welcome welcome to yet another extraordinary event in the life of trinity college of vermont this time under the rubric of the faith p waters and dad chair in the humanities a program established in one thousand nine hundred six to honor faith waters commitment to the liberal arts we wel this series of lectures with great pride for the water chair series speaks to the heart of the mission of trinity college of vermont this college this seventy five year old institution of higher education that builds on the legacy of our founders the sisters of mercy their vision for the education of the under served the education of women and the education of older adult students serves as a springboard for the gifts and the talents of our faculty and staff who keep our students at the center and serve as model for truth telling for teaching and learning in a community of mutual respect for spiritual development for civil academic discourse i'd also like to welcome you and especially our g alice walker in the mersey tradition of hospitality the very same gracious tradition in which trinity college and many of you welcomed me and my family dan laurel and ta you've opened your arm your homes your offices and your classrooms and welcome and i've discovered that this openness of mind and spirit is deeply rooted in our culture in the culture of trinity and also in the culture of this great state of vermont for monts freedom and unity is our motto we have a talent for nurturing individual initiative but still we draw ourselves together to community to build a whole that's far richer than its individual members community from the latin word building with gifts trinity's mission has been built with gifts the gifts of the sisters of mercy and all of you here tonight who join us in special moments like this in which we celebrate our selves and we challenge what is i see clearly as i move about the campus and as i move about this great city into the business and educational community and to government offices that our region looks to us that trinity for ideas and for innovation for collaboration and this college response in full measure what a powerful environment in which to educate our one thousand four hundred students in the way that we do in the liberal arts and sciences in the only woman's college in vermont in small intergenerational classes through our groundbreaking pace program for adult and our weekend program the only one in this region and soon in january will begin offering housing and transportation for students from far away from the city through our three graduate programs that are tightly focused around our mission education just this administration and community mental health through our community service scholars program that serves as a national model for moving people from welfare to work through our enhanced program that gives students with disabilities an opportunity to experience a full fledged college experience through our long standing community service scholars program that draws faculty and staff and students together to give back to communities near and far away through our women in small business projects that typifies trinity's and entrepreneurial spirit into our many institutes and partnerships here and abroad but most of all in the catholic value center traditions of the sisters of mercy because in this increasingly complex world it's harder and harder for human beings to remain centered to find meaning in what we do and to carve out roles of fulfillment but trinity strong liberal arts and sciences foundation and values centered approach will continue to be a force for empowering women and all of our students to fully employ their intellect their personal gifts and their spiritual striving in becoming full partners in learning and future architects of healthy communities here and abroad during their lifetime and trinity will continue to draw to itself people of character and spirit and who has more of that than our honored guest alice walker so welcome to all of you who've come here tonight to hear her speak and welcome to you alice walker for extending to your great gift of word and spirit and gr on behalf of women everywhere welcome i am not alice walker behalf of the department of humanities of trinity and as the coordinator of the faith p waters in doubt share in the humanities welcome to an evening with alice walker perhaps best known for her novel the color purple we now look forward to her new work on activism and that's where it isn't titled anything we love can be c and that will be published when they torture your father plant a tree when they torture your brother and your sister plant a tree when they assassinate your leaders and lovers plant a tree when they torture you too bad to talk plant a tree when they begin to torture the trees and cut down the far as they have made start another i'm very happy to be here tonight very happy to see so many of you and the ones where you're sitting is not so very dark that i can't see you at all i've been very warmly welcomed in burlington and it feels like a very good place to be trinity feels like a good place to be i think you're all very fortunate to be here although not perhaps in winter as orrin has said i have just finished a book on activism and i want to share one of the essays with you and i think this is a very appropriate place for this particular essay  so this book anything we love can be saved is actually named for an essay that i wrote about zora neale hurston many years after her resurrection because by now there is a zora neale hurston festival in florida every year and it keeps growing and she herself is someone who is known around the world her work as rich as around the world and is something that might not have happened but happened because many people loved her and loved her because they recognize who she was not from critics but from what she herself had actually done so this piece that i want to read to you tonight very long and it's called the only reason you want to go to heaven is that you have been driven out of your mind and the subtitle is off your land and out of your lovers are clear seeing inherited religion and reclaiming the pagan and it starts with a quote from genesis unto the woman god said i will greatly multiply by sorrow and i conception in sorrow the shall bring forth children and i desire shall be to the husband and he shall rule over the in my novel the color purple sealy and should discuss as all thoughtful human beings must the meaning of god should says i believe god is everything that