Admiring the Color Purple

The Color Purple by Alice Walker was a Pulitzer Prize winning novel and Stephen Spielberg’s 1985 movie by the same name was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Last month June and I both re-read the book and watched the movie again—and were impressed again by both. 

Alice Walker is a talented novelist and poet. She is also a lifetime social activist and the one who coined the term “womanist” (in “Coming Apart,” her 1979 short story).

Walker was born in Georgia, the youngest of her sharecropper parents’ eight children. She was an excellent student, and upon graduating from high school she received a scholarship to prestigious (HBCU) Spelman College in Atlanta. Howard Zinn was one of her professors there.

Under the direction of SNCC, Alice and many other Spelman students joined the effort to desegregate Atlanta. They were supported by Prof. Zinn—who subsequently was fired in the summer of 1963. Because of that, Alice transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York and graduated in 1965.

Through the 1970s Walker was active both as a teacher and an author, and then 40 years ago, in 1982, The Color Purple, her third novel was published. The next year she became the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Color Purple is a feminist work about Celie, an abused and uneducated African American woman’s struggle for empowerment. According to Britannica, among other things the novel was “praised for the depth of its female characters and for its eloquent use of Black English Vernacular.”

Here is a short conversation between Shug and Celie that shows some of that vernacular—and indicates where the title of the book came from:

Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it (Kindle ed., p. 195).

The same Britannica article goes on to say, “The Color Purple movingly depicts the growing up and self-realization of Celie, who overcomes oppression and abuse to find fulfillment and independence.”  

The novel is a classic, for there are many today who need to overcome oppression and abuse the same as Celie did 100 years ago. More broadly, as a theology professor in Australia writes, The Color Purple is

both a cry of rage and protest against the injustices and inhumanity we humans inflict on one another, and a stubborn affirmation of hope in the midst of suffering, of endurance against all odds, of a kind of triumph in the end as we become more and more who we truly are.*

The Color Purple is also a book about God. The above quote from the book is just one of many referring to God.

The author herself said in a 2006 interview, “Twenty-five-years later, it still puzzles me that The Color Purple is so infrequently discussed as a book about God. About ‘God’ versus ‘the God image.’”**

The blogger cited above explains that Walker clearly holds a panentheist view of God in which “the divine is deeply immanent within everything, a faithful creator and life-giving Spirit. She revolts against the intellectual idolatry that reduces God to the white, to the male, to the human.”

And Walker herself states that the “core teaching of the novel” is delivered by Shug, who says to Celie, “I believe God is everything, . . . Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it” (Kindle ed., p. 194).

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Look how the wild flowers grow. They don't work hard to make their clothes. But I tell you that Solomon with all his wealth wasn't as well clothed as one of them” (Matt. 6:27-28, CEB).

Perhaps when he said this, Jesus was looking out over a field of wild flowers and admiring the color purple.

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* Michael O’Neil in a 2016 blog post.

** From the Introduction of the book in the Kindle version (loc. 80).

Note: For an abundance of information about Alice Walker and her outstanding book, see https://bookanalysis.com/alice-walker/the-color-purple/.

The Universal Christ

Many of you are familiar with the name Richard Rohr, the Franciscan friar who was born in Kansas in 1943 and who has long lived in New Mexico. A few of you may even remember “Listening to Richard Rohr” (pun intended), my 2015 article about him. This article is about his highly significant new book.

Rohr’s Potent Book

The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe was issued on March 5 in hardback & paperback, and on Kindle. According to this National Catholic Reporter article, that potent book debuted at No. 12 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction.

As indicated in my previous blog article, I spent 30-minutes (or more) every day for a couple of weeks carefully reading Rohr’s book, and I found it to be of great profundity.

Perhaps because I have been reading Rohr’s daily meditations for the last few years, I found the first part of the book more helpful than the latter chapters, which were mostly ideas that he had previously explored in his meditations.

Rohr begins his book with a fairly long quote from Caryll Houselander (1901~54), an English mystic whom I had not heard of before. Reflecting on her words, Rohr refers to “the Christ Mystery” as “the indwelling of the Divine Presence in everyone and everything since the beginning of time” (p. 1).

That is the basis for his thought-provoking exposition of the meaning and significance of the universal Christ.  

Rohr’s Main Point

More than anything else, Rohr emphasizes Incarnation on a far broader scale than most of us have ever seriously considered. Incarnation begins with Creation, he says, and thus we live in a “sacramental universe.”

Rohr’s viewpoint is one of thoroughgoing panentheism. He is clear about that point: “I am really a panentheist (God lies within all things, but also transcends them), exactly like both Jesus and Paul” (p. 43).

Thus, God is seen as present throughout and within the whole world. Rohr starts his fourth chapter with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, which I have long liked:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

“Christ Is Not Jesus’s Last Name” is the title of Rohr’s first chapter, which I found to be the most challenging of the book. There he states clearly that “the first incarnation was the moment described in Genesis 1” (p. 12).

He goes on to say that “‘Christ’ is a word for the Primordial Template (‘Logos’) through whom ‘all things came into being, and not one thing had its being except through him’ (John 1:3)” (p. 13).

It was that “Template” (“Logos”) that became flesh in Jesus. So, Rohr clearly affirms both the particularity of Jesus of Nazareth and the universality of Christ.

This is all closely related to what I wrote about in the third chapter of my new book Thirty True Things Everyone Needs to Know Now, although I wrote it before having the benefit of Rohr’s lucid book.

The title of that chapter is “God Is Fully Revealed in Jesus, But the Christ is Not Limited to Jesus.” Rohr makes that point more emphatically than I was able to do there.

Rohr’s Key Emphasis

There is so much more that needs to be said about Rohr’s thought-provoking book, but the following words summarize a key emphasis found in it:

A mature Christian sees Christ in everything and everyone else. That is a definition that will never fail you, always demand more of you, and give you no reason to fight, exclude, or reject anyone (p. 33).

We Christians need to think long and hard about those words—and about Rohr’s entire book.