Lent: Stirring the Cauldron

from Patheos: "The Lenten Season" by the Corner Crone

I’m not the first person to write about a Witchly Lent. The link between a regenerative season bridging winter and spring and the season which links Christmas to Easter is too strong as is the link which binds a time like Easter not only to Passover but other festivals that might be regarded as pagan or “witchly”. But anyone who has a witch’s Lent probably grew up Catholic or something close to it, and in keeping Lent you are also looking at things that have been around you your whole life, evaluating them, examining, re examining, picking up and putting down.

            I came to a witch’s Lent slowly, hesitant of its Catholicism. After all, wasn’t that what I was trying to walk away from?But as the Craft and my life become more about walking toward something than walking away from things, this changes. As my life becomes more about being truthful and less about being this thing: a writer, or a Catholic, or a teacher or a witch, lines blur.

It is in the place of blurred lines we can re examine things we’ve gotten used to, or things that long troubled us. I listen to the Church readings and prayers for Lent. Test them for depth, am sometimes surprised at how one note they can be:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent….

“Lord, great and awesome God,
you who keep your merciful covenant toward those who love you
and observe your commandments!
We have sinned, been wicked and done evil;
we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.
We have not obeyed your servants the prophets,
who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes,
our fathers, and all the people of the land.
Justice, O Lord, is on your side;
we are shamefaced even to this day…

we, the men of Judah, the residents of Jerusalem,

Be mericul or lord, for we have sinned….

Now, I want to be clear. There are some self indulgent strains of the Craft (or of everything for that matter) which flatten out troubles, ignore that which troubles and concentrate on the pleasant, but I don’t practice this way. Any serious practitioner of anything knows repentance has a place, true enough, but such groveling and self abasement cannot be the only or a healthy facet of the way that we deal with the Divine.  Even as I look at these Lent  passages there are several which are about renewal and about return.  The very word repentance means to turn around. The witch before her cauldron might be reminded not only to turn around, but to “stir around”. In the spiral dance, in the treading of the mill and the tracing of the star we are not only turning for ritual, but turning as the reminder that this earth, so hard and frozen and old and perhaps even bereft of nutrients needs to be stirred up. Our lives are one with the winter earth, settled into one thing, our collective focus dimmed by long stints of looking at the same thing over and over again. We all need to be stirred up, for though as witches we are committed to this change, as frail people change scares us. Here is the first focus of the witch’s Lent.