by bell hooks
It suggests searching, exploring, having the spirit of adventure to discover meaning. It is an adventure of exposure and risk. It requires one to embrace the unknown as a given of the trip, and perhaps even as one’s destination. It will take courage, strength, trust, and discipline to travel successfully; in other words, it is in journey that spiritual character is forged.
Before I wrote Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, the image of myself that I identified with was that of a bohemian artist concerned first and foremost with art—sometimes that would be painting, at other times writing poetry. I had begun to do both as a child. Thinking of my vision as political, as one that might serve as a guide influencing others, had not occurred to me. When I felt an inward “spiritual” call to explore the social and political implications of black femaleness in relation to the feminist movement, I resisted.
Listening to my heart, I felt called in the direction of the feminist movement, and I was reluctant to answer the call. It was one thing to espouse radical ideas, especially about gender; it was quite another matter to become actively politically engaged. Not yet twenty years old, I was convinced that my faith would always be challenged by whether I could sacrifice ego-centered longings for a more collective good. I answered the call of voices deep within me and began to write a book about black women and feminism. Journeying deeper into a realm of critical thinking and political consciousness that had been initially stirred by the life and work of Malcolm X, I began to find myself more at odds with the world around me. By the time I entered graduate school, I had finished this book and thought I could return to that old identity, focusing once again solely on literature, art, and a world of creative writing. This was not to be. I was not the same person.
When I first published a chapbook of poems, And There We Wept, I had chosen to use as a pseudonym my great-grandmother’s name, Bell Hooks. Though there were many reasons for choosing and keeping a pen name, the one I seldom talked about was my religious belief that it was important to deflect away from self and ego. Using another name was for me a spiritual exercise. It meant that I had to give up a particular kind of recognition that comes when our person is more directly identified with the work that we do. Another aspect of this exercise was that the pen name was to serve as a constant reminder to me that I was not my ideas, that they did not represent the voice of a fixed identity. The hope was that I would always remain detached, non—ego identified with the work. Since my spiritual practice required that I remain open, ever willing to change and let go, I wanted to create a meditative distance between me and my writing. The use of another name created that distance and, although in those days I rarely used the name except when writing, it was a challenge.
Graduate school was difficult. I found most of my classes to be without passion or joy. And the rich intellectual life I had dreamed of seemed more and more to be a fantasy. The academy as I experienced it was essentially such a dishonest, disheartening place that I felt myself torn, pulled between the longing to walk a spiritual path that I often hoped would lead to a monastic vocation and the longing to lead a contemplative intellectual life. In my search for self-understanding, I came to rely more and more on spiritual teachers and their writing and felt less engaged with critical theory. Still, I wanted there to be a place in my life for theory and politics as well as spiritual practice. My quest was to find that place.
Influenced by Islamic mysticism to believe that my work must be in the world and not away from it, I began to think of ways to bring spiritual practice closer to the intellectual work I had chosen, and to infuse that intellectual work with a political vision of social transformation. When I discovered Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan’s book of dialogues, The Raft Is Not the Shore, I learned from their shared wisdom. Their insistence that it was more significant to practice faith than to know doctrine or even to do all the right spiritual rituals was helpful to me. Nhat Hanh’s thinking about self-recovery converged with my thoughts about the decolonization of black people and our collective efforts to engage in political self-recovery:
In the Buddhist tradition, people used to speak of enlightenment, as a kind of returning home. The three worlds—the world of form, of nonform, of desire—are not your homes. These are places where you wander around for many existences, alienated from your own nature. So enlightenment is the way to get back. And, they speak about efforts to go back—described in terms of the recovery of oneself, of one’s integrity.
Using this vision of self-recovery to think about the struggles of colonized people to make themselves subject, I began to see points of convergence between the effort to live in the spirit and the effort of oppressed people to renew their spirits, to find themselves again in resistance. In my political writing, I began to draw together the spiritual and the political.
After I finished my doctorate, I went to teach full-time at Yale University, though I had already taught at several institutions. Yale was special because the African-American culture center every Sunday became a place for spiritual bonding. An interdenominational, traditional black church service took place there. Worshippers were students, staff, faculty, and members from the surrounding neighborhoods. Though it was often a small group, I was reminded of the importance of community by participating once again in collective spiritual worship. At black church, we linked worship with the daily struggles of life in that academic world. We worked to offer one another concrete practices that would strengthen us as we worked to maintain spiritual practice in an environment that overvalued the mind and the intellect. In response to what I took to be the spiritual hunger of my students and my own longings, I worked to create a critical pedagogy that would enable students to use the knowledge and information gained in the university to live more fully in the world, one that would speak to heart, soul, mind, body, and spirit. Increasingly, I found myself giving public voice to the spiritual practice that I had been silent about. Giving a lay sermon at a Yale black church service during International Women’s month, I found myself struggling to articulate my sense of spirituality, its meaning in my life. My talk was titled “Called to Love.” In it I described my years of spiritual journeying in search of a particular doctrine and tradition I might claim and follow, the disappointment I felt when the attraction of no one faith moved me. After years of learning about different traditions, I found myself putting together bits and pieces from various religious teachings. The tie that bound them all together was the emphasis on Love as a transformative force, as the ultimate expression of godliness.
