a conversation

One of the main sources of conversation has been my relationship with monotheism in general. Many of my close friends get nervous when I sound too Christian or too Muslim. I think that Cat's statement from the quaker pagan blog resonates, "they get nervous when I go to christian events that I go "too native". My own conversation with Sufism in general has led me to a deeper appreciation of my own love for the earth based tradition that I am ingrained into, but has brought me into relationship with my ideas around God, forgiveness, grace and change. These areas have been areas of taboo for so long because they "smack" of ideas of worthlessness, sin, abominations and so forth that are the main reasons that many people leave Monotheism (intolerance aside). It isn't that people aren't wanting to be accountable in that context really, it is that the idea that our persons are worth less than a filthy rags gives them (and me) the hives. Later on they avoid accountability because of this very wounding from their previous religious situation.

It is interesting that even the term God or Lord (of which paganism has both!) can activate fear or distrust in the alternative faith communities. We have a dance of understanding / misunderstanding and avoidance of use of certain terms because they are loaded from our previous traditions.

My own healing around these terms often begins with a lot of anxiety, fear, trepidation and angst. When we begin to discuss a divine aspect of the Mono-God as being compassion and mercy, my immediate internal response is one of the ultimately mature "nu uh!" towards the right of center religious privilege. Surprised, I realized that my own innate person is still wounded from my church. Being a pastor at the church and trying to love people who were quite frankly intentionally unlovable and trying to figure out how to embody Christ-like love anyway can make one stiff at best and normally outright hostile. It's hard then to see how when there is an outright hostility to you, and what you feel like you actually stand for that God perhaps is at fault for not protecting you.

I have a personal parallel to this in another context: It's like this, when you are abused by your father, you are mad at your dad because it sucked, it didn't matter if you figured out how to make it okay, it still causes intimacy issues, relationship issues and trust issues. However, I was more angry at my mom, who knew about it didn't protect me and make it stop. She didn't divorce him, ask him to go away, and ultimately covered her own ass in the process holding her daughter accountable for this.

This is the same with the church. I was in an abusive relationship with the church who I felt that God called me to and yet the one who I was supposedly saying was loving, a protector and the guardian was in fact, sitting back and watching me be beat up and emotionally moved around by my congregation.

So, the idea of God being loving and compassionate is not feasible in that context for me. So in response, we create a "this god, not this other god" duality, by saying statements like, "I would never serve a god that would be like this, or stand in judgement like this," etc. This is where paganism makes things easy, or does it? For me, it just made things more complicated, because like the abuse situation, it makes other relationships with other gods that I care about difficult to trust, because they are in the same role, so to speak and I have a wounding around that. And, if you couple the idea that as soon as you go deeper into your faith tradition you discover that there is in fact just ONE, then you have yourself back in the vat of pickles that you tried to escape.

So, when you go deeper, you have to deal with the wounding. I have been going through a process of readdressing God and working on forgiveness for many things, many of which are frankly the result of freewill and my work in this life. I have been unloading the term Lord so it can be there as a empowering word in my magical vocabulary, not something that has dominion over me as a button connected to a wound. And I have been giving myself grace to be not perfect, compassion when I am there and having a hard time with this process and engaging in repentance. See, I still get the hives when I use that term, and I may not get to use it. However, the definition of repentance is merely the willingness to be different when shit isn't working and it is in opposition to my True Will. I realize that our conversations with the Monotheistic bunch isn't as far as away from our own path that we would like. They are not the same, but in fact we are in the same boat, on the same stream and are in fact heading the same direction.

In working with the Sufi's it's funny that they have been the one to tell me that the duality is in MY head that there is no separation. There is no above and no below, we just ARE. My paganism holds that too, but to hear that from monotheism, from my source of wounding freed my soul to accept it wholeheartedly and say, "yes, exactly!"

It's easy to think something in your head and believe it when it comes from within. At the same time, it's hard to not acknowledge the ways in which how you were raised or respond to the majority belief on a topic when yours is different in some way. These two can be in competition with each other. The only way that I have found to release this competition and allow the other to exist next to me is to embrace its reality and say, "yes like that" even knowing that they may not mean it exactly the same. I can smile when someone talks about their relationship with God and applaud them for their work and think about my own connection to the Goddess or the God. I can talk about the Lord with my mother and know that we are both feeling the same holy guidance even though the flavor might be different. And, I can do this with integrity as each day my shadow bits have less power.