She must be New Age, he’d thought at first, shuddering.

She must be New Age, he’d thought at first, shuddering.
--Alice Walker

Despite a prolific career and iconic cultural status, Alice Walker has fallen out of favor with a majority of her critics; her later work, when it is discussed at all, is regarded as a disappointing end to a stellar career. However, the difference critics have noted is not in the substance of what Walker advocates, but in the community in which she locates her work. Walker transitioned gradually from a womanist and culturally centered work to advocating for a spiritually grounded global humanism. I argue in this chapter that her late work Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart and Buddhist self-help texts present the same theology proposed by Shug in The Color Purple; Walker’s vocabulary has shifted, but her vision has not.

Walker’s work has always held an interest in transcendence and faith, but these concepts were grounded in personal and/or social growth narratives, in which an individual hero or heroine overcomes a stuck moment in her life and develops a new paradigm, often changing her material conditions at the same moment that he or she is overcome by a psychological or spiritual shift. The most famous of these works, her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple, cast this empowerment in terms of womanism, a spiritual ethics that became adopted by a number of theologians and African American theorists. I begin by discussing the complexity of the Color Purple’s engagement with literary and cultural traditions, to suggest why or how the text has become such a rallying point for American fiction.

Walker’s most recent texts have withdrawn from this culturally specific narrative to locate her protagonists in a universal context; she has replaced a specific dialect with religious (New Age) terminology and supplanted a specific journey into her characters’ interior life with an abstracted sense of this life’s spiritual significance. This shift to New Age humanist themes is paralleled by a formal literary shift to more explicitly ideological, spiritual parable (rather than the more evocative and character-based healing narratives that drive her earlier novels). These thematic and literary shifts suggest a shift in values to emphasize self-discovery and individualized development rather than a healing activity in a bonded, blood-related community.

Although twenty years separate these two texts, the central process by which Walker’s characters achieve these goals remains the same: a dynamic relationship experience, political engagement, sensual experience and self-acceptance. By exploring the difference between healing narrative and spiritual parable, I will revise the critical narrative on Walker’s work, suggesting that her shift to spiritual parable represents a natural continuity from her early texts and suggesting how this shift relates to the larger picture of spirituality as the central narrative of women’s empowerment in the late 20th century.

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... but then there's this section of the chapter:

“I am not a Buddhist,” Walker writes, insisting that she is trying to practice and “embody” Buddhism, not subscribe to a strict set of doctrines (WATO 94). She writes that Buddhism helped her expand her sense of herself and how much suffering she could endure; and that “… The Color Purple was actually my Buddha novel without Buddhism” because it was her response to the “assassinations and betrayals of the Civil Rights movement” (99). After these events, which signaled both “unbearable suffering” and a profound sense of disillusionment, Walker writes that she “[like the Buddha] sat down upon the Earth and asked its permission to posit a different way from that in which I was raised” (99). The failure, betrayals and heartbreaking losses of the Civil Rights Movement prompted Walker—who came of age during that era of volatile loyalty—to reorient, reconstruct her own perception of life, coming to terms with a different reality. That different reality was a theology of sensual, spiritual growth and woman-centered perspective, and it emerged from precisely the same process that Buddhism does—an open-hearted, open-minded confrontation with bare reality, a sitting down upon the ground to internalize a new sight and vision of life and whatever it is that truly matters to you (We Are the Ones 99).

Walker’s new work echoes the metaphors of Buddhist instruction—perhaps one of the most repeated phrases in Chodron’s Awakening Compassion tapes is “open your heart,” a generic response to every difficult situation in life. Stressed about the dissertation? Open your heart to the stress. Angry at the racist who just condescended to you at work? Open your heart to the anger and create compassion. Standing in a picket line in Jena, Louisiana? Open your heart to the group solidarity you find.

Open your heart is a catchphrase for a generic emotional response, a controlled reaction that can be trained with enough meditation. This sense of discipline is important to the practice of tonglen.