Considering a Majority of my wiki group project focused on the various images of God throughout time, I thought it was interesting that in “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker, the Character Celie has trouble with her image of God. Celie can’t seem to get the “White Folk’s” God out of her mind. In most churches from the time they depict a very classic depiction of Jesus as the Aryan man with dark blonde hair and soft blue eyes. Only Celie has trouble with this interpretation, because she can’t identify with God or Jesus. In fact due to hard ship she feels the need to turn away from hardship because of like any other man Jesus and God weren’t there in her mind to help her through the sorrow filled years of her life. She humanizes God to the point of him being absolutely unreliable.
I can identify with her struggle to view God as more than human and feel the frustration that nearly every person experiences when hardship rears its head; whether its sorrow, loss, anger, or despair. Many of us feel abandoned by God. We lose hope. I know I have. However the excerpt provides a message of hope. In fact I recall the infamous “Footprints” prayer, where God assures the person that in during all the hard times when they only “saw one set of prints” as opposed to both the person’s and God’s, that God carried them. The prayer like the passage inspires hope, it lets us know that we are not alone; in the worst of times God is there to carry us through.
The passage has a more symbolic and colorful meaning behind it than simply God’s accompaniment, Shug contrasts Celia’s pessimistic view of God with her words. She describes a God who is always present (whether we choose to notice it or not), one that is ageless, genderless, fearless. She assigns God as an IT. An IT that doesn’t care if people don’t try to please IT. An IT that appreciates all the things people do to try and please IT. But most importantly an IT that just like everyone else wants to love and be loved.
The Core of Shug’s message being that people should stop trying to criticize all the prayers that go unanswered and things that go wrong, but simply stop and notice all the little thing that IT has already done for them. She provides the example of the color purple of the wildflowers that brighten the day as she walks past.
I find Shugs message to be an affirmation of my own beliefs and even more eloquent and hopefull description about God she claims that she “couldn’t find God in a Church” and I couldn’t agree more. Not to discount the mass however but to acknowledge that God’s presence exists in everyday life and that God is not a vengeful God but rather the loving IT that may have even had “hair like sheep’s wool”, an IT that just wants to be LOVED.
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