is ever was or ever will be sealy raised to worship  god that resembles the little bites man who works in the bank only bigger and feared it learns to agree i agree also it was years after writing these words for shows that i discovered they were also spoken millennia ago by isis ancient goddess of africa who as an african can be said to be a spiritual mother of us all there is a special grief felt by the children and grandchildren of those who were forbidden to read for business to explore for question or to know looking back on my parents and grandparents lies i have often felt overwhelmed helpless as i've examined history and society and especially religion with them in mind and seen how they were manipulated away from a belief in their own judgment and faith in themselves it is painful to realize they were forever trying to correct a flaw that of being black female and human that did not exist except as quote men of god but really men of greed massage and a and violence defined it what a burden to think one is conceived and then rather than a pleasure that one is born into evil rather than into joy in my work i speak to my parents and to my most distant ancestors about what i myself have found as an earthling growing naturally out of the universe i create characters who sometimes speak in the language of immediate ancestors characters who are not passive but active in the discovery of what is vital and real in this world characters who explore what it would feel like not to be imprisoned by the hatred of women the love of violence and the destructiveness of greed talk to human beings as the quote religion by which they must got their lives what is happening in the world more and more is that people are attempting to decolonized their spirits a crucial act of empowerment one that might return reverence to the earth thereby saving it in this fearful of nature spiritually colonized age and example of this decolonization occurs in the color purple shows the pagan discusses the nature of god was silly the confused christian and this is the section from the color purple didn't it a i don't write to god no more i write to you what happened to god issues who that i say she looked at mysterious they the devil as you is i say you not worry about no god surely she said wait a minute hold on just a minute here just because i don't harass it like some people those know don't mean i got religion what god do for me i asked she say cd like she shop he gave you life good health and a good woman that love you to death yeah i say and he give me a ledge daddy a crazy mama a lowdown dog of a step daughter and assist are probably will never see again and how i say the god i been friend and let him hear me i say if you have a listen the polka love women the world would be a different place i can tell you she talk and talk on the butch me way from blasphemy but i bless say much as i want to find i was out there waiting for us what else can you be was sent as have most good times i say you know why she asked because you ain't all the time worrying about god i say not what she said that ain't is the worry about god a lot but wants us to feel loved by god those do the best those can the please him we would like you telling me god love you and you are never done nothing for him i may not go to church sighing in oh she say i can lay back and just my last be happy have a good time with this like bless me michelle enough she says see let me tell the truth have you ever found god in church i never did i just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show in a god i have a built in church are brought in with me and i think all the other folks did too they come to church and share god not find god with some folks didn't even have an issue said they did once didn't speak to me while i was there struggling with my big belly and mrs rotten cherry right she sa no no i say i'm to shane nobody ever asked me this before so i'm sort of took by surprise besides when i think about it i don't think quite right mr well that would be no improvement she say then she'd tell him it is old white man is the same god she used to see when she prayed if you wait to find god in church see lee she say that he was bound to show because that's where he lives what how come i ask because that's the one that's in the white folks white bible should a guy say god wrote white folks had nothing to do with it how come he look just like them then only bigger and i hate mohammed how come the bible just like everything else they make all about them doing one thing on another and all the colored folks doing is getting cursed pay them in attention the last thing the guys want to think about the god is that hair is kinky that's the truth i say and no way to read the bible and not think god why she say then s when i found out that i thought god was white and the man i lost interest you mad cause you don't seem to listen to your prayer do the male listen to anything call it say you can as should say but i don't have to ask sophia i know why people never listen the cult people period if they do they only listen long enough to be able to tell you what to do he 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 sometime it just manifests itself even if you're not lookin i don't know what you're looking for trouble do it for most folks i think sorrow feeling like shit you calling it it ass yeah she says it god and i he or she it may be us but what do it look like i asked don't look like nothing she say it in a picture show it ain't something you can look at apart from anything else including yourself i believe god is everything so everything that is there ever was or ever will be and when you can feel that and be happy to feel that you found it sure is a beautiful something materia she frowned a little look out across the yard and leaned back in a chair look just like a big rose she say my first step from the old man was trees then air then birds then other people but one day when i was sitting quiet and see them like a motherless child which i was it come to me that feeling of being part of everything and not separate at all and news that in fact hurt a tree mom would bleed and i laughed and i cried and i run all around the house i knew just what it was in fact when it when you know god loves them you enjoy them a lot more yourself you can just relax go with everything that's going and praise god by liking what you like your god don't think is dirty no she's a god mated listen god love everything you love and i mess with stuff you don't but mo than