"Athana, how do you worship?"Someone a while ago asked this in a comment. My answer: I don't.
The Goddess doesn't ask us, or want us, to ‘worship’ Her; worship is a war-god thing. 'Worship' implies a hierarchy -- a lower, and a higher -- whereas everything on the Goddess's earth is utterly and totally equal.
The closest I get to what a goddite might call ‘worship’ is when I sit in the woods and just be. Last time, I sat on a tree that had fallen next to another tree, so I could lean against the living tree. The trees formed an 'L' at the edge of a clearing that was almost as round as a wheel. After five or ten minutes, something happened.
It really was as if a veil had lifted. Suddenly the entire woods thrilled with magic. Although it was everywhere around me, it seemed stronger in the stand of birch on the far side of the clearing. This was something beyond words. Something bigger and unfathomably more vital than words, yet gentle and loving and innocent and intelligent and overwhelmingly healthy all at the same time. I felt as if I'd moved into another time dimension.
Do you realize how many branches there are in a forest? How many leaves? How they’re all connected? How utterly powerful this unending network of connection is? It’s an intricacy and a loving beyond words, and we’re connected to it, too. We're all in the club. We all belong.
You have to feel this for yourself, I can’t even begin to describe it. Words aren’t the Goddess’s primary vehicle.
How do you feel it? Study Goddess. Begin today. Find people who can guide you. Read. If you can, find a bit of the natural world untampered with by humans and sit in it. Throw some music and dance into the mix. Try a little; you’ll find the path. It may not come overnight, though, so be patient and keep at it.
Good luck!
Love,
Athana
P.S. Groups are great, too. In the past, I’ve been in Goddess ritual groups, and I’m forming one that’ll meet for the first time this coming Monday. But groups aren't necessary for everyone.
P.P.S. Feel free to fill us in on how you get in touch with Goddess.
7 comments:
I think worship can be classified as many different things. Firstly, I don't think it has to mean there is a hierarchy. The Goddess teaches all things are one. Through worship this concept can be honored. The divinity of all things, the divinity within ourselves, the oneness of all things, can be honored. If one worships with this concept clearly understood then there is no patriarchal god-ite-ness about it.
Meditation, Esbats, Sabbats, the lighting of candles, dancing under the moon, etc can all be seen as forms of worship. Even if we just get together and honor the divinity within each other - this is still worship.
The Goddess has been worshipped/honored for millennia. Some people enjoy ritualized activities and some don’t. It’s up to tradition and personal preference. I think the idea should be to redefine the idea of worship not nix it all together.
Take this as genuine curiosity, not probing for weakness? =)
Q: This good feeling that you describe -- how do you know that it indicates the existence of a Goddess (as opposed to, say, some other type of deity, or no deity at all). I guess what I really mean is, do you label the connectedness a "Goddess" because that is your closest description? Is she meant to represent something, or are these other things just parts of her character? And if indeed they are, where do you make the move from appreciating connectedness to believing the Goddess exists?
I hope that makes sense =)
Grian, I should have been more specific. When I say I “don’t worship” the Goddess I meant I don’t bow down and scrape and efface myself to Her the way the war gods demand we do to them.
See, I think the Goddess creates an entirely different kind of society than the war gods do. She creates a society in which everyone is equal. The war gods create societies stuffed with hierarchy -- no one’s equal. Everyone’s on a different rung on the social ladder, higher or lower than tons of other people “above” and “below” them.
The war gods need this kind of hierarchy because it means all our energy is taken up making sure we keep our rung on the ladder, and trying to climb to higher rungs. That way we have no energy left to fight the war gods – we’re all fighting each other.
It also means there gets to be one person on top of the pile: the king, dictator, ruler, president. That way, when the society needs to take stuff from another society, that one person can just say “kill!” and the war begins promptly.
In a healthy society, we don’t have dictators ordering us around. When decisions need to be made, we all gather round and decide together on major issues – which is the way it needs to be done, but it takes time, and we lose out to war-god societies who have one guy lording it over everyone else, and who can just say “Kill!” and everyone goes out and kills, no questions asked.
The only answer is to get rid of the war-gods -- all over the world. That's a tall order, I know, but it has to be done -- and soon. But remember, it’s not the people at fault, it’s their gods.
“Knowing,” Paxton, is in the sphere of science and the rational world. “Knowing” is not part of spirituality. Christians are correct when they use the word “faith.” Like you, I have faith that Goddess exists.
But really, man! Look around you! Are things born out of males? Do men create life? Is there anything more awesome and sacred and mind-blowing than the creation of new life? And is it, or is it not, the female body that creates life? Hasn’t it always been so?
Did you know that the first war gods, in order to get people to even glance at them, had to come up with totally hilarious ways to give birth? Some of them split open their bellies, and babies popped out. Others vomited out the baby. Zeus gave birth to Athena, who sprang forth full-grown from his head, or some such nonsense.
