Description
Cobalt: The Blue Zone takes you with me on my journey to becoming a Spiritual Baptist Mother and leader of The Margaret Ryan Spiritual Sanctuary. It explores my journey of becoming a Spiritual Baptist and traces the growth and development of the Spiritual Baptist Faith as a Faith Tradition established by ex-enslaved exposed to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
The history of the Spiritual Baptist Faith and the source of its essence as a spiritual force in the Caribbean region is central to the narrative. The everyday workings of the faith, what is Spiritual Baptist spirituality, and importantly the struggles of these former enslaved Africans with defining a new Faith Tradition that marries their African spirituality with the doctrine of Jesus Christ also form part of the exposition.
As a Spiritual Baptist practitioner, I have not been blessed with what many practitioners call spirit/spiritual work experiences. What this means is that before the Holy Spirit began to reveal specific spiritual rituals to me, I had little experience witnessing spiritual workers at work: healing, removing curses, responding to spiritual wickedness or helping people with various issues in their lives through the application of spiritual responses.
Despite having the blessing of a mother who was a Spiritual Baptist healer and worker, as a practicing Spiritual Baptist myself, I was only interested in the Bible and its contents. For the more than 36 years of being baptized, I have loved and served God and tried to follow His guidance. During that time, I recognized that His gift to me was pastoring and dedicated my life to that calling. Over time, the Holy Spirit planted messages and ideas into my spirit but I only began writing them down when He gave me the direction to set up The Academy of Grace in 2006.
With this mandate from God, and unsure how this would become a reality, I began to work harder at my prayer life and discovered through my Mourning journeys that I needed to learn how to better hone my spiritual senses so that I could hear from God, how to recognize that He was speaking to me, and how to record and decipher His messages. That journey over the years led me to begin writing down my encounters with the Holy Spirit, especially those which were instructing me to take specific actions which involved spiritual rituals, since these were new to me.
The Holy Spirit was always communicating with me, but the flashes I received, I dismissed as my imagination. It is only when I began to work on my spiritual sense of smell, hearing, sight and taste that I was able to decipher the Holy Spirit in communication with me.
Out of these communications, I was guided to carry out several special rituals related to my experiences at the time, each being revealed as God prepared me for my role as leader of the Margaret Ryan Spiritual Sanctuary. This book is a result of the Holy Spirit's direction to write about my spiritual experiences. The title came from the Holiest of Holies. Cobalt: The Blue Zone.