In Search of Our Mothers’ Healings: Holistic Wellbeing, Black Women, and Preaching

The lives of black women in North America, historically, converge with socioeconomic conditions, creating health disparities between black women and other demographic groups. These health disparities co-exist alongside narratives about black women that contribute to rendering the bodies, and subsequently the health, of black women invisible or nonessential. Many traditional approaches to preaching healing texts advocate for treating the human body as incidental to a greater aim of the text. In contrast, preaching with the lives of black women in view requires a hermeneutic that recovers the significance of the physical body, as it is grounded in theological frameworks that espouse communal belonging in conjunction with holistic existence. This essay explores the preaching of Baby Suggs, holy, from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, as a prototype for such a hermeneutic at work within preaching that makes way for healing and wholeness as real possibilities in contemporary contexts. For various reasons, many preachers and homileticians approach discussions about preaching that focus on biblical healing and miracle stories with care and caution. Haphazard approaches to these texts undermine concerns of pastoral care and responsibilities to listeners who live with disabilities or illnesses. With these issues in mind and some best practices, homileticians must pay careful attention to the many pitfalls associated with preaching healing narratives. These pitfalls include confused understandings of healing and cure that equate individual sin, shortcomings, and disabilities with an individual’s lack of faith and prevention of desired healing. 1 Furthermore, preachers and homileticians too often are hesitant to preach these texts as genuine accounts of the miraculous. Instead, preachers and homileticians turn toward rational or non-supernatural explanations of these narratives. This practice may occur because these preachers and homileticians may consider these encounters and phenomena as events of a different era and time. While the qualifications related to preaching about healing increase, the tendency to ignore or only briefly to engage the role of the human body in healing stories also increases. Because of minimal engagement with the bodies present in these narratives and the healing they experience, healing and the human body become a foil in the plot of larger theological themes or moral platitudes. Subsequently, those who will preach sacred texts that claim divine healing may render this phenomenon incidental and make an attempt to find other objectives. If this occurs, those preachers may potentially reinforce contemporary narratives that distance the significance of the body and the need for healing as real possibilities in present contexts. This unintended consequence requires preachers to consider interpretive frameworks that retain the body as a critical entity while also attending to “best practices” ethics in preaching about healing. In considering the lives and health of black women in the United States and a hope for their holistic wellbeing within a theological vision of preaching healing, I offer an 1 See Kathy Black, A Healing Homiletic: Preaching and Disability (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996); Kathy Black, “A Perspective of the Disabled: Transforming Images of God, Interdependence, and Healing” in Preaching Justice: Ethnic and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Christine Smith (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998).