Letting my political and intellectual work be guided by an ethics of Love, I began to feel a harmony where there had been a sense of conflict. My quest was to express divine Love to the fullest in all my work. In this quest I have drawn from the writing of Martin Luther King Jr., who believed that the world would be healed by a “creative redemptive love.” And despite the evil in this world, the hatred and alienation, King was able to maintain his belief that love was “ultimately the only answer” to all our problems. Giving his “Where do we go from here?” speech he could testify:
I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we are moving wrong when we do not do it because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.
Fundamentally, the foundation of meaningful spiritual practice is a loving heart.
To be guided by Love in every action of daily life enables the individual to act politically and intellectually in a manner that embraces always a collective good. Once my comrade and friend Cornel West and I were discussing our committing to sharing the “word” in both a political and a spiritual sense, and we were talking about the issue of responsibility. I was reminded of the line in the song that Sweet Honey in the Rock sings, “When we work for freedom, we can rest.” Cornel raised the issue of “sacrificial love,” calling attention to th
e example of Jesus. Later I wrote these words to him in a letter:
I was awake last night thinking about your comments on sacrificial love—which I believe begins with surrendering one’s life to God. This surrender is the state of being through which and from which one serves, whether that service manifests as political organizing, writing, or teaching. It is this state of surrender that enables one to be in touch with divine will, so that it is not simply our choosing but god who chooses within us. That is the intimate solitary space of our submission where god speaks to us, where we are still, where we are truly “servants.” In that still place, found in meditation, prayer, times of silence, I listen to my heart as I attempt to choose the direction of my work, the causes I support.
Living a life in the spirit, living faith, means that I must be ever vigilant, critically interrogating my actions, my words. Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged spiritual vigilance, confessing that “I subject myself to self-purification and to endless self-analysis; I question and soul-search constantly into myself to be as certain as I can that I am fulfilling the true meaning of my work.…” Often before I write or speak, I pray, asking in the words that I learned as a child that “the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight.” These moments of prayer remind me of my spiritual task. It is my hope and my experience that they temper the ego and deepen my compassion.
Thich Nhat Hanh has taught me much about the meaning of compassion. Through this teaching, I have found ways to understand and bear the isolation I often feel, the sense of exile. In The Raft Is Not the Shore he reminds us,
I think that when you decide to do something in order to become yourself, and your thinking and your aspirations become one, you might find that you are quite alone. People will not understand; people will oppose you. A kind of loneliness, a real exile settles in. You may be with your parents, with your friends, with your community, but you are in exile practically because of that situation.
Confronting myself with compassion, I learn to practice the art of forgiveness. I learn how to love myself in a way that strengthens my capacity to love others.
To understand the place of compassion and forgiveness in resistance struggle is important for any revolutionary movement. Unless such a movement is guided by profound Love, it will often embody the forces of evil and corruption that it may seek to change. This is why it has been so necessary for black liberation struggle in the United States to have been nurtured by the wisdom of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Both men emphasized the power of Love. For King, it was often the love we direct outward to others, even our enemies; for Malcolm, it was the love we extend to ourselves. Authentic spiritual practice is not a naive experience. It does not lead one away from reality but allows us to accept the real more fully. It means that we recognize the reality of sin, that we think of it in relation to the notion of putting “asunder,” estranging, alienating. And, fundamentally, it means that we are able to choose life over death and as a consequence of this choice are able to know compassion, offer forgiveness, and create the circumstances that make reconciliation possible.
Howard Thurman maintained that the experience of redemptive love was essential for individual self-actualization. Such love affirms. In Growing Edge, Thurman contends: “Whether he is a good person or a bad person, he is being dealt with at a point beyond all that is limiting, and all that is creative within him. He is dealt with at the core of his being and at that core he is touched and released.” In much of his work, Howard Thurman cautions those of us who are concerned with radical social change not to allow our visions to conform to a pattern we seek to impose but rather to allow them to be “modeled and shaped in accordance to the innermost transformation that is going on” in our spirits.
To be guided by Love is to live in community with all life. A culture of domination like ours does not strive to teach individuals how to live in community. As a consequence, this must become a core practice for all of us who desire to transform society in ways that will bring justice, enable peace and well-being—learning to live in community. All too often, individuals think of community in terms of being with folks like themselves—same class, race, ethnicity, social standing, and the like. It is when we are able to empathize, feel with and for experiences that are not our own and may never be, that we come to know “how good and pleasant it is for brethren to come together in unity.” To make community, we need to be able to know truth, to speak openly and honestly.
