By Priscilla Greear

Staff Writer

ATLANTA--Dr. Diana Hayes, a lawyer and associate professor of theology at Georgetown University, read from her book Hagar's Daughters: Womanist Ways of Being in the World and signed that and other works at a forum held April 25 at the Catholic Center of the Atlanta University Center.

Hayes described her struggle for identity as an African-American of faith before earning doctoral degrees in religious studies and sacred theology and becoming one of the country's prominent black Catholic theologians.

Hayes, who earned her doctoral degrees at the Catholic University of Louvain in Leuven, Belgium, is also the author of Trouble Don't Last Always: Soulful Prayers and And Still We Rise: An Introduction to Black Liberation Theology.

In Hagar's Daughters Hayes addresses Harriet Tubman, Zora Neale Hurston and Hagar, the rejected and cast-out biblical slave and mother of Ishmael who survived by talking directly to God. Hayes calls upon black women to avoid defining themselves by societal stereotypes. She challenges them to listen to the Spirit within themselves and utilize their creativity, intellects and talents to find their own voice.

She described a womanist, which refers to black women's new liberated ways of being in the world, as one who loves strongly, exposes and calls for constructive changes for blacks in the church. She spoke of "the black experience of a personal God, one who is transcendent as the bringer of justice and liberation, and one who is eminent as the one who walks and talks with us telling us that we are God's own."

"I believe my experience is that of many black women. For most of my life I saw myself as an object...seeing myself only as I was reflected in the eyes of others, the one that nobody else knew quite what to do with. I was in many ways my own woman. I did not know my own place. I was searching for myself, my own identity," Hayes said.

"My presence in the Catholic Church has been one of constant challenge," she continued. "I have (had to) prove not only my existence but the validity of my existence in the face of so many others who are not like me at all. It has been a constant struggle, therefore, for me to define not only who, but whose, I was. That struggle has included finding, acknowledging and eventually rejoicing in my very own voice, a voice unlike anyone else's because it arises out of the very depths of my being."

Hayes recalled America's brave and creative black women throughout history who endured an oppressive society through the spirit of survival found within themselves which they passed on to future generations.

She told how the illiterate Rebecca Jackson was guided from within as she taught herself both to read and write. Hayes also recounted the ways black slave women survived oppression by creating rituals, including spirituals, blues and sorrow songs.

These women survived, Hayes said, because they drew upon and reformed African spirituality, which is more holistic and conjoins the human and divine in contrast to Western society, which separates the sacred and the secular.

In Hagar's Daughters Hayes explains that 'mothering' African-American women are those who maintain nurturing traditions which reveal how their culture evolved; those grandmothers, aunts, mothers and older sisters form a community of women which sustains the spirit within it.

"Black women are the mothers, the bearers of the African American culture. They have gone back to their spiritual roots in Africa and the United States," she said.

"They must speak for themselves because no one else is able or willing to speak for them. Nor are they willing any longer to be spoken for...They have looked within themselves and their black sisters to find that spirit of God which has always been with them, but which, over the years of their sojourn in this strange land, they have, at times, lost contact with," she writes.

Hayes told attendees that black children today don't know their heritage or the meaning of respect and are in danger of losing their spirituality. She urged mothers to continue sharing their faith with their children, to hold their families together, to return to the Scriptures since "the truth will set you free" and to share their African past. The church, she said, should be restored as the source of community, but where the talents of all types of people may be developed.

The theologian added that the womanist theology of liberation is intended to bring wholeness to African-American men as well as women and those of other races and classes. She noted that more black women today hold bachelor's and master's degrees than do their black male counterparts.

Acknowledging the pain and frustration of their struggle, Hayes said, "We are black women, tall, strong, bending, but barely breaking; we are not superwomen. We cry, we hurt, we grow weary in the struggle. We cry out with Fannie Lou Hamers, 'I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.'"

Ida Proctor Baker, a member of Sts. Peter and Paul parish, Decatur, who attended the forum, said "I've seen quite a lot of changes for black women in the Catholic Church -- but I don't think just 'black' woman any more. The role of women needs to be upgraded because I think that women do well as Eucharistic ministers and religious education leaders--are performing more religious roles in the church. We know that women will never be able to consecrate--the roles will never escalate that high. We have a male-dominated religion. Women are in these (mentioned) roles, but I think that's as far as it's going to go."

"We have a lot of single women who are grandmothers who would really do good work and would return to the church if they were not so limited in what they could do," she added.

Paula Newkirk, also of Sts. Peter and Paul, agreed that the black community has lost its connection with African roots and traditional values. She attributes the loss to the breakup of nuclear and extended families for economic reasons.

"We give far more consideration to the economic concerns which leave that void there for the children. Children are not raised as they once were. Therefore they don't learn those values."

Bridgette Hector, a student at the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta who works with inner-city black women writes programs using womanist theology to empower them and address their problems.

"One of the main ideas of womanist theology is creating a paradigm, or a way of looking at God through the eyes of African-American women," she said. "I work with youth and women, and it's the avenue I use to speak to their particular issues and concerns."

Ama Ohene-Bekoe, a Ghanian-American graduate of Georgetown where she took Hayes' Black Liberation Theology course, is interested in economic and political aspects of the relationship between church and community. She hopes to earn a doctoral degree.

"I think that she (Hayes) challenges...(black women) just to consider (taking) the unbeaten path which many do not. She's traversed that path. I believe my calling as a person of faith... is a largely untravelled one, an unbeaten path," she said. "Her witness, her trial, her tribulation, her triumph is an encouragement."