
          The Journey Is Home by Nelle Morton. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1985. 248 pp. $21.95.
          Reviewed by Heyward, CarterCarter Heyward
          Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, 29-30, 32
          
          Among feminist theologians, the name Nelle Morton conjures up
images of courage, intelligence, and friendship. Morton was the first
(and for years only) woman on the faculty of the Theological School of
Drew University; a worker for civil and other human rights; and a
leader in the Southern Presbyterian Church and in the ecumenical
global community. She is a theologian whose book many of us have been
awaiting as if for the birth of a child. This remarkable book has
arrived at last.
          The significance of The Journey Is Home is not
primarily in the logic of either its structure (ten occasional
pieces--lectures and essays that span the 1970s) or its content (a
carefully crafted interplay of history, autobiography and theory that
focuses on language and metaphor). It is a well structured, deeply
intelligent book, but the power of its impact resonates beyond the
printed page. Beginning with its title, The Journey Is Home is a
metaphor--which, as Morton shows, is not something that can be
explained or analyzed discursively.
          Emphasizing the vital role of metaphor in feminist theology, Morton
writes that it "begins with the concrete and demands total presence."
[It] cannot be defined. It can only be actively followed on its
journey and perceived in its functioning.... [It] is not metaphor
unless it is on the way." It involves a "shattering of inadequate
image[s] . . . and [an] ushering in of [a] new reality." In these
words, Morton conveys a sense of how her own book affected
me. The Journey Is Home is the concrete, daily, lived
experience of one woman who is inviting open-ended participation by
others who cannot expect to have our way defined for us by the
author. We can only follow this woman's journey and see for ourselves
what happens.
          I was shaken as I read, which is why I often shut the book for days
at a time, saying to friends who asked what I thought of it, "I'm not
sure." One can be sure about what one thinks of most theological
works--including most feminist texts. But one cannot be clear in the
moment about a book that rattles the brain as it churns the gut,
pushing to expand even seasoned feminist sensibilities. In patriachal
time/space, one is not prepared, logically or reasonably, to meet the
theologian as an eighty-year-old white Southern woman whose "wild and
bizarre" blood cells are keeping her alive; whose "cunt" is sacred
space; and whose lifelong liberation journey with marginalized people
of different colors, classes, and creeds has plumbed new depths during

the past decade, carrying her to the point at which, in her own words,
"I am now in search of new positive images faithful to woman
experience."
          "Woman" experience is no grammatical or typographical error, any
more than it is, for Morton, an historical aberration. The journey
that unfolds in these pages is not merely about "women's" experiences
or the "women's" movement.
          
            "The women's movement" [implies] something tangible
and more organizational, such as NOW.... To say "the woman movement"
. . . opens up a whole, moving, pervasive way of perceiving--an
emerging, accelerating, enlarging, powerful, growing potential that
cannot be contained by the use of the possessive "women's".
          
          Morton's dynamic journey becomes, for her and for this reader,
woman home. She tells of the place that is no place--and every
place--for the woman who is shackled within the politics of
patriarchal logic and, in the same historical moment, is "heard into
speech" by those who are willing to listen to her find her own story
rather than attempt to tell her what it is.
          Nellie Morton tells us nothing about what feminists ought to
believe (which is one reason she suggests that this book is not
"theology"). She tells us what being Nellie Morton involves and,
through the lens of her particular life, something about what may be
the costs and consequences, losses and gains of being ourselves in a
world that is harsh with those whose love for life and justice knows
no bounds.
          