anything else god love admiration you saying god vain i asked not should say not saying just want to share a good thing i think it pisses god off if you are by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't even notice it  it do when it get pissed off ask oh and make something else people think pleasing god is all god care about but any food living in the world can see it always trying to please us back say everything wrong to be loved saying and then make faces and give flower bouquets trying to be loved you haven't noticed that trees do everything to get attention that we do except walk not the color purple where it come from not a little while flowers nothing now that much as open and i feel like a food next to him it will scrub of a bush in my yard m thought a strength but not altogether still it is like shoes say you have to get man off your eyeball before you can see in a thing at all man corrupt everything you say shoes he own your box of grits in your head and all over the radio he try to make you think you everywhere soon as you think he everywhere you think he's god but he ain't whenever you trying to pray and man plop himself on the other in the that tell him to get lost conjure up flowers when water a big rock but this is hard work let me tell you he'd been there so long he don't want to birds he threatened lightning in blue was when earthquakes us fight i had to pray at all and every time i  spirit before a long time i was confused after all when someone you trust shows you a picture of a blonde blue eyed jesus christ and tells you he's the son of god you get an instant image of his father and older version of him when you're taught god loves you but only if you're good obedient trusting and so forth and you know you're that way only some of the time there's a tendency to deny your shadow side hence the hypocrisy i noted early on in our church the church i attended as a child still stands it is small almost tiny and made a very old silver gray lumber painted white for a couple of decades ago when an indoor toilet was also  it a simple serene suite it used to nestle amid visit green foliage at a curve in a sandy dirt road inside its rough hewn benches smelled warmly of pine there was a huge red oak tree that shaded its yard from which people took bits of bark with which to brew a tonic for their chickens i remember my mother boiling the bark she cut from the tree and feeding the reddish brown tea to her pullets who without it were likely to cannibalize each other the county years later and without warning cut down the tree and straightened and paved the road in the attempt to create a tourist industry where none had existed before they've been flooded the surrounding countryside the fisher people from far away who whiz by in their pick up trucks today know nothing about what they see to us they are so unconnected to the land they appear to hover above it like ghosts the church was donated to our community after the events of patient proclamation and eight hundred sixty six by the daughter of a slave owner it is hours only for as long as services are held there few young people have remained interested in the church and so it has been kept going i want to two elderly women i have supported their efforts to keep the church open by responding to whatever modest requests for assistance they have my age i do this because i respect these old women and also because i recognize them as the keepers of a personal heritage that is very dear to me the  virtually all of my relatives including grandparents and parents is just across the way as is the vet's public space where the first consolidated school for black people in our community used to stand a school my father was instrumental in erecting i find myself once or twice a year sitting on the church steps peeking into the windows or just standing in the yard remembering i'm going to pause right here because i have a question to ask you is there an echo for you to know you don't hear an echo oh good  yes you do is very curious reading and hearing my own voice just one step behind me but i'm sorry you have to have that as well what i remember is playing tag and hide and go seek with my cousin and best friend delilah she was radiant lea black funny and fleet of foot and her mother dressed her in the same airy colorful summer dresses and patent leather shoes and which my mother dressed me perhaps she had more pigtails i had bigger bows in winter we wore identical maroon colored snow suits which served us well in the uninsulated church which was then and still is heated by a pot bellied stove we would grow up to lose touch and she would barely escape a violently aboot abusive marriage about which i would hear only after the fact i remember my father huddled with other men outside under the trees laughing my mother scrubbed and shining smiling we were all on our best behavior even my incorrigibly rockers brothers who only a church managed to be both neat and quiet because we were methodist and sang mostly standard him the singing wasn't all that great i loved it though because i like singing with others still do and i was even as a small child  sincerity in the voices of everyone after singing in a kind of song together there was nobody in the congregation i didn't love perhaps it was even more sincere one hundred years earlier legin had it that the former slave owners would stop their buggies underneath the red oak to listen sometimes professional gospel singers came down from atlanta and turned the place out they were undisputed queens in their shiny red or blue row they shouted at god as if they knew him personally and also knew he was hard of hearing the black stuff around their eyes which began to run and smear the moment they began to sweat was strange to us as was the fact that they wore and wiped off more lipstick in an afternoon than my plain countr mother with own in her whole life my mother in addition to her other duties as worker wife and mother of eight children was also mother of the church i realize now that i was kind of a little church mother in training as i set out for the church with her on saturday morning we would mop the bare pine floors grunt dust cloth over the benches and wash the windows take out the ashes dump them behind the outhouse clean the outhouse and be sure there was adequate paper we would sleep the car for the thing in the pulpit and i would reverently dust off the bible each saturday my mother slipped managed to purchase from nigger savings she a poster the pulpit chairs including the throne