“A prayer is one who prays,” says Elizabeth Cunningham.
I agree.
And, experience proves that a prayer is one who forgets and remembers, wanders and returns, hollows out and fills up.
I’m someone who struggles to fit the word into my life. Prayer conjures pews and penitence, both of which I left somewhere in the last millennium.
In spite of all that, this week, it would seem I am immersed in prayer. For that, I am grateful.
The novelist Elizabeth Cunningham joined us on KnotWork Storytelling to read us from her new memoir, My Life as a Prayer. Together, we explore an excerpt that blends prayers for help and of thanksgiving with some wonderful insights into her writing life.
As I said, prayer is everywhere for me this week.
Perhaps not coincidentally, I finally went spelunking behind the bed to retrieve my rosary, the cheap pearlescent beads my mother bought me in the Vatican just a few months before she died.
With these, I can fall back into my haphazard middle-of-the-night practice of Hail Marys and Our Fathers I learned from
and Clark Strand’s Way of the Rose. I am reciting the words that wound round the hearts of my Catholic ancestors, and the practice still feels both organic and foreign.Just after dawn, other prayers flow most easily. The distant ridge wraps the valley in a rose gold embrace. The Canada geese calls are faint, and then so loud, and then they grow faint again. I weep into the all of it all, which is so bittersweet and heartbreakingly liminal. I’m transported to the spirit level without uttering a word.
And, then in the afternoon hours, when I’m tugging or being tugged by a puppy dog who is growing stronger by the day, I have been listening to Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman.
At those moments, prayer becomes a lot like introspection and a plea for help. Help me find the bravery to ask myself the hardest questions. Help me receive the answers so I can transform my actions as well as my words.
On reading Christena Cleveland’s God Is a Black Woman as a white woman trying to remember to pray
When you read this book (I hope you will), you walk with a Black woman across the Auvergne region of France in search of the Black Madonnas and a god that truly affirms the sacredness of her Black femaleness.1 Along the way, there are so many stories of pain and release as Dr. Cleveland explores the lifetime religious abuse, racism, and sexism that set the stage for this pilgrimage.
Dr. Cleveland’s book offers layer after layer of revelation. She affirms ideas that I think know at a certain level, but still don’t really know in my bones. God Is a Black Woman feels like an invitation to encounter a kind of knowing that is almost familiar (I know the divine feminine, I’d have said before I’d journeyed with Christena), but is also entirely new.
As a white woman who fancies herself someone who “gets it,” I have a host of problems with the figure that Dr. Cleveland describes as “whitemalegod.” And yet, I have something vital in common with this fictional but oh-so-real divine force of masculine off-planet power because we live on an earth where color still counts. I have thrived in the structures built according to “His” white supremacist dictates. These structures were built, after all, to keep me safe and pure.
And yet, these same structures are what molded me to perform perfection in order to be accepted and loved, raised me to despise “the other,” and still limit my imagination and my engagement.
This book radiates with the passion of the Black Madonna. I read it as a bold, yet loving, request to reckon with all the ways I still just. don’t. get. it.
When I’m being a least a little bit brave, I will admit that I am still coming to know that liberation that’s just about gender and not also about racism, ableism, and the support of the LGBTQ community isn’t real liberation from patriarchy at all. White feminism was built for me, and it was a comfortable home for decades, but it wasn’t built for everyone. And, at last, I am really internalizing the truth that “freedom for some” is just not remotely free enough.
Though it almost seems unnecessary to say this, I’ll shout it once again for the people at the back: the dictates of whitemalegod hurt us all, regardless of race or gender. Our pain manifests to dramatically different degrees, of course, and the comparison game can get real dangerous, real fast. (Eg. your Irish ancestors may have been treated horribly when they immigrated to the US, and for a time, they may not have been seen as respectable or counted as “white,” but that in itself does not convey useful insight into what it means to be Black in America today.)
To be born outside of the systems of power is to be crushed by that power. To live within that power is to be crushed by your own oppressive obsession to maintain that power at any cost.
And dammit, our earth and all that dwell upon her have had enough of all that.
Do I believe that God is a Black woman?
Part of me wants to try to dodge the question and say “well, I’m not sure we need to personify God, as we know that we must conceive of Spirit as something beyond the human world,” but that’s a cop out. And Dr. Cleveland is too smart to let that sort of slippery logic let us avoid this vital energy of God’s Black womanhood.
Dr. Cleveland addresses the question of putting a color and gender on the divine early on. Yeah, it is an anthropocentric thing to do, but since our culture programs us to do it by default (side eye to the beardy man upstairs in the clouds), why not do it consciously?
I mean, one of the most appealing aspects of the white feminism I discovered in college (at a Jesuit university) was that I could break up with whitemalegod and find myself in the lap of the goddess. Funny, the Goddess Brigid who game to me always seemed to have red hair and green eyes…
The Deepest Dark Womb of Creation
As I write this in my car, waiting for my daughter’s high school choir practice to finish, I look through the windshield into the frozen night sky. Everything beyond the odd yellow glow of the streetlights is darker than dark.
It’s the simple reminder that, for half of each revolution of this earth, we are wrapped in the black cloak of night. It starts to seem ridiculous that we would be taught to exclusively worship a bright male god when nature shows us that it is just as likely that we were born of a dark goddess.
A Black Woman God.
In deep respect to Dr. Cleveland’s work, and with a full awareness of how she describes the radically open arms of Black female God, and also issues a warning to white women who would claim and co-opt this powerful reality of the divine without truly embodying the anti-racist work required, I say yes, God is a Black woman.
And I will bow my head and promise to keep listening to what, as she calls it, a Deeper Power, so I can really know what that means.
(I’m still reveling in a “Deeper Power.” I mean, oh my goddess, what a shift to dethrone that ivory tower Higher Power B.S. and ground our sacred knowing deep in the womb cave of earth and the birthing body! Yes. That. Please.)
Let’s return to Elizabeth and her wisdom on prayer
Does it seem odd that I am devoting so much of a newsletter about Elizabeth’s Cunningham’s book about prayer to another author’s spiritual memoir?
I have the great honor of knowing Elizabeth well, and she has held space my wide-ranging wondering and worrying for years. I know that she is deeply committed to questioning the limits of white feminism, too, and I’m trusting my approach suits her just fine.
In my podcast conversation with Elizabeth, we talked about the whispers that come through in that long, dark, prayerful time between 3 and 5 AM.
There was something Elizabeth said that felt epiphanic, and it seems to resonate powerfully with God Is a Black Woman:
“I just heard the other night, while in prayer, that I did not know how I was loved.
You know, we think, ‘well, God loves everybody.’ And we think that means God loves everybody the same.
What I heard the other night was, ‘No, God loves everybody totally, distinctly, and passionately. And you need to understand how that works.’
I think it’s possible to believe that we are valued just exactly as we are.”
https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/a39503554/black-madonnas-france-journey/