Walking the Path: Am I Called? Live the Questions.

I've been digging through dozens of blog posts over at Patheos' Pagan Channel. There are so many different perspectives within the neopagan community (which, if you want to use the "large umbrella" sense of the term, includes Wiccans, Goddess devotees, and others). I find it exciting to encounter all of these points of view, and to consider them seriously and thoughtfully as I work out my own sense of the path I'm on, why I'm on it, etc.

Over at Heathen At Heart on Patheos, Molly Khan's recent post spoke to a concern that I've been muddling over for a while. One of the prevailing ideas that I've encountered among explicitly polytheist neopagans is the notion that we don't choose to worship the Gods, they choose us, call us, or pester us until we recognize them. One of my first blog posts on this subject jokingly used the metaphor of Eris "tailgating me" until I "switched lanes," but that's all it was - a metaphor. I consider myself spiritually tone-deaf, for the most part. Switching to the pagan path for me is a choice; the symbol system fits, the cosmology and ritual gives form to a set of existential and philosophical principles that I (more or less) consider to be valid.

Khan's blog post, while pushing back against the growing normative model of a "call" from the Gods, still spoke of a sense of connection, an implicit feeling of a numinous/sacred sense that only later in her life she came to recognize as Nerthus, the Norse goddess of the Earth. She ends the post with the suggestion to "Honor who you will, and don’t wait for deities to come knocking down your door – the choice is yours."

While I really appreciate the suggestion that it's ok to seek out a Deity and start seeking a relationship with Them, I still have this niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Modern (and probably Paleo-) Paganism is very much about experience. In Jordan Paper's Polytheological work, The Deities Are Many, he points out the much-echoed sentiment among other Pagans that "Faith is both meaningless and irrelevant. We know what we experience; it takes no leap of faith to assume the reality of deities we have directly encountered. [...] Arising from encounters in rituals, visions, and so forth, our acceptance of the validity of the experienced deities is absolutely no different, except more certain, than knowledge gained from sensory experiences." (p. 13-14)

Remember when I said I consider myself spiritually tone-deaf? Perhaps it's my Protestant upbringing, but I don't think I've ever had a "sacred experience." Perhaps once or twice while singing lyrics that felt profoundly true, but they were very difficult to interpret. I've spent so long studying the sacred experiences of others, I think I may have stunted the growth of my own ability to have those experiences myself!

While reading Khan's post, I found myself thinking back to my childhood. (Queue future post about memory dynamics and their importance to identity - until I write it, you should check out this fine post over at Aedicula Antinoi.) I don't often think back that far. My mental space is generally filled to capacity by a number of simultaneously running "programs," most of which inevitably end up slowing down my processing speed. Inevitable result: Absent-Minded Professor Syndrome. (I actually dislike computational metaphors for the brain, but this seems to work. But I digress!)

I thought back to my early teens, when I would spend hours hiking alone in the scrub-brush-covered hills of my hometown, climbing rocks and letting myself wander. I'd let myself get lost, or "pixie-led" as I used to call it. (Thanks Ari Berk and Brian Froud.)  When I got old enough, I'd ride my horse alone over the hills, through the washes, and over fields. My horse was old - nearly 30 and well-retired from his previous life as an endurance racer - but he and I had adventures like you wouldn't believe. I was in-tune with the natural world in ways that I can't even fathom anymore. One day, when my father and sister went out for a ride and didn't return home at the expected time, I attempted to track them, with a fairly decent degree of success (they returned home before I caught up with them).

All that changed when I went to college. I spent so much time in my head and indoors, that I lost touch with that world-sense, that connection to other beings beyond my human community. Even though I started studying religion, I now believe that I actually lost my capacity for religion. I assumed that religion required belief, and that this faith thing was about assent to doctrines on the basis of revealed scripture. (Protestant baggage) I never learned, in the first place, that spirituality and religion were (or should be) primarily rooted in one's experience of the Sacred. As I lost my sense for connection to the world around me, I didn't realize that I was, in fact, losing my religion. What I mistook for a failure in belief was really an experience of belief that failed to correlate with any meaningful experience.