            Shaken in a woman world
          
          Many Christian feminists may be troubled by Morton's unequivocal
indictment of God the Father. Unless we see, however, that the turmoil
into which we may be spun is not Morton's fault, nor our own, but
rather is rooted in the contradictions of living life as
self-respecting women in a world/church that does not teach us to
value women, we will miss entirely the purpose of this woman book and
the power of this woman journey. Post-Christian and other
non-Christian feminists are likely also to be shaken by Morton,
specifically because her woman home includes the church. For her, the
Christian church is no place for feminists to get stuck--but it is a
place for Christian feminists to sojourn along the way that cannot be
contained within patriarchal fixtures of institutional space or
chronological time.
          Morton realizes what many feminists lust after--to be
empowered/empowering women in a woman community that cuts across lines
that divide us in patriarchal space. Christian/post-Christian,
lesbian/straight, "academic"/ "common," older/younger are categorical
pitfalls into which Morton does not fall. She sees that common women
are not to blame for the vicious consequences of patriarchal
structures, including those which separate woman from woman--such as
compulsory heterosexism, religious imperialism, racism, classism, and
sexism.
          Because Morton has been for several generations a public antagonist
to white_supremacy and economic exploitation, I was surprised and
disappointed that she made no attempt in this book to integrate an
analysis of racism and classism into her compelling metaphoric
treatment of sexism and heterosexism. This is a serious problem--not
with Morton's life-journey, but with her analysis, since no structure
of oppression can be understood adequately without some analytic
attention to other structures that help hold it in place. What is
autobiographically apparent is Morton's awareness that the truths of
which she speaks cannot be measured adequately simply by those who
share her own race, class or gender. She recognizes the limits of her
own autobiography and does not pretend to transcend them. Moreover,
she has lived the struggle that moves beyond the lives of white middle
class women, and the resources from which she draws her book have been
cultivated by her engagement with the global work of liberation. She
sets several of her essays and lectures explicitly in this context,
not to "prove her credentials" but rather to help bring the written
word into the praxis of real human struggle.
          Morton makes no claims to speak authoritatively for or about the
universal and daily liberation work of all people who are
oppressed. She speaks with confidence only of that which she, a white
middle-class woman, believes. And, from her own struggle for justice,
what Morton has come to believe is that God the Father is the supreme
deity of racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism, and that he is
the deadly foe of all truly human liberation.
          The last three essays of this book bear witness to Morton's most
recent spiritual sojourning. It is here that we are introduced to the
Goddess. She has come to Nelle Morton via a number of woman-loving
groups and occasions, and most especially through meeting, "in a river
of blood"--and becoming--her own mother. In this reunion,
Morton--already a strong, empowering woman to others of us--was reborn
into a "new child," able at last to respect herself (and her mother),
newly empowered to embody the heights--and depths--of her woman
being.
          Morton writes that no one whose imagination and creativity are
inhibited by the rationality of patriarchal theology will be able to
hear what she is saying, and she is correct. For here is an empowered
woman, a citizen of planet earth in a pervasively patriarchal
time/space, whose power is emerging full force through the aegis of
other women as she moves into and beyond her eightieth year. Here is a
formerly liberal Christian woman who was born again, if you will, in

meeting the Goddess. Morton has been moved to speech by a womanpower
literally unavailable within the limits of patriarchal reason. She has
experienced the creative power of God the Mother, not God the Father:
Wisdom, not Word; being heard to new life, not being taught new
insights. She writes, "[In] a sexist culture and sexist religion the
option for the Goddess may be the only, the only sane, redemptive
move."
          Morton is an honest woman who is speaking the truth not only of her
own life but moreover of the power of images in the life of the
world/church. The symbol of God the Father (which, Morton suggests,
has lost whatever metaphoric power it may once have had) does not
empower men to respect women or women to respect ourselves--no matter
how He is dressed up, not even if He is called "She." The metaphoric,
imaginative images of the Goddess--God the Mother, woman God, sister
God, lover God--may be indeed the "only sane, redemptive" spiritual
resource left for self-respecting woman.
          As we come into our power, regardless of our patriarchal
affiliations, we can begin to live as self-respecting, woman-loving,
life-affirming, justice-making women whom the institutions of our
lives have no power to break or destroy. Our strength to love
ourselves despite patriarchy does not derive from our escaping
patriarchy but rather from our Goddess-given knowledge that each of us
is more than simply herself. We are women connected to women. Our
power and community carry us beyond the boundaries of our own skins
into the past (which teaches us), the present (which presents us with
our life work), and the future (which we are co-creating, and which
belongs to us, although we may not, as individuals, live to taste the
fruits of the harvest we sow).
          Morton's faith rings with the same moral commitment and
metaphysical implications that characterize other theologies of
liberation, but her radical feminist bias reveals what is missing from
all nonfeminist liberation movements; a deeply woman-rooted,
woman-loving power. The Goddess' is with us, not above us. Her realm
is sexual, not disembodied; organic, not dualistic; inclusive, not
exclusively the domain of those who think right, look right, speak
right, or have the right genital structure. She is celebrative and
permissive, not morbid and proscriptive. Her spirit is rooted and
grounded in justice making, not in law and order. Most notably for
Morton, the Goddess is not merely another face of God. She is the
antithesis of everything that the patriarchal deity has come to
symbolize.
          If other women want to spend energy trying cosmetically to touch up
God the Father, to transform Him into an androgynous figure and
thereby to "create the false impression of having arrived," Morton
will not attempt to thwart us. It is simply the case that she herself
is moving on. Lest we imagine that her vision is too facile for this
oppression laden world, we should recognize that, for Morton, the
journey is struggle. It is as bloody, angry, and conflictual as it is
tender, playful, and celebrative.
          Nelle Morton has not only shaken me to the core of my patriarchal
remnants. She has also, with this book, made me a wiser, happier
feminist. For she is herself a metaphor, an image of what can happen
to little Southern girls who "go barefooted and take off our winter
underwear every spring" all the while aware that something bad is the
matter with the world into which our mothers have borne us. Many of us
have been there, and many are yet to come. Nelle Morton offers us
fresh water for the journey.
          
            Carter Heyward a native of Charlotte, N. C., is professor
of theology of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge Mass,  she is
the author of Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power,
Sexuality, and Liberation (Pilgrim, 1984). This review of
Nelle Morton's book is copyright 1985 by Christianity and Crisis, and
reprinted with permission.
          
        
