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Overwhelmed with Thoughts of Jesus

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I’m overwhelmed with thoughts of Jesus.

Jesus and God and Christianity and the Lord’s Prayer and compassion and forgiveness and hope and judgement and freedom from judgement and all of the things which made (and make) me feel connected to the Sacred.

I don’t know what to do with all of this.

andormix _ Jesus

It started when I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk next to her shopping cart. She was filthy and small, and she looked deeply tired. Bringing her food I asked,

“How are you?”

She looked up at me, a bit surprised at having been spoken to or asked after. She thought for a moment.

“I’m recovering,” she said somberly.

My heart broke a little. It wasn’t the response I expected. It was so vulnerable, and honest. Her statement felt unfathomably large, as though she was recovering from all of the things that had ever been done to her.

She seemed grateful for the attention, and for the food.

“God bless you,” she said, sincerely.

My heart broke some more.

I headed off, feeling heavier in my boots.

Further down the path, I heard the call of a crow. I looked up and saw it sitting on top of a telephone pole. I thought of the Morrigan.

“Remember me.“

I felt a bit jarred. The crow seemed to take notice, and then began to fly.

I walked in the direction of the crow, uncertain. Walking in the other direction on the opposite side of the street was a man holding a book under his arm. There was a yarmulka on his head. He looked at me, probing. Are you a part of my tribe? I looked similar to many of the Orthodox men walking through the neighborhood, but not an exact match. Close, but not close enough.

The words sink a little deeper.

Am I a part of his tribe?

There is this dialogue running in me that keeps returning to the religion of my youth and young adulthood; to the man who was the subject of so many of my conversations. There is also my Paganism, built and cultivated over the past four or five years. It is young and lacking the same kind of deep root system I developed in my Christianity, but it is still a part of me now.

My Druidic studies are calling me to look at the world as an enchanted, alive, vibrant and magical place. There’s a shortage of that perspective these days. Meditating on these ideas brings me peace. But then I see someone who is broken, or damaged, or simply doing their best to not fall apart, and I think back to the lessons of compassion and kindness I learned in the Church. I feel compelled to love other people without reservation. I feel compelled to offer them respite. I feel compelled to feed them, to care for them, to treat them with dignity and respect.

These are the desires that rise up out of my memories of the Lord’s Prayer, or the stories of Jesus. These are the principles that I valued about my Christianity.

And I don’t know what to do with all of this reflection, or how to talk about it. I don’t think I’m becoming a hard-core or born again Christian, or even a Christo-Pagan. But there is a softening inside of me that feels directly connected to Jesus and to the language of mystical and contemplative Christianity.

Just the other day, after a similar encounter with an old woman on the street in Portland, I had the thought —

“I’m going to go ahead and believe in God.”

The thought came into my head before I could censor it.

A few days later I polished a Celtic cross that I’d picked up a few years back. It’s a replica of one I saw on pilgrimage in Ireland, the place where I first found Brighid. I hung the cross around my neck beside my Awen and acorn pendants. It’s still hanging there at this moment.

So there’s this softening to Jesus, and a confusion about what that means, and — in no small way — a concern about how this occurrence will be perceived by others.

Will Pagans see this as proof that I was never really one of them? Will Christians see this as proof that God is calling me back to the Church?

 

Photo by  Isaac Torrontera

Caught Up in the Flow: What I Believe

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Flow

This is less a journal of my proclamations as it is a record of my process.

I am figuring it out as I go.

If you think you’ve already got it figured out, my writing may likely rub you the wrong way.

Over the past several days I’ve been in the midst of what my husband identified as a “post-modern dilemma.” Everything is up in the air, it seems. Nothing feels grounded, or imbued with clear and certain purpose. Relevance is fuzzy. I find myself looking at the sea of ideas before me and thinking, “But what’s the point? What of all this is actually meaningful?”

My husband, who listens patiently as my heart-rate and pitch climb in tandem, suggested that I work a little to hash out my beliefs. My own beliefs.

Not the architecture of the system I’m operating in. Not the beliefs of most ADF Druids, or the beliefs of hard and soft polytheists, monists, superhero-devotees or chaos magicians.

Mine.

When I recently told a new acquaintance, who has been active in the Pagan community for a long time, that Pagans were a “people of practice, more so than a people of belief,” she said,

“Are you kidding me? Really? Pagans concerned with practice? That’s not been my experience.”

Perhaps we’re not what I think we are.

I don’t talk about belief much. I dodge the questions, sometimes. My mother asked me what I believed during a conversation about me being a Pagan, and I tried to give her a general overview of the things that Pagans believe.

It was a total cop-out.

I think most of us avoid talking about belief. When we do talk about it, we run the risk of being barked at, being told we’re wrong, being alienated, or being scolded. Beliefs, Ian Corrigan once told me, are just opinions. I’m not sure I agree with him. Beliefs feel more intimate than opinions. Beliefs nudge up against the places where we’re most vulnerable.

So what do I believe?

I’m going to give it a go at explaining it here. I’ll write without stopping for three minutes and see what happens.

Ready…

Go.

 ____________

I believe that we’re all connected. I believe that the human heart is king, and that the focus on the divine over the human is a mistake. I believe it’s backwards to establish a religion that’s based on the gods first, because we are human, and the act of being human is all we have to reference. We cannot be certain about much of anything, and to build a religious practice around the things that we are least certain about seems foolish, and fearful in a way.

I believe that it’s easier to be dogmatic than to be honest about the things you don’t know. I believe that there are people in every religious tradition who want to assert that they know what the gods want, and that a lot of hard polytheists are the ones doing that now. I believe that the hard polytheists who are railing against the soft and fluffy Pagans are sounding a lot like the monotheists that many of them detest so much.

