Green lap, brown embrace, blue body: the ecospirituality of Alice Walker - Afro-American author

Walker indicates more than once that activism is the constructive alternative to suicide, murder, wholesale slaughter. Yet she also allows for the possibility that the rage which fuels resistance may also require killing. Grange Copeland kills. Tashi kills. A young black woman used and abused by a wealthy white lawyer kills.(28) It is as if to say that where life is suppressed and growth is stunted, where persons and systems conspire not to "breathe with" but to suffocate,(29) resistance and activism may sometimes have to kill before anyone or anything can begin to heal. That is the tragedy which "conscious harmlessness" might prevent. And it is Walker's hope that cultivating a sense of the good, the beautiful, and the holy will avert violence and let the killing cease.

Pantheism

Walker's celebrations of eros and commitments to activism are clearly religious activities. It does not take long, however, to realize that, for her, true religion and vibrant spirituality require the renunciation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the adoption of more pan-religious and pantheist sensibilities. Yet this does not mean a wholesale rejection of Christ. Indeed, Walker has written that Christ advocated the healthful perception of oneself, of women, of people of color, and folks at large as "beloved expressions of the Universe (i.e., children of God). . . . " It is this element of gospel, of genuine good news, that she sees most often expurgated from Christian preaching. She also is convinced of the presence of protective spirits - not necessarily the angels of Judaeo-Christian tradition perhaps, but something like them. She finds these understandings of the goodness of being, and the striving of the spirit world to support well-being, as crucial for human survival and enjoyment. She continues:

This feeling of being loved and supported by the Universe in general and by certain recognizable spirits in particular is bliss. No other state is remotely like it. And perhaps that is what Jesus tried so hard to teach: that the transformation required of us is not simply to be "like" Christ but to be Christ (LBW, 98).

Walker regrets that this message of our own cosmic dynamism and Christic possibility is not what the Christian religion has generally imparted. It has seemed instead, she believes, to have transmitted an image of God as taskmaster and inhibitor,(30) a God "who said women deserved to suffer and were evil anyway" (AWL, 13). This, at least, is the image of God she claims to have received from the Methodist convictions of her mother. Walker does not merely reject what she understands to be the churchgoer's image of God. She also redefines the role of Christ and places the historical Jesus not in the unique role of only-begotten Son but as one among many beloved children, though a distinctly enlightened one. A gifted child, he is worthy of worship. But so are our present brothers and sisters, our ancestors, wisdom figures, and the many spirits in the world, as far as Walker is concerned. She observes: