Troubling the African Feminine Divine | April 13, 2025 | Hassaun Jones-Bey

As described last month, Howard Thurman wrote concerning the spiritual “Wade in the Water”,

[T]his man with the incurable disease… believed the legend, for he had seen it work…. If somehow he could manage to let down into the waters while they were being troubled then he would be healed…. This is in essence the story of the man beside the pool in the fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. What would these early singers do with this story? They sang,

Wade in the water

Wade in the water, children

God’s gonna trouble the waters.

            … They took the imagery of the simple New Testament story and applied it to their own situation. For them the “troubled waters” meant the ups and downs, the vicissitudes of life. Within the context of the “troubled” waters of life there are healing waters, because God is in the midst of the turmoil….

            This leads to another very searching insight. Here we are face to face with perhaps the most daring and revolutionary concept known to man: namely that God is not only the creative mind and spirit at the core of the universe but that He—and mark you I say He—is love. There are no completely satisfying ways by which this conclusion may be arrived at by mere or sheer rational reflective processes. This is the great disclosure: that there is at the heart of life a Heart. When such an insight is possessed by the human spirit and possesses the human spirit, a vast and awe-inspiring tranquility irradiates the life. This is the message of the spiritual. Do not shrink from moving confidently out into choppy waters. Wade in the water, because God is troubling the water.

            But the time that we are entering seems to question whether it is God that is troubling the waters. As mentioned last month, many find themselves suddenly at risk of, or actually being out of work. Many find themselves suddenly at risk of or actually being deported to foreign lands. Climate crises are worsening and going global. Global politics are threatening a third World War. But scripture seems to say that these are just temporary trials.

            The operative question is, How is God troubling the waters. The answer seems to be with awareness. It has become impossible to ignore this stuff. The river is so deep that it does not seem wadeable. Thus, we need a response to Thurman’s description (presented last month) as the “happy blending of majestic rhythm and poignant yearning” in “Deep River.” Thurman seems to provide one today (actually 50 years ago) when he quotes scripture, “Is there no balm in Gilead?” And when we peruse his writing concerning the Balm in Gilead spiritual,

The setting is the Book of Jeremiah. The prophet has come to a “Dead Sea” place in his life. Not only is he discouraged over the external events in the life of Israel, but he is also spiritually depressed and tortured. As a wounded animal he cried out, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is no physician there?” It is not a question of fact that he is raising—it is not a question directed to any particular person for an answer. It is not addressed either to God or to Israel, but rather it is a question raised by Jeremiah’s entire life. He is searching his own soul. He is stripped to the literal substance of himself, and is turned back on himself for an answer. Jeremiah is saying actually, “There must be a balm in Gilead; it cannot be that there is no balm in Gilead.” The relentless winnowing of his own bitter experience has laid bare his soul to the end that he is brought face to face with the very ground and core of his own faith.

            The slave caught the mood of this spiritual dilemma, and with it did an amazing thing. He straightened the question mark in Jeremiah’s sentence into an exclamation point: “There is a balm in Gilead!” Here is a note of creative triumph….

            … [It] arises out of the creative unfolding of two very profound insights.

            In the first place, there is the insight that life is its own restraint. The logic of this notion is that there is a moral order by which the life of the individual is bound. It is inescapable, and applies to all men alike. If this is true, men do reap what they sow; not only because it is so written in the Book, but also because it is part of the nature of life. In the last analysis life cannot be fooled, however powerful and clever the individual may be. This notion is a dynamic weapon in the hands of the disadvantaged. It makes it possible for them to ride high to life, and particularly to keep their spirits from being eaten away by gloom and hopelessness. The slave made this discovery long ago; this insight came to him crystal clear, and was a boon and a saviour….

            How easy it is to forget this—to think that life will make an exception in one’s own case. This is a timely lesson for our nation as a whole. At the moment we stand as the graphic masters of much of the earth by virtue of our vast resourcefulness, our material resources, and the techniques by which we have reduced great conglomerates of nature to simple units of control and utility. It is a terrifying truth that life is its own restraint, and that the moral law that binds in judgement the life of the individual binds the nation and the race. Unless there is a great rebirth of high and holy moral courage, which will place at the center of our vast power an abiding sense of moral responsibility, both because of our treatment of minorities at home and our arrogance abroad, we may easily become the most hated nation on earth. No amount of power, wealth, or prestige can stay this judgement. If we would be beloved we must share that kind of spirit as the expression of the true genius of our democratic government.

            The second insight here is that the contradictions of life are neither final or ultimate…. Man is caught in the agonizing grip of inevitables; and whatever may be his chance or circumstantial assignment, all his alternatives are reduced to zero. For the man in power this is a happy philosophy. All notions of social superiority based on the elevation of a principle of racial inequality lifted to the dimension of a new law of life, find their nourishment here. They state in bold terms that the God of the universe is basically partial, immoral or amoral; or, from the point of view of the under privileged by birth or election, God is demoniacal….

