Why I Serve

A friend of mine  answered this question on her own blog not long ago now, and,  Since I am now celebrating the one year anniversary of my second set of vows to him, vows which initiated a very difficult spiritual period for me, this may be the time to answer that question again.

I can not say that I was someone who always wanted to devote my life to religion and to a deity, indeed if people who knew me even ten years ago saw me now I bet they would be very surprised. Where I grew up the unspoken rule was that religion was something very private and not talked about with other people, my family members were either atheist or the sort of Catholic that went to church on Sunday and that was about it; with no one discussing it or seeming excited about it, it was hard for my child self to see what was so important about religion. I knew early on that Catholicism was not for me, that Christianity in general was not for me, and that monotheism didn’t feel right to me, and that was as far as it went for a long time.

I was exposed to Greek mythology first when I was nine, and I absolutely fell in love with those deities in a way that, in hindsight, probably was the start of a religious devotion. It was also then that I became what I like to call an intellectual polytheist (in that, if deity does in fact exist, polytheism makes more sense than monotheism). Had my childhood been quieter and more peaceful, I may very well have pursued that budding interest further and perhaps wound up on this path much sooner.

The notion of service as well was a completely foreign thing to me when I was younger. I am a lone wolf by nature and learned early on that the only person you can really depend on is yourself; I did not bond with my family (and though I get along with them now that I am no longer living them, the distance has made it even more clear that I am, for whatever reason, more of a close family friend than an actual member of the family) and many of the other people I knew at the time didn’t understand me, didn’t like me and were very often cruel to me. I could not have imagined then loving something so much, trusting something enough to want to serve it so completely.

But that was all before I met Hermes.

To say that I owe him my life is no exaggeration. What I was living before was nothing resembling a life and without his intervention I would probably still be there now; that is assuming I was still living at all and I do firmly believe I was rapidly heading down that path. He came to me when I had been beaten down, broken, written off as a lost cause and left to rot wherever I fell; bit by bit he rebuilt my spirit, rebuilt my life, made me feel for the first time that there was something worthwhile there after all, maybe I had something to live for after all.

My life does not look the same as it did even just a couple years ago, and I am noticeably not the same person either. He moved me out of my old life and into a new one that, after an understandably rocky start, turned out to be perfect. I have a home of my own, a wonderful girlfriend, a trio of pets, several friends (even if they are mostly online) and I’m content and I’m happy; as someone who didn’t have many life skills, worse interpersonal skills and never had a word of encouragement from anyone, that’s a lot more than I could have ever hoped to have.

Though it may not be what I started out wanting to do, I can not imagine ever doing anything else, couldn’t imagine not having him in my life. And yet still there are times when I really need to be reminded of that, of why I’m here and how much this really does mean to me.

To say this past year was difficult is an understatement, and the difficulty started with those vows made. It was not a minor step I made there, it was something I knew would fundamentally change our relationship dynamic, and as such it was going to drag a lot of issues to the surface (especially when dealing with an area where I already know I have baggage to spare) and force me to deal with them. I can’t say that I handled that part gracefully, but probably in a typical and understandable way, and probably exactly as he expected me to. My relationship suffered during this last year and I spent long stretches of time feeling cut off from him, cut off from the purpose he gave to me, and that only made it worse. And though I knew, both from moments when he forcibly punched through my walls and messages he sent me through other people, that he still loves me and he’s still here and not going anywhere, it didn’t make things easier or at least never for very long.

I spent a lot of time this last year questioning my path; if this is where I want to be, if this is something I can even do. I don’t know about the second part, but I do know that I want to try, that I’m not ready to give up just yet. After all that Hermes has done for me, all he has given me and everything he has come to mean to me, I owe him my absolute best effort and I know I haven’t given that yet. But even beyond the gratitude, I don’t want this relationship to be over, I don’t want to end it.

Hermes has given me a list of tasks to perform, items to acquire, things to learn; I have a basic daily routine I am supposed to adhere to, and regular times I am supposed to spend with him. This is how I will begin to get my spiritual life, my relationship with him, back on track; this is the first step I have to take before I can progress further. Hermes is not, in my experience, the sort of deity to grab someone by the short hairs and drag them kicking and screaming down the road – trick you into doing what he wants you to do yes, arrange circumstances that forces the issues he wants you to deal with to the surface yes, physically force you no. Especially not in our relationship, in these circumstances this is a decision I need to make on my own; I know what I need to do and he’s waiting for me to make my move all on my own, waiting for me to decide this relationship means enough to me that I’m willing to do the work and deal with the road blocks.

However hard this last year has been, and however much harder its going to get crawling out of this hole and training myself in what I need to be trained in, I still have both reason and desire to continue serving. This is still the path I should and want to be on, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes.

Hail Hermes! Happy anniversary and thanks for this reminder, I needed it.

Spiritual Writing

One thing Hermes has always been good at is making sure I get the information I need when I need it (whether or not I actually recognize it as being vital information at the time I get it is a whole other matter). Just as I’m sitting around figuring out how to begin working to regain the ground I lost over this last year, I see this post from Naiadis on her excellent blog (seriously check it out).

What in particular about that post jumped out at me like a divine slap to the back of the head, was where she talked about how writing played a part in her relationship with Poseidon, in meditation and awareness and in her interactions with him.

I am grateful that these things occur to someone, because it certainly never occurred to me.

