer, and the border between the sacred, the otherworldly, and perhaps… the ridiculous… becomes a little more porous. We’ve just come through the Harvest Moon, and for those rituals following celestial bodies this month opens with the final days of Sukkot, followed by Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah—a season where we construct ritual and scripture. Later in the month, Navratri and Durga Puja invite us into stories and rituals of transformation, divine play, and the struggle against forces that diminish life. And then, at the month’s end, we come to Samhain, Halloween, and our longstanding human practice of making contact with what usually stays hidden. This month, as we Queer Jest, we trouble what those traditions may already know: how play is not the opposite of seriousness. Sometimes levity, jokes, masks, costumes, or deliberately ridiculous gestures give us access to truths we cannot reach by solemnity alone. What does jest’s queering allow us to reveal, practice, or refuse? What becomes possible when we are given permission to be excessive, unserious, or otherwise outside the roles we usually inhabit? And if the space of play is temporary, what might we carry back with us when the costume comes off? Join our hosts @revmicahb and @trans.rites on October 6 for this month’s hour of queered lectio zoom divina: sacred text and music from wherever curiosity, creativity, and serious play have wrestled with our themes. You are welcome, in whatever mask you choose to wear… or remove…for the occasion!

And here’s a reminder for our upcoming themes:Join us TUESDAYS, November 3 for Queering Kin and December 1 for Queering Labor! #QueerSpirit #SeriousPlay #SpookySeason

📷: Still from “The Jester,” 1908. From the Public Domain Review. taken in Judson Memorial Church - New York City by @trans.rites

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Mark your calendars to join us on October 11th, 5:30PM, for the first Love Feast of the season at Judson Memorial: 243 Thompson St in NYC. We'd love to have you as we welcome the 2026-2027 Faith in Harm Reduction Community Ministry Cohort.

Future gatherings will also take place on November 8th and December 13th. Always Free and open to all!

[Img description: a light blue flyer that features a photo of people gathered in the sanctuary of Judson memorial, Judson and Faith in Harm Reduction's logos, and these words: The doors are open: Join FIHR for another year of fellowship at this season's first community love feast. Come share a meal and sacred gathering with us as we welcome the 2026-2027 FIHR Ministry Cohort! Hear from our fellows about their visions for this year and the future of radically destigmatized sacred work. Always free and open to all. Sunday, October 11 at 5:30 in the Judson Meeting Room. Save this season's dates: November 8 and December 13. Interested in joining our cohort for trainings and conversation? Email elae@faithinharmreduction.org for info + to join our mailing list.] by @trans.rites

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AND WE’RE BACK (AGAIN): RE/ORIENTING TO DISORIENTATION. OPEN CLASSROOM CONTINUES!
With a sidequest to Austria for STWST’s New Contexts festival / Ars Electronica complete, a few backlogged Open Classroom videos have been lost in the sauce—but THAT’S OK! It feels not only possible but necessary to recognize that the backlog IS the work and the system overwhelm IS the lesson. The relational challenges of exhaustion, sickness, conflicting capacities and styles, and the struggle to address polycrisis, too, IS the work—not an inconvenient symptom keeping us from the “plan.”
And yet: this requires reorientation, again and again, as our best-laid hypotheses meet bodily, logistical, relational, infrastructural and ecosystem realities.
In the classroom—as in my creative, social and spiritual practice—this positional awareness has become both politics and strategy. For years, I’ve opted for DISORIENTING mechanisms that trouble gatekept forms of meaning-making, knowledge-sharing and institutional metric-meeting.
But wherefore consent?
Do students, especially in required or core classes, OPT IN to disorientation? How can they? Is there room for agency—and for locating a desire to accept disorientation from the jump, as first-year students, while also orienting toward standardized expectations, behaviors and modes of production?
What is it for if not for the world?
If developing our capacities for making meaning and communicating requires cutting ourselves off from the world in order to “focus”—only to find those skills lacking outside the silos of industry and gatekept legibility—who are we becoming?
This week, I returned to screen-off, whiteboard-encompassing, impassioned dialogue with my seminars about my long-time commitment to the #DisruptorMechanismProtocol and #Disorientation as both mechanism and ethic, seeking their full sign-on wherever possible from young folks often new to systemic analysis and sociopolitical awareness.
More coming on Substack, with materials to support your engagement.
How do you resonate with these challenges? How is your life disorienting you—and asking you to reorient with intention and attention?
#OpenLearnin taken in Pratt Institute by @trans.rites

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On Grief Practices: “If I must die / you must live to tell my story” || Mariam Mohammed Kamel Mohsen, b October 3, 2022, Age 1 at Death. | This week, as the poet and scholar Refaat Alareer’s birthday passed, his words have been echoing in my head alongside the thousands of names of lives that continue to be extinguished in Gaza – and in Congo, Sudan, Lebanon, ICE detention facilities and prisons, etc – at the hands of fear, greed, and power. This card was one of hundreds laid down this year as part of the powerful Yizkor service that brought together over a thousand souls - Jews and allies - this Monday for Yom Kippur here in Brooklyn. Each holding the name of a different life lost and the age at death – many reading “0”, “1”, “2”. I was grateful to be able to be a part of the planning process and a Gabbai for the ritual itself this year – as an Interspiritual minister whose background is significantly culturally Jewish, and whose own study and practice continues to deepen specifically in Jewish ritual and text, I continue to be inspired and moved by the way Jewish advocates, activists and spiritual leaders with their hearts committed utterly to liberation SHOW UP and am grateful to learn alongside their vision; they show up in protest, show up in material ways, show up in public meaning-making and creative public offerings - like the song I’ve added here, from Aly Halpert which has been a part of many rituals here, and which has often accompanied my grief these last years. The reimagining and rewriting of ritual and prayer - Yizkor, Purimspiel, Seder - is deeply people led, in keeping with that tradition’s commitment to collective ownership of the work of spiritual grappling and community responsibility, to Tikkun Olam. What might a regular grief practice look like for you or your community? What changes when you embody and commit time and space, attention and intention towards naming and holding and acknowledging grief, and the losses, the violence, the injustices that seed and sow it in us at such a scale? It’s more and more essential, for me, and not only not the opposite of joy but its companion, a dialogic partner. #grief #remembrance #faith taken in Grand Army Plaza Fountain by @trans.rites

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💐💐💐for HIA! Stopping for the grid on the gram is rare these days, a sign of life full to bursting. BUT this calls for a pause and for APPLAUSE, as our beloved Hiawatha Collins gets honored for his many many years of tireless work tonight with the Joe Bostic and Jose Capestany VOCAL for Compassion Award at the @vocalnewyork Gala at Roulette! This human being is so exceptional, so fierce and loving, and a real PREACHER for the people. Can’t wait to see what he seeds in this second year of his ministry in our @faithinharmreduction cohort this year! 👏👏👏 #HarmReduction #Advocacy #Liberation taken in Roulette by @trans.rites

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