Like most of us, I suspect, I first came across Alice Walker in The Color Purple, her controversial Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Yet the sequels to this story have moved me far more. Possessing the Secret of Joy is a devastating exploration of misogyny and the abuse of sexuality. It focuses on a minor character from The Color Purple — Tashi — who married the adopted son of a missionary and left Africa with him “but had taken her wound with her to America.” Although most obviously an indictment on the genital mutilation suffered by about 100 million women and girls living in today’s world, it is also about the moral mutilation by which we deny others and ourselves the right to be whole human beings, and by which we distort and maim our relationship with God. It is an incredibly powerful book which could teach many of us. The Temple of My Familiar, in contrast, is “a romance of the last 500,000 years” again considering misogyny and oppression but essentially a passionately optimistic exploration of spiritual recovery through love and openness to the entirety of creation. In this novel it is Tashi’s sister-in-law, Olivia, who explains most explicitly her problems in relating to the “Christianity … of conquest and domination,” in which white man “in his insecurity and feeling of unlovableness, made himself the sole conduit to God,” yet she does manage to find God in the “story of the earth” and observes, “After all, since this world is a planet spinning about in the sky, we are all of us in heaven already!” But hers is only one of many journeys with God in this astonishingly rich, beautiful and affirming novel.

These, then, were my background to reading her compilation of writings, Living by the Word. The double meaning in the title, of both Christian and autobiographical implications is entirely apt, for, as she explains, her work is for her a way of praying. Sometimes this touches on prophecy as she unfolds to her readers the injustice of this world — her failed attempts to visit her ‘sister’, Dessie Woods, who was jailed for twelve years after a struggle with an armed would-be rapist in which it as he who was shot dead; the government organised massacre of a community of radical utopians whose dogs, compost heaps and scarcely clad children disturbed their neighbours; and her own arrest for demonstrating outside a weapons base against the use of her tax money to wreak destruction on her Central American sisters and brothers — and in her tales of hope for humanity in lives of people special to her or her relationship with so much of Creation. She describes her anguish over her daughter smoking, her frustration with critics of The Color Purple, her struggle towards vegetarianism. In this last context one account is of her encounter with a particular small, grey chicken in Bali, herding her chicks across the road with great determination, and she writes,

I can never not know that the chicken I absolutely saw is a sister (this recognition gives a whole different meaning to the expression “you chicks”), and that her love of her children definitely resembles my love of mine. Sometimes I cast my quandary about it all in the form of a philosophical joke: Why did the Balinese chicken cross the road? I know the answer is, To try to get us both to the other side.

It is not so much a question of whether the lion will one day lie down with the lamb, but whether human beings will ever be able to lie down with any creature or being at all.

It is impossible to review adequately the spirit of her writing — the passionate exhortation to be what we were created to be, (“oppressed hair puts a ceiling on the brain”), and to celebrate what we are, which includes all our brothers and sisters across space and time, human, snake, horse and tree. Even when I do not wholly agree with her judgements I find the essence of her faith infectious. In her concluding essay she maintains that,

The Universe responds. What you ask of it, it gives. The military-industrial complex and its leaders and scientists have shown more faith in this reality that those of us who do not believe in war and want peace. They have asked the Earth for all its deadlier substances … The Universe, ever responsive, the Earth, ever giving, has opened itself fully to their desires. Ironically, Black Elk [a Native American about whom she has written earlier] and nuclear scientists can be viewed in much the same way: as men who prayed to the Universe for what they believed they needed and who received from it a sign reflective of their own hearts.

I remember when I used to dismiss the bumper sticker “Pray for Peace.” I realize now that I did not understand it, since I also did not understand prayer; which I know now to be the active affirmation in the physical world of our inseparableness from the divine; and everything, especially the physical world, is divine. War will stop when we no longer praise it, or give it any attention at all. Peace will come wherever it is sincerely invited. Love will overflow every sanctuary given it. Truth will grow where the fertilizer that nourishes it is also truth. Faith will be its own reward. Believing this, which I learned from my experience with the animals and the wild flowers, I have found that my fear of nuclear destruction has been to a degree lessened. I know perfectly well that we may all die, and relatively soon, in a global holocaust, which was first imprinted, probably against their wishes, on the hearts of the scientist fathers of the atomic bomb, no doubt deeply wounded and frightened human beings; but I also know we have the power, as all the Earth’s people, to conjure up the healing rain imprinted on Black Elk’s heart. Our death is in our hands.

“Knock and the door shall be opened. Ask and you shall receive.”
“Whatsoever you do the least of these, you do also unto me” — and to yourself. For we are one.

“God” answers prayers. Which is another way of saying, “the Universe responds.”
We are indeed the world. Only if we have reason to fear what is in our own hearts need we fear for the planet. Teach yourself peace.

“Pass it on.”

by Joanna Chamberlayne

The Color Purple 1982

ISBN 0671526022

Possessing the Secret of Joy 1992

ISBN 0224035274

The Temple of My Familiar 1989

ISBN 0704350416

Living by the Word 1988

ISBN 0156528657