Receptivity is not something that comes easily to me; despite what you may have heard around Pagan circles about women being receptive in nature and men being projective (and let’s not get me started on that), I am predominately projective maybe somewhere around seventy percent. What receptivity I do have is further complicated by the lingering effects of the survival methods I had to use to get through an abusive childhood, severing and walling off most of the connections I had to anything outside of myself. Naturally Hermes can punch through those walls when he wants to, or else I would not be here now. And I can achieve a state of openness and awareness when I concentrate on it, turning my usual focused attention outside of myself. And this was fine in the beginning, but I know he expects more of me now, something a little more consistent, in order to progress our relationship and the Work. And that means I have to work through these blocks and move past this hurdle.

Browsing around Pagan sites and forums you will find a lot of suggestions on meditation, on opening up and achieving awareness. A lot of them though do not seem to work for me, go against the way my brain processes things. As an example, many of these more popular techniques are geared toward more visual thinkers, and I am more verbally oriented I think in words (I have found a way to make visual techniques work for me, but it involves using a running dialog in my head to paint the picture I’m supposed to see, it all starts with language). While I might be able to move up to the more common techniques in time, first I need to learn something that works with my brain’s natural inclinations.

Oddly, I have never thought of writing as a means to open awareness to things outside of yourself. And the more I contemplate that, the less I understand why it never occurred to me before. Lost in trying to follow other people’s lead, I seemed to have missed the obvious for such a long time.

Writing has always been something that was important to me. Since I was three or four I was constantly making up elaborate stories, and from the time I learned how to write I was committing those rambling tales to paper. When I was a teenager that intensified as my writing was my only escape from what was going on around me. It was always so easy for me to get lost in my work, the hours go by unnoticed, the rest of the world slips away, just me alone with my thoughts that increasingly stop feeling like my own and start feeling like something outside of myself that’s flowing through me, using me as a conduit. It’s amazing what comes out of my head during these sessions, very rarely looking anything like what I originally intended and which sometimes contains layers of meaning it might take me months to see.

And isn’t that exactly what I’m looking for? Isn’t that what the meditation and visualizations are ultimately supposed to achieve, something very close to what I can easily fall into just from having a writing project to be involved in?

Writing has also played an important part in my religious life and my interaction with Hermes, although it was very early on and I think I may not attribute the proper amount of credit to that experience any longer. Who knows why, since every time someone calls me by name I’m reminded of it.

No, Gavin is not the name that I was born with, but one given to me by Hermes and that I took when I made my vows to him. It is my Pagan name, or at least one of them, one I can use in all aspects of my life. Its not an alias I use on the internet, everyone I know now calls me Gavin and most everyone I have met since those vows were made have no idea my name was ever anything different. I have plans at some point in the future to have it legally changed, since the name I was born with (which only my immediate family still uses) feels even less like my own than it did before.

The name itself came from an epic rambling story I was working on for about five years, during the period of my life that I didn’t leave the house and was trying to figure out how to function again. I began working on it maybe a year or so before Hermes officially made his presence known to me, and it pretty much consumed my life at the time; I would get up and do nothing but work on it, eventually coming out of my fog long enough to remember that I have to eat and then right back to it again. Eventually Hermes helped me to see what I was really doing there, aside from fine tuning my ability to write sadistic violence (what? you didn’t expect rainbows and kittens, did you? ), was writing about myself.

After learning that I put the project down, having no more need to work on it. I had gained a lot of insight into myself during that time, into what exactly had happened to me during my childhood and the impact that it had, how it altered the way I thought and behaved. And having a better understanding of what makes me tick, I was able to begin accepting things and learned how to function within my means rather than using the more common model of behavior. Without the knowledge I gained from that experience, I’m not sure I would have been able to move forward with my life.

I did not immediately connect Hermes to the project, since I had started it before I ever met him and this was before I fully realized just how interested in me he really was. Not until he moved in and ordered a complete remodeling of my life; in addition to requesting my vows and telling me I had to move out of my mother’s house, he gave me a new name, the one I used for that character I unknowingly saddled with all my problems and giving him a way out. Out of curiosity, I had grabbed up one of my sister’s baby names books and looked up the meaning of the name that had been given to me, which I thought I had invented years earlier.

That one name referenced an animal sacred to Hermes was a bit of a surprise, but by itself could still seem like a coincidence. The my new last name was, in essence, an epithet of his seemed like less of a coincidence – and as the years went by, as things changed (or were revealed to me more like it), that fact has gained multiple layers of meaning I never could have seen coming then.

This was my inital introduction to the world of Hermetic Meaningful Coincidence, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last time he brought about a change like that, quietly pulling my strings and moving things into position until I become accustomed to things enough that we can bring it up directly, plus the months or years of set up help to erase any doubt that the message is a genuine one.

I haven’t done much writing in the last several years, I fell out of the habit when my depression got too bad to continue it, which of course only made the depression worse. For the last little while I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that, about how even when life was at its absolute worst writing was a small bit of happiness that I was able to hold on to, that made things at least somewhat bearable. And while my life is certainly good now, there still seems to be something missing, a hole (or a severed connection?) that my writing once filled which simply can’t be filled with anything else. Writing, it seems, is one of the things I need to be doing in order to be happy and fulfilled and functioning correctly.

