Healing thru Us
This Family and Friends Day, I am led to share the most powerful experience of family, that I recount in my book, Loves...Regardless: Forty Devotions Inspired by Womanist Creative Thought and Theology:
I arrived in Gallatin, Tennessee on June 2, 2009 all alone. I was there to serve a Shalom Zone in a community still deeply fragmented by racism and classism. I was there to work with a well-meaning liberal White woman who did not acknowledge my blackness; she perceived me as different from the Black women she encountered daily because my education made me exceptional in her eyes. I was living in the lush lakeside quarters of a board member far beyond the other side of the tracks where the Shalom Zone was located. I was an outsider, feeling isolated and unseen.
In a matter of days, I experienced the restorative power of community. It started at a community BBQ. I met Charlotte. Her heart was as wide as her smile. She did not know me, but she invited me to Sunday dinner at Big Mama’s house. There I met Big Mama, Sylvia, Wanda, NaCole and a host of other women and men whose love demonstrated the power of community. By the time June 22 rolled around, I wrote on my blog about being in a place, “that has not left me alone, or without family, or without bangin' macaroni and cheese for the last three Sunday afternoons after church.”
Big Mama an’nem are healers, building bridges, and showing off as they exemplify God’s love in community. They are not the only ones. Black women know how to show love and affection beyond me and mine. Sadly, as womanist theologian Monica Coleman writes in Making a Way Out of No Way, our fractured society esteems individualism above community. This way of being is antithetical to Black women’s ways of being. We are righteous open arms. We are southern hospitality and Ubuntu, connected through our shared humanity. We are healers. However, in order to survive, we have adapted to white hegemonic ways of being to the detriment of our communities and our souls. We must return to ourselves so that through us God can heal our communities.
Pastor Donna Owusu-Ansah