like one in which the preachers that she also laid new carpeting on sunday morning she would bring flowers from her garden i love this you know i would love to be where you are because it's like being read to just before going to sleep there has never been anyone who amazed and delighted me as consistently as my mother did when i was a child part of her magic was her calm no nonsense manner if it could be done she could probably do it was her attitude she enjoyed being strong and capable of anything she didn't know how to do she could learn i was thrilled to be her apprentice my father and brothers clear the cemetery of brush and cut the grass around the church while we were inside by the time we finished everything sparkled we stood back and it marred our work sister walker my mother was thanked for making the church so beautiful but this wise woman who knew so many things about life and the mysteries of the heart the spirit and the soul was never asked to speak to the congregation if she and other mothers and sisters of the church had been asked if they were taken for granted that they had vision and insight to match their labor and their love with the church be alive today and what the women who said what they are protested that that eve of the bible did not represent them that they had never been that curious but of course they had been just as curious if a tree had appeared in their midst with an attractive fruit on it and furthermore one that they were informed would make them wise they would have enabled it and what could be so wrong about that a way god had told adam about the forbidding for he had said a word directly to ease and what kind of god would be so cruel as to curse women and men forever for eating a piece of in his wife to god as if she had forced him to eat the fruit rather than simply offer him a bite would they have said adam's behavior reminded them of a man who'd got a woman pregnant and then blame the woman for tempting him to have intercourse thereby placing all the blame on her would they have said that god was unfair well he was wiped his son was white and it was truly a white man's world as far as they could see what they have broken of the god they had found not in the bible but in life as they wrestle death delivering babies or as they worked almost beyond and sometimes the young and capacity in the white man's fields i remember my mother telling me of a time when she was hugely pregnant and had an enormous field of c n twenty five to thirty acres to chop which is to say to weed all by herself her older children were in school from which she refused to take them her youngest trailed behind her and fell asleep in the far my father who was labor dairy men and sure for had driven the ball slated to town as she looked out over that immense acreage still to be covered my mother felt so ill she could barely lift the hoe never had she felt so alone coming to the end of a row she laid down under a tree and asked to die instead she fell into a deep sleep and when she awakened she was fully restored in fact she felt wonderful as if a healing breeze had touched her soul she picked up her hoe and continued her work what god rescued my mother was it the god who said women deserve to suffer and were evil anyway or was it the god of n judge mental nature calming and soothing her with a green crudeness of the tree she slept under and the warmer she lay upon i tried to imagine my mother and the other women calling on god as they gave birth and i shudder at the image of him they must've conjure he was someone after all who said black people were cursed to be drawers of water and hewers of wood that some people  slaves and abused others was taken for granted by him he audit the killing of women and children by the hundreds of thousands if they were not of his chosen drive the women would have had to know how little they and their newborns really matter because they were female poor and black like their cursed children of hagar and ham and they would have to promise to be extra good obedient trusting to make up for it life was so hard for my parents generation that the subject of heaven was never distant from their thoughts the preacher would gleefully or so it seemed to me run down all the trials and tribulations of an existence that ground us and only to pull heaven out of the biblical hat at the last minute i was intrigued where is heaven i asked my parents who was going to be there what about accommodation and food i was told what they sincerely believed that it was in the sky in space as we would later describe it that only the best people on earth would go there when they died we'd all have couches to lounge and great food to eat wonderful music because all the angels play heart it would be granted would there be any white people probably oh there was not one white person in the county that any black person felt comfortable with and though there was a rumor that a good white woman or man had been observed sometime somewhere no one seems to know this for a fact now that there's been so much space travel and men offend on the moon i wonder if preachers still preach about going to heaven and weathers the same place the truth was we already lived in paradise grabbers we couldn't enjoy it this is what my mother and perhaps the other women knew and this was one reason why they were not permitted to speak they might have demanded that the men of the church notice earth which always leads to revolution in fact everyone has known this for a very long time for the other more immediate and basic reason my mother and the other women were not permitted to speak in church was because the bible forbade it and it is forbidden in the bible because in the bible men alone are sanctioned to own property and in this case the earth itself and woman herself is property along with the asses the oxen and the sheep i can imagine some latter day just to fill in our community apparently worship the goddess a pagan and a pagan religion one of those the god of the old testament is always trying to wipe out having the nerve to speak up about being silenced and the smugness with which are inspiring and indifferently train minister reverend with be might have directed her to a passage from the new testament that is attributed to st paul let women keep silence in the church he would run his pledge you finger underneath the sentence and she would read it and feel thoroughly put down for god wrote the bible she would have been persuaded and every word even every word about the murdering about murdering the