My parents, who simply didn’t understand my hobby, used to hang over my shoulder and wonder aloud whether or not I planned to ever do anything with my writing, because if I can’t ever publish and profit off my work then what was the point of it? Unfortunately I think some of that thinking might have rubbed off on me and may have contributed to my putting down the pen for such a long time. Normally I don’t buy into that unfortunately popular notion that it you can’t make money off it it’s not worth doing, and yet I allowed that to get in the way here. I think it was largely do to with lack of encouragement from family, and the people who spent so much effort directly attacking my habit because they didn’t like what I wrote (that it wasn’t all rainbows and kittens), it left me deeply insecure about my talent. In other areas I’m able to ignore or at least work through the negative feedback loop that runs through my head, but this is also the one area where I actually do care what other people think and so it’s a lot harder to overcome years of constant criticism and apathy even if I knew people had alternate motives for saying the things they did. I wouldn’t have the confidence to send anything off to a publisher, so why do it at all then, right?

Now I realize that doesn’t matter. I won’t lie, it would make me exceedingly happy and fulfill my only real childhood dream to get my work published, but making money off something is not the end all to be all, whatever our current culture might think. Writing made me happy, and it connected me to something outside of myself, and that is important, far more important than making money (having grown up around people trapped in careers that made them miserable, I learned first hand money isn’t everything). Even if I end up keeping my work entirely to myself, it will still have been worth my effort in creating it, it will still have served a purpose.

Writers write, that’s what they do and there is no use trying to deny it. I’m tired of feeling like there is something missing in my life, and I’m tired of struggling to open up using methods that don’t work with my brain wiring. With this now in my head, I think I may be able to kill two birds with one stone.

I’ve wanted to begin writing again for a while now, but struggled over where exactly I was supposed to start. I think I’ll take Naiadis’s suggestion and use it as a spiritual tool, a meditative practice and a means to connect again with Hermes. Do again what makes me happy, get my relationships back in order.

And so thank you, both to Naiadis who shared this and to Hermes who probably made certain that I saw it. Who knows how much longer I might have sat with this solution right in front of my face before I saw it on my own.

Out of Curiosity

Now that I am no longer involved in internet email lists, I have turned my attention to a previously mostly ignored area, Pagan Blogs.

Though I may have a slightly dusty blog myself, with the exception of a small handful of them maintained by friends of mine, I’ve mostly ignored this medium before. There is a limit to how much online reading I can do in a day, and some of the lists I was one were very active. With that officially out of the way now, I’ve been refocusing my attention in this direction.

I put out a call on my Livejournal to be pointed toward any Pagan blogs I’ve not heard of that might interest me. On the off chance that someone here who doesn’t read my Livejournal (or who can not comment there) has any recommendations, I am still looking.

I have also noticed my blog linked in places that I wasn’t previously aware of. Which of course is always appreciated. But, for curiosity’s sake, I am interested to know who has my blog linked where. If nothing else, perhaps I can at least return the favor.

Time to Move On

If you are a Pagan of some variety (and I imagine that at least most of the people reading this blog are) then you may have noticed this past month was a tad… well, crazy. The Pagan Wide Crazy has affected most of the people and groups that I’m acquainted with, as every even small frustration and minor personal problems all erupted at the exact same time. The massive infighting, which we Pagans are more than used to dealing with, was a lot worse than I ever remember seeing it before.

I’m not usually one to give much weight to concepts like Mercury retrograde, especially when I so often see it employed Pagan wide as a get out of being a douche free card. But this incident, how far reaching it was, almost makes a believer out of me. If it had been just a few people in one group in one tradition perhaps, but its hard to believe even for a more skeptical mind that this was all pure coincidence.

The end result of this incredible drama filled month is several people walking away (or going to walk away) from the various groups, organizations, internet communities that they once called home and foraging out on their own. And yes, as you may have guessed, I will be among those people walking away.

This is not something that suddenly came up in the last month (in all likelihood wasn’t for any of the people who have walked away, even if it may have seemed that way to those they left behind), it’s not something I’m doing because of everyone else many of whom are friends of mine (though I admit their leaving as well does lend some strength to my move as well) and it likewise has nothing to do with personal problems that have occurred between me and a group I was once involved in (which some of you may or may not be familiar with). This is something I have been struggling over for some time. I have been silent here and silent elsewhere in other religious venues as I slowly and rather painfully worked out how to make this final major change to get me to the place where I need to be now.

Actually back when I accepted that the reconstructionist label no longer fit who I am and what I was doing, I should have taken the hint then it was time to back off from the community. I had thought it would be easy enough to continue interacting with people and groups, because after all nothing with me has changed that dramatically. I didn’t immediately see the overall problem with that statement: I have left behind a label that no longer has any real relevance to me, and yet I will remain in groups defined by that label.

At one point in time, I definitely needed it. When I was first starting out, first learning, the online community was an invaluable resource. And indeed I was one of the people who managed to make it through my newbie years unscathed, something that people who didn’t manage it like to claim is impossible (of course, I also did a lot of research on my own, was more likely to ask for sources rather than answers and carefully worded the questions that I did ask so that I would not be misunderstood). But now, as far as the basics of belief and practice go, I already pretty much know where the majority of the community stands and, more importantly, I know where I stand, and as I explained in a previous post that place where I stand is fairly far off from the average. And there is still a lot that I need to learn in order to do the things I need to be doing, and those are not things that I can learn from lists and forums, not things I can share with the people there.

