Spirituality Training – Spirituality Exercise
1) My spiritual beliefs have actually shifted a great deal. I was born, baptized and raised Roman Catholic, but around the age of 14 or 15, I started to realize that the way I was practicing religion felt really hollow. I never felt close to the Divine while I was in church, but there was something while I was out in nature. I stopped going to church for about a year, and in that time, I started practicing Wicca. For a little over two years, I practiced, and never in my life had I felt closer to the Divine than I did then, but there was still something missing. Around the age of 17, I had a revelation that pulled me away from Wicca. In the Wiccan Rede, one of the tenets is “An’ it harm none, do what thou will”, which basically means that whatever magick work you do cannot harm anyone else. However, the entirety of Creation is part of a great Web, in essence, and anything you do affects the Web. Living causes little vibrations that cause gradual, gentle change, but magick work, like the spells I did to bring about job interviews or to help bring money towards the family, were like rocks thrown into a pond. Even if I did not directly cause harm to a person by sending negative magick their way, I may have caused someone to not get the job interview or caused someone to not get a raise because my mother got one. I could never find a way to work in a way that did not shake the Web, and I lost my way again. Only after I moved away from my family to live with my then-boyfriend (now fiancée) Daniel did I start to look for the divine beings I felt near me when the trials of life became too much. One night, in the midst of meditating, back before my brain discovered stuff to do when I was trying to get it to be quiet, I suddenly realized that one night a few years before, when I found out that my younger sister had been diagnosed with cancer, the entity that had come to me had feathered arms, and after a long run of soul-searching, research and my own personal feelings and the voice that had spoken to me, I realized that I had been calling out for a mother figure greater than my own, and Isis answered. Since then, I have worshipped the deities of the Egyptian pantheon, and it feels like I finally belong.
2) I know that I am doing the right thing when what I do is for more than just myself, at least in most cases. Sometimes, I do have to take care of myself, but I always act in respect for the laws of the land when those moments arise.
3) I believe that the fate of the soul after death is controlled not by the one ‘right’ religion, but rather by the beliefs of the person who died. This would mean that a Catholic or Christian would be going to Heaven or Hell, depending on their judgment at the Gates, but someone who believes in reincarnation would go through whatever paths before being reincarnated into their next life. I, for example, believe in the Egyptian concept of divinity, including all of the varied gods and goddesses, so when I die, I will have to survive the trials on the path to the room where my heart will be weighed against the feather of Ma’at. Though I will not be mummified, I do still need my body preserved for my heart to go with me into the underworld. Once the judgment has been made, however, what happens is where I differ. I remember bits and pieces of various previous lives, so I know that my soul has been reincarnated before. Here, my heart on the scales opposite Ma’at’s feather, the weighing will determine what kind of life I will live in next – should the feather be heavier, it will be a life closer to joining the Divine permanently, but should my heart weigh more, I will live through a life where I must make up for what happened in this life that made me guilty in the eyes of Ma’at and Her council. This links back to the idea of the multiplicity in understanding the Divine, as well as our own feelings on the matter. One thing that I feel very strongly about is this – while the Divine controls enough of the afterlife that certain things, such as the god or divines you must account your life to, are immutable, the path that one’s soul takes after death depends on the conviction that they held onto the tightest. (Yeah, I copied and pasted from my Creed assignment.)
4) No matter the name you use to call upon the Divine, nor the number of Divine Forms you believe in, from one to one million, it all is answered by the Great One Divine Force, an entity that is so great that he/she/it encompasses all of the things within Creation. Additionally, the entity is all things at once and is nothing, the very essence of the Infinite. Since the human brain cannot comprehend something so vast, we associate various names to it, be they male, female, animal, plant, or whatever else, and in many religions, the associations are made with multiple deities rather than just one. The Great Divine is like a diamond, with numberless facets, many of which you cannot see, and as such, there are many mysteries that encompass the powers and ways of the Divine. The reason that I came to understand this, aside from a great deal of psychic work I have done over the years, is seeing the people who pray to their particular deity, and the answers that they receive, the strength of faith, and the way that they, despite all the other faiths out there, believe so much that nothing can make them waver. Seeing that, it made me realize that there is a power up there greater than any one religion can explain. (Yeah, I did it twice.)
