You know something is over. You're not sure what comes next. And somewhere underneath the grief and the freedom, there is something in you that still wants to practice — to gather, to go deep, to belong to something true. That's why The Clearing exists.
WHAT IS THE CLEARING?
The Clearing is a digital spiritual community for people navigating faith outside the confines of institutional religion. We are post-Christian in orientation — not because we've abandoned the sacred, but because we've refused to keep pretending that the forms we were given are the only forms that hold it.
We believe the inner life is real and it is terrain worth knowing. We believe that spiritual formation is not something that happens to you in a pew — it is something you practice, build, and inhabit. We believe that the ancient technologies of the hush harbor, the clearing, the circle, and the kitchen table are still alive and still work.
Our Rule of Life
Every community lives by something. We live by these:
Radical Truth Telling
We practice honesty — with ourselves, with one another, about what is and what isn't working. Pretense has no home here.
Grounded Spirituality
Our spirituality is tethered to land, to body, to place. We refuse disembodied religion. The sacred lives in the soil under our feet.
Tethering to Tradition
Post-Christianity is not amnesia. We hold the Jesus tradition, the hush harbor lineage, and our ancestral wisdoms with care and critical love.
Ethics of Non-Separateness
We build an ethics rooted in the belief that we are not separate from one another, from the earth, or from the sacred. What harms one harms all.
Cosmo-Theandric Wholeness
We hold together what has been artificially separated: the divine, the human, and the cosmos. We practice an integrated spirituality.
Toward LIBERATION & TRANSFORMATION
We center Black liberation and womanist theologies, Indigenous knowledges, and cultural wisdom. Healing and justice are not separate projects.
The rhythm of the community
Bi-weekly Gatherings
Live community sessions every two weeks — teaching, reflection, and circle practice led by T and guest practitioners.
seasonal series
Each season we go deep on a theme or practitioner — six weeks of structured inquiry, readings, and practice.
Weekly Discord engagement
Between gatherings, the conversation continues. Weekly engagement, shared reflections, and community presence in our Discord server.
co-stewarding & wellness ministers
Most spiritual communities center one leader, but The Clearing rejects that model we practice co-stewarding as a theological commitment to plurality, shared leadership, and a variety of voices.
The Problem We're Solving
Spiritual Exile is Happening
Millions of people — disproportionately Black, Brown, queer, and women — have left or been pushed out of institutional religious communities. They have not, however, left the spiritual life. Many remain deeply formed by religious tradition, theologically sophisticated, and hungry for community. What they have lost is a container — a place that can hold their full complexity, their honest questions, and their ongoing formation without requiring them to perform certainty they don't have or accept frameworks that have harmed them.
The cultural, psychological, and communal consequences of this exile are significant. People navigating post-Christian faith often experience isolation, grief, and a loss of the practices and rhythms that structured their lives. At the same time, they carry gifts — deep theological literacy, hard-won wisdom, a hunger for authentic community — that have nowhere to go.
The Clearing was founded in response to this gap: to create a digital-forward spiritual community that can hold people in post-Christian transition, provide structured formation, and galvanize them — together — toward healing and toward good in the world.
What We Are Building From
-
The Clearing is a theologically grounded community with a clear and specific intellectual lineage. Our frameworks are drawn from:
-
The theological tradition that centers the experience and liberation of Black and queer people as the interpretive lens for spiritual truth.
-
Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie Townes, Delores Williams, and the tradition that names the particular spiritual experience of Black women as generative theological ground.
-
We learn from Indigenous frameworks on land, relationality, and the sacred — as correctives to Western Christianity's extractive cosmology.
-
Drawing from Raimon Panikkar and the mystical traditions: the divine, human, and cosmic are not three separate orders but one integrated reality. Our spirituality must be able to hold all three.
-
The African American hush harbor as a technology of spiritual formation — a structured practice of communal encounter, truth-telling, and transformation done outside sanctioned spaces.
-
The practice of departing from institutional religion not as abandonment of the sacred but as a form of sacred refusal — a threshold space, a vestibular theology.
-
Post-Christian does not mean post-Jesus. The Clearing engages the Jesus tradition with critical love — reading Jesus as a practitioner of subversive, embodied, liberation-centered spirituality whose life offers ongoing insight for those navigating the margins of empire. We engage this tradition alongside, not instead of, Orisha traditions, African cosmologies, indigenous wisdom, and other living spiritual streams.
Our tethering to tradition is not nostalgia. It is the practice of knowing your root system well enough to grow freely from it.