suckling babies of your enemies and stealing all their worldly goods was true i remember going with my mother to get water from the spring what is a spray and many will ask just as i did it is a place in the earth where water just bubbles up pure and sleet you don't ask for it you don't put it there it simply appears there was one down the hill from our house in a quiet grove of trees someone years before had put a piece of terra cotta culvert around it with a notch in the lip for overflow we did bob battered aluminum buckets in the shallow well always careful to spot where the crawfish might be hiding some people pronounces crayfish but in the south we say crawfish and perhaps it for a minute before trudging back up the hill how on earth did the crawfish get in there i'd ask they were always unhealthy sprains was the answer yes why i don't know this just the way it is but why is that the way it is where did they come from there were no other for miles around i never saw them in the creek cranston's where my brothers and i waited this was a mystery that was not explained by my mother's final exasperated god brought them i was happier with my father's explanation well you see these crawfish used to live all around book kids but it just got to go down hard on account of all them fires the lumber company makes cleaning up the sled so they held a in fact neither of my parents knew how the crawfish got into the spring on the one hand i could strain to imagine a large white man in a white row unfortunately real life white men in robes belong to the klu klux klan loving carrying two tiny crawfish down the heels to place in our spring or i could stand aside about the stout hearted crawfish pioneers leaving bucket with their spears robot catalog crawfish sized suitcases the water we collected had many uses we drank it we wash dishes clothes in ourselves with it we wanted our livestock and my mother says it's a bowl and flower garden because of the criminal exploitation inherent in sharecropping the sharecropping system in which the land owner controls land season tools as well as records of account sharecroppers were often worse off than sla which was the point sharecropping was the former slave owners revenge against black people for having attained their freedom and the such complete subjugation and outright terrorism that included right beatings burnings and being thrown off the land along with the entrenched southern custom of lynching it is no wonder that people like my parents saw up super from any god they were forced to have that as descendants of africans and native americans and europeans scottish and irish both my mother's that my father's side they might have had their own ancient gods or that history human beings they might choose a god uniquely perceived by themselves never entered their minds except negatively the quote heathen from whom they descended knew nothing of salvation they were warned in church and any god except the one in the bible was just another delusion produced by satan designed to keep them out of heaven satan always described as evil in color black or red african or native american never is limited to be also a son of god made also in the image of his creator just the shadow side of him and yet everyone in our family and in our church understood instinctively who satan was he was the other side of the quote son of god we always saw in the white people around us never did we see jesus among those who insisted we worship him only judas and every day pagan means of the land country to allah peasant all of which my family was it also means a person whose primary spiritual relationship is with nature and the earth and this i could see day to day was true not only of me but of my parents but there was no way to ritually express the magical intimacy we felt with creation without being accused of and ridiculed for indulging in that other word for paganism heathenism and christianity we were informed had fought long and hard to deliver us from that in fact millions of people were broken physically and spiritually literally destroyed for nearly two millennia that's the orthodox christian church quote saved them from their traditional worship of the great mystery they perceived in nature in the sixties many of us cared our parents profoundly when we showed up dressed in our african or native americans  we shocked them by wearing our hair in its ancient naturalness they saw us turning back to something they'd been taught to despise and that by now they actively feared many of our parents had been taught that the world was only two or three thousand years old and that spiritually civilized life began with the birth of jesus christ their only hope of enjoying a better existence after a lifetime of crushing tawil and persistent abuse was to be as much like the long haired rabbi from a small jewish sect in a far off desert as possible then by the grace of his father who owned heaven they might be admitted there after death it would be segregated of course who could imagine anything different but perhaps jesus christ himself would be present and was speak up on their behalf after all these were black people who were raised never to look a white person directly in the face i think now and it hurts me to think it the true believers in our church must have been wondering if in heaven jesus christ of white man the only good one the size santa claus and abraham lincoln they'd ever heard of  sit near them on saturday night everyone in my family bays from head to toe even though this meant half a day spent carrying pails of water up a steep hill the water was heated in the big black wash pot in the yard on sunday morning we rose washed our faces had a hearty breakfast and went off to church as the smallest i was saved by my mother dressed by my mother fed by my mother and wedged into the front seat of our secondhand blue and cream packard between my mother and father they had worked hard all week for the landowners benefit this was their only time of pleasure of rest other than an occasional saturday night film at the local picturesque picture show we spent most of the day in the church listening to the minister who stood on the carpeting my mother had laid and read from the bible i had dusted sometimes there were wonderful stories daniel in the lion's den the three wise men david and goliath the life of christ everybody loved jesus christ we recognized him as one of us but a rebel and revolutionary co system please speaking up for the poor the sick and the discriminated against and going