The Body I Was Given - Silent Encounter
A 40-day silent encounter. September 9 – October 18, 2026
THIS IS THE EVENT REGISTRATION FOR SEPT 23-27
I cannot fast my way into knowing what it means to live in a Black body in America.
I cannot voluntarily experience what I have inherited the privilege of not experiencing.
I can only sit here, in this body, and refuse to look away.
What I am doing
I am a 78-year-old white woman who continues to confront what my whiteness has afforded me.
Beginning Wednesday, September 9, and concluding Sunday, October 18, I will sit silently from 11:00 a.m. to sunset, five days a week, Wednesday through Sunday. Thirty days of sitting, inside a 40-day liquid fast.
One chair is placed opposite me. It remains empty until someone chooses to occupy it. The empty chair is an invitation — not an interrogation. Anyone may sit. Silence is the rule. You may stay as long as you desire.
Listen. Fast. Walk. Sit silently. This is my body of work since I came to Chicago. I listened to stories, being witness to people's lived experiences, their truth. I fasted to confront history. I walked to confront history. I now sit and face the experience of simply being present.
When & where you can join me
September 23-27
Bike Box YMEN
1302 S. Pulaski Rd., Chicago, IL 60623
UPCOMING
September 30-October 4
Stone Temple Missionary Baptist Church
3622 W. Douglas Blvd., Chicago, IL 60623
October 7-11
TBD
October 14-18
Theatre Y
3611 W. Cermak Rd., Chicago, IL 60623
October 18
Theatre Y
The Body I Was Given: Silent Encounter Community Gathering
Past Events
September 9-13
Theatre Y
3611 W. Cermak Rd., Chicago, IL 60623
September 16-20
Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva
102 S. 2nd St., Geneva, IL 60134
Why silence
I'm not explaining racism. I'm not demonstrating outrage. I'm not asking a Black person to educate me. I'm simply making my body available for an encounter.
There is no conversation, no performance, no entertainment, no agenda. Nowhere to hide. Sitting silently across from another person can make you aware of your own thoughts, discomfort, emotions, presence.
Silence gives the other person enormous freedom. You can look at me, cry, laugh, become angry, stare at the floor, close your eyes, leave after thirty seconds — or stay for hours. I am asking nothing. I am simply present.
The silence itself becomes the medium. Instead of telling you something, I am creating a space in which you have the opportunity to encounter yourself.
Why fasting
I see the 40-day liquid fast as my personal discipline for staying present with something I cannot personally experience. My inner guidance keeps sharing this, and I'm listening.
What makes the fasting meaningful is not that my hunger resembles Black suffering. It is that it doesn't.
My fasting is voluntary. My sitting is voluntary. My discomfort is voluntary. I can end this experience and walk away at any time. Racial oppression is not voluntary and cannot be ended by the person enduring it. The silence and the fast work together to hold that contradiction.
Forty days has enormous resonance in religious and cultural traditions — wilderness, purification, transformation, preparation, ordeal.
What I am not doing
I am not sitting here as a representative of Black America. I am sitting here as a white American, confronting my own position within America's racial history.
I do not pretend that my voluntary fasting can represent the involuntary suffering produced by racism. It cannot.
I cannot fast my way into knowing what it means to live in a Black body in America. I cannot walk my way into that experience. And I cannot sit across from another person and claim to understand what their life has required of them.
I am not asking anyone who sits across from me to explain racism. I am not asking them to forgive me, teach me, validate me, or participate in my understanding of the world.
Why I can walk away
I occupy a white body that is granted freedoms and assumptions that are not granted equally to Black people. I want to make that inequality impossible to ignore, without pretending that my experience can stand in for theirs.
The freedom to leave, to move, to wander, to enter spaces — all of it unremarkable, for me, in this body.
Who gets to move through this country freely?
What does this body get to do? Where does it get to go? What assumptions accompany it? What does it mean to become conscious of those advantages? And what responsibility follows that consciousness?
I did not choose the body I was born into. I can choose what I do with it. I can use it to move toward people rather than away from them. I can use it to make space rather than take up space. And I can sit in silence with another human being and resist the impulse to fill that silence with an explanation.
Can we sit with it?
America has spent centuries speaking about race. We have argued about it, legislated around it, denied it, defended it, protested it, studied it, and politicized it.
But can we sit with it?
Can we sit with history without immediately trying to escape into innocence, into denial? Can we sit long enough to ask what repair actually means?
H.R. 40 represents, in part, an invitation for this country to examine itself — to look directly at slavery, its aftermath, racial discrimination, and the consequences that continue into the present. What would it mean for America to be willing to sit with its history long enough to examine what happened, who benefited, who was harmed, and what repair and reconciliation might require?
How to be part of it
Sit with me. Come any day, Wednesday through Sunday, 11:00 a.m. to sunset. Sit across from me for as long as you want.
Or sit nearby. There will be chairs. Bring your own chair or blanket. Being silently present is its own participation.
Check out. As you leave, there will be Post-it Notes to write on. Write a word or phrase. How are you leaving?
Come back on October 18. On the final evening we will gather at Theatre Y in a circle and share about the experience — mine and yours.
When I am finished, I will still be able to stand. I will still be able to walk away.
That freedom is precisely what I am asking myself — and this country — to examine.
I can walk away.
But I am choosing to stay.