Meg Rooney
CBF Leadership Scholar, Georgia
African-American womanist novelist, short story writer, poet and social activist, Alice Walker is not a believer. She does not attend church. She doesn’t partake in any of the religious related practices that we hold dear. But she is a theologian and I have felt closer to God through her than anything I have encountered in my recent seminary classes.
This semester, I decided to take an undergraduate course that met my passion for writing and rhetoric. It was within this class that I was assigned to read and write a rhetorical analysis on Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel, The Color Purple. Of course, like any other seminary student, I was most intrigued by Walker’s depiction of and relationship with God.
“Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. 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” (Walker, The Color Purple, p. 194).
Walker presents a very spiritual, inclusive God that is with every person all of the time. She pursues an agape kind of love. Not too far from Christianity, is she? Regardless of who we are and what we do, God has made a home in us. God loves us in a way that we can’t understand and calls us to do the same to others. To love without reason. Sometimes it is easy to get wrapped up in the religious technicalities. We go so far in trying to make the church perfect that we lose the holiness of why we are gathered in the first place.
As I continue to deconstruct and reconstruct my faith while in seminary, I am anchored to two truths: God is with me and loves me. This is the foundation upon which I will continue to build my faith. I hope it provides some comfort and relief knowing that you do not need to do anything to be worthy of God’s love and presence. It has already been given. We just have to receive it.
Pray...Give...Go.