up against the boss man the art of doc's jewish religious leaders and rich men of his day we knew that people who were really like jesus were often lynched i liked his gift for storytelling i also loved that after moses and joshua he is the greatest magician in the bible he was also i realized later a fabulous missive healing by the power of touch and the laying on of hand i think jesus could give the ultimate massage much light is still i learned he could dance this quote from the acts of john from the gnostic gospels is worth remembering to the universe along the dancer he who does not dance does not know what happened now if you follow my dance see yourself in me but basically according to the scriptures we had sinned woman was the cause and this was before i understood that the root of the word sin is to be all our life we must suffer just because we existed worthless worthless luckily enough we would die but even then only a very small number of us would get into heaven there was hail a pit of eternally burning fire for the vast majority but where was hell i wanted to know under the ground i was informed it was assumed most of the white people would be there and therefore it would be more or less like here only foreign hot hotter than the sun in the cotton field at midday nobody wanted to go there i had a problem with this doctrine had a very early age i could not see how my parents had been each month my mother had what i would later recognize because i unfortunately inherited it as bad p m s at those times her temper was terrible the only safe thing was to stay out of her way my father slower to anger was nonetheless a victim of sexism ideology learned from his father the society and the church which meant i battled with him throughout childhood until i left home for good at seventeen but i did not see that they were evil that they should be cursed because they were black because my mother was a woman they were as innocent as trees i thought and at heart generous and sweet i resented the minister and the book he read from that implied they can only be saved by confessing their sin and accepting suffering and degradation as they do you just because a very long time ago a snake had given a white woman an apple and she had eaten it and generously given a bite to her craven hear this was insulting to the most drowsy intelligence i thought noting that my exhausted father often napped while unsure which but what could i do i was three years old when i was in my thirties i wrote this on sunday school sir can i take fifty who made you was always the question the answer was always god well there we salvage mostly it is ironic to say the least that the very woman out of whose body i came whose pillow we arm still held me willingly indoctrinated me away from herself and the earth from which both of us  and toward a frightful jealous cruel murderous god of another race and tribe of people and expect me to forget the very breasts that it fed me and i still leaned against but such is the power of centuries old indoctrination we know now with what absolute heartlessness the male leaders of the arthur das christian church not unlike those of arthur box judaism and islam stamped out generally after robbing them of their lands and enslaving them pagans and heathens our ancestors and theirs around the globe a campaign of such unspeakable cruelty that has lasted for so long and that still continues that if you have had the heart to encounter it in art politics literature of consciousness until the present or thanks in large part to feminism them in the scholarship and to resurgent belief in the sacredness of the feminine which has been deliberately erased demonized and disparaged in all major religions but thanks also to indigenous peoples who though a mere remnant of their former selves before being invaded by conquerors professing christianity have river have risen up to speak in defense of the ancient goddess god of all  in this connection how did you dream as extraordinary film sent cofa has much to teach us while being photographed dancing and carefree inside the walls or slave castle contemporary africa a black fashion model for white boston magazine finds herself trapped inside the castle stun jhon from whose loading tunnels millions of the slaves africans from the fifteenth to the train century begin their soul shattering journey to the new world the woman is hard five to discover she has somehow slipped back into the past and is in fact one of her own and slaves and sisters we follow her spiritual development as her own beliefs are denied her and the imprint of christianity is literally beaten and branded into her flesh people of color have been so successfully brainwashed to believe white orthodox christianity has given us something we didn't already have we rarely think of what it has taken away senko postfix to this it also perhaps for the first time in cinema graphically depicts the process by which sadists who purport to be christian have forced their religious ideology on the cultures they destroyed in the black church we have loved and leaned on moses because he brought the in slave israel lights out of egypt we have a dent a fight with him so completely that we have adopted his god but here another look at moses whose wife was a media knight two of whose children were midianites and whose company father in law jethro was also a midianite this is from the book of numbers the thirty first chapter and the children of israel took all the women of midian captives and their little ones and took the spoil of all their cattle and all their flocks and all their goods and they burnt all their cities wherein the dwelt and all their goodly castles with fire and they brought the captives and the prey and the spoil into moses and eliyahu the priest and into the congregation of the children of israel into the camp the plains of moab which are by jordan near jericho and moses was ross with the officers of the host with the captains over thousands and captains captains over hundreds which came from the battle and moses said unto them have you saved all the women alive now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that has known man meaning every woman who is not a  sense that you know in the bible they have it take the some of the prey that was taken both a man and a beast about and eliott the the priest and the chief fathers of the congregation and moses elie as of the priest it is the lord commanded moses and the booty being the rest of the prey which the men of war had caught was six