TL;DR: Crawley's The Lonely Letters as discussed by the authors is a semi-autobiography of loneliness written between two characters, A and Moth, with the goal of cultivating a deeper relationship with the divine.

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Abstract: Ashon Crawley's ground-breaking work, The Lonely Letters, is an exercise in “thinking with” Black life, or, to be more specific, the “lifeworlds of Blackpentecostals” (10). According to Crawley, Black life offers an “alternative to” (142) Western epistemology and its particular genre of the human being, the individual and rational subject (27–28). The Lonely Letters, in thinking through and with Black life, challenges the reader to (re)imagine religion, mysticism, epistemology, performance, and the possibility of life together otherwise.The text is composed of semiautobiographical letters divided into five sections—Breath3, Shouting3, Noise3, Tongues3, and Nothing3. The letters themselves are written between the characters A and Moth. Moth is a composite character of lovers and friends throughout A's life; A is based on Crawley's own adult life. Indicative of the title, Crawley calls the letters an “autobiography of loneliness,” reflective of his experience of being a thirty-nine-year-old who had yet to fulfill his desire for a long-term romantic partnership (6). However, this text is not simply one individual's lament of his lack of romantic connections, but Crawley's loneliness speaks to the trauma of being rejected by one's community, particularly one's religious community, by embracing a blackqueer life (7). Therefore, these questions drive Crawley's project: “What happens when blackqueerness is what one experiences as connecting to others, but living such a life is what creates or occasions the distancing metaphorically and materially felt from family, friends, religious communities? What is that but loneliness of and from and in the desire for social worlds, for sociality? And can anything be made in the distance, at the border, in the margins? This distance marks limit, but limit marks occasion or, as Nahum Chandler would say, possibility” (7). In asking “can anything be made” at the border/limit produced by this experience of abandonment, Crawley is gesturing toward a possibility. That possibility, which serves as the connective thread of the text, is none other than a mysticism otherwise, a Black mysticism, reflective of an “abiding connection with one another and the creaturely world” (91).However, before engaging Crawley's mysticism, it is important to note that the whole of The Lonely Letters is permeated with a particular Blackpentecostal ethos that reflects Crawley's Blackpentecostal past (which is in fact, despite his having left the church, his Blackpentecostal present). Crawley states: “I am still trying to discover something about the lifeworlds of Blackpentecostals and The Lonely Letters gives another occasion for such a thinking with” (6). One must be careful not to misunderstand Crawley's use of the term “Blackpentecostal,” assuming that he is only referring to the movement that begins with William Seymour in 1906. For Crawley, Blackpentecostalism is an epistemology, an epistemology otherwise, one that rejects Western epistemology's attempt to radically separate the zone of “thought” from that of “feeling.” Blackpentecostal epistemology is a matter of feeling, “not against thought, but feeling as thought” (37).This alternative epistemology grounds A's/Crawley's examination of mysticism. Rather than engaging the major figures of Western mysticism, A thinks through mysticism in asking questions about how these early traditions bespeak the problem of Western epistemology. Crawley gives special attention to the practice of “renunciation” in Western mysticism, that common practice of rejecting the body and sociality with the goal of cultivating a deeper relationship with the divine (91–92). A/Crawley argues that in early mystics' attempts at renouncing sociality and the body, they were attempting to create the “the individual … the self … the subject,” not unlike the individual subject that would mark Western epistemology (22–23). This singular self, in “vertical relationship with god” (23), views the social/relationality as an impediment to the individual's creation of themself as an “enclosed subject” (23, 25).Scholars of Africana religion should take heed of the way A/Crawley seeks to imagine mysticism otherwise, a mysticism of radical connection one to another (91). A/Crawley theorizes a mysticism rooted in and produced from the site of Blackness. For Black people, those always and already outside of the genre of Man produced in the Enlightenment (28), Blackness disrupts the logic of the enclosed subject, the individual created in flight from the social. To be Black is to embrace the “intramural,” the cultivation of life together (31). Thus, the ways in which Black people create life together is a mysticism otherwise, a communal mode of being alternative to the genre of Man.What possibilities does Crawley's Black mysticism hold, a mysticism not rooted in any specific religious tradition (21) but reflective of the ways of being and knowing found in Blackness? What generative sources of inquiry might arise when mysticism is an expression of blackqueer belonging, rather than the singular individual's relationship to a divine figure? Crawley's work provides the means through which scholars of Africana religion might center the agnostic and the (a)theological, for Crawley's mysticism is uniquely rooted in the possibilities found in life together, and that communal life is sacred in and of itself. What need does one have to touch the face of god when one can caress the face of a lover? Why seek to be “ravished” by the divine when human intimacy is given such profound meaning and value in this (re)imagined mysticism? Crawley states: “Perhaps we have been trained away from, we have been taught to give up, the possibility for mystical experience. Which is to say, perhaps we have been trained, have been taught to give up the possibility for touch, for touching feeling, for touching friendship, for touching relationship, unless under very strict control, by the state for example, mediated by a god or a state or an institution that says it's ok?” (147).The value of Crawley's work is not found in the answers it provides, but in the possibilities it gestures toward. Crawley's examination of modulation, the way Black Pentecostal singers push the limits of their voices in moving into a higher register, is fitting here. Crawley theorizes that with each push to “take it higher” there is “the possibility for critiquing the sonic space just evacuated and escaped” (167). Crawley engages diverse discourses and disciplinary spaces throughout his text, and yet he challenges the reader to “take it higher,” moving outward both as a critique of the (disciplinary and theoretical) space being abandoned, as well as a challenge to go further. The Lonely Letters bears the potential to push religious studies scholarship beyond what was presumed possible.

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