Truth-telling has to be a spiritual practice for many of us because we live and work in settings where falseness is rewarded, where lies are the norm. Deceit and betrayal destroy the possibility of community. In challenging the separation of public and private in feminist activism, or any struggle of the exploited to move from object being to subject being, we act to restore the idea that meaningful ties, bonds of love and affinity, are fruitful in a world beyond domestic reality. Strengthening our capacity to offer a sense of community to those who are different, we prepare to dwell in that deeper community that is based on shared vision. I am moved when Nhat Hanh shares: “I want to express my hope in the community of people who have the same concerns and who are working for the same goals. What helps individuals in the community is your doing the same things I do, in your own way. I can learn from you.” Or when Sharon Welch emphasizes the call for unity in Communities of Resistance and Solidarity, explaining what solidarity means in relation to Christian practice: “Solidarity breaks the bonds of isolated individuality and forgetfulness—the bondage of sin—and enables the creation of community and conversion to the other.” In my political writing and other forms of activism, I endeavor to evoke, build, and sustain a sense of community that I see most strongly developed in theory and practice by religious and/or spiritual people. Those of us who would transform society have much to learn from studying black liberation struggles in the United States. For throughout the history of black freedom movements, the prime movers and shakers have been individuals committed to a life in the spirit.
In recent years, I have chosen to speak publicly about spirituality and spiritual practice because so many of the young people I teach are often overwhelmed by feelings of hopelessness and despair. They have been that group of individuals in my life who most want to know what sustains me, what allows me to keep the faith. And I have answered them openly and honestly. I share with them the meaning of spirituality in my life. I live my life in a manner that I trust embodies the ideas, beliefs, and values I write about. Perhaps one of the most intense political struggles we face as individuals seeking to transform society today is the effort to maintain integrity of being. In my letter to Cornel I wrote,
We bear witness not just with our intellectual work but with ourselves, our lives. Surely the crisis of these times demands that we give our all. Remember the song which asks, “Is your all on the altar of sacrifice laid?” To me, this “all” includes our habits of being, the way we live. It is both political practice and religious sacrament—a life of resistance. How can we speak of change, of hope, and love, if we court death? All the work we do, no matter how brilliant or revolutionary in thought or action, loses power and meaning if we lack integrity of being.
I can testify that meaningful spiritual practice sustains and nurtures progressive politics, that it enhances the struggle for liberation, that it allows that integrity of being to surface in settings where we are sorely tempted to move against our vows and beliefs. As Gustavo Gutierrez proclaims, “A spirituality of liberation will center on a conversion to the neighbor, the oppressed person, the exploited social class, the despised race, the dominated country.… Conversion means a radical transformation of ourselves.… To be converted is to commit oneself to the process of the liberation of poor and oppressed, to commit oneself lucidly, realistically, and concretely.” Hear again the call for concrete action, for a radical faith realized in deeds.
Balancing the inner spiritual journey with our struggle to work in the world requi
res ongoing practice. Often when I am uncertain about where to stand politically, when I feel that I may not be seeing clearly, I read from Psalms 139, especially that passage which says, “Search me, Oh God and know my heart: try me and know my thoughts.” I have tried here in this writing to speak of the way spiritual inner movement flows outward, the way the fire within burns with an intensity that brings light, vision, warmth to every aspect of my being. It is this sacred fire that can be felt in my writing. Anyone who has known the sweet communion of holy spirits, the ecstasy of divine love knows how difficult it is to give such experience words. To me, these words that I have written, a confession of my faith, are necessary testimony even though they can never name religious experience fully. I have wanted simply to locate that meeting-place of spirituality and progressive politics in my life.
divine inspiration
writing and spirituality
In the town I grew up in on hot summer nights when nature was in still repose, it was possible to wander down a narrow unpaved street following the sounds of a tent meeting. It was possible to hear the sounds of voices moved by spirits—voices caught in moments of divine rapture. As children of a more conservative faith, we were not allowed to attend Pentecostal meetings. I went once. My best friend’s family were all “holy rollers” as they were often called. And I was allowed to attend with her, even though I was given strict instructions to maintain myself. In other words I was not to allow myself to surrender to the call of divine rapture. I was not to be moved by unseen spirits.
The spirits were there in the tent that night. I could hear and feel them. To my friend who had always attended holiness meetings, there was nothing special or exciting about watching worshipers shout or speak in tongues. But I was mesmerized. Awed to be a witness to mystery. I only saw and heard it once yet the expressions of religious ecstasy and shared rapture stirred my soul. I came away believing more deeply than ever before in a mystical force in the universe—a force that had the power to call us, to touch us with divine spirit.
