Blog Your Blessings Sunday

Today I am thank­ful for the many tal­ented, cre­ative peo­ple who inspire me. One of them is Alice Walker, author of one of my all-time favorite books, “The Color Purple.”

There is a very inter­est­ing inter­view with Ms. Walker at beliefnet. She talks about her new book, “We Are the Ones We Have Been Wait­ing For: Inner Light in a Time of Dark­ness,” which is def­i­nitely going to be the next book I read.

What really intrigued me about this inter­view is her phi­los­o­phy about the Divine Cre­ator. “Alice Walker has always known God. But she prefers terms like ‘God­ness’ [I like this term!] and ‘Mama’ to describe the divine—for her, it is every­where, from the Japan­ese maples out­side her win­dow to the slow yoga she practices.”

About “The Color Pur­ple,” she says, it 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.”

Asked what she sees when she closes, her eyes and tunes into God, she responds: “I don’t close my eyes. Why would I close my eyes? It’s every­where. I mean it just is. What is this if it’s not God?”

The inter­viewer also asked her if she feels that she has had a sense of God in that fash­ion her whole life. About that, she says:

Yes. I do. In fact, 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?

On the mat­ter of thank­ful­ness, she responds to the ques­tion of whether she has prayers that she says on a reg­u­lar basis this way:

“Thank you” is the best prayer that any­one could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme grat­i­tude, humil­ity, under­stand­ing. Peo­ple pray and pray–and that’s fine. But, for me, “Thank you” just basi­cally says it all.

Indeed it does.

In every­thing … give thanks. Amen and amen!

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