It didn't help that I started to struggle with anxiety and depression as an undergraduate, which inhibited my ability (or even desire) to feel anything at all. I retreated into intellectual hyper-space and rode a knowledge-high all the way through graduate school, where I continued to study religion! It was in graduate school that I came into contact with Process theology/philosophy, with my first queer friends, and with parts of myself that I didn't know existed. The inner landscape of my own being terrified me; I stuck to "eh, I do what I do, I don't need to know who I really am" for some time. But the intellect-high was becoming unsustainable, and by the time I finished my M.A., that constant chasing of the "high" had failed to produce any of the expected results or benefits. I failed to get into any PhD programs. I floundered. My "Self" was entirely a product of my intellectual pursuits and capacities. If those pursuits and capacities failed to meet the (arbitrary, commercialized, socially-determined) markers of worthiness and value, then what value did I have? Zip. None. Zilch.

I got as low as I've ever been.

I started teaching, floundering still, and doubly-smacked by my former failings and my ongoing incompetence as a new teacher. Let's just say, it's taken a LOT of work to claw my way out of that hole. I think I've escaped (for the most part), but there's a difference between recognizing that you've stunted your emotional/spiritual growth and actually growing emotionally and spiritually.

I tried to pick up on Christian practices again, hoping that some of those flashes of feeling and connection I had previously experienced would start to fill the void.

They didn't. It isn't that the Christian symbol-system isn't "true" enough, or beautiful enough, or meaningful enough. That's what makes it all so frustrating; I understand Christianity extraordinarily well. It IS beautiful, meaningful, and "true" (in a sense). But now that I'm letting stunted parts of me grow, I find that the framework, the trellis, offered by Christianity (of various brands and flavors) no longer supports me. As a child, I thought I was a tomato. As it turns out, I'm climbing jasmine! (Or vice versa. This metaphor is extraordinarily superficial. Gardening metaphors are not my strong suit.)

But what is the right framework? How do I know which system "fits" best? My intellect keeps trying to form a logical argument, some kind of justification for why one is better than another. But now I know, or at least have a sense of, the fact that you don't "choose" a symbol system purely by intellect alone. You've got to let your vines reach out and grab onto those frames which best support them. It's a blind reach, but once you've got a firm hold, you know whether it will support you or not. The system I'm currently investigating (best described by the articles on the Ar nDraoicht Fein website) feels right. It doesn't just conform to certain intellectual positions (Process Philosophy being the strongest one). It clicks with deep needs and sensibilities, for reasons I can't quite articulate.

Is that the same as a "call"? I'm not sure. I'm not very good at this "heeding experience" thing. "Feeling" itself is difficult for me. But I know, deep down, that seeking to answer this question is worthwhile. The Pagan path has offered me the best tools I have encountered for doing so. Of course, it can't all be about the "answers." As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote,

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

A New Year, a New Path (Or how the Goddess of Chaos tailgated me until I moved over into the right lane.)

Wow. Why did I abandon this blog? Possibly because I had Tumblr for a while, then I fucked up so badly that I left under a cloud of ignominy. I felt thrashed by the unfortunate situation that caused me to leave, and spent a lot of time agonizing over it. I did not then realize that those events, which I could only see as disastrous at the time, were in fact important omens of things to come.

During graduate school, I had been introduced to the Mysteries of Eris by a good friend. The Paratheo-Anametamystikhood of Eris Esoteric (or POEE) and the Principia Discordia seemed at the time to be silly and just for fun, even if they also offered up a particularly apt and helpful way of understanding Reality. I found appeals to Eris and Discordian philosophy to be helpful as I made sense of the challenges of graduate school, the collapse of my ego after PhD program rejections, and the unique, exquisitely painful realities of adjunct teaching.

I've been teaching undergraduates as an adjunct lecturer for one and a half years now. During that time, the seeds of doubt and confusion planted in me during graduate school began to blossom. I've studied religion for eight years, I told my students, but I still don't a) really know what it is, nor do I b) actually know what I believe. I started out as a Lutheran Protestant. Then, through an academic exposure to Greek & Coptic Orthodoxy, I fancied myself a mystic with a deep appreciation for High Liturgy. (I mean, hey, who doesn't appreciate High Church liturgy?) Discordianism, Existentialism, Process philosophy/theology, and a few attempts at teaching World Religions then spun me around so fast I hardly knew which way was up.

While I taught, many things changed: I had to stop and actually check in with myself, rather than flutter about in the realm of intellectual potentiality. I finally figured out my sexuality. (Asexual!) By extension, my gender-identity came into question. (Agender? Gender-Queer? IDFK.) I suppose the religion question was due to come back around eventually.

