Altar Work: Black Women, Sacred Reclamation and the Fourth Wave of Womanism

From the storied halls of history to the living, breathing spaces of the present, altars have served as a key resource and tool for creating sites of memory, honor, reverence, and spiritual communication across the religious landscape. Altars are physical sites of remembrance, reflection, and revelation accessed through various forms of expression, practices, and rituals. Altars embody both fluidity and tradition. Altars serve as an important metaphor for Black women’s spirituality, especially as the fourth wave of womanism fully emerges and forms. Like altars, Black women’s spirituality is grounded in both tradition and fluidity. As a new wave of womanism emerges, Black women are taking the autonomous approach of reshaping their spirituality to go beyond the Christian scriptures and creating a multiplicity of faith by incorporating traditions, rituals, and practices from African Traditional Religions (ATR) and other forms of religion to aid in a sacred reclamation of reconnecting to God, ancestors, the spirit world and ultimately, themselves. This paper seeks to explore how, like physical altars, Black women’s changing and evolving spirituality in the fourth wave of womanism consists of four primary dimensions: remembrance, reverence, revelation, and re-membering.

According to the research from Cyril Pocknee in The Christian Altar: In History and Today, altars within the Christian church have evolved consistently over the past few centuries. Each change that altars have taken was to meet the respective needs and beliefs of various congregations and denominations within the Christian church. Though the sizes, materials, and adornments of altars changed significantly as the centuries progressed, the sacredness of altars never faltered. Throughout its various changes, altars have remained places for lament, celebration, prayer, and partaking of the Eucharist. However, the ways of expressing these distinct and unchanging qualities continuously changed as deeper understanding, revelation, and spiritual needs changed amongst various denominations throughout centuries.

Using the historical example of how altars have evolved serves as a perfect metaphor for how Black women’s spirituality is growing, changing, breathing, and living. According to Dr. Layla Maparyan in The Womanist Idea, “Womanism, while inherently and unapologetically spiritual, is not aligned with any one particular religion, faith, or life system. Its spiritual perspectives are amendable to a host of spiritual traditions and are flexible enough to accommodate the doctrinal differences in diverse ‘pathways to infinity’ (36). This is an important perspective in exploring the changing landscape of the sacredness of Black women’s spirituality. This observation of womanism empowers and even encourages Black women to craft their altars of spirituality with doctrines, practices, and rituals that push them to radical wholeness. Womanist biblical interpretation and womanist theological thought have been significant tools in helping Black women to see themselves represented and included in the Christian tradition. However, the Christian church, and more specifically for this context, the Black Christian church, has engaged in practices and beliefs such as misogynoir and a consistent dismissal of queer bodies, that have left many Black women spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and even physically unsafe.

The metaphorical altar of Black women’s fluid and changing spirituality has four distinct dimensions: remembrance, reverence, revelation, and re-membering. These dimensions are helping Black women lean into their spiritual autonomy to craft a liberative, safe, and inclusive spirituality.

Remembrance

Black women’s spirituality must be a site of rituals and practices that push them to remember their ancestors by seeking ancestral wisdom, care, and protection. Whether it is placing pictures of ancestors on their physical personal altars, cooking their grandmother’s recipes, wearing their aunt’s favorite outfit or jewelry, or continuing a family tradition their mother started, when Black women engage in these acts of ancestor veneration it not only provides historical connection and cultural memory but it reminds them they have a cloud of witnesses that are always with them, for them, and behind them.

Reverence

Like physical altars, Black women’s spirituality is a site of reverence. In curating a faith that is a melting pot of various beliefs, traditions, and rituals, Black women’s evolving spirituality is an expansive space where God, spirit guides, Orishas, and/or the Divine are honored. Black women get to decide who receives that reverence for them both personally and communally. The practice of honoring deities has been demonized through the Westernized theological viewpoint of Christianity and thus, has placed a heavy shame on the bodies of Black women engaging in the beliefs and practices that kept ancestors before the transatlantic slave trade. As ebonyjanice highlights in All the Black Girls Are Activist, “Operating through the Westernized Christian lens, The Christian Demonic Filter categorizes Eastern religious and spiritual truth systems and Black deities as wicked or unholy. The Christian Demonic Filter, specifically, has a heavy filter on all things referring to anything culturally, traditionally, and historically Black as demonic” (103).  

 Revelation

A faith that is living and active produces revelatory insight. Black women’s spirituality is a site and dwelling place where answers are provided. It is a space filled with continual spiritual activity that provides spiritual insight, interpretation, understanding, and remedies. Whether through the practices of meditation, prayer, or some form of ritual, spiritual downloads are more than a gift being offered, they are a promise being kept for divine guidance and intuitive wisdom.

Re-Membering

Black women have to try to survive and live their lives against the background of a world that consistently seeks to dismember them. Black women are curating a faith that allows them to be healed and put back together again from the harmful and violent wounds of racism, sexism, classism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and more. Black women’s wholeness is a birthright in this wave of Black women’s spirituality.

As Black women seek to curate a faith and spirituality that empowers them, centers them, and most of all, sees them, the fourth wave of womanism is an invitation for Black women’s spirituality to not be limited to just the highlighted wrinkled pages of their bibles, though it can/is included, but to add other spiritual ingredients that they see fit to connect them back to ancestral rituals, practices and wisdom for their survival.