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I attended last Sunday's service, and was absolutely blown away by Rev. Brown's selection of readings, music, and the thoughts she shared with us during the sermon.
Today, I am going to try to add to her thoughts about the interconnectedness of humankind, using Alice Walker as my touchstone. I'd like to talk today about how Alice Walker has, through her writings, helped me learn about what I call “life as I DON’T know it”, and how she has assisted me as I try to learn compassion and empathy for others. Tall order for 15 minutes or so, isn’t it?
When she spoke so eloquently and movingly about her birth into a religious community, I found myself thinking more about the location of the story. You see, I was born in Iowa too. As she described the church where her father was a minister, I had no trouble picturing the building or the neighborhood; it’s not far from the neighborhood where I grew up. I could even picture the type of people who attended the church (truth be told, I can kind of see what they were wearing!). As I thought about the physical location we shared in our early years, I realized (thankfully) that I had the start of my sermon today. Thanks, Deanna!
So, I was born in Iowa, and raised in what you might describe as a lower-middle class family. I didn’t really know about our economic status, but I can honestly say I never felt poor in any way. After my parents divorced, I know my mom had trouble making her paycheck stretch until the end of the month; what I didn’t know was that my grandparents would always step in to help.
And, because my mom worked one, and usually two jobs, I spent summer vacations, school breaks, and sick days at my grandma and grandpa's house. I didn’t appreciate at the time how lucky I was to be raised by such a large, extended family—my brother and sister are a lot older than I am, and helped raise me too. I was protected from, and therefore couldn’t appreciate, the struggles my mom had during my childhood (but more about that later).
I knew about divorce, I knew there was more than one way to define family, I knew there were kids who had more than I did, and I knew there were kids who had less, I even knew about drug and alcohol addiction, and at an early age was very familiar with the Alcoholics Anonymous organization and its' precepts. I knew there were different shades of skin color—in Iowa in the 1960's there was white…and black. I knew I was a Democrat. By the late 1960’s, I knew about the importance of civil rights, and a little about the dreams of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I had heard about the hippies, and would have gladly joined a commune—that sounded really cool.
By the mid-1970’s, I knew a little about the women’s movement, a little about Vietnam and why the “boat people” were settling in the Midwest. I knew, and felt guilty about how we had treated Native Americans and black people throughout history. I thought I knew most of what there was to know about world--and U.S--history—I might not have completely understood it, but I thought I knew the important stuff. I mean, come on—I was going to college—of COURSE I knew all that stuff.
But I didn't really KNOW about “others”—“others” defined as people who weren't white, who weren't protestant, who weren't that common ethnicity called "middle class American". I had African American friends in high school, in college, as a young adult, but I never KNEW them—never talked in depth with them about their families, their childhood, their ancestors, what it was like to grow up in a family that wasn’t mine.
In other words, I didn’t understand, nor was I truly connected to these people I thought I knew.
I took my first Women’s Studies class when I was a Junior in college, and through reading the writings of Maxine Hong Kingston, Sappho, Rita Mae Brown, and Audre Lord, I began to realize I didn’t really know the world, or the people who lived in it. I also came to the conclusion that I really didn’t know history all that well either. I was horrified to read about the binding of women’s feet, or what it was really like to grow up in segregated America. The more I read of other women’s experiences, the more I wanted to read—I wanted to know about life in China, in India, in ancient Greece.
What I didn’t care to learn about was other religions—I thought I had grown up and left all that childish stuff behind. My Methodist upbringing still colored my moral outlook; I was a liberal, but only to a point—if there was a Heaven, I was pretty sure it would include Jewish people, but that’s as far as my imagination would go. If there was a “God”, he would be a grey-bearded old guy who would have nothing to do with those “pagan religions” (in this category, I would have lumped Islam, Goddess worship, Buddhism, and so on).
I’m not sure when I read The Color Purple for the first time, but it was probably shortly after it was published in 1982, when I lived in Boston. I was transported from my comfortable urban setting to a place in rural, southern United States. It was interesting for me to later discover that Alice Walker held The Color Purple story, and its’ characters, in her head until she could find a proper setting to write them into life on paper. She was living out East at the time, moved to San Francisco, but those characters weren’t comfortable “being alive” until she found a house in the country—there they allowed her to birth them on to the page. When I read this, Alice Walker’s third novel, I was introduced to a world I did not know existed. I knew about the Civil War, I knew what led up to the Civil Rights movement, but I didn’t know about life for American black women between those two events. And I certainly had no clue what life could be like for a woman like Celie. Through Celie’s letters to God, I was allowed to connect to a woman I didn’t know, to think about situations and experiences with a compassion I didn’t know I had. Most of the events in Celie’s life took my breath away, but I think that of all of Celie’s trials, the separation from her sister, and the lack of contact with her had the most impact on me. The emotions of that separation—those I could understand, because my sister and I were that close, and yet far from each other in a physical sense.
