Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought

7. Bodies in the World

| 143 7 Bodies in the World The discussion in chapter 6 is a useful interrogation of embodied religious experience in the form of conversion and redemption, yet it leaves untapped an important area in that it does not sufficiently place black bodies and their redemption within the context of the larger natural environment . Humans are a part of the web of life, connected in profound ways to the world. And none have spoken the truth of this connection with more power and passion than Alice Walker. In her novel The Color Purple, she has Shug speak these words: “But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed”1 The human body exists within a framework of mutual dependence that must be addressed theologically. In light of some rather pressing questions , not the least of which is premised on the truth of this interconnectedness , is this: How should we understand and feel natural disasters? The redemption theme at the center of chapter 6 continues in this chapter, but here it addresses the relationship of humanity to the earth that is often referenced in terms of “recovery stories.”2 When these stories, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, are held in tension in an overlapping fashion, the basic structure of humanity’s relationship to the natural environment resembles shifts between decline and growth, progress and struggle.3 The thread linking these various moments of engagement—whether one privileges decline or growth—is the nature and meaning of connection between bodies and the space they occupy.4 And whether framed in terms of domination over nature or as respect-filled relationship to nature, this interaction surfaces ideological arranged issues of race, gender, and class.5 While environmental history engages a variety of issues and questions, here I am particularly concerned with the connections between black bodies and thought on and action within nature.6 Through a brief discussion, proper context is provided for the more focused theological analysis of recent disasters in the southern United States. 144 | Bodies in the World The Meaning of Nature For more than a few centuries, efforts to reinvest the earth with religiously significant meaning have been underway.7 But there have been various angles and dimensions to this project, and some have concerned the relationship of white bodies to troubling black bodies, and both to an earth in flux. The connections were clear in that North America was understood “as the site of natural resources, Africa as the sources of enslaved human resources.”8 In addition to the somewhat apparent racial component to this reinvestment project, there were gender dimensions just as prevalent in that the earth was understood metaphorically as female substance to be dominated by male power. The Bible provided a framework for this discourse, particularly the book of Genesis and its depiction of materiality as flawed but redeemable. Drawing from this process of renewal, religious conversation about the natural environment (of which we are a part) tends toward a theologizing grounded in doctrine of God and soteriology. As the song goes: Work ye, then, while yet ’tis day, Work ye Christians, while ye may, Work for all that’s great and good, Working for your daily food. Working whilst the golden hours, Health, and strength, and youth are yours.9 Undergirding this project of redemption was an assumption that carving the United States out of the new land was a matter of divine right, a moment of divine will lodged literally in the physical earth. The language is nuanced in contemporary conversation with, in most cases, a less explicitly theologically contrived retelling of the story. Nonetheless, this country still tends to think of itself as privileged, based on a divine economy of attention that marks “Americans ” (read citizens of the United States) as a special group, one on which God smiles and grants certain socioeconomic and political arrangements and reach not granted to others. From the Puritans on, this framework—eventually buttressed by supposedly scientific advances—has marked the ontological posture of the United States. To the extent the new “chosen” labored in the New World (and forced labor from enslaved Africans), it was to make evident the privilege and rights to land and its benefits. This perspective and its particular system of ethics and morals guided the shaping of...