hundred thousand and seventy thousand and five thousand she and threescore and twelve thousand bees and threescore and one thousand asses and thirty and two thousand persons in of women that had not known man these miserable grieving or young women whose relatives had all been killed ended up as sex slaves concubines and dredges in the service of the soldiers and priests women have little voice in the bible and what voice they do have is given them only to illustrate the deviousness silliness and trustworthiness and general insignificance of their sex the only thing that makes them truly worthwhile is the birth of a sudden they expend much of their energy trying to bring this about in the whole of the old testament only deborah the judge fash tie the dignified wife of a foolish king and esther who saves  moses and indeed were told to stand back when he came down from the mountain with the ten commandments which after all was not written for them now were forced to share their husbands and homes with strange weeping women raided from other lands as to why my mother and grandmother rarely spoke of their spiritual connection to the universe we have only to read and d and served other gods and worship sam he is the son or the moon or any of the host of heaven which i have not commanded then shalt bring forth that man or that woman unto by gates and shelf stone them with stones till they die and for this section i am and did it to the fabulous elizabeth cady stanton and her great work the original feminist attack on the bible for her insights and for her very courageous attitude because she was writing in the eight hundred fifty s this is a god who does not recognize you as he is on the she was circumcised i don't believe the men in the congregation i grew up in realize this they were definitely not circumcised on the other hand reading the old testament and how readily this god would kill you if you were  instance zipper on the non jewish wife of moses circumcise is there he gave them signs with iraq prior to entering egypt i am inclined to believe the circumcision of women genital mutilation women who wanted to belong to be accepted by god has some of its roots here certainly the slaughter of nine million which is over from three to four five centuries and europe has leviticus the twentieth chapter twenty seven first a man also or woman that half a familiar spirit or that is a wizard shall surely be put to death they shall stone them w stones their blood shall be upon them under this order the wizards moses joshua and jesus especially jesus who raised people from the dead and changed water to wine would have been burned at the stake in the europe of the fifteenth through the eighteenth century or the seventeenth century it is chilling to think that the same people who persecuted the wise women and men of you is midwives and healers then cross the oceans to africa and the americas and tortured and enslaved raped impoverished and eradicated the peaceful christ like people they found and that the blueprint from which they worked and for which they still work is the bible they don't to me in the creek this is my baptism they don't take me in the creek a tiny brookl muddy good with rotten leaves a greenish mold floating definable the love it was for love of god at seven all in white with god smut rene my smelly socks and his bullfrogs bores gluing up my face this is the poem of a seven year old pagan the god of heaven that my parents and the how deeply did i love those who stood around fall only waiting to see my saved to head reappear this experience of communal love and umble hope for my well being was my reality of life on this planet i was unable to send my mind off into space and search of a god who never noticed mud leaves or bullfrog or the innocent hearts of my tender loving people fatal to love a god who does not love you a god specifically created to comfort lead advise strengthen and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else we have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction our own religions denied forgotten our own ancestral connections to all creation something of which we are ashamed i maintain that we are empty lonely without our pagan heathen ancestors that we must lively them up within ourselves and begin to see them as whole and necessary and correct their earth centered female reverencing religions like their architecture agriculture and music suited perfectly to the lives they lived and lead those who are left today i further maintain that the jesus most of us have been brought up to adore must be expanded to include the wizard and the dancer and that when this is done it becomes clear that he coexist quite easily with pagan indigenous peoples indeed it was because the teachings of jesus were already familiar to many of our ancestors especially in the new world they already practice the love and sharing that he preached that the christian church was able to make as many genuine converts to the christian religion as it did everyone deserves to worship a god who also worships them of god that made them and likes them that is why nature mother earth is such a good choice never will nature require that you cut off some part of your body to please it never will mother earth find anything wrong with your natural way she made it and she made it however it is so that you will be more comfortable as part of her creation rather than less everyone deserves a god who adores our freedom nature would never advise us to do anything but be ourselves mother earth will do all that she can to support our choices whatever they are for they are of her and inherent in our creation is her trust we are born knowing how to worship just as we are born knowing how to laugh and what is the result of the colonizing the spirit it is if one truly does possess a third eye and this i open one begins to see the world from one's own find a view to interact with it out of one's own conscience and heart one's own pagan earth spirit we begin to flow again with and into the universe and out of this flowing comes the natural activism of wanting to survive to be happy to enjoy each other and life and to laugh we begin to distinguish between the need singly to throw rocks that whatever is oppressing us and the creative joy that arises when we bring our collective stones of resistance against injustice together we begin to see that we must be loved very much by whatever creation is to find ourselves on this wonderful are we begin to recognize our sleet generously appointed place in the make