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As I have fallen more in love with the Holy, it has become clear to me that God/dess (God doesn't have gender so I try to be equal opportunity!) is all around me: in the people I see, in the land that I walk on, in the air that I breathe, and in the spirit that animates me.

But this has not always been as apparent to this woman and it has come at a cost of saying that this physical world is worth time and energy to delve into to understand Divinity further.

I was taught, as many of us were, that the Holy was only found in transcendence (even though paradoxically God is everywhere!) and that this physical realm was a distraction at best from holy pursuits. I was also trained at university and seminary that the Protestant Christian version of the scriptures was the only source of true wisdom that could be trusted and that every other source of knowledge or wisdom could be fallible.

While trodding this path I came to this passage spoken by Paul to the Romans (1:19-21):

“19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”


I found myself in an internal battle between what scripture was telling me, which is that the heavens declare the Glory of God, and a mass of well intentioned teachings from a religious community that was so fearful of committing the sin of idolatry (confusing a physical object with the transcendent Holy) that it was unwilling to look at anything outside of a single religious text to even look for a more mature understanding and knowledge of God.

Then, I did something really ballsy: I prayed to the Creator to show me the unknowable in the knowable. Show me grace by show me the truth as the truth, and show me the falsity as falseness. Or said another way, Show me what YOU are really about, since God told me that he/she is not a spirit of fear!

Seemed simple enough at the time.

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that some things that are true about God are by nature a mystery to us, unknowable, and majestic. But he also tells us in the same treatise that humanity commences with its knowledge of God through the senses, saying, ”there are some truths which the natural reason also is able to reach…For, according to its manner of knowing in the present life, the intellect depends on the sense for the origin of knowledge; and so those things that do not fall under the senses cannot be grasped by the human intellect except in so far as the knowledge of them is gathered from sensible things.” - Contra Gentiles, I, c.3.

St. Aquinas teaches that while God is inherently unknowable because God is multi-layered, nuanced and multi-faceted, we should still use the faculties given us. My own Mother, fearful for the salvation of my soul, never wanted for me to leave Christianity, but she more than any one person taught me that I was not to fear people, only God. And it was with this in my heart that I set off to remove the darkness and foolishness in my mind.

I had no idea where I would wind up (not all of it good!).

Over the next decade plus years I spent time “beholding the universe around me and observed the order and arrangement in it.”

to be cont...

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In looking up the word plant and I was amused. It said that a plant is something or someone who is secretly introduced into an organization in order to influence the behavior of its members. This implies to me an intentional action, something that was set upon to do for a reason to create some sort of change in a system that perhaps wouldn’t change or move in that direction otherwise. While I am seeking this type of change actively in my life, I thought it was noteworthy to think about the quality of what we put into our daily life and what affect of which that has on our inscape that we are unaware. In this case, the plant is love! The qualities of love are compassion, enthusiasm, mercy, grace and charity. It is also longing and desire. We are asked by Goddess to plant LOVE into our spirit, the longing, desire, the compassion and the grace of the Holy Ones in our spirit.

So who are the Holy Ones? This is not a straight forward answer but a nuanced mesh that leaves many openings for us to explore. My mind moves from “the redeemed brethren” from Rev. Robert Kirk to the ancestors, guides and spirits that live, move and have their being in the divine river of eternal unity, known in Craft as the River of the Goddess. These are our spiritual companions who ever seek the breast of the Sacred Mother as our source and sustenance.

As I wander down the grey paths of the hidden realms, my inner spirit notices two parts to this emerging as active dynamics: One is an active planting of the love agenda or qualities in our spirit, which would then make us more like the holy attributes, and allow it to become that our decisions would be influenced by that inner directive. Like adding a flavor to a soup, we would find our sauce, our veggies and our meat all influenced by this flavor automatically, and ideally made tastier and greater than the soup would be otherwise. A sacred movement of bland to tangy!

The second is those persons who have Love as their trait. This would by extension put us into deliberate presence and relationships with the intention of bringing us into alignment with friends and companions outside us who uphold the very values that we are looking to embrace. This has as the added value of finding ourselves being modeled decisions that follow the inner directive of our spirit, a community in which to ask for wisdom and we could enter into trust with that inner directive because it is brought forward by people whose informants are in league with love as the inner landscape and quest. We also become the community of souls that are available to others to as a medium of mercy and grace to the world.

