One of my
favorite passages from The Color Purple
– by Alice Walker – is when Shug explains The Divine – also known as God – to
Celi. Here’s that passage:
“Here's the thing, say
Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You
come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.
And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know
what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord.
Feeling like shit.
It? I ast.
Yeah, It. God ain't a
he or a she, but a It.
But what do it look
like? I ast.
Don't look like
nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at
apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say
Shug. 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.
Shug a beautiful
something, let me tell you. She frown a little, look out cross the yard, lean
back in her chair, look like a big rose. She say, My first step from the old
white man (god) was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. 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. And I laughed and I cried and I
run all around the house. I knew just what it was.
Indeed, we don’t want folks to think of us as needy. But we all are. We need one another. And we need plants and animals and a healthy
earth.
So we are here today to SHARE our experiences together. We will pour our waters into a common bowl,
as use these waters as we bless our babies together and water our plants.
We are proud of our Seventh Principle and we celebrate "the
interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part" with our Water Communion.
(Homily followed by celebration of Water Communion).
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