My spiritual life has largely been on hold for this last year, part of this has to do with internal problems that were cranked into high gear with my second dedication to Hermes almost a year ago now (and that part I’m sure came as no surprise to him and was likely planned on, knowing me as well as he does), but also because of my being slow to act on several of the changes I need to make in my life to get myself to the place where I need to be. A year spent up against a road block is more than long enough, and its high time that I go through and make the changes that I can make (because not all of them can happen overnight, unfortunately). It is no longer good enough to maintain ties with communities just because they once held some importance to me even though that is no longer the case, because I’m not at the same place or because they themselves changed. If something is not actively contributing to my spiritual life, if I am not getting something out of the association (and they getting something out of an association with me) then it is not worth it to continue on. There is a limit to how social I can be even over the internet (I am an introvert through and through ) and how many different things I can pay attention to at the same time; I need to focus myself in appropriate directions and weed out any and all distractions.

Though I do not intend to sit here and bad mouth the community as a whole (certain individuals within the community yes ), it goes without saying that it needs some work if it is going to stay around and be a real presence in the years to come. That many of the long term and more successful organizations are currently going through major upheavals (mostly centered around prominent members leaving) and re-evaluating who they are and what they want to be accomplishing is (I hope) a sign that this change is about to begin. Truly, I wish them all the best of luck.

But this does also signal, as is usual in times of healing and transformation, that things are also about to get a lot worse before they get better – if they get better. And this also presents yet another reason why I need to back off now.

I am a liminal person serving a liminal god; this has always been the case, but over this last year my liminal status has become even more pronounced (if possible) than it was before. I have never been community oriented (note that I did not say anti-community, there is a huge difference between condemning something altogether and recognizing that, while it is a positive thing for others, it does not work for you) and always knew I was destined to be mostly solitary, serving Hermes in a private one on one fashion as opposed to on behalf of a (human) community, that any involvement I might have in the community would be secondary at best and any impact an indirect result of that private work – which makes sense if you think about it, as Hermes’ action in the world often comes about through accident and coincidence, indirect routes. For those who want to insist that if you are not neck deep in community then you are Doing It Wrong, I must respectfully (or not so respectfully, such as the case may be) disagree; this may not be a common, mainstream path but it is certainly a legitimate one. Every religion has its fringe element, and that is where I plan to be.

If the community is going to survive and rebuild itself, it’s going to take a lot of work, and people that are both realistic about what that work actually entails and are committed to getting it done. It may never be a community it a traditional sense – keeping in mind there that I draw a very sharp distinction between “community” and “a bunch of people loosely tied together over a particular commonality”; the latter does not equal the former (that many people expect that it does is, I think, one of the biggest sources of the Pagan Drama we all know and love), it takes a lot more than having one thing in common and co-existing in some internet elist (or even in a real world group) to make a community. It may never be more than the latter (with a few real, smaller communities scattered here and there), but that doesn’t mean things can’t be a lot more functional than they currently are. People need to decide what they really want, and more importantly, what they are willing to do to accomplish that. It’s not going to be easy by any means.

And, as a liminal person, I am not meant to be a part of this solution. My focus is, and has to be, on my largely personal and private relationship with Hermes and the Work he wants me to do. I simply do not have the same investment, personal or spiritual, in the formation of a community (or functional group of people) that those who both want and need, again personally or spiritually, that in order to be fulfilled and doing what Work they need to do. And as such, I can not allow their problems to become my problem; especially in the midst of a massive upheaval and the (hopefully) start of a major transitional period, I need to back away.

A lot of people might not like this, and indeed people who are very community oriented often do not understand (and mistake the motives of) those of us who are not. We all have our part to play, and it isn’t all focused in the same direction. This troubles I’ve had this last year have really shown me where my place is, where my focus is, and how I truly need to be moving in the right direction or the rest of my life suffers as a result. Being embroiled in community drama is proving to be both a distraction and a drain; a year is more than long enough I can not remain stuck behind this road block any longer, I need to put my energy back into my relationship and my private practice. The community is not truly benefitting from my presence as I said I can not be part of the solution to their troubles; I could continue to hang around and take up space anyway but that would be pointless, worse I could try and force myself to be involved and volunteer for work I’m unlikely to ever actually do because my heart isn’t really in it (while sacrificing my actual Work in the process) but that would cause far more harm than good. Really, this is best for all involved.

I do not intend to disappear from the internet altogether, merely pulling back into my own private corner of it. There is likely some good that I could do here publicly for those who seek me out, not to mention the individuals I’ve met who do contribute to my spiritual life whom I don’t want to lose contact with and… well, I am an introvert with a lot of trauma related issues and many problems interacting with people in person, the internet has always been a social outlet for me, to help find the few people out there I can relate to and tolerate. And I may even maintain some presence on a small handful of lists and forums, provided they are contributing something to me and I to them. For those who want to find me, there is always my Livejournal and of course this blog. And as I refocus my energy into building my spiritual life in the direction it needs to go, I hope to be using this blog a lot more than I currently do, as I’ll have more to talk about again.

And to those in these various groups I’m parting ways with, I do thank you for the help you once gave me and, once again I truly wish you the best of luck in the future.

