The call to spiritual transformation is the call to freedom.
It is a prophetic call heard within the depths of the mind, heart and soul, a calling from God, resonating in our consciousness, in our environment, in each every breath that we breathe and space that we take up.
It is a voice of strength, illuminating us with faith. It is a voice of deliverance, reminding us of our freedom. It is a voice of power, anointing us with grace. It is a voice of divinity, blessing us with love. It emanates everything that embraces us: the blood in our veins, the cells in our bodies, the vision that we move forward in.
If you listen, you can hear it, feel it, touch it, taste it, dance it, sing it, clap it: an ancestral call to raise us from semi-consciousness to a state where we can see God.
Malidoma Patrice Some teaches us that “ancestors have an intimate and absolutely vital connection with the world of the living. They are always available to guide, to teach, and to nurture. They represent one of the pathways between the knowledge of this world and the next. . . . [T]hey embody the guidelines for . . .all that is most valuable about life.” (Of Water and Spirit (Putnam: New York, 1994) at p. 9)
If I am still, I can hear them distinctly – not downtrodden as they were in the physical world, but holy and divine. Their call is one of deliverance. It is a call heard in the midnight hour, in the rustling of the leaves, in the sip of the living water: a call to Spirit and to Truth.
It is a call that no one can stifle, even those who refuse to hear it. It is a call that is at once collective and individual. In order to recognize our worth as individuals and as a species, we must not merely hear it but respond to it. No matter what our life circumstances may be, we are always free to do so.
Enslaved Africans heard the call, and their survival is a testament to their response. God called on many of our ancestors in a profound way, and great men and women like Nat Turner, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth listened and acted.
Take Sojourner Truth, for example. Her spiritual transformation began when she had a vision that her former “master,” from whom she had escaped, would visit. Truth told her “mistress and master” that her former “master” would come that day and she would leave with him. Her current “owners” were surprised because they had not heard that he would come.
Sojourner Truth took her child and prepared to leave with him. As she approached him, however, she had a more compelling vision: “God revealed himself to her . . . [and showed] that He was all over — that He pervaded the Universe.”
Even though she was physically enslaved, Truth realized that “there was no place, not even in hell, where [God] was not.” When her attention was finally “called to outward things, she observed her `former master’ had left” without her and her child. She walked back into the house, “exclaiming aloud, `Oh, God, I did not know you were so big.’” (Narrative of Sojourner Truth (as told by Sojourner Truth), at 35-36)
God is big indeed–a power too awesome and all- encompassing to even conceptualize. God fills our hearts; embraces our bodies, blesses our souls, lights the sky above our heads, strengthens the earth under our feet. God is the sun and the stars and the moon.
God is the essence of life, in which we live and move and have our being. When we begin to acknowledge that God is awesome and we are made in God’s image and likeness – not a he God but male and female, according to Genesis – we open our consciousness to realize the awesomeness of our own true nature.
Harriet Tubman understood the power of the Divine and trusted in the Presence of God. She escaped enslavement herself and risked being recaptured, beaten, and killed when she returned again and again to help hundreds of Africans escape slavery in this country. Her courage and strength are indicative of her deep faith in the power of God.
During one mission in a bitter snowstorm, she found that the enslaved Africans she intended to help escape were not at their appointed meeting place. With only a tree for shelter, she did not turn back and refuse to wait in the storm. Apparently knowing God would protect her, she stood behind the tree for the entire night in the snowstorm until those she came to help arrived.
The abolitionists who wrote of this account depicted her as an ignorant child instead of a powerful spirit woman and “her people’s” trust of God as naive. But Jesus taught us that we must be childlike–that is unconditional and complete–in our trust to enter the kingdom. Harriet Tubman and many others suffered the indignity and horror of American slavery, yet the tremendous power of God kept them moving toward freedom.
Despite the beatings and other insane acts of violence against the minds and bodies of enslaved Africans in this country, no one could master them as long as they mastered their own consciousness. Even if we appear to be free, we are “slaves” to external conditions if we do not embrace our own self-worth and master our own mind, soul, and spirit.
By external conditions, I mean the things we can see with the physical eye – the appearance of poverty, the appearance of illness, the appearance of terror. Of course, these things do exist in the material world, but we do not have to be controlled by them. When we realize that God is the movement and momentum underlying all things and that we live, move, and have our being in God, we attain mastery over ourselves.
Sojourner Truth was her own master because she was directly connected with Spirit. Despite her circumstances, she was called to transform herself into a powerful leader when she realized that God is everywhere and bigger than any man-made institution or three-dimensional, time-bound realm.
God moved Sojourner Truth to sojourn for Truth in a manner that would liberate not only herself but other captured Africans. She remains a master teacher of the principle that God is much larger than any beliefs or concepts we might have – larger even than existence as we know it. Her life and the lives of other Africans in this country are a critical example, rarely acknowledged, of how the recognition of God pushes us far beyond even our greatest expectations.
Like Sojourner Truth, Nat Turner, who led a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, was one of the greatest spiritual masters of his time. He claimed that the “Spirit” spoke to him, saying, “Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.” By Spirit, he meant “the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days. “ Turner prayed continually for two years “whenever [his] duty would permit – and . . . had the same revelation, which fully confirmed that [he] was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” (The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Leader of the Late Insurrections in Southampton, Va., As fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, Nov. 5, 1831) Turner understood that obedience to the call of God is the source of true freedom.
What do these African American prophets teach us? That when we recognize the presence of God everywhere in our lives and open our consciousness to tap God’s infinite power, we can do more than we could ever imagine – not so much for our personal gain but for the benefit of all humanity, which is where our true worth lies. We are able to taste the sweetness of freedom when we realize that there is no separation between all that we are and all that God Is.
The Brown Girl dares to step out of the box of conventionality that has always excluded her – to envision a creation that is far more inclusive, one that sees beyond the European biblical tradition that “remade its past to suit its own interests”– and recalls ancient Africa’s place as the Motherland of creation.
Moses says to the Israelites, “you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deut. 32:18 NIV). Isaiah said that God cried out like “a woman in childbirth,” reminding her children that she upheld since conception and “carried … since… birth” (Isaiah 42:14, 46:3). It was this Mother God, Hosea recalls, who taught us to walk, who healed us, who lifted the yokes from our necks, who bent down to feed us (Hosea 11:3-4).
Even Pope John Paul I recognized that God is not just our Father; “even more God is our [M]other.” Hence, we should not be limited to a male-dominated creation mythology that leaves out the Mother Creator.
God as Mother is not merely Creator but is creativity itself.
Creator as Mother is the epitome of Love: love as grace, love as compassion, love as peace, love as strength, love as power, love as wisdom, love as community, love as justice, love as faith, love as hope. Creator as Mother is not a gender – but is the energy of creation constantly and continuously creating itself.
Few would dispute that due to European male dominance of Christianity as a tradition, God the Father governs the majority of our relationships with God. But that solely paternal relationship is often limited to the over-literalized metaphor that it is.
The paternal image of God as Father has so monopolized “Christian speech about God that the equally legitimate and in some ways even more appropriate symbol of God as Mother [has been] eclipsed.” However, this historical, political, cultural, and economic dominance of man over woman does not dispel the Truth that God is greater than any pre-conceived notion of human sexuality or gender. God’s attributes as Creator can be better identified with the attributes of Mother as the major creative, life-giving force in the world.
“Since it is women whose bodies bear, nourish, and deliver new persons into life and, as society is traditionally structured, are most often charged with the responsibility to nurture them into maturity, language about [Creator] as mother carries a unique power to express human relationship to the mystery who generates and cares for everything.”
The Brown Girl, as a Columbian Indian, sings that God is “the mother of all races, the mother of all tribes. She is the mother of the thunder, mother of the rain and rivers, the mother of trees and all living things.” Of course, many if not most theologians choose to stay deeply embedded in a tradition merely because it is traditional; they refuse to entertain Creator as Mother since “the Bible speaks of God as ‘Father’” – fully ignoring the fact that the biblical image of God was created by men wrote the Bible.
The Brown Girl – surrounded by the hatred and condemnation of a white male-dominated world, is a Creator who uplifts those who have been marginalized and demonized – putting them in their rightful place as equal heirs to the throne; a Creator who has “a mother’s love that makes the beloved beautiful”; a Creator whose love cannot be earned or merited but is “freely and abundantly given.”
Creator as Mother generates everything and ensures that it flourishes. “Without origin, without source, without beginning,” Creator as Mother is not a gender but is creativity itself. “Creation is not something God did . . . Creation is something God does and is still doing.”
“There is a creative force constantly at work in man and all creation.” Creator as Mother is “sympathetic, comforting, loving, forgiving, and instantly healing,” with all “compassion and healing power of the Father at ‘Her’ command.”
Those of us who are oppressed, marginalized, denigrated, and impoverished realize the presence of God when we understand that “every moment is the beginning of a new creation.” Creation did not begin and end in seven days; those days are just symbolic of the Truth that “[w]herever there is the evidence of creative action, there God is.”
“God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” We experience God through our expressions of the creative source. We are a living expression of God.