I could also understand suffering—not nearly to the extent of Celie’s suffering, but I could understand it. My brother had died when I was a senior in high school, and that’s when I felt God left my life too—I still believed, but I was skeptical. Walker’s description of Celie’s struggle with her relationship with God resonated with me. As Celie says to Shug:
"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." ..
"All my life I never care what people thought bout nothing I did", I say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to think. And come to find out, he don’t think. Just sit up there glorying in being deef, I reckon. But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God. Even if you know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain."
I also understood the conversation between Celie and Shug about religion, because this was the theology of my father, my grandmother, and at that time, the theology I held fast to—that you didn’t need a physical church for religion, and that God could be many things. This is a portion of that exchange:
“It?" I ast.
"Yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It."
"But what do It look like?" I ast.
"Don’t look like nothing, she say. It ain’t a picture show. It ain’t something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything", say Shug. "Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It…".
"People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back."
"Yeah?" I say.
…"Yes, Celie", she say. "Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?"
Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn, not the color purple. Not the little wildflowers. Nothing."
I believe it is a sign of a well-written book if, every time you read it, you get something else out of it. This time, as I re-read this passage in preparation for today, I was reminded how important it is to take time to appreciate nature. Too often, we get caught up in the minutia of everyday life, and forget that the sunset is nearly always spectacular, or that clover has these great flowers on it. It’s not just “God” showing off, it’s our world reminding us what’s important.
From Boston, we moved to England, and I had my daughter there. These two events intertwined more than I thought; they brought me to a better understanding of my mother. First of all, I finally understood what it was to have a child, to be a mother. That was the simple thing. The next thing was more difficult, and it’s a process that continues even today. I had always been close to my father; I think I knew him, and all his faults, pretty well. I didn’t understand his demons, but I knew he had them. In contrast, not only did I not give my mom a second thought, I truly did not know or understand her. So, in a sense, my dad’s death was a gift to me—an opportunity to know my other parent.
Like so many people, I did not notice the work that was done domestically. My mom, and other women in our family, were the ones who kept the family intact, but I didn’t recognize or appreciate that back then. I truly did not know, or understand, her life. I felt no connection to it, and therefore did not truly appreciate what an incredible woman she is. In my defense, I can say I am truly a product of the patriarchal society I was raised in; the work women did, the lives they led, were unimportant—they did the work that had to be done so the important things—war, conquest, writing of novels, thinking great thoughts—could happen, and then be written about so kids in school in the 1960’s and 70’s could learn all about the great wars, the thoughts of Sigmund Freud, the view of life from John Steinbeck. We did not hear about the women; we knew of Betsy Ross but not Madame Currie. We learned about John but not Abigail Adams. We were educated about the birth of our nation, but not about who really birthed our world—this happened not just in school, but in our churches: we heard of Adam and Eve, but not Lilith. Alice Walker says it best in her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved:
A poem, with the lines:
I no longer recall
The Catechism
Or brood on the Genesis
No.
I ponder the exchange
Itself
And salvage mostly
The leaning.
Walker writes:
It is ironic, to say the least, that the very woman out of whose body I came, whose pillowy arms still held me, willingly indoctrinated me away from herself and the earth from which both of us received sustenance, and toward a frightful, jealous, cruel, murderous “God” of another race and tribe of people, and expected me to forget the very breasts that had fed me and that I still leaned against. But such is the power of centuries-old indoctrination. We know now with what absolute heartlessness the male leaders of the orthodox Christian Church—not unlike those of orthodox Judaism and Islam—stamped out, generally after robbing them of their land and enslaving them, pagans and heathens, our ancestors and theirs, around the globe: a campaign of such unspeakable cruelty, which has lasted for so long, and which still continues, that few have had the heart to encounter it in art, politics, literature, or consciousness until the present era. If our awareness is beginning to change, it is thanks in large part to feminism and feminist scholarship, and to a resurgent belief in the sacredness of the feminine, which was deliberately erased, demonized, and disparaged in all major religions. But thanks also to indigenous peoples who, though a mere remnant of their former selves, before the invasions of conquerors professing Christianity, have risen up to speak in defense of the ancient Goddess/God of all pagans and heathens, Mother Earth.
