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Water is for healing, cleansing, renewal and rejuvenation. According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs 83% water. When a mothers water breaks she brings life into the world. Water is representation of all things new. Water is used to dedicated our lives back to God. Water is used to keep the body hydrated, the earth moist, plants, animals, and the universe from overheating and dying. Water is the spiritual renewal of life.
Our hair is the ornamental beauty God gave us to protect our crowns, however the crown of the human body is not the hair. The crown is the head, the Vertex, the highest point on your scalp. According to Merriam-Webster dictionary: “the crown is: the topmost part of the skull or head. b: the summit of amountain. c: the head of foliage of a tree or shrub. d: the part of a hat or other headgear covering the crown of the head. e: the part of a tooth external to the gum.” If we understand then that the scalp is protecting our brain, our operating center for the entire physical body, four of our senses are in our head, and our spiritual connection to God starts at the top of our head where our Crown Chakra resides. Renewal then must start at the crown of our head and flow down our bodies. Each chakra center in our body must be touched by the water. If water refreshes the entire body, then we must know that to ensure spiritual connection, renewal, rejuvenation water must wash our body from the top of our head down to our feet. We must immerse ourselves fully in water to experience total renewal, healing, cleansing, birth, and rebirth. If you are a woman, you must make this connection as a part of your divine feminine renewal. More specifically, if you are a Black woman. How does this connect with the divine feminine? Water renewal from our crown down is important because feminine energy is intuitive, it is wisdom. The divine feminine is supported innately by spirit of the creator through our intuitive understanding. A woman must be spiritually grounded and deeply rooted in the source of feminine energy to connect with creativity, nurturing, maternal connections, and healing support for herself and others. It is with this understanding that clarity and connection to neighbor can be manifested. Divine feminine collaboration is born out of villages that are run by and supported by women collectively. In order to present our wholeness, we must first be whole in spirit and in truth. We must first restore our energy back to ourselves before we can help and support others. What is the process for spiritual renewal before all other things? To immerse the whole body in water as it gives us life. When water connects with our physical form, our bodies we open up; our muscles relax, or skin exfoliates, we experience refreshing renewal of ourselves. Women of most cultures wash their hair on a daily basis, or at very least two, or three times a week. Women in my community, the Black community commonly wash our hair on average once a week, maybe every other week, and some even longer, but what is rare is the Black woman that washes her hair more than once in a week. Not because we are not clean, but because we have been taught too much water will damage our hair, or it takes too much time. Why is this even a concern or a conversation? Because our crown is not being nurtured, renewed, or replenished, yet every day that we wake up is a day where we know the heaviness of our assignment to be a community builder, a mother, a wife, a professional, an activist, a pastor, a teacher, and yes in a time gone by the machine that produced more human resources for the plantation without our permission or our desire being considered. The Black woman was the surrogate breast for white women, family members, and other slave mothers. Black women have been in fields with their heads wrapped from sunup until sundown, we have cleaned the homes and watched the babies of others coming home and sinking into a chair only to start again in our own homes, never having time to renew our energy. As Black women we have created the multibillion-dollar industry for hair care products, purchased hair, and oils for our scalp, also products to protect hair against water, yet we are heavily burdened with the cares of everyone except ourselves without the fullness of renewal. Protecting hair against water because the amount of time it takes to prepare our natural hair takes too much time, or because we cannot keep paying for an appointment with our stylist. We would rather preserve the work we put in once a week, or every other week, or more, than to immerse ourselves in the replenishing, renewing, refreshing process that was presented to us as a gift from God at birth. Some would argue our hair would dry out from too much water, I argue if you use the moisturizers, the butters, the conditioners your hair would love the love you give it and grow, and your crown will honor you with clarity, creativity, and replenish your spirit. The fact that we wash our bodies from the neck down indicates that our feet are refreshed more often than our scalp, more than our Vertex, our covering to our control center to our Crown Chakra is put on hold for days to ensure we can move our feet and get going faster, without having done the work to renew, replenish, and refresh our minds, our crown, our chakra where the “third eye” of wisdom resides. We are offended rightfully so by the idea of being labeled “angry black women”, “bitchy”, demanding, overbearing, and argumentative, yet we cannot imagine how some of this is the outcome of all of our efforts to keep everything running for all of the facets that we live and serve while not taking time to really honor our body and renew our mind and spirit. We