Enter Eris.

A few days ago, I made use of Discordian metaphors in a comical, cultural-critique performed at an eclectic artists' salon in Los Angeles, put on by San Peña Producciones. According to the feedback I got after the show, it worked. It worked really well. Not only was I actually funny (go figure!), but they got it. I started to feel that Eris' chaos-power was a useful way to think and talk about the absurdity of claims to the objective truth-value of particular models of the Order of Reality. Orders (or paradigms, or models, etc.) are never objectively verifiable or "True," but they can be evaluated - by their effects. Some Orders are more beautiful than others. Some are more likely to lead humans to responsible, ethical behavior than other models.

Suddenly, I didn't feel so anxious about picking a model.

Sometimes, it takes an experience of Chaos to push (poke, prod, provoke, prick, etc.) us into adopting more authentic, more genuine, more beautiful models of Order. Sometimes, Chaos bites us in the ass if we linger too long between Orders, refusing (out of laziness) to adopt one. Refusing to adopt an Order doesn't make you more "tolerant" or more "enlightened" than anyone else; it casts you adrift; it removes you from a context; it leads you into apathy; it disorders your relationships with others an the world. Order is as necessary as Chaos. Chaos isn't evil, nor is Order. I tend to value Chaos over Order, generally because I associate Order with domination or control. But this doesn't need to be the case. Only shitty and ill-conceived Orders/Frameworks/Paradigms lead to Domination. The trick is to recognize that Order and Chaos are not separate "things," but potentialities inhering in all human beings. We are the bridges between Chaos and Order, and with those two powers we can make the world. But we most do so carefully, with a deep sense of responsibility for the consequences of that Order, for ourselves as well as for others - human and non-human, as well as for the planet.

....

So what is the Order for me? What Framework will I adopt as I step out onto a new Path, one hopefully characterized by careful, well-intentioned steps, a clear goal, and a sense of responsibility?
I love Christianity. Truly. If this seems in doubt, realize that I've spent the last 8 years studying it, and four of those were spent almost exclusively obsessed with MONKS. Really. I learned two dead languages to try to better understand these amazing people from the past.

But as I've been kicked about by Chaos and its many minions, as I have started to integrate the vast amount of data I have accumulated about religion over the years (that's going to take a while!), I have found that the monotheistic, creedal paradigm just doesn't work for me anymore. I don't know if it ever really did, or if I was just fooling myself. (As a counterpoint, Eris would fart in my face and chortle: "You're ALL just fooling yourselves!")

I had the great pleasure to attend two rituals held by my local Druid grove, affiliated with Ar nDraiocht Fein, or ADF. I went out of sheer academic curiosity during Imbolc and had a ball. The second time was for their Skirophoria ritual, a Greek "first-fruits" celebration. This second ritual happened the day AFTER my Discordian-themed rant at the San Peña salon. A friend of mine from graduate school and her BF were there as well. Unlike me, they have long identified with neo-pagans.

In the midst of the dance offering, one of the offering bowls to the omphalos (axis mundi/World Tree) was overturned. An apple was kicked aside, and I swear, when that apple rolled, it was like a flash bang. It knocked me back, blinded me, deafened me; but in that dark silence there was a ringing in my ears then a faint laughter. Gotchya Bitch! ... Thanks, Eris.

If you know anything about the myth of the Apple of Discord, the apple was the equivalent of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for the ancient Greek world. It helped kick off the Trojan War. The instant I picked up the apple, I shared a horrified look with my friend. HOLY SHIT. Was this a sign?

Now, if you know me, you know that I don't put much stock in "woo woo" stuff. Really. I'm pretty skeptical. I also happen to be spiritually tone deaf. But in this moment, when the Gates were open and the Sacred Space centered us all within a truly meaningful Cosmos ... I felt connected.

So you know what? Maybe Gods and Goddesses do exist. Maybe they don't. But what I do know is that in my initial studies into the cosmology and assumptions held by the ADF, I finally feel like I've found an Order that centers me. So I'm going to read my ADF guide. I'm going to work with and support my local Grove. I'm going to pray, which is something I haven't done in nearly a year. Not just that, but I'm going to follow the ADF's Order of Ritual for the Solitary as I pray. This former-Protestant is going full Catholic Pagan!

You know what? I'm actually excited. For the first time in a while, I've got a path. Why not walk for a while, enjoy the scenery, and see where it goes?