5) My spiritual practices include celebrating the eight solar festivals noted by most Pagan groups, which include four high solar festivals and four lesser solar festivals. The year starts and ends on Samhain (October 31st), which is the third of the Harvest Festivals. The next festival is Yule (Winter Solstice), which is a high solar festival. After that is Imbolc (February 2nd), Eostre (Spring Equinox), Beltaine (May 1st), Litha (Summer Solstice), Lughnasadh (August 1st, the first of the Harvest Festivals), and Mabon (Autumn Equinox, and second Harvest Festival). Besides that, there are daily prayers to the deities of my ‘inner sanctum’, or the five to whom I call upon in times of aid, such as house or personal protection spellwork. Each of the five is associated to one of the five elements on the Pentagram: Thoth to Air, Isis to Earth, Nekhbet to Water, Ma’at to Fire, and Horus to Spirit. Additionally, in times when those five cannot answer to my situation, such as dealing with the recent death in my family, I called upon Osiris to comfort me in my loss, knowing that, despite He not directly being the ones awaiting my great-uncle, He still knew of his death and provided the comfort I needed to get through this. There are other things that I can do, depending on the situation, but as I stated before, since great magickal work tends to really shake the Web, it is a rare case indeed when I do so.
Until next time,
May the Force be with you,
Padawan Tiphereth Amarandir
Something I remembered…
Well, I may have joined the Jedi group at the end of May, but that doesn’t mean that the work I did before then doesn’t count, especially when I’m not actually done with it. What I’m referring to in this case is the work I am doing with the Earth Spiritualists of Chicago (ESC) to create a Pagan Sunday School. We had, on 17 May 2009, a meeting of half a dozen members of the group where we dicussed what could be done to set up the curriculum and organization of a Pagan Sunday School. Initially, we would start with classes every month on the second Sunday before slowly working up towards twice a month, and then to every Sunday.
The topics covered during this meeting started off with the setting of goals for forming the school. These included the age ranges that we work with in the school, how and what we teach the kids, the importance of interpersonal communication and activities, and where we can go to help facilitate the various lessons that we want to teach. From there, we broke it down into smaller topics, such as the fact that while we are a NeoPagan organization and school, we will still focus our energies towards teaching respect for and fellowship with other religious groups and organizations, as well as non-religious practices, such as Yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, and other energetic practices that can be supplemented into the program so that were not bringing in just religious ideals. From there, we figured that the age brackets should be: Birth-2, 3-6, 7-10, 11-13, and 14-18, and from there, the 18+ members would be initiated into the ESC as formal members.
Even though the formal initiation isn’t until the members are 18, the Sabbat and Esbat festivals are still planned to have aspects that are geared towards the kids, as well as the adults. However, the festivals and the initiation are not the only means by which the children will be able to experience NeoPaganism, as we are also looking into coming up with modern coming-of-age ceremonies. Also, we will be planning various trips out to nature preserves and other wildlife areas in order to teach respect for the natural world, as well as how to work with nature during magickal rituals and such.
Another concern for the school is funding, but we’ve talked about using charity type benefits, such as bake sales, and arts/crafts fairs, as well as charging a nominal fee for the classes, either to be payed with money or paid off with services for the school, such as cleaning or teaching. Classes should run about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, and will alternate between periods of individual time and group play.
One of the most interesting things we discussed was the idea of a non-physical attendance where the students, during the opening circle, choose a rock, twig, or other natural physical representation for themselves, a piece of nature that “resonates” with their own energy, placed on the altar in the center of the main room to say to the cosmos, “I’m here”. Additionally, at the end of class, the students remove these representations, simillar to post-ritual grounding of energy and the dismissal of any spiritual or divine forces called to aid the ritual.
The other thing that I have participated in was a 12-hour workshop on various spiritual practices that connected into the “Solar Fire, Surging Waters” Summer Soltice/Esbat ritual planned for that night. Over the course of about an hour, the story was told of Isis’ journey to find the missing parts of her murdered husband, Osiris, and how she had called upon Ra to give her the strength to find him and restore him to life. Within this story, we were told that the power for change and the strength we need to survive, the “light of Ra”, is within us all, and that we just need to be able to look. As one group, the 50 or so of us danced and chanted, calling upon the power of the Divine to awaken the power within us. We asked for the blessings of the Sun, reflected in the lunar light, and the blessings of the waters of Earth, including the blood within us, to flow with the energy we need to begin another cycle of change.
I am not sure when there is another major ritual set up for the ESC, but there is another planned administrative meeting regarding the Sunday school some time in the middle of September.
Until then,
May the Force be with you,
Padawan Tiphereth
