God Is A Black Woman

Christena Cleveland’s God Is A Black Woman is a powerful, challenging, uncomfortable and inspirational read, and much more. I can’t say that it was easy to read, but I am so glad that I came across it. It is a really important challenge to our conventional thinking, which is there, whether we like to admit it or not, but which needs to be moved into a significantly new place. We simply cannot impose our categories on God, and then especially when they are rooted in wrong ideas of power and position. Cleveland puts it powerfully, but importantly: “The prevalence of white male images of God easily lead us to conclude that God is definitively and exclusively white and male. And like many culture-shaping ideas, we don’t even question the idea or how it shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. For most of us, regardless of what we might want to believe or claim to believe, the image that immediately comes to mind when we imagine God is that of a powerful white man who is for and with powerful white men. It’s a deceptive idea that flies under the radar, powerfully shaping us without our consent.” She rightly points to the importance of our imaginations and the effect of how we ‘imagine’ things to be. We need to capture a new understanding of God, which take us to radically different places, and which retains the ability to free our thinking about God. “The Sacred Black Feminine cannot be distilled into a TED Talk or a tidy sermon. Though She can rock with the best of the intellectuals, She exists beyond the edges, beyond the orthodox ways of knowing, and beyond traditional logic. She beckons us in dreams and speaks to us through our embodied experiences. As I continued to journey toward the Sacred Black Feminine, I could see that She was guiding me away from my obsession to prove Her and instead inviting me to simply experience Her.”