Cecilia Loving is a Detroit brown girl who stepped into her greatness in NYC, arriving from Los Angeles in a state of culture shock.  She realizes that sometimes we have to experience what we don’t want to know what we do want, which is the beginning and hopefully not the end of all stories.

Cass Tech was her launching pad in 1976, when she graduated from Performing Arts with a full scholarship to Howard University.

There is a lot between these lines that forms the foundation for Brown Girl, including the Jefferies Housing Projects, the Holy Spirit that lived there, the Last Poets, Broadside Press, Gil Scott Heron, Martha Jean the Queen, the Home of Love, the creative vision of Kenneth Jones (her brother in Spirit, who always showed her the way outside of the box), her four brothers who always had time to share a good book or a fight, the 1967 riot, the revolution that never came, Ralph Waldo Emerson meeting Harriet Tubman on the day that King died, and she began untangling poems from her soul — that were happy not to rhyme.

Howard was home in the 70’s, a place where she found expression in Theater and Business and hope in Law, where she realized everything pretending to be sisterhood was best expressed in “being” rather than “saying.”    There was Dee in her Sunday hats and the urge to find God in the midst of magical parties that never seemed to end.

There was Dr. Singleton and scholarship and Paulette, Karen, Myreah and hope springing everywhere in the seeds of possibility.  And then there was UCLA, which could strangle the life out of any brown girl unless she is girded in the salvation of the kind of self-love taught at Howard.  (Why isn’t there a major in Love?)

Theology would never pass for God’s unconditional breath in which we live and move and have our being.)

Well, Carol Heywood was there and Melville Nimmer and Sheri Bailey and Walter Allen Bennett and Theater Producing and the Law.

What better escape for a brown girl from the projects (at a time when she did not realize the importance of telling her own story) than to become a lawyer.  (Sorry, this is getting longer than expected, but a brown girl realizing her divinity must be able to tell her own story.)

If California was hell, NYC was heaven — in the way that heaven should be, in the way that allows you to embrace the power of your own rhythm and be your own dance on the edge of possibility, in a way that screams everyone is here — come on in and surrender to the greatness that you are, in a way that approaches you on a crowded street and shows you the way to remembering.

Oh yeah, then there was the law, NYU, Legal Aid, prestigious law firms: and the truth that it contains the souls of many brilliant people who thought it was the path to salvation.  All of the lawyers that she knows, which is nowhere near the total number of lawyers, are great, and a great number of them actually chose the law to help others rather than themselves.

She wrestled with the law like a demon for over 22 years, but God finally won out and revealed her true calling.  Every bad marriage needs to end at some point.  One day, when she couldn’t ignore God any longer and became brave enough to trust herself, she found herself in seminary (not another degree!!!!).

School is a language she could always understand and so God used it to summon her outside of the beaten path to be One with the endless creative source always giving.  Spirit revealed to her that God is a Brown Girl Too and that she must teach others to listen to their own stories so that they can give the universe the love that it needs to embrace the worlds that are constantly unfolding.

She co-created SPIRITMUV in 2007, a transdenominational church of Ancient Wisdom and New Thought, after New York Theological Seminary.

She is blessed to be able to hold Sunday Services at Unity Center of NYC, at 2:30 PM every Sunday.

What is your Brown Girl Story?  Do you realize just how great you are?

 

 

Postscript:

SPIRITMUV® (www.spiritmuv.com), founded by Cecilia Loving in September 2007, exists to build a community of like minds dedicated to self-transformation through the cultivation of spiritual development.  At the heart of its teachings is the principle that the Kingdom of God is within us (Luke 17:21) and that we all live and move and have our being in Spirit.   The following are some of the services that SPIRITMUV provides: a meaningful, motivational, life-transforming worship service every Sunday (www.spiritmuvvideo.com); a daily meditation (www.spiritmuvmeditation.com); online spiritual messages at www.spiritmuvblog.com),  workshops and classes on spiritual principles (see, e.g., www.godisabrowngirltoo.webs.com).  Reverend Loving is the author of Prayers for Those Standing on the Edge of Greatness, God is a Brown Girl Too, and God is a Lawyer Too: Ten Laws of Unlimited Success, as well as several workbooks.