On the Value of Anger

(posted for International Pagan Values Blogging Month)

Wait a minute, what did she just say? I couldn’t have heard that right, we can’t really be valuing anger, can we???

Yes, you heard me correctly.

There are many ways in which my thoughts, experiences and values don’t line up with many other people’s. So perhaps I should use this time to blog about some of the things I’d be willing to lay down money that other people aren’t going to touch. Starting with anger.

Because we live in a culture heavily influenced by Christian morality and its turn the other cheek, the meek shall inherit the earth philosophy on life, most of us grow up demonizing anger, believing it a wholly negative emotion for which there is never a justification. New Age philosophy, which influences a good chunk of the modern Pagan movement, is no better on that front; though their reasoning may be different, they also hold that anger is negative and destructive and needs to be avoided at all costs.

I’ve met plenty of Pagans and a few Christians that claim to reject anger, are always happy, serene and pleasant about everything all the time. To be perfectly honest, I don’t like dealing with such people because I find them creepy; I often find myself wanting to lean over and stick a pin in their leg, just to see if it would piss them off. Anyone who has interacted with me online or in person knows that I’m not the cheeriest thing out there and identify as a misanthrope, but that doesn’t mean I am incapable of being around nice people, this goes beyond that. Its like what I imagine interacting with someone who had had a lobotomy must be like, there is something almost robotic in their responses. Human beings are designed to feel a wide range of emotions and to entirely remove one of those emotions from your repertoire removes some of the humanity from you. Some people consider that to be enlightened, but then again a lot of traditions deplore anything human or worldly, a view that I in general disagree with (even as a misanthrope).

Although this is not the focus of my post, I will acknowledge briefly the other side of the equation, not as common but equally annoying. There is a contingent in the Pagan community of arm chair warriors who have of never been closer to a war than watching old John Wayne movies on TCM, who have no training and no discipline but still think they can call themselves warriors because I guess it sounds so macho and bad ass; also there are those so called “dark” wiccans or pagans that often as not come across as very young late teens early twenties, naive sheltered kids rebelling against a middle class upbringing. Both of these groups often embrace so called negative emotions such as anger and elevate it to a quality to be celebrated and utilized above and beyond all else, probably mostly as a phallic extension or a way to rebel against the dominate paradigm rather than any well reasoned self examination. This side also misses the point though in a very different way.

Are all modern warriors or self identified dark pagans going to fall into that category? No, of course not. Just like its very possible to embrace wanting to be a nice person without taking things to extremes. But more often than not anger seems to be an emotion that people are completely irrational about, swinging to either to one far end of the spectrum or the other, with very little rational middle ground to be found.

The fact is no emotion is wholly negative when expressed with a sense of moderation. Everything can become negative if over used or used the wrong way. There is such a thing as being too nice and becoming a door mat; there is such a thing as being too giving or too understanding and becoming an enabler. But do people try and warn you about excessive kindness? Not anywhere near as often. And again, those traditions that deplore the human condition seem to consider excessive kindness enlightened, whatever harm that can do to you and to those around you.

You feel anger for a reason. When someone does something to hurt you, you have a right to feel angry. When someone does something to hurt your family or your friends, you have a right to feel angry. Anger can serve as a sign that something is wrong, that you need to protect yourself, that you need to change something. Its a perfectly natural and justified reaction to someone or something, knowingly or not, violating your boundaries. Its not something you should have to apologize for.

If you would say this is basic stuff, looking around at our culture does not bear that out. What do we as culture truly value? A person that is never angry, that can forgive anyone anything no matter what. A woman who can embrace her child’s killer in love and forgiveness is hailed by the media and the public as some sort of a saint, something we should all aspire to be. While I guess the woman who can’t do the same is a lesser person, sure we feel bad for her experience but we’ll expect her to work on that anger so that she can come to a place of forgiveness. It is after all, the only way she’ll ever be able to move on.

As controversial as it may be for me to say this, I do believe a big part of that is nothing more than our cultural attitudes that instill a sense of guilt for maintaining a degree of anger toward anyone. We’re supposed to love everyone, or at least not hate anyone. This isn’t always the way that things were, and in plenty of ancient cultures not only was anger or holding a grudge considered okay it was the correct and moral thing to do when someone harmed you or yours. I don’t recall reading about a lot of ancient Norse or Greek warriors being kept up at night over it. Why should I be?

I have been abused or ill treated for much of my life. Am I angry about what happened to me? Of course I am. Do I hate the people who abused me? You bet I do. Is this eating me up inside, interfering with my life, preventing me from moving forward? Absolutely not. In fact my life has steadily gotten better in that I am living on my own, far from those people; I have a girlfriend, a small circle of friends, an apartment I take care of, a deity I serve, a religious community I interact with; sure I will always struggle with things like self esteem, anxiety, trust issues and the like, but for the large part I am very happy where I am now. The anger and hate I feel is there but more dormant in the back of my mind, it doesn’t dangle over everything I say and do, for the most part I rarely even think of it.

I’ve been told often enough that I need to “come to a place of forgiveness” so that I can “move forward.” I think its very plain to anyone who saw my life then and sees me now that I have indeed moved forward by leaps and bounds, all without coming to that place of forgiveness. And who is it often telling me this? Usually people who, when they list all the instances of “anger” they graciously and selflessly forgave and put behind them, tends to include things like the guy that cut them off in traffic, the waitress that got their order wrong, the anonymous idiot on the internet that disagreed with them, the boyfriend that ended their relationship after just two weeks and I was sooooo in love with him! You don’t tend to get lectured by those that have been through things like serious abuse and betrayal, even if they have felt a need to find a way to forgive they usually get it if you don’t.