Alice Walker, throughout her whole career, has stressed the importance of connecting with the feminine. I too believe that we all need to be more connected, more aware of our feminine roots, our feminine side, if you will. Our understanding of each other, and our connectedness, personally as well as globally, will be complete when we embrace and fully understand our other half. Alice Walker learned this much earlier than I did, and through her writings and those of others, I came to this new way of looking at the world. It took a while—let me explain:
At the same time that I was getting re-acquainted with my mother, I was getting acquainted with the Unitarian Universalist Church. A few months after I started to attend, I found out about the Women’s Studies Group, and began to be a regular attendee. Over the years, I attended sessions focused on the curricula “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven”, “The Chalice and the Blade”, and “Rise Up and Call Her Name”. In short it was here I learned the most important spiritual lessons of my life. What I learned as a child in organized religion has been replaced by what I have read over the years, by my understanding of truth, but more importantly with what I have LIVED over the years. I have discovered so much about myself, and now feel very comfortable with my Goddess-based humanist spirituality. Again Alice Walker said it best, from the same chapter in the same book. As she speaks about the poem, “Baptism”, Alice Walker says,
"This is the poem of a seven-year-old pagan. The “God” of heaven that my parents and the church were asking me to accept obscured by the mud, leaves, rot, and bullfrog spoors of this world. …It is fatal to love a God who does not love you. A God specifically created to comfort, lead, advise, strengthen, and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else. We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction. …All people deserve to worship a God who also worships them. A God that made them, and likes them. That is why Nature, Mother Earth, is such a good choice… Everyone deserves a God who adores our freedom: Nature would never advise us to do anything but be ourselves. Mother Earth will do all that She can to support our choices. Whatever they are. For they are of Her, and inherent in our creation is Her trust. We are born knowing how to worship, just as we are born knowing how to laugh."
As I have gotten older, I have learned the importance of recognizing those ancestors who have gone before us, who have paved the way for us, and who helped shape our lives. During the last year or so, I have contemplated changing my name—I felt a need to have a name of my own choosing and thought a lot about selecting a name that would allow me to honor and connect with the women of history. Then I thought about my grandmothers, and the roles they played in my life; what better way to honor them than to be able to name them every time I said or wrote my own name? And so it will be—by the end of this month, I will legally change my name. Of all the names I contemplated, this felt the most right; I feel grounded in a way I have never felt before. I am finally, and rightfully, recognizing these women for the important role they have played in my life.
This knowing who I am has allowed me to be even more curious about others—who THEY are. I especially love to read about people I have never read about before—learning about the “life as I DON’T know it”. I love it when I have a “light bulb” moment, when something makes sense because I am now looking at it in a new way. Alice Walker has told me about the African-American experience, Amy Tan about the Asian-American experience, Wilma Mankiller the Native-American experience. Just recently I have had the opportunity to begin to learn about the lives of Muslim women—Mohja Kahf wrote about life as a Muslim woman growing up in Indiana in The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. I’ve been reading about the life of an Iranian woman--Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis (this book is also the One Great Read for our area this summer). I also have to thank the internet for furthering my enlightenment; as she said last week, we are now able to feel a global connectedness when we learn from others across the world. That gives me hope. For the more we know of others, the harder it is to hate them.
I continue to learn from Alice Walker; to be challenged and lifted by her. In the midst what had to have been a time of despair for her--the Bush Administration, Alice Walker published a book of hope. In "We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light In a Time of Darkness", she writes:
"We are the ones we’ve been waiting for because we are able to see what is happening with a much greater awareness than our parents or grandparents, our ancestors, could see. This does not mean we believe, having seen the greater truth of how all oppression is connected, how pervasive and unrelenting, that we can “fix” things. …It comes from the simple belief and understanding that what one is feeling and doing is right. That it is right to protect rather than terrorize others; right to feed people rather than withhold food and medicine; right to want the freedom and joyful existence of all humankind. Right to want this freedom and joy for all creatures that exist already, or that might come into existence. Existence, we are now learning, is not finished!”
And, I am certain, I will continue to learn from all of you; to be challenged and inspired. It is my hope that we all will find new ways to connect with each other, and with the rest of the world.
In closing, I want Alice Walker to have the last word. She wrote this poem just this year, for the Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi:
Loving humans
Is tricky
Sometimes
A slap
In the face
Is all you get
For doing it
Just right.
Loving humans is a job
Like any other
Only
More
Bumps
On the way
To work
Which is full on
All the time.
Loving humans
Makes us
Want
To invite
Ourselves to tea
With rancid
Dictators
We think we
Can convince
Of our
Story’s side
While all
They think
About
While
We sit & dream
Is how
They can
Get away
With
Poisoning
Our tea.
And how
If only they
Had
Enough tea
Already
Brewed
They could
Waterboard us
To death
With it.
Loving humans
Means
Writing poems, songs
Novels, plays, slogans, chants
protest signs
Our critics
Want
To stone
Us for
While
We think of
Them
As people
Under different
Circumstances
We might
Be able
To help.
There is
Indeed
A Buddha
In
Every one
Of us
Loving humans
With all
Our clear
Unmistakable
Reluctance
To evolve
Makes this hard
For most humans
To see.
But not you.
