Sunday, November 8, 2009

OPENING READING, a conversation between Celie and Shug from The Color Purple

What God do for me? I ast.

She say, Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that love you to death.

Yeah, I say, and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again. Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown.

She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you.

Let ‘im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.(192)

READING #2 from We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For:

My own early imprinting was…Christian. And though I have experienced immense sorrow over the way enforced Christianity, the white-supremacist version, wrecked and ruined my people’s innate spiritual integrity, I remain a lover of Jesus, who…never abdicated his responsibility to the suffering, the dispossessed and the poor. I see the Christ spirit in all those who cannot be bought away from their love of humanity, all those who cannot be bribed away from their love of what is compassionate and just. (118-119)

SERMON

Too often, we think of theologians as dead white men, not as living, juicy women of color. We tend to think of theology as the province not of you and me, but of the few great brains like Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Henry Nelson Weiman and James Luther Adams whom we’ve read but don’t always understand. Theologians, though, are the foundations—the ones who are synthesized into our thought and experience to create the framework by which we define our own meanings—at least ideally. Theology does not come from books or from the church, but from the ground up as ordinary and extraordinary alike try to make sense of this common human life.

I first preached on race and African American theology in my first church in Port Charlotte , Florida. A wonderful biracial woman was a member there. After the service, she said she’d have a book for me. I almost got it, she said. The next Sunday she handed, or rather shoved, a book by Jill Nelson at me. Read this, she said. You don’t yet get the black women’s experience. It was indeed a revelation that led me to study the theologies of liberation with a black woman and to encounter the works of African American women theologians and writers. For Jill Nelson described herself as a black woman in America as a "two-fer in American hell."

The theologies of liberation are contemporary Christian theologies, theologies that seek to understand the message of Christianity as a liberating message for the poor and the marginalized. Latinos, Latinas, African Americans, Native Americans and other people of color seek to find the theological basis for human rights in the Christian message. Alice Walker is one of those people.

She calls God "Mama," for that is the way she understands that spirit that lives both outside and within her. We know Walker as an author, a poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner, an activist, a beautiful and proud African American woman with dreads that are now salt and pepper and a wisdom guided by age and by thought and by openness to the knowledge of ages and continents and history. She wrote The Color Purple and Possessing the Secret of Joy, Anything We Love Can Be Saved and In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens and she wrote We are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

One of my friends is the retired presiding Bishop of the AME Zion churches for the district that includes the Tampa Bay area. Her name is Mozella Mitchell. She’s taught me to understand the theologies of liberation, and she’s taught me some things about black woman’s experience. To Mozella, Jesus is a black woman, which she announced in my UU church one day to people’s great consternation! She once described the experience she had at a Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights protest. She was standing on some steps, about to speak when she was approached by some young white feminists. They remarked to her that it was refreshing to see a black woman supporting abortion rights. It was then, said Mozella, that she became conscious of being a black woman among mostly white feminists. "I had thought I was a sister," she remarked. It was that experience that made her delve even more deeply into Alice Walker and her like, into those women of color who call themselves "womanist" theologians.

It was Alice Walker who coined the term "womanist" to mean those women of color who see the gospel as having a specific, liberating content for women of color like themselves. The term comes from a male African American expression of irritation: "You acting womanish." That means, according to Walker, "wanting to know more and in greater depth than is good for one—outrageous, audacious, courageous and willful behavior." A womanist is "responsible, in charge, serious." She loves, she is committed, she is a universalist by temperament."

"Her universality includes loving men and women, sexually or not. She loves music, dance, the spirit, food and roundness, struggle, and she loves herself. "Regardless." Walker insists that a womanist is "committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female."

In defining womanist theology, Walker invites us to glimpse the particular plight of black women, as a survivor of the interlocking oppressions of sexism, racism and classism. Traditionally marginalized by a capitalist system, by stereotypical sex roles that the black woman was expected to assume, and by the machismo of the traditional black male, the black woman was and often still is the low person on the American totem pole.

Unlike some of the literature of victimization that came out of white feminism, Walker’s theology is a survivor’s theology. It is hopeful—the audacious hope of which both Cornel West and Barack Obama speak. It is a hope against hope—hope in the face of all that is wrong and all that is done wrong in this world.

In her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy, Walker not only tackles the issue of female genital mutilation, but also leaves us with a theology of hope. "There are those who believe black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation." It is much this same understanding of that quality of African and African American life that underlay the theology of Martin and Coretta Scott King. Walker’s sensitive portrayal of her protagonist Tashi in her 1992 book did more than any human rights organization to spread the word of the horror of FGM.