I’ll state this very plainly: if something such as the getting cut off in traffic is the best personal example you can come up with, you are not qualified to lecture me on anger. You don’t know what anger is, you haven’t come anywhere close to real anger.

So what sort of anger do I know? I have been abused physically, I’ve been emotionally degraded, I’ve been treated like an animal. My rage is seething, black, all consuming, something that wants only to destroy, to kill. There is a rage in me that is capable of seriously hurting or killing someone; I think everyone has such a capability in them that can come out under the right circumstances, but most people will never come face to face with that. If I had been given the opportunity to cause serious damage to one of those people, I likely would have. My rage is a frightening thing, frightening to the people who have seen it in its full force (or even half force), frightening to myself as well. For a long time I actually tried to be as non confrontational as I could be because I was afraid of that anger exploding out of control.

But that’s not helpful, and I learned that pretty quickly. You can deny you are feeling anger all you want to but you are, you always are. And either it expresses itself in a healthy way, or it goes in a bottle deep inside until that bottle gets too full to hold anymore and it explodes out in less healthy ways. Being non confrontational means not establishing boundaries, not taking care of yourself and making certain that other people treat you with dignity, the way you deserve to be treated. If you just feel serenely peaceful about everything, if you only calmly accept everything that comes at you, where is the motivation to change? The motivation to stand up for yourself?

Anger can be a powerful motivator. That may well be the only reason why I didn’t kill myself back when the abuse was happening, why I never gave up when I was told there was no hope. I didn’t have anything in life, no support no hope and seemingly no way out, all I did have was my anger, my hate. That’s what kept me getting up in the morning, what kept me fighting and what likely saved my core personality from being broken, what inspired me to struggle to heal myself and go out into the world and try to forge a life for myself when I was told I would only ever fail. Sure, now I have a girlfriend who loves me, I have deities that love me, friends that care, a life that’s worth living, but prior to all that I had was spite. I was not going to let those people win, I was not going to let them be right about me, I was not going to let their efforts ruin anymore of my life than it already has. Spite helped bring me to what I have now, without it I might have never left my bedroom. Even now I can still bring that up when I need it to push me through something difficult to do; I want to succeed in my life on my own terms, because I was always told that I couldn’t.

When ignoring anger isn’t realistic, you can make it work for you instead. Using it as motivation is one way. Anger can be crafted into a shield, used as a defense mechanism; people haven’t harassed me in years because, as I’ve been told, I put off a vibe that I’m someone you don’t want to mess with. Anger can be crafted into a weapon to be used in defense when the shield is not enough. I’ve been working the last year or so of finding that line where I can unleash that rage in appropriate levels without having to worry about losing control too much. Doing so has put me in a far better place in life in that I’ve been able to strip out the people that have proven themselves a toxic drain on my mental health, and I won’t be letting that happen again either.

Yes its possible to dwell too much in anger, to allow it to consume you in unhealthy ways. Using it as a motivator is helpful but sooner or later life needs to be about something else; some people deserve to be hated but sooner or later you have to stop thinking about it all the time, you have to move on with or without forgiveness (and you can do it without, don’t let people tell you otherwise); using it to defend your personal boundaries and those of your family and friends is a very effective and very good way of using that emotion, and there is a huge difference between that and being a bully. Those are extremes to avoid just as one should avoid being a door mat or an enabler, but anger is one of the few places where people actually advocate throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You feel anger. You do whether you want to acknowledge it or not. Its a human emotion and it has its uses. Better to learn to acknowledge it, to listen to what its trying to tell you, to learn to control it and get it to work with you to help improve your circumstances in life. It can become one of the more helpful tools in your arsenal … or, it can give you an ulcer, a break down, ruined relationships when it explodes out at random, or maybe just a miserable life surrounded by people that don’t feel a need to respect you and you have no motivation and no way to change that. You decide.

International Pagan Values Blogging Month

As some of you may or may not be aware, June has now been tagged the International Pagan Values Blogging Month. Several friends of mine are participating in this endeavor and making some interesting posts on what their various traditions value and why.

The question is, should I participate in this? I know one friend says yes, but I myself an mostly undecided for a number of reasons.

For one thing, my values are not specifically Pagan values in that they do not come from any specific religious tradition. I was agnostic for twenty years of my life before finding Hermes, and in those twenty years I had to figure out a way to get along in the world, and those twenty years and the things I learned therein do not vanish merely because I have come into religion now. I’ve never been of the opinion that the gods truly want us all to just dump everything we were and adopt someone else’s idea of who we should be wholesale, without even stopping to think about it.

My childhood was not one of milling around with the rest of the sheep, being spoonfed ideas about what I need to believe and what I need to do and swallowing them unthinkingly. Most of my childhood consisted of people telling me that there was something wrong with me, something that needed to be fixed so that I could be brought more into alignment with everyone else; that forced me to really think long and hard if that was actually true, if there really was something wrong with me. And the answer I walked away with was no; there is nothing wrong with being weird and thinking and acting differently than most other people, nothing wrong with flouting gender norms and no reason why I need to be a certain way just because I was born with female parts especially if its not in my nature to do so, nothing wrong with having “eccentric” aesthetic tastes, being a little on the aggressive side, being blunt and unemotional, being morbid and liking violence as entertainment, or any of the other large number of things people didn’t like about me. Nothing inherently wrong with any of it, just within the view of the culture itself.

