The Fall of the Titans by Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1596–1598)
In most mythologies there
is an awesome place where we are told that gods and monsters, Olympians and Cyclopes, Israelites and
Philistines, are not diametrically opposed, but all related. Gaia gives birth
to the Titans and the Cyclopes. Noah is the ancestor of Israel and Egypt
What if we came back to
the place where we acknowledged our spiritual families as being wide and
diverse as our actual blood families? What if we based the links we feel to
others, not on like mindedness, but on the love we barely dare to speak and the
need that defines our human condition? What if, after the last two thousand
years of governing our various cults of religion, ethics and politics on
exclusion, we began—not naively, but with honest discomfort—to acknowledge
how little we know, how much we need each other, and how multifaceted are our
many intersecting alliance of culture and belief?
Tonight, for the first
time in a long time we had a great Wednesday night worship service. One tribute
to faith of my fathers, or mothers, really, is that Wednesday night and Saturday
night are special nights of worship and or ritual. But both my Saturdays and my
Wednesdays had become pretty static, predictable, affairs to be gone through
but not transformed by. Stagnancy creeps in this way. We don’t mean for it to. What
I still love about the Wednesday and Sunday night first services is that they
are very Catholic and still connect me to all the people who worship as I
worshipped in the church that I was born into. Catholicism not as something
agreed to cerebrally, but as the gift of a way one was born into. That is how
most people knew religion until the Protestant reformation, and though some
shun this, it has a great value, that no matter what my beliefs and how I
adjust them, no matter how far I or other go, we are still part of this people
in the same way that Albert Einstein, Freud and Baal Shem Tov can still, with
no doubt, call themselves Jews.
But what was wonderful
about the later services and which I had lost in the last few months, was that
they were not only largely ecumenical, but even evangelical, drawing on all
sorts of services and lessons from people all over the world, praying and worshipping,
singing with all manner of people, some—no many—whose views I often find
problematic to say the very least. In my
solitary work I am dealing in very specific ways with my personal deities and
my own revelations. I am working my own private path, but even that is not
truly private. The deity is invoked, and unlike Christianities insistence on
the three being one, I allow the many faces of God to be just that, many—the
Gods. The spirits are invoked, the ancestors as well as the descendants unborn
and the I know not whats. Some people reading this are invoked, and all
blessed. And that is in solitary work.
But on Wednesdays and
Saturdays, I am putting myself in communion with I don’t know who as well, and
also I am putting myself in communion with those I know all too well, eating
holy bread and holy wine with those who are not as liberal as me, those who are
not as ready for change as me, those who have a different view of change, not
simply my crowd but the crowd that is opposed to me. In usual life I would tie
myself to the pagan or pagan friendly, the queer, the leftists, the occult and
forget all those who wounded me or simply frustrated me in the past whom I
cannot stand beside for very long. In every day working, because I must, I turn
away from the views of God I was brought up with as well as those who view God
in that way. And yet, the older I get the more I must admit, not because of a
reasoned out and cerebral belief, but because of those I am linked to and the
words I was brought up with, I am on the continuum of many groups I don’t often
have much to do with, still linked to my Catholicism, still even linked to my
Evangelical teenage years. It is as tempting for witches as for evangelicals to
pretend that they are in the chosen and important family with certain knowledge
that no one else has, but the Saturday and midweek services take me to a place
of sacred discomfort. On those nights I am united to people who do not agree
with me at all, who would not love me, or understand me, who I do not love and
who would not love those I love. I am uniting with people who sang these songs
and prayed to this God but had no room for me. Not by handholding or pretending to agreement, but merely by still breathing, I remain united with the places and the people I have walked
away from.
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