Walker continues her theme of hope as the end and purpose of all theology in this poem:

Expect Nothing

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
Become a stranger
to need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
than your own small heart
or greater than a star;
tame wild disappointment
with caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka for your soul.

Discover the reason why
so tiny human midget
exists at all
so scared unwise
but expect nothing. Live frugally
on surprise.

And in the following poem on her father’s death, Walker shows us what Reinhold Niebuhr called the "final form of love," echoing too, the less than ideal situation of the black woman.

Looking down into my father’s dead face

For the last time
my mother said without tears,
without smiles
without regrets
but with civility,
"Goodnight, Willie Lee, I'll see you in the morning."
And it was then I knew that the healing
of all our wounds
is forgiveness.
A forgiveness that permits a promise
of our return
at the end.

Modern liberal Christianity preaches the gospel of compassion, which we find in Walker’s activism on behalf of many causes, such as the cause of peace.

From Living by the Word by Alice Walker:

I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker "Pray for Peace". I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth. Faith will be its own reward.

Walker’s poem "Let Spirit Lead us" speaks of the essence of her faith, and her trust in it.

When we let Spirit
Lead us
It is impossible
To know
Where
We are being led.
And we know
All we can believe
All we can hope
Is that
We are going
Home
That wherever
Spirit
Takes us
Is where
We
Live.

In the back of our hymnal, there is a reading from Walker. It echoes this same spirit and does so with the cadence of the Sermon on the Mount:

Love is not concerned
With whom you pray
Or where you slept
The night you ran away
From home.
Love is concerned
That the beating of your heart
Should kill no one.

In a Beliefnet interview with Valerie Reiss, Walker discussed The Color Purple, and gave us an understanding of the book as more than a novel. "The Color Purple," she said, "is about theology. Many people assume that it’s about just about incest, wife abuse, spouse-beating; all of that is in there, but you will notice that the journey that Celie is making is toward her self-realization as a part of the entire Godness. Speaking of God as everything there is, was, ever will be." She goes on to say, "When I was 13, I stopped going to church because I felt like they had taken this huge, amazing, incredible Godness and whittled it down to this tiny little thing that they stuck in the church every Sunday when people were too tired really to listen, and fell asleep because they were exhausted from still being slaves, basically."

"And I wanted, and I insisted, even at that age, on going out into nature and truly feeling what is there, what—you know, we’re not—you know, the reason we are not alone is that—because earth is with us. We are her beings. It’s not because there’s somebody in the sky who’s watching us, you know?"

And, later, also in The Color Purple, Walker speaks the philosophy of her pantheism through the voice of Celie. She writes about "that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all." She continues: "I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed." Emerson would have resonated with that feeling.

The rituals of Walker’s womanist Christian faith are the rituals of a personal faith, borrowed from the traditions of yoga, of prayer and of meditation. They are the rituals of dance, of drumming, of ancient African voices and the voices of contemporary feminism. They are self blessings like this one: (from We Are the Ones). About it, she said, "On the day of the bombings I realized why Christians cross themselves. And why the people of Islam turn toward Mecca. I knew that I also need a gesture of self-blessing that would, at the same time, symbolize blessing and protection of the world and its varied inhabitants…Spirit, the Grandmother Spirit of Earth, sent me this mudra and chant:

(according to Walker, the mudra is to hold the thumb and first two fingers together, symbolizing unity, while making a circle around one’s heart.)

One Earth
One People
One Love

And more, Walker’s dream of a world more just and loving echoes the prophets and poets, the reformers and the martyrs in modern, eloquent, lyrical language born of the passion of a woman in the 21st century with the vantage point of history.

In a prayer written after 9/11, She prays:

At this time of mourning
May we be connected to each other,
May we know the range and depth of feelings in ourselves and in
Each other.
There is vulnerability, fear, love, rage, hatred, compassion
Courage, despair, and
Hope in ourselves, each other, and the world.
May we know our most authentic feelings
And voice them when we speak
May we tap into soul and spirit when we are silent
Together.
May healing begin in us.
May we form and become a circle.

Begin by holding hands in a circle.. Be silent and feel the clasp and connection Of hands and heart, Then each in turn Speak for yourself And listen to each other Put judgment aside Remember that anything voiced that you want to silence May be a silenced part of yourself. Sing what spontaneously wants to be sung And end each circle as it was begun. Hold hands once again, hold silence… Invite blessings Until we meet again.

Oh, thou ebony goddess Alice, may we all invite blessings until we meet again. Ache. Amen.

SOURCES

• Beliefnet.org
• Singing the Living Tradition, UUA
• Walker, Alice
  • The Color Purple
  • Possessing the Secret of Joy
  • In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens
  • We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For
• Wikipedia, "Walker, Alice"