So you won’t see me quoting from the Delphic Maxims, or any other ethics list from ancient times. Not that there isn’t some wisdom and good advice to be found there (though I quibble over some things there), codified lists of ethics have simply never been my cup of tea. For one thing, some ethical systems (such as the one from Christianity, though it isn’t the only one) set the bar so high as to make it impossible for anyone to follow it absolutely, and the only purpose of such a system is to send people into a perpetual guilt cycle over things they can not help but do. Ethical systems should not be easy for sure, but they do need to be possible or there is no point to them. Also when ethical lists start to get too long and complicated, you see people cherry picking the three or four they want to focus on and ignoring all the rest. And of course anything can be warped to justify whatever you want it to provided you are creative enough; I once witnessed some amazing logical acrobatics where a person used Delphic Maxims such as “Control anger” and “Speak well of everyone” to include allowing him to go on a war campaign against everyone who disagreed with him. That was amazing, and its also not uncommon.

Keeping it short and sweet seems the best approach to me. Decide what is most important to you, how you want to fit into the world (and it won’t be the same for everyone), and stick with that. My behavioral codes are just a few, but they do encompass quite a lot.

My values are not community builders, you won’t make tons of friends or sustain tribes with my values. My values are designed to allow me to co exist peacefully among groups of people that I otherwise have nothing to do with. They are the values of the stranger, the outsider that doesn’t want to be an insider, the liminal hermit that occasionally has to wander out of the wildwood and interact with the community for mutual survival.

Not all of us want to be pillars of the community, not all of us want to be everyone’s friend, not all of us are naturally cut out for that. And that does not make us immoral people either. I grant you that most people are community oriented, whether than means a larger community or a smaller more intimate tribe; not all of us are though, our contingent is a small one but some of us find our interactions with community are disastrous and we thrive better on our own. Most codified ethics are set up to reflect community life, and much of that will have little to no relevance to those outside.

I grew up without community, without support from others, and my loner nature makes me immune to things like peer pressure; the person I am now reflects my lack of influence from the broader culture. I am very much an individualist, and one can not be an individualist in a broader community. Which isn’t to say that every community demands you assimilate into a Borg like mass of unquestioning conformity (although some do), but all groups have their norms and their expectations and they will make certain demands on you. For most people it won’t be too much to ask, but for me it usually is. We all have things that are important to us and we all have limits about how much independence we are willing to give up; I tend to find that most communities’ inroads violate my limits. And since I am used to being, and thrive better alone, the situation is not much of a big deal to me.

I can attach myself to a group on occasion, and become their trickster of sorts. I am often able to act in ways that would normally violate their codes of conduct, but somehow its okay with everyone because its me. Don’t ask me to explain that exception to you, I’ve never quite understood it myself however often it has happened. Groups can do well by inviting such people in, their presence can bring about needed change and without change things stagnate and die. But there are always limits to the usefulness of such people. I never forget that I am not truly of the group and never act as though I am, and I mind the signs that my welcome has worn thin and leave when appropriate.

So, what are the values of an outsider? My conduct mostly involves being respectful (when appropriate, and it isn’t always) of other people’s ways while at the same time being certain that my own ways are afforded equal respect from the other side; finding that liminal moment where two sides can come together and negotiate business, each giving just enough and being willing to let a whole lot more slide by. I protect my own interests since, as a loner, I have no one else doing it for me. I’m not big into a lot of conventional values like turning the other cheek, not big into forgiveness or giving people a million second chances. Respect is a loaded term, but I do believe in common courtesy, unless of course you insisted you’d rather be treated differently. I could go on.

On the surface I can look like a hardass, but I must be doing something right; though I don’t go out of my way to be well thought of, I’m finding that often enough I actually am. Not by all people, but there is a distinct pattern to what sort of people don’t think well of me that leaves me not very worried about that.

Ancient values or not, I’ve always gotten the sense myself that Hermes in general approves of my course of action, not a hundred percent of course and we’re still working to curb my explosive temper for one example. Hermes is a god of strangers, of the outsider and the traveler, and this is the spiritual position I find myself operating from. Its not difficult for me to imagine such things would be of importance to him as well, not belonging to a community doesn’t equal freedom to act like a complete ass whatever some others may think.

I also must admit that most of my behavioral codes strike me as being so basic I don’t even think to talk to about them. Of course anybody walking around in public nowadays knows that common courtesy is far from common any longer; I suppose most can no longer be called basic if it doesn’t occur to most people, whether or not it should. Which could also make talking about some things a little more difficult if I don’t even think to put some things into words.

And that’s why, though this is an interesting idea and a good thing to show that no one religion has the corner market on values, I remain uncertain about participating anymore than this.

But hey, I have a month to change my mind, don’t I?

Issues of Ownership

I sometimes describe my religion as being “Hermes Owned and Operated.” In lieu of simple labels, it seems accurate enough and most people do understand what I mean. Of course, it is also supposed to be somewhat tongue in cheek.

