536 - In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness

In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness
By Emilie M. Townes

Nashville, Abingdon, 1995. 160 pp. $14.95.

Emilie Townes's book In a Blaze of Glory examines womanist spirituality as social witness. This is Townes's third, and I would say best, book. It is a welcome endeavor because whereas Townes's edited anthology, A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, offers an introductory-level smorgasbord of writings by diverse womanist authors, and while Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope provides important ethical insights into the life and thought of nineteenth-century churchwoman and social activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, in this latest book we hear

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Townes's own voice at length. One is able to gain more than a glimpse of her own thoughts about womanist spirituality.

Townes is not afraid to address issues that other authors have left relatively untouched. In a recent lecture at the School of Theology at Claremont, where I teach, she addressed the topic of AIDS in the black community from an ethicist's perspective. In a Blaze of Glory is replete with the frankness and lack of hesitancy to break new ground that I found in her lecture on AIDS. For example, little has been written on a womanist approach to ecological issues or on loving one's body. Townes, in her chapter', "To Be Called Beloved," not only makes a call to love bodies, including black bodies, but she addresses the problem of environmental racism as a form of lynching. Her metaphors are striking and require one to probe the significance of statistics on environmental hazards in black and poor communities. Is it indeed a form of lynching? Because the result is slow death, the metaphor of lynching strikes a very resonant chord.

I found myself wishing for a definition of spirituality in the lives of historical African and African American peoples in chapter 1, "The Spirit That Moves Us: African Cosmography in African American Synthesis." This chapter, which opens part l, "Moorings," tends to be descriptive of "spirituality" without giving a clear definition of the term from the perspectives of historical peoples. While Townes offers a helpful definition of womanist spirituality in her introduction and in chapter 6, I would have appreciated similar discussions in chapters 1 and 2, which are historical. This would help connect historical understandings of spirituality with the contemporary understandings that build on them. Nonetheless, these "mooring" chapters are foundational and informative. Townes's discussion of the Kongo cross in relation to the Christian cross is especially intriguing, particularly as it pertains to understandings of human community in relation to the entire cosmos.

Chapters 3-6 move beyond Townes's initial discussion in the introduction to offer fuller definitions of womanist spirituality. Chapter 6 elaborates that such spirituality is "concrete, particular, universal, relevant, relentless, self-critical, communal. In short, it is social witness, but it is not monolithic." Womanist spirituality is "lived experience of faith," which involves "integrating faith and life." It questions the inordinate suffering of the poor and oppressed. It is also self-critical. Throughout the text, Townes encourages readers to explore this "lived experience of faith" by examining various sociohistorical illustrations of womanist spirituality in relation to sociopolitical, economic, and ecological problems.

As for the task of womanist spirituality, Townes seeks healing of the socioeconomic, physical, and spiritual wounds in black communities across class lines. Her own poetry at the beginning of chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 evocatively indicates areas for healing in a way that is not didactic or discursive. These chapters form part 2, "No Hiding Place Down There," which is the heart of the book. As she wrestles with moral issues surrounding HIV/AIDS, sexual violence, classism, and apocalypse, Townes clarifies what she means by spirituality as social witness.

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I find Townes's analysis of apocalypse and the moral responsibility of the black church to "teach out of its strength that is the historic Black community of faith" important, because this sense of community-"of family beyond ourselves"-is indeed being lost and must be restored by the social witness of the Spirit. Townes's discussion of the Spirit in chapter's I and 6 adds another piece to womanist quiltings on concepts of God as Spirit. I strongly recommend In a' Blaze Glory for courses in women's studies, spirituality, and womanist theology and ethics.

KAREN BAKER-FLETCHER
School of Theology at Claremont
Claremont, CA