ABSTRACT
This chapter on Messiah and Polite Occasions elevates Anne Babson to the role of theopoet and explains her poetry’s relationship to gerotranscendence. Babson’s poetry exemplifies aging feminist daughters reflecting the Holy Spirit within contemporary American women’s spiritual literature. These feminist poems identify God as a traveler, transitioning with the aging woman wherever she goes, even to the end of time. The author theorizes 11 characteristics of Feminist Pentecostal Literature in order to better understand Babson’s spiritual journey within the broader project of late American women’s spiritual literature. Finally, this chapter compares and contrasts Babson’s and Lucille Clifton’s spiritual understandings of the eschaton in considerations of nature and an aging earth.