As I am thinking about this, my mind moves to those who make love into an effete feeling: lacking power or inward strength. Love does not ask us to be door mats and especially does not ask us to uphold actions that are contrary to our spirits. Love asks us to be honest, straight forward, open to the inner hearts of those around us, to be willing to offer ours and those around us the grace to enable change when an incongruity to Love is discovered. Love is the law, not a suggestion. All magical practices, Spiritual practices, inner goals and relationships that we foster should be done through the lens of Love as it’s guide and guardian. Love is not the caboose on the train but instead is the engine that guides the soul on its track towards to the foothills of experience and enlightenment. Love gathers power and builds power, it does not remove it from ourselves or another. It does not mask its needs, it listens intently to its children and feeds them. It does not pretend to know something it does not. It upholds grace and truth as its mantra. We don’t have power, we are power!
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Well" Logic in Spiritual Interactions

Chalice WellI admit, I was raised on country music and bluegrass. It has a special place in my heart. And while I do not admit to this very readily, I find that often times it holds gems even as I run across them haphazardly while changing stations. I am going to date my country music secret a bit and bring up a dandy tune from the early 80s by the Oak Ridge Boys…

"My daddy used to tell me don't be fooled by what you see
If you want to get to the heart of things you gotta look way down deep"

As I thought about this, my brain stopped and went into that deep place we all know and said..."what?! I should be able to tell what something is by what it looks like, smells like or acts like. In fact, I should be able to tell fairly quickly if I want it, what is is, box it, label the box and put it neatly on a shelf somewhere." But I know that I do need to look closer too... and that is a lot like work. To paraphrase a common quote here in the coven…. The song has HELL logic. Hell logic for those not from Oregon is a tongue in cheek phrase that we use to describe a suggestion or an idea that makes too much sense and we either should have thought of it ourselves or we see that we are being silly in making it more difficult than it needed to be.

I’d like to assert that it is in fact Hell logic’s little sister “Well logic!” Also known as Miss "Nothing Is As It Seems On The Surface." We live in an age of technology where we plug something in and it turns on, we put in a secret code and we get invincibility. (Did my geek girl side peek out?!) We are in an age where most things can be evaluated on the surface. This is alluring and comfortable. We can look at something in this realm and discern right away whether or not it is something that we want or need due to specs on the side of a box written by the manufacturer, and we can discern if something is working whether the light turns on when we plug it in.

However, in our spiritual lives, this may not be the case. We have look a little deeper in the well. A Sufi mystic once said that it is our thirst as we sit next to the deepest well that shows that we are doing it right, not the lack of thirst. As we grow closer to our conversation with our True Will, we find ourselves more and more thirsty. Our well runs deep and it is thirsty. This is counter to what we might want to think in our plug it in world which is if it was working we’d be less thirsty. Spirituality is counter intuitive… or we might say it has Well logic.

We can also be deceived and think that we know ourselves too by our outer actions and ultimately try to use these as manufacturers labels for ourselves. We all do it. “I’m a gardener, an outdoor person,” “I’m a geek,” “A gamer,” “A loser,” “Way on top of it…”"Not like that/them". These are just labels of an outer identity that our minds have put on to make the world make sense to us and make us feel like we fit in.

But our true selves are none of these. Hell, we don’t even get to be our thoughts. These all influence us, they ultimately prejudice us against other people, other ideas, and ultimately ourselves. As the apparently strange things come out of our core being, we start labeling them with labels such as a good or bad, or me or not me. But this is not the case. This is our minds trying to keep order and make sure that we stay on the ego path. This magical working winds up creating a soul cage for us to take up residence in.

Dig a little deeper in your Well. Truth is understood in paradox. Look closer at the mystery under the water. The still pool reflects the Goddess in the sense that we have to look into the depths underneath to really understand this. Craft is not plug it in technology. This is the mystic path. The one that if we are more thirsty, we know we are doing it right.

"The mighty river's flowin' where the water's cool and sweet
Don't be fooled by a muddy dream be careful when you drink
Life is what you make it sometimes a livin' hell
If you want to find that promised land dig a little deeper in the well."

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