should reconsider this; if we first ensured our crown was intact, even if it takes longer, even if it takes more time, even if it cost more, we should consider what the benefit of immersing our whole selves in the water would mean for our healing, our centering, our creativity, and our nurturing of self and our families, our communities, and the world. Maybe our blood pressure would be lower, maybe our mental health would be better, maybe our thoughts would be clearer. Black women were not created to be a human resource, a tool for production, for usage like a machine. We were not created to support everything, everyone, and women of other cultures while neglecting ourselves. We are not made of steel. We must not get angry or carry the anger of the world around us because everyone except us, men included, are immersing their entire bodies in water for renewal daily, while we wait to refresh our entire body when it is convenient to wash our hair. We are delicate, we are made to be graceful, ours is a culture of peace, we are meant to seek our help from God. Our hair is not our crown it is the ornament of protection that we decorate on top of our crown, and our hair should not determine how the rest of our body, mind, and soul respond to the issues of life. While great hair can make us feel beautiful, a nurtured crown will make us radiate from the inside out. The crown determines how we respond. The crown must be protected, nurtured, nourished, and given a chance to reset every day, or often. Before you prepare to defend your hair care against my suggestion just know that I am only giving you something to consider when all else fails and you can’t shake the heaviness of the world, the depression coming out of the burdens we carry, consider immersing your entire self, from the top of your head, to your toes into the water that God gave us as a gift of life. This blog features my essay submission to Duke University Seminary, and Chicago Theological Seminary. I was admitted to both universities, however CTS won me over with the commitment to social justice, and broadening the "Public Square." I continue to contemplate and evaluate my work in the area of Pardon Eve. My experiment is based on the evolution of women as we remove the lies, myths, and the unacceptable requirement to live by the laws of man instead of the God of Universal Truth. The essay was written to start my thesis and I continue to build on it:
2017 years plus millions more mark the time lapse between the first cardinal sin and the condition of womanhood today. The story of Adam and Eve happened before the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. According to Genesis and the mythological systems, the seminal event happened to the first two people in the entire human family. We could say it took place on the day the Creator decided it was not good for man to be lonely—during the first seven days of humanity’s existence! Yet, this very story has guided human history, and thinking, in a multitude of ways and continues to do so as if it happened yesterday. Eve’s sin was cardinal, but only the first of innumerable others committed by all of mankind for the greater part of the balance of human history, the slave trade, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima, to name a few catastrophic events. All Eve did was bite an apple, look at what we have done. The Good News arrived 2,017 years ago and it showed up forgiving prostitutes and murderers, liars and thieves, felons and apple biters. Does the Good news apply to a lady in a garden who was tempted to bite an apple or not? His reconciliation should be retroactive and as such, extended to the forgiveness of Eve! Jesus of Nazareth is the new way and therein lies the revolutionary impact of his arrival. He is "The Way" whose life was proactive and retroactive. I believe the God would be willing to pardon Eve. Nevertheless, Eve continues to lie in wait for relief from her eternal sentence of disrespect and second class citizenship. Much of the deception in the reckoning of Eve is in the telling of the story and more so, it’s recitation and recantation, in relationship to the recount of the coming of The Christ. In many ways the forgiveness of Eve has been lost in translation—misguided by logistics. Without dispute, the most common source of the story of Eve’s deadly transgression is the Bible. The account is told as a part of the book of Genesis, but what is never noted and always ignored is that by the time her conviction is overturned by the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, 2017 Christmas seasons ago, she had suffered, the balance of human history and negative human thinking. The balance of human history is not clearly represented in the five-hundred pages or 39 books that it takes to move from Genesis to the Book of Matthew because our minds don’t make the mental or mathematical leap. The life of Jesus of Nazareth, as the line of demarcation between a felonized Eve and a free one, seems fuzzy to the point of elusiveness. However, the line is the same monumental strait, that when crossed, allows the redeemed drug dealer to leave the prison gates and lead the community’s youth onto a path of self-respect and productivity or a murderer to walk out and protect the weak and wanting. Actually, the line is not fuzzy, at all. The path of redemption is clear; It’s the math that’s fuzzy. Eve’s equality is stifled by our minds because we fail to compute that Jesus professed forgiveness on behalf of Eve, too! No follower of Jesus can continue to fail to acknowledge this fact. On Sunday morning, its perpetuation , is most evident by who is allowed in and out of pulpits. Ecclesiastical authorities read the Bible, but they don't do the math. Now , the great news about the "good news" is that the United States of America is founded upon a system of theology dedicated to the proposition that Eve is equal. It is hard to imagine, that out of the whole of human history, millions of years, trapped by mythology, that women have only had the right to fight for equality, in this country in particular, for 250 years. In spite of the despicable truth of human history, that Eve suffers persistent scorn, in it’s truest form, our country is predicated upon her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. By this symbiotic truth—the redemption of Jesus of Nazareth, plus the US Constitution, Eve's descendants possess the ways and means to demand their equality. And, as a matter of historical immanence, it must be given. Before Jesus of Nazareth women were cursed by Genesis for all time. After Jesus of Nazareth, all people are forgiven, including women, and they have choices over their lives and over their bodies. Choices denied to them by the overwhelming balance of human history. Ecclesiastical authorities, who are not doing the math fail to understand and see this. Eve deserves a pardon from all of us! Temptation to eat from the tree of good and evil was too great. She was convinced against guidance, that the serpent’s assurances were true. Eve accepted his gift and then she also gave it to Adam; he ate the fruit as well. And yet her crime is prosecuted and persecuted for all time. God, in knowing their deeds, had mercy on them and gave them skins of clothing. He sent them out of the Garden of Eden and into the world forever. Eve’s actions resulted in a life outside of happiness. Though Adam did not protest taking the fruit, the greater burden of transgression fell on the shoulders of Eve. She had taken the first bite. Nevertheless, they would suffer the cost of their actions together. Ultimately they were given mercy to live, but it would be outside the protected environment they had always known as they were forced to go into a world where they were responsible for making difficult choices. Eve received her sanction: she would suffer in childbearing and would desire after her husband, even as he would "rule over her existence—" hers would become the role of an underling. As for Adam, in his exile, he was sentenced to working the very ground from which he had been formed. Eve carried Shame, Blame, and Guilt over the pain and suffering her actions caused her family. She had been created as “a good thing” and brought forward to help Adam; she forfeited the glory of her role. Instead, she became the excuse of his suffering, abuse, disrespect, and objectification. Before the first bite were they companions? Did they see each other? Women have made great strides, created wondrous movements and supported those suffering through the ages. Women have carried babies, and upheld families— immediate and extended, created change in opportunities, education, and our environment. It is time Eve receives a pardon from the mental limitations placed on us by old mythology. How many birthing pains per child, per generation before Eve, our grandmothers, our mothers, our sisters, our daughters can mark Eve's time served and be granted forgiveness by us? Did that one action damn her to a sentence of life, upon life…upon life…upon life? No matter her giving, nourishing, nurturing or sustaining of humanity, her punishment seems to be embedded in our thinking with an eternal sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. Her monumental strides and innovative contributions fall beneath the shadow cast upon her. Must she accept less for equal or greater work than the Adams of the world? Must she pretend to be unaware? Must she feign ignorance and substandard intellect to receive support from the Adams of the world? Must she first work her body to introduce her mind? Must she cover her authentic self, makeup, hair and eyelashes, tucks and silicone in order to be accepted as beautiful? Must she cast her eyes away and pretend she alone is the apple of Adam’s eye? Even though it was he, who was once her companion, and he who saw only her…before the bite. Eve needs relief from the shame, blame, and guilt that settled upon her for eating the forbidden fruit. She is now a tainted fruit herself—the untouchable. She is denied substance, access, and acceptance. The story of Eve is every Woman’s story. The Eve experience is cross-cultural. Do you think a president, as leader of the free world established in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness, will one day give Eve a fresh start? Eve, of our mindset, wants to re-enter the land of opportunity with full freedom to go and sin no more. She can make greater strides, open newer spaces, and re-claim her honor to carry and mother children in wholeness. Eve, can pray and usher the world into peace. She can support Adam out of a deep-seated, loving desire wrapped in the fabric of choice. We live in a society that needs to seek a pardon for Eve. Our grandmothers, mothers, sisters and daughters are all descendants of Eve. We must all grant this forgiveness so that she can take her rightful place beside men. We have a purpose to help them, we have a mission to create new life. Let’s raise our voices to support the release of Eve back to her rightful place. She has been left uncovered far too long in a mean world. Give her the right to go and sin no more to start anew. |
AuthorApril L. Smith believes in the power of women rising. "We are the other energy of humanity. We are necessary to make humanity whole. We are joyfully and wonderfully made. We are In united agreement with all masculine energy that dreams of a better society." This blog is a facet of my authentic self. #PardonEve Archives
December 2020
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