Deirdre Jonese Austin
Author, minister and member of CBF’s Pan African Koinonia,
North Carolina
Who is God?
What is God?
Where is God?
These are questions on which I reflect as I read my Bible alongside Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
When I read my Bible alongside the literary works of Alice Walker, a writer, poet and activist, I am invited to encounter an expansive God. This is a God who is everywhere and in everything—the people around me, the trees, the color purple. Walker writes, “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifests itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for.”
As a minister whose work focuses on Black women, I think it is important that we can find God in ourselves and in each other. This is because it challenges an image of God that has been used to justify our oppression, the God of the slave owners and white supremacists, the God of those who perpetuate gender-based violence, the God of those who seek to rob women of their call and the other images of God that are harmful and death-dealing to our bodies, spirits and humanity. We can affirm that the violence we experience and that was experienced by our ancestors is not God; God is not the cause of our pain, violence and suffering. God does not have to look like our oppressors, but God also does not have to look like us.
Walker writes, “God is different to us now, after all these years in Africa. More spirit than ever before, and more internal. Most people think he has to look like something or someone—a roofleaf or Christ—but we don’t. And not being tied to what God looks like, frees us.” We can see God in ourselves and in those around us. Seeing the imago dei in others mandates that we love others, that we love our neighbors as ourselves. And yet, seeing God in everything mandates that we not only love other humans, but that we love and care for all of creation. When we see the image of God in our neighbors, we won’t harm them. When we see the image of God in nature, we will work to preserve and conserve it. Alice Walker calls us to continue the justice work of Jesus in calling out harm and promoting an ethic of radical love for all of creation.