Quinn on Books: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Review of Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World by Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis

Review by Michael Quinn

My partner is a Christian. He’s been seeking a spiritual home. Prior to the pandemic, he spent many Sundays trying out different churches throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Some, he felt, had a drowsy, old-fashioned quality. Some felt like cults. Some were inhospitable to gay people.

One Sunday, I accompanied him to the East Village’s Middle Collegiate Church. Twenty-five years earlier, I’d lived across the street. I have dim recollections of hearing its bell toll through my weekend hangovers. I’d never once stepped foot inside.

The place was packed with all kinds of people. It thrummed with energy and excitement, like the buzzing before a sold-out show. There was no curtain to go up, no spotlight, no stage. Yet we were definitely in the presence of a star. Preaching her philosophy of “Love. Period,” the charismatic pastor took command of the room, taking stock of the doomsday headlines—racism, transphobia, global warning—and urging everyone to “pray with your feet”: to stand up, march, make a difference. Her words radiated compassion and intelligence, but also a vibrant joy.

My partner was stunned by the radical politics. This direct address of the most pressing social issues of our time was not what I was expecting at a church service, either, but my reaction was different: I felt invigorated.

That singular star-quality shines through in Reverend Dr. Jacqui Lewis’s stirring new book, Fierce Love: A Bold Path to Ferocious Courage and Rule-Breaking Kindness That Can Heal the World, which outlines her manifesto for a new way of living in these “hot-mess times.” The first African American, the first person of color, and the first woman to lead Middle since its founding in 1628, Lewis is “not trying to convince you about God,” she explains, but to get you to witness, understand, and believe in something far more universal: the power of love.

Lewis takes as her starting point the Zulu philosophy of ubuntu: “a person is a person through other people,” she explains. She outlines nine behaviors that gradually nudge our absorption from ourselves to the people we care about to the world at large. They involve things like kindness; authenticity; moral courage; speaking truthfully; and loving ourselves unconditionally.

To illustrate these ideas in action, Lewis shares stories from her life. Fierce Love is, in part, a kind of spiritual autobiography: an accumulation of hard-won life lessons and a stripping away of everything else. A child of the 60s, the eldest of six, Lewis had her first encounter with racism in a New England elementary school. Although she’d never even heard the word the little white girl from Mississippi spat at her, “Her nastiness made me feel nasty,” she writes. Recounting the incident at home, Lewis got different reactions from her parents: her mother gently explained and soothed, her father demanded (and got) apologies from the little girl and her family. Lewis grew up to possess a little of each of her parents’ superpowers: the love and the fierceness.

A high-achiever with “good girl syndrome,” she first studied chemical engineering before switching to psychology. A successful sales career with Kodak moved her around the country. She married one white man, then another—relationships that frayed the rope of her relationship with her father.

Like many people of the cloth, Lewis’ road to the pulpit was a winding one. Privately, she struggled to break free from the “evangelical churchliness” of her upbringing and “have a relationship with God.” After a pastor “sees the calling” in her face, she enters seminary school, which “was about learning and unlearning what it meant for God to have a say in guiding human life.”

As a pastor, Lewis also has a sizable role in guiding people. Fierce Love touches on some of the incredible work around social justice Lewis is leading at Middle—even without a physical place to congregate. Last December, a vacant building next door caught fire and the church was destroyed. Only its 800-pound New York Liberty Bell miraculously survived the blaze. In June, right before it was carted away to the New York Historical Society for safekeeping, it rang 19 times—struck by Lewis, in a hard hat and a colorful robe—in honor of Juneteenth, the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans. The building may be gone, but Lewis’ commitment to social justice seems everlasting.

This commitment is, in itself, a kind of faith. And hope springs eternal. Lewis writes, “Just imagine what we can do, together, if we own our power every single day to live justly, to choose fairness and equality.” Fierce Love is an invitation to share in this vision and make it a reality. When it comes to the power of love, Lewis’ pull-no-punches account will make a believer out of you.