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This audio tape is an excerpt from the studied chapter “OVERCOMING YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Last night, I was watching Will Smith’s movie Collateral Beauty, about a man who loses his only child, a daughter who was only six years old, and the pain that he grows through in order to return to himself. The movie raises the question what is “collateral beauty”? We always talk about collateral damage, the negative secondary or by-product of an accident, catastrophe or tragedy that brings additional pain, hurt, injury, and suffering. But we never talk about collateral “beauty,” which is, to me, the ability to see the glass half-full instead of half-empty, the ability to see the presence of God, even in the midst of messiness, turmoil and strife.
The movie Collateral Beauty focuses on three attributes, which in many respects reflect mind, body and soul: death, time and love.
The collateral beauty of our challenges is that they allow us to re-start, to re-invent, to re-create, to re-establish who we are – to get rid of the old so that the new can emerge. In John 8:51, Jesus says “Very truly I tell you, whoever obeys my word will never see death.” Nothing and no one can destroy the pure presence of Spirit expressing as us. So we get up from our mats and walk. We rise like a phoenix from the ashes. In three days, we find our temples restored.
It doesn’t matter what or who we are confronted with in the world, nothing or no one is too great for God. Even what others mean for evil, God means for good. As the scripture teaches us, the battle is not ours, it is God’s. No weapon formed against us shall prosper.
The collateral beauty of disaster or difficulty is that we can experience the fullness of the perfect divine order of life, realizing that despite appearances, we are in our right space at our right time.
Collateral beauty is more difficult to see because we are distracted from seeing the good everywhere present, the birth of Spirit all around us, the widow’s oil that keeps pouring, the baskets of fish and bread left over. The Psalmist says (27:4) “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.”
So even when we are blinded by the events and transgressions of the world, through their impact, we are given a new vision: one that allows us to see God in every word, every breath, every event, and every circumstance.
Or I can step out into the sunlight of a new day, a day that I have never seen before. I can release the baggage of yesterday. I can climb a new mountain and cross the waters of new faith, realizing that this, too, shall pass, but more importantly, that this – whatever this is, is the blessing of collateral beauty: a small crack in the universe, where I can see God.
Where do I start, some might ask.
The Chief of Fire Operations would say throw away your script and your PowerPoint and just let them see the spirit of who you are and listen to why change is important: how even the most conservative of us, the most hopeful of us, the most amazing of us, the most loving of us are all agents of change.
The courage of change stands at the edge of redemption, the fear of falling, the blackness of fire, the lost of hope, the roof of abandon and catches you just before you go over the edge of the abyss and holds you there beyond politics, beyond bigotry, beyond religion, and sees you as neither mind nor body but soul and r
The wall of blame, the wall of distance, the wall of hatred, the wall of envy, the wall of false pride, the wall of lies, the wall of resistance, the wall of fear has got to come down, so we can really see that we are one, despite our differences.
In his book Fidelity, Thich Nhat Hanh says “[i]n true love, you don’t exclude anyone. . . . Loving one person is an opportunity to love everyone. The deepest gift mindfulness can bring is the wisdom of nondiscrimination.” 
thing — we must love one another.
TAOISTS SAY: No one is a believer until he loves for his neighbor, and for his brother, what he loves for himself.
the universe and used by the universe to be loving, it does not matter what we call God. Nor does it matter who we love or who we help because we realize that we are One.
The true gift for Christmas does not come in wrapping paper. We keep seeking from merchants what we can only find in ourselves, and that is the Spirit of a love that blesses without condition.
traditions that no longer serve us, that we abandon the contradictions of a world that excludes due to politics and positions that are personal and embrace a new world that is unlimited in a love that uplifts the unique contributions of everyone.
On February 2, 2006, Anita Moorjani experienced death after cancer devoured her body over four years, and she found herself in a state of pure joy and jubilation – without fear, anxiety, helplessness or despair. She describes this beautiful feeling of death as a complete healing – where she was encompassed by pure, unconditional love, and energy that healed her completely. What she experienced is the love that embraces each and everyone of us. Paul said that we live, move and have our being in love.
being pure love is the same knowledge that a baby begins with, in a voice that we have long forgotten, which says I am love. In the Spirit, we are unbounded by time and space, untouched by experience.” This baby is the pure energy of Christ born in us.
This is the season not merely to give a wrapped gift or a store-bought card but to begin the practice of looking all all whom we meet and say I love you, realizing that in that love, we find ourselves because every real love story is a story about oneness.
because I accept you expressing as you; not because you are willing to conform for me but because I am willing to accept you by respecting, accepting and even honoring your differences.
God is a Brown Girl Too 