Dreaming the Future Closer

Someone I know made an interesting point recently: one of the problems confronting those of us in and on the margins of modern polytheism is the tendency to overstate the success of our ritual work.  While we may be quick to reach out with comfort, prayers, and ritual work when a friend faces difficulties, we are not good at confessing the difficulties we have with our prayer and ritual work.

There’s a structural denial that often goes on here.  We are surrounded by a community that treats our faith as fluffy, so much imaginary play, that we feel compelled to prove the contrary to them, to others practicing like us, to ourselves.  Confessing that we have difficulties connecting to divinities, that we sometimes question our motives for ritual work has come to be equated with confessing that we are not sincere, that our faith is delusion.

But that denial must be overcome.  The inability to face it corrupts our practice, dulls our insight, weakens our community.  We need to rediscover the scale of spiritual difficulties that are part of our life.  Ritual failure is not a sign that we are in delusion or that the spiritis hate us.  It is a sign that we are in need of aid, that we must reassess our current path.

Denying that we have doubts, that we must stumble and fumble sometimes, is delusional and will damage our faith.  It introduces a powerful narcissism into our faith, makes of it a mere tool to our own comfort, an opiate.

It’s too easy to let our sense of the spiritual become narcissistic, like we are chosen and unique, and so deserve special privileges.  We don’t.  We live in the world, a small part of it, and need to appreciate that our faith is about being in that place to the best of our ability, channeling the sacred into it.

That’s a struggle more often than not.  Sometimes, it can be a good struggle, like honest labor.  Sometimes, it can be a rough, just hanging on struggle, like a starving woman clinging to life and hope for relief.

Sometimes, the work of ritual is necessary but uncomfortable.  Sometimes, the work of ritual is uncomfortable because unnecessary.  Whatever the case, though, we cannot support ourselves through ourselves.  By sharing that, by conversing with each other about it, we invite deeper wisdom, we invite the divine along with our fellows.

It’s about objectivity as I talked about in the last post, about coming to terms with the concrete life we are living, not an abstract fantasy of the life we want.  It’s not just about accepting it, but engaging with it, nurturing it. 

We can’t nurture each other when we can’t even be honest abut our most basic experiences.  If I delude myself about the efficacy of an offering, of a prayer, and then proceed to share that delusion, I nurture nothing.  If those people do the same, we, as a group, move further from each other and the world we live in. 

We need a true conception of what does and does not foster our spiritual maturity.  We need to appreciate, through honest talk, the real differences in what does and does not work for each individual, not for the sake of the individual alone, but for us.

In truth, faith isn’t about ‘us’ as individuals but ‘us’ as a group, as a community.  The us is about the creation and support of a community within the world, it’s about making a community of the world.  Not the world in the abstract sense, but in a concrete sense, with these people, with these spirits, with these tools, with these symbols, with these places.