I believe that I’m Pagan, but sometimes I think that I’m more of a lowercase “p” pagan; that my religious life is a construct, an artifice, a choice.

I believe that if we all were more aware that what we’re doing in our religious life is a choice, we might be a little less inclined to lash out at one another when we realize they’ve made a different choice than we have.

I believe that every idea we have about the divine is a choice. I believe that hard polytheism is a choice, as is soft polytheism and all the other -isms. I believe that it’s right to acknowledge that because your religious life is a choice, there is a possibility that your views are not completely accurate.

I believe that accuracy is not the most important component of a religious life.

I believe that authenticity is more important than accuracy.

I believe that if your tradition is not fostering something authentic in you, you should leave. Or stay, if you feel that staying and working to represent yourself is authentic.

I believe that the seed of wisdom is in all of us, and if there was anything that was like the God that I knew as a child, it is this. It may not be sentient, and it may not be the creator of the universe, but there is something in my heart that is like the thing in your heart, and if this thing could be awakened in us, we might recognize it in each other.

I believe that everything we do in our life should foster the awakening of that seed of fire in our hearts.

Everything.

 ____________

Ok. That was more like 7 minutes.

My first question, which seems a little funny to me, is:

What does that make me?

Somehow I’m conditioned to be something, and I’m not sure that’s the point.

I am expression.

I am caught up in the flow.

That’s what I am.

And, sustaining that — being the expression of this long list of things I believe — seems like the truest task ever set before me.

Where Does Belief Belong?

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I’m having a difficult time identifying the right place for belief.

I was brought up a Christian. Episcopalian, to be specific. Belief, for me, was connected to creeds. If you’ve never recited a creed, it goes like this:

I believe X, and X is this. X did this, was this, is going to be this.

I also believe in Y. Y is this relationship to X, and Y is this.

I believe in Z, too…

It’s a little math-like, when you remove all the personal pronouns.

Creeds are useful in the way that they unify a group, but they do little to inform the individual about beliefs. I didn’t really come to the believe in “One God” through any mystical experience. There just always was One. It was the first line of the creed, after all.

This morning I had a somewhat spirited conversation about the commonly held belief in certain Christian sects that the world is somewhere in the vicinity of 6-8000 years old. The notion raises my hackles a bit. An Earth timeline is nowhere to be found in the creeds of my youth, and it wasn’t something that ever came up in a sermon, either. We didn’t use the Bible to determine the age of rocks.

But, my resistance to this Christian belief was called into question. How could I, someone who has encountered a god that I believe to be Arawn, the Welsh god of the Underworld — which is quite specific an assessment for something so illusive as Deity — take issue with anything that someone else believes? Where exactly do I draw the line between empirical thinking and magickal thinking?

Schooled On Belief

I’m taking a class right now through Cherry Hill Seminary, a Pagan Seminary in North Carolina, called, “Why Magickal Thinking Isn’t Crazy.” The class is being taught by a Harvard schooled physicist, who is also a Wiccan. It’s a four week course that’s open to anyone, regardless of your level of education or experience.

We’ve been engaging a lot with the principles of scientific thinking in the first two weeks, looking at how information is gathered, calculated and researched. Magickal thought and practice, as we’re examining is, can be understood to encompass phenomenon that exist inside and outside of Pagan culture, including Meditation, Prayer, Remote Viewing, Psychokinesis, and Channeling.

The purpose of looking at things scientifically is to show that these phenomenon are real. They are measurable — at least, most of them — and they should be given legitimacy.

I’m mostly having an easy time with this class, but I’m running into some issues with reconciling imperial thought with magickal though. It turns out I’m more inclined to be a binary thinker than I would have guessed.

I want to say, without reservation, that the world is older than 8000 years. I also want to accept, whole-heartedly, that people can communicate with gods. I resist thinking that the world is 8000 years old because there is empirical evidence that speaks to the contrary. Yet, there is little to no empirical evidence that speaks to the existence of Deity in any form — singular or plural — and yet I have no problem with accepting my own personal experience.

Belief as a Catylst

Belief informs action. We believe something about the world, and then we relate to the world based on what we believe. If we believe that the world is constantly being held together by super-strong, invisible, winged and sparkly creatures, then we might live our lives giving thanks to those creatures. We might be on the lookout for them. Our actions, in many situations, would be informed by this belief.

I’m ok with that, even though I don’t hold that belief. I don’t see the potential for immediate harm done to me by another person holding that belief either.

But then I start thinking about the belief that some have the Deity bestows power, and that that power is being directed to a certain end. I’ve seen this in Christian circles (as has anyone been paying attention to the media these days), and I’ve seen it in Pagan circles, too. I was at a Full Moon ritual where the group raised energy and directed it to the universe in order to “bring to justice” a person who had inflicted harm on another person who was said to be “one of our own.” The working wasn’t explicitly malicious, but it had some ugly undertones.

People who do magick, who direct energy in a certain way, are operating on a set of beliefs about how that energy works in the world, and how it should work in the world. So, belief and action are connected there, too.

But should they be? What are we to do with belief, especially considering that belief has proven to be much more a divider than a uniter among peoples?

Should we throw belief to the wind, or can we imagine engaging with belief in a way that still allows for us to live in the world with people who believe something completely different than us?

I want to know what you think about belief. Do you see your belief influencing the way you interact with others? Did you come to your belief through a religious upbringing, or did you construct your beliefs outside of religion? Do you experience personal conflict when you encounter someone whose beliefs are radically different than you own?

Leave your thoughts and beliefs in the comment section. And, if you’d like to expand the conversation even further, share this post on Facebook and Twitter!