Your Jehovah had his own angle. Didn’t he get down in the dirt with his hands, shape up a human figure and then ‘breathe’ life into it? And then didn’t he stick his hand into this guy, yank out part of his skeleton, and somehow – he doesn't explain how (how could he!) – form a woman?
On hierarchy: God expresses his wishes in the book of Isaiah -- "This is what I want from you: free those who are wrongly imprisoned, lighten the burden of those who work for you, let the oppressed go free, remove the chains that bind people, share your food with the hungry, give shelter to the homeless, give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help."
And in James: "How can you claim to have faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ if you favor some people over others? Doesn't this discrimination show that your judgments are guided by evil motives? If you favor some people over others, you are committing a sin. You are guilty of breaking the law."
I would also address the relation of rationality and faith...but I'm not that smart =P at least not before breakfast ;)
I'll think further on the male-female-birth thing, too. My initial reaction is just this -- we must be sure to distinguish between the creation and the sustaining of life. The female body is where life flourishes after conception. But neither the male nor female body contains potential for human life in and of itself. Mysteriously, when male and female are brought together, life may happen...but it would be silly for *either* party to say "Hey, I did that".
I'm not really sure if I'm going anywhere with these thoughts, or just typing for the joy =P
Paxton - I see what you are asking. It's like when we ask you why you attribute your moments of divine inspiration are coming from Yahweh and not some other source.
In my case, I have looked at the reality of the World, and the science we know of Her, and I have concluded that She is alive, She is conscious, and I am a part of Her body. All sensation, thought, inspiration, birth, growth, death, all of it are elements of Her. We are not separate from Her or below Her, any more than you are separate from or higher than your spline.
I have concluded that "It" is a "She" because life begins with the female. Some species can produce females without males, and some snakes can produce males without females, but nowhere in nature does a male create anything without a female. They can contribute, but they can't initiate it, nor can they do it alone.
"but nowhere in nature does a male create anything without a female"
Isn't that what the snakes would be doing?
And random question, what is a spline? =P
I will be honest, if the Bible didn't use male pronouns for God, I am not sure I would believe strongly that God was either gender. Perhaps I've overlooked some attributes of God that are indicative of maleness per se, but I'm not sure. Now it is after the fact, and I know God as my Father, but I think that is mostly due to the Bible's special revelation. =)
About the birth thing, though. Everything in nature gives birth to its own kind. Women have human babies. Cows have bovine babies. Cats have cat babies. So if Nature is the nature of the Goddess, then the Goddess would give birth to little Goddesses, not various and sundry things that are still somehow part of her body.
Nothing in nature really demonstrates the kind of "birth" you're talking about. Babies once born are no longer, or cannot long remain, part of their mother (unless you are talking emotional or social connections). So in that sense, the relationship between the Goddess and all of us must be very *unlike* any observable natural birth. For the Goddes gives birth to things A) Not of her kind, and B) Not all the same kind and C) still part of her body after their birth.
A belief in creation, rather than birth, makes sense to me. When something is created, it is a different kind of thing than its creator (or creatress), and it is separate from its creator. And yet it may still have a relationship to its creator. If this is hard to imagine, that is because humans cannot "create", they can only modify the resources around them that have already been created (by carving a stone, or making paint and using it, etc). And we cannot give life.
But I do recognize parallels between creative human *thought* and this hypothetical Creator of the universe. Creative human thought requires nothing (save the thinker's experience and personality and intellect), and uses up no resources (save time, for us time-bounded creatures). And the things that human thought creates do indeed seem to take on their own sort of life. If you create an imaginary friend, or a character for a story, pretty soon they are saying things that you would never have expected, developing their own personalities, seemingly coming to life. I've experienced this myself -- where your characters grow up and then you are almost observing them, not directing them? I don't know if it's the same in painting or sculpting or other pursuits, because I am not good at those things and always get bogged down in technicalities.
But I can certainly extrapolate from my own experience as a creative writer, and imagine a creative God or Goddess (notice that none of my speculation, up to this point, suggests anything about a gender). We would expect a Divine creativity to be "higher" than human creativity, but still comparable in many ways (I guess that unless you have the Biblical hint that we're made "in God's image" it would be hard to justify this assumption).
Oops, I have to go now, so I don't have time to wrap this up. I just want to end with the thought that, in this hypothetical system of Creation not Birth, we might say that we only have life because the Creator is always thinking about us (just as imaginary friends only exist when the thinker's thoughts are directed towards them).
Yeah...sorry for rushing off like this -- I hope it made sense. I wasn't trying to prove anything, but just exlain why a Creator and Creature relationship makes more sense to me than a Mother and Child relationship...though if you believe the Bible, to quote C.S. Lewis, "there is a rumor going round the shop that some day some of the statues are going to come to life" -- in other words, *become* Sons of God, not only creatures of God.
Anyway, bye for now =P
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