Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian

Christian Century, May 17, 2000 by Suzanne Selinger

Against the Wind: Memoir of a Radical Christian. By Dorothee Solle. Fortress, 171 pp., $16.00.

WHEN DOROTHEE SOLLE'S editor first suggested that the theologian write an autobiography, Solle replied that she had better things to do. But the editor persisted, and the resulting book has been recently translated from German into English. Marian Wright Edelman, founder, director and advocate of the Children's Defense Fund, wrote her memoir after recovering a long-forgotten diary from her college years. Elizabeth Achtemeier, Old Testament scholar and preacher, wrote her autobiography as a way of witnessing to God's working in her life.

All three books are extended expressions of gratitude. Achtemeier invites readers to be spectators of the Christian drama. Edelman and Solle exhibit a secular Christianity in the tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and their introspective analyses parallel Augustine's conversion account. All three present love of life as an important part of their spirituality. All three discuss their mistakes, exhaustion, pain, frustration and joy. All three books are tales of spiritual formation--and at the same time, acts of spiritual formation, for we always write at least in part for ourselves--and each discloses a distinctive spirituality. Each says a lot about the church as an institution. Each includes a personal jeremiad or two.

Edelman was a plenary speaker at the 1998 American Academy of Religion meeting--a forum few lawyers have occupied. But she speaks and writes in the language of the pulpit, a language marked by commitment, passion and learning. Like her AAR address, her book includes cascades of statistics, but it also provides stories. She sees herself fundamentally as a servant leader, engaged, among other things, in training a new generation of servant leaders.

Edelman's use of the upper case for "Black" and "White" makes clear that race is a constant presence. "Don't lower your guard; don't forget the racial tightrope," she warns. She also reflects on the privilege of being a black girl born at a particular time--she was a teenager when the civil rights movement began--and born into a particular family.

Her father was a Baptist minister in Bennettsville, South Carolina, and her mother filled the many roles of pastor's wife. Community elders reinforced and exemplified her parents' values and priorities. Two priorities, enveloped in a sense of gratitude and indebtedness, are constant for Edelman: to serve the black community (which involves concern for the spiritual health of the white community also), and to serve God.

God's presence and the importance of prayer in Edelman's life are demonstrated by the passages she quotes from her college diary in which she asks God for guidance and discipline. Readers who know her collection of meditations and prayers, Guide My Feet (1995), will recognize this young voice. She prays for God to make her strong in purpose, will and goodness, and for the Lord to make her will like iron. She prays that God will work through his unworthy servant; she prays for God to examine her and tell her how to change. The gift of this book is its author's cultivated, disciplined spirituality.

Spelman College in Atlanta allowed Edelman to begin to discover her own powers, challenged and nurtured by unforgettable teachers and administrators, including the renegade white historian Howard Zinn, and a series of guest preachers that included Martin Luther King Jr. She won a fellowship for study in Europe during her junior year. At age 19 she woke up one morning in Paris with no supervision and no American-white-imposed identity. She felt she had gone to heaven. She returned to the U.S. the next year to work for freedom from the ground up, first in the civil rights movement and then in an effort to save children from death, deprivation and crippling white prejudice.

In 1960, during her last semester of college, Edelman and the movement met. On the heels of the Woolworth's demonstrations that began in February and spread like wildfire, she organized demonstrations involving all of Atlanta's black campuses. Faced with both hesitant college administrators and angry whites, she issued a directive in her diary, "Get a hold of yourself and then forget yourself."

She proceeded to Yale Law School, where her studies were punctuated by work with movement leaders, including two friends from Atlanta, Julian Bond and Andrew Young. She also became close to William Sloane Coffin. She went to Mississippi in 1964 for "Freedom Summer," thinking that her legal skills would be helpful in the voter registration project. When she came to work dressed in jeans and an old shirt, the disappointed faces taught her that she was also the symbol of the human dignity that her clients sought. Henceforth she dressed like a proper lawyer.

Edelman values her mentors: her parents, the community of Bennettsville, teachers, political figures and activist clergy. And she values children. Indeed, learning from children is one of her themes. They are the civil rights movement's heroes, its shock troops and too often its martyrs.