"Women at
a church here in New York wrote: 'we won't give until we have a woman preacher'
and put the pieces of paper into the collection plates. Well, they hired
a woman preacher the next week."
Delores Williams' first book, Sisters
in the Wilderness (Orbis, 1993), starts off in the desert. There, Hagar, the slave
of Sarah and Abraham, is struggling to find "a way out of no way."
She is a slave with a murderously jealous mistress, Sarah. She has been raped
by her master, Abraham, and forced to carry his child. She is completely cut off
from her homeland and her people. She is at the bottom of the social hierarchy
of the time.
Yet God speaks to her. When she runs into the desert, preferring to die rather
than submit to Sarah, God tells her to return for her child's sake.
Hagar's life of hardship and her intense and personal exchanges with the Divine
occurred centuries ago. But her story resonates still. For womanist theologians
like Williams, Hagar exemplifies the struggle of black women throughout history.
"Hagar's predicament involved slavery, poverty, ethnicity, sexual and economic
exploitation, surrogacy, rape, domestic violence, homelessness, motherhood, single-parenting
and radical encounters with God," Williams writes in Sisters. "Even today, Hagar's
situation is congruent with many African-American women's predicament."
In the end, although Hagar is banished by Sarah, God protects her from dying in
the desert. She and Ishmael survive and flourish, and Hagar lives to see Ishmael
become a leader of his people. She found her way.
But Hagar is still such a powerful symbol today because so many women haven't,
says Williams, who is Professor of Theology and Culture at Union Theological Seminary
in New York.
"So many of us are single parents, like Hagar," she says. "We may or may not be
dealing with poverty or violence or personal grief."
Williams herself has had plenty of "Hagar moments." Her husband died suddenly
in 1987 when Williams was in the middle of doctoral work in theology at Union.
She was left to raise four children in their teens and twenties, finish her dissertation
and find a way to survive economically.
Like Hagar, Williams, who is Presbyterian, says intense encounters with God and
a deepening faith helped her slog through the grief and turmoil after her husband's
death.
"We were between a rock and a hard place, and I didn't know for awhile what we
would do," Williams remembers. "But I went back to the faith of my mother and
grandmother, and it was a wonderful kind of inspiration."
Williams says her childhood in Louisville, Ky., was largely spent in church.
"My mother and grandmother were Seventh Day Adventists, my stepfather was Baptist,
my father was Catholic, and my grandfather was a Presbyterian," she says.
"We would go to church on Saturday evenings, Sunday mornings -- and often in the
middle of the week, too."
There were church school and prayers and competitions to see which child could
look up a Bible verse the fastest. But as a young Williams scrambled to learn
the books of the Old Testament, she watched her mother and grandmother supplying
the church suppers, staffing the outreach committees, and pouring their spare
money into the offering plates.
"I noticed, even as a child, that the women were never deacons or leaders," Williams
said. "The woman were the backbone of the church, but they were never elevated
into formal leadership positions."
Today, Williams has become a voice for women who, like her mother and grandmother,
give their time, money, and spirit to churches that don't want to hear their voices.
"In my mother's and grandmother's time, it was the spiritual power of the women
moving a male agenda," Williams said. "The women didn't exert authority, but without
the women there would be no black churches."
Williams says her own womanist awakening was a long time coming. During college
in Louisville, she threw herself into the Civil Rights Movement by organizing
demonstrations for the NAACP youth council.
"At the time, I didn't question why women were doing a lot of the work and getting
none of the credit," Williams says. "As for the church, I didn't think that it
was at all relevant in any revolutionary way."
Today, Williams as a seminary professor continues to remember the wisdom of her
mother and grandmother. Her habit of weaving childhood stories in with her graduate-level
classes has earned her a reputation of being "down-home and brilliant," according
to former students.
And Williams is still in the business of unraveling and naming the history of
the oppression of black women -- and helping them break the centuries-old patterns
of sexism and exploitation. As she writes in Sisters, "Womanist theology opposes
all oppression based on race, sex, class, sexual preference, physical disability
and caste." She faults African-American denominational churches for a multitude
of sins against black women, including responding to the HIV/AIDS crisis with
denial, sacralizing the male image, encouraging homophobia, and exploiting emotion
rather than provoking thoughtful questions and responses.
Black women in particular, she notes, are in a double bind -- bound both by notions
of what is acceptably female and by a history of slavery.
"[In the antebellum period ] black women were forced to take the place of men
in work roles that, according to the larger society's understanding of male and
female roles, belonged to men," Williams writes in Sisters in the Wilderness.
So overcoming racism and sexism for black women, she says, means not only claiming
full humanity, but the right to their own gender as well.
"There's still a lot of work to be done," Williams admits. "This is by no means
ancient history."
Williams tells the story of a recent luncheon with Hillary Rodham Clinton at the
traditionally black New York Theological Seminary. Although plenty of women clergy
and students were in the audience, Williams noticed that not one joined the ranks
of clergymen who asked Clinton campaign-related questions.
"This tells me that many women may still be bowing to male authority," Williams
said. "I realized that drastic measures will have to be taken to challenge what
is happening."
Williams wonders if picketing churches or, better yet, withholding pledges might
not make clergymen sit up and take notice. Keeping back the money usually gets
the job done, she says.
"Women at a church here in New York wrote: 'We won't give until we have a woman
preacher' and put the pieces of paper into the collection plates," Williams said.
"Well, they hired a woman preacher the next week."
Less public measures might include requiring all seminary students to take a feminist
or womanist theology course.
"Many students look on these courses as the 'fluff' courses because they are electives
and seen as not that important," Williams says. "But the only way we're going
to get a wider audience to understand the issues is to educate them."
For many, the education may not come without a great deal of resistance.
During the now-infamous 1993 "Re-Imagining Conference" in Minneapolis, Minn.,
a comment Williams made about the violence inherent in the crucifixion was lifted
out of context and broadcast in national news reports about the event. Williams
points to the sexism of the conservative press, which viciously attacked many
conference participants and caused some to lose their jobs.
Afterwards, Williams kept quiet, but did not take back a single word. In fact,
she is now at work on a book on atonement theory that examines the sacred status
our culture gives to violence.
Williams also works hard to address that violence on the streets, where as a young
woman she performed as a poet. She chairs the board of Project Green Hope: Services
for Women, an agency now headed by Williams' first Ph.D. student at Union, Anne
Rebecca Elliott. Each year Project Green Hope helps about 200 women fight substance
abuse and successfully adjust to life after prison.
As in the classroom or in the lecture hall or in her books, Williams' compelling
conviction as she works with Project Green Hope's clients is that for each, as
for Hagar, God will speak -- and help them find their dearest wish: "a way out
of no way."l
Rachel Roberson is a freelance writer living in San Francisco, <rayrober1@aol.com>.