            But if perchance the contradictions of life are not ultimate, then there always is the growing edge of hope in the midst of the most barren and most tragic circumstances.

If you cannot preach like Peter,

if you cannot pray like Paul,

you can tell the love of Jesus

and say, "He died for all."

On the “love of Jesus” Thurman wrote,

Few of the spirituals have to do with the nativity of Christ. This has given rise to many speculations. James Weldon Johnson was of the opinion that the fact that Christmas Day was a day of special license having no religious significance to slaves is largely responsible. My own opinion somewhat concurs. It should be added that, in the teaching of the Bible stories concerning the birth of Jesus, very little appeal was made to the imagination of the slave because it was not felt wise to teach him the significance of this event to the poor and the captive. It was dangerous to let the slave understand that the life and teachings of Jesus meant freedom for the captive and release for those held in economic, social, and political bondage. Even now these implications are not lifted to the fore in much of the contemporary emphasis upon Jesus…. Unlike the Apostle Paul, he was not a Roman citizen. If a Roman soldier kicked Jesus into a Palestinian ditch he could not appeal to Caesar; it was just another Jew in the ditch.

            Mary, the mother of Jesus, was “lifted to the fore” in Roman Catholic syncretisms, however, by African indigenous traditions from which many of the enslaved in the Americas emerged. Her motherhood was just one aspect of the feminine divine—in which the Christian concept of Jesus seemed to apply to a whole new generation. And who, but the coming generation, must ultimately solve the problems that this generation cannot?

            In the King James Version of the Bible, John 1:14 states, "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.” Indigenous traditions (scriptures in nature rather than in writing)—from which revealed written traditions emerged—seem to combine this emergence of a new generation with a feminine divine source.

            According to Yoruba religious tradition, for instance, a woman with a child strapped to her back and a pot of herbs on her head for feeding the child, was running from a dispute with her husband, who also happened to be a hunter and a diviner. The woman fell while running and disappeared in a river of healing that flowed miraculously out of the pot of herbs, which also fell from her head. The woman’s name, Yemonja, became associated with that particular river (the Ogun River), as a spirit of motherhood, artistic creativity and healing.

            Enslaved Africans from this Yoruba tradition looked back across the ocean from the port city of San Salvador, Bahia—where more Africans were enslaved than anywhere else in the Americas. They, and captives in Cuba as well, somehow managed to bring the consciousness of Yemonja’s healing and life-giving river across the Atlantic Ocean—to associate her with the oceans of the world and with Mother Mary in Catholic traditions. Religiously speaking, Yemonja’s voyage might be thought of as a pilgrimage. Environmentally speaking, it’s just the next logical step in the water cycle.

            So, in the Candomble continuation of Yoruba tradition in the Portuguese language of Bahia, Yemonja became Yemanja (Yemaya for Spanish speakers in Cuba) as a mothering ecology of life in oceans and rivers throughout the world. The enslaved and their descendants thus celebrated and expressed their collective embodiment of the Creator’s sacred ego through ceremonies of drum, dance, and song that continue to reverberate globally even today. Recovering the African Feminine Divine in Literature, the Arts, and Practice: Yemonja Awakening, a 2021 collection of essays, attempts to display both the subtlety and vastness of Yemonja’s purvey in human affairs. The editor’s write:

While many people see Yemonja as a maternal figure, we would be remiss if we do not appreciate her contributions as a goddess of arts and healing. Yemonja Awakening bridges aspects of the essence of her being an orisa who governs arts, healing, and transformation from the origin of her worship in Yorùbáland to the Americas and throughout the world.

            This edited volume provides a context through which to understand the myriad ways in which the African feminine divine is being reclaimed by scholars, practitioners and cultural scholars worldwide. This volume also seeks to address the complex ways in which the reclamation of and recognition of Yemonja facilitates cultural survival and the formation of African-centric identity. In particular, these cultural practices are symbolically represented by Yemonja, the African female deity who is the mother of the entire world of the Orisa. As mother of the sphere of goddesses/gods, humans, plants, and animals, she is “Omi Jori,” leader of waters. This connotes her status and power over all realms of existence. Yemonja is the deity whose province is the Ogun River; however, in her power and desire to protect her children during the Middle Passage she became Yemaya and [Yemanja] in the Americas. Since Yemonja also references sexual, creative, spatial, and spiritual energies, the editors and contributors see her as being pivotal to this project as an expansive and original cartography of impact of the African feminine divine globally.

            Modern documentary movies, such as Yemanjá: Wisdom from the African Heart of Brazil, show this feminine divine as protector, nurturer, and mother, particularly in contexts where religion finds itself critical of rather than submissive to empire. Such imagery is presented by the “Light in the Sky” music video below, which might be considered a Central and South American (Afro-Caribbean) version of “Wade in the Water.”

            As Thurman put it, “This is the message of the spiritual. Do not shrink from moving confidently out into choppy waters. Wade in the water, because God is troubling the water.”