up of the cosmos we begin to feel glad and grateful to be here thank you i agreed to do some question and answers if you would like for her to thank you i can only do about five because i've been talking all day and i'm getting tired but i would like very much if you have something that you would like to ask or something that you would like to offer now's the time how did you how did you start your journey and who encouraged you i started my journey on a greyhound bus i anchor the driver insisted that i sit in the back and i never person he just has more life more humor in fact there was in one of those conversations he's having with his male disciples they are complaining and they say master why do you kiss mary on the so you know i think that of course they cut out everything that was the show that this person has a real humorous lively dancing spirit but when you think of how much love he had for people and how quickly he got to the core of a situation look right directly into the hearts of people you know he had a lot of liveliness and that he was advancing radio you just know that and i think it's a great tragedy that the image that you see of him as a cold dead bloody one rather than one that is dancing and radi why do you realize that because we can't see you you sound like the voice of god  i don't know you know i i think i'm pretty much like everybody i have a lot of suffering and you know i haven't been spare suffering and i've had to learn the gift of suffering and you know and to know that there really is one nobody escapes and i think even the people that you think of this being crushed are over byrd and therefore depressed and downtrodden spiritually wounded you know i think we've all been there or we will all be there but we don't have to stay there and i think people who begin to have insight into spirit and how it works can really help people through those periods that that is what the church is for that is what spiritually active people often are here for me they are to help help the rest of us get through those times that have some difficult do you notice the mike this much better now now not really my mother was really indoctrinated i mean she was so confused for her i think she left the church a methodist church but then embraced another religion that i thought was even less open and it was terribly difficult to see this woman who who'd naturally was just open in the open wide heart big hearted become because of her indoctrination disclosed conservative in a negative way person you know who believed what she was being taught about you know all the you know life and it was a view that was so much more narrow than her or her own natural way and i think many of those have had that experience you know when our parents and grandparents o that it would be chaos because people have their own concepts and ideas about what is not about what what is it what they think i i think that would be a very go well at all thank you have you ever noticed how one of the i consider the problem is that god no matter how many talk about god it's always he that's a clue because i simply what we're talking about is god who are constructed to  do certain things on earth and also and they are just used to keep us down and i understand what you're saying and i think for me that is one of the reasons that i do appreciate jesus very much i mean i had a real struggle with that because it was you know christianity but i thank you for your your comment and also i don't mean to single out christianity i mean because it's patriarchal religion i mean islam has done just as much harm you know orthodox judaism is not innocent and i think that when i you know read about you know people in the rainforest i mean some of the cultures in africa when they were first quote discovered and the way that they shared what they had the openness of the societies very much like native americans in this on this continent people seem to know that they learned from nature how to be loving and generous i mean you know that when the  came here they were often saved their lives were literally say by the people who they found here i mean they nursed them they fed them they close them they shared everything with them and there are some really wonderful records about that and they written by christians themselves especially catholics jesuits the jesuits left really good records and they often write about their their surprise the shock they hear they all came sick with dysentery and disease you know smelly where this horrible on and you know slicing the heads off of indian children and feeding them to their dogs and wherever they went until they turned into this you know savage attack on against the people the people tried to befriend them you know and  often comment these jesuits that the people that they met were so much more christian than the people they came from that they were often when they when they reconnected with them they were embarrassed to call themselves christians and they tried to you know be something else because they were so ashamed of the brutality with which the christians had come and dominated the native people so you know i am not asking anyone to give up whatever they believe but i think that given the fact that we all have pagan ancestry we do ourselves a grave disservice in following any directive that tells us we have to deny that part of ourselves is a very real part of us you know i mean we were not born two thousand years ago we are very anxious all of us everybody in this room has pagan ancestry this this world where you don't even think about them anymore except as something that you're ashamed of this is why you hate yourself this is why you hate yourself if you love your own ancestors you would not be trying to change yourself to look like other people that you're not related to so it's very complicated and it takes a lot of time to think about it you know and you have to be gentle you have to be gentle with yourself and you have to be gentle with the people who are talking to you about these things because these are all so things their spirit things and i take a lot of time there's no rush you cannot rush it you either feel it or you don't and at some point if you really are serious and you really want to be all of who you are if you really want to go back to your as sisters and bring them into your heart you will do that and i guarantee you when you do that you will be a whole person and until you do that you will be fragmented and you will not know self love and you will not be free thank you