The first time I ever referred to myself as owned was in a Livejournal entry as an offhand joke while I mused on my first year of being formally dedicated to Hermes. It might have been forgotten entirely, but that someone I then had barely even heard of decided to be personally offended by what I had said, launched a tirade against me elsewhere, presenting the situation in an overblown and highly distorted form making it seem that I said a whole ton of shit I never once implied. The ensuing drama assured that the phrase stuck in my head.

I have not continued using the phrase entirely out of spite. Having had time to think it over carefully, there is a degree to which it is very applicable.

I find myself generally dissatisfied with the term “patron god,” though it is one that I have been using for years now because it is a term that people in the Pagan world know and recognize. It is a problematic word however because its definition is a bit too flexible and not universally agreed upon. People use patron to describe the god they are fully devoted to and serve in a formal and often public fashion, to a deity they have a moderately close relationship with though without the mundane life interference or call to serve, to whichever deity they happen to worship more than the others for whatever the reason (their job, mutual interests, just think they’re cool). Some people hold to a more conservative definition (as I do) others far more liberal. It can, and has, made for a confusing situation.

I do believe that a different term is needed to describe those with close relationships with their deities but who are ultimately still another faithful worshiper like any other, and one for those whose deities strongly interfere in their every day lives and who do feel called to serve those gods (whether that is through a community or in a more direct and private way). It has nothing to do with issues of specialness, wanting to paint myself like I’m better than anyone else. Its because the relationship dynamics are different, the expectations are different. Thus I believe descriptive terms should reflect that difference without my having to give an extra explanation.

I am of the opinion the word patron works better for the more intense, service oriented relationships, and that a different word should be used for the god you happen to feel closest to (before accepting Hermes as my patron, I referred to him as my primary deity, that worked for me and people generally understood what I was talking about). I also know that this is not going to happen. Definition wars rarely work in favor of the aggressor, when large groups of people have been using a word a certain way for a great length of time they are not going to appreciate someone barreling over with their chest puffed out insisting that you can’t use that word anymore because I’ve decided to define it according to how I think things should be. I’ve been on the other end of that before, I didn’t take kindly to it and the hell that I’m going to turn around and do the same thing. However right you may think you are, sometimes the only thing that can be done is to find a word of your own to use. One of these days perhaps, I or one of my clever friends will dream up a perfect general term to describe this relationship dynamic. Until that happens, these problems remain.

As well as being tongue in cheek, by calling myself owned I wished to convey the intensity of our relationship and the place he holds in my life (if I can be both funny and serious at the same time than, as one of Hermes’ people, that’s exactly what I should do). For the most part, people understand this and I’ve not had problems with reasonable people understanding my meaning.

I was accused of being a slave in the attack against me, that by calling myself owned I was implying a master/slave dynamic in which I have no autonomy whatsoever. I do not honestly believe that this was an genuine misunderstanding so much as it was it was a deliberate distortion, especially as it has never happened since except with one individual who lets his biases be known loud and clear.

That does not concern me. However, there are in fact those who identify themselves as godslaves, who refer to their deities as “owners” and they do mean it in the master/slave dynamic and they often do mean that they have little or no personal autonomy. And this movement is beginning to gain some publicity. And its more for this reason that I want to clarify what I mean, so as not to confuse those familiar with a different dynamic.

When I finally began noticing the flood of omens that Hermes was sending my way, when I acknowledged that his interest in me was far from casual and that he was my patron and pushing me toward something else, I made a pledge to take vows to him in service after a year’s time; a year because there is no reason to rush such things, I wanted to take the time to be certain that I was doing the right thing, that this was really what I wanted and that it was really what he wanted.

By the time I was ready to make my vows, everything in my life had changed.

My childhood was an abusive one, physically and emotionally; the severity varied by degrees at different points in time, but it was overall a negative experienced marked by encounters with people that beat me, neglected me, ridiculed and degraded me, or betrayed the trust I foolishly placed in them. The recovery process from this took time, and by necessity was something I had to do on my own. It was during this recovery time that Hermes first made himself known to me, and it was largely because of him that I was able to recover at all (by rights I should not be any where near as functional as I am). But I would not be much use to him living in isolation as I was, and continuing to live with a family I simply don’t get along with in close quarters was taking a severe toll on me. So these were some of the things that he fixed.

Within that year Hermes brought me out of a transitional period, and gave me a whole new life. He arranged for me to move to a new city, to have a steady income, a romantic relationship, hell he even gave me a pet as a birthday present. I have a small real life community of friends and acquaintances, and a far larger internet community of the same. My physical health and mental well being have improved a thousand times over.

I’m not going to pretend it was all easy and wonderful, nothing ever is and Hermes is not exactly a god of the easy path. Though the apartment I’m living in now is beautiful and peaceful and I’m alone with my girlfriend, the first two homes were far less than ideal (in unsafe locations, with unpleasant people), and there was a brief stint working at a job that … well, to call that place a massive and constant dramafest would be a severe understatement. But even these were far better than the conditions I was living under before and, right now, things are about as close to perfect as they have ever been, and far more than I thought I ever deserved.

Hermes had a hand in all of this, his involvement was considerably less than subtle as far as I am concerned, though of course you are invited to believe me on these points or not. It was only about a week after Hermes and I had a long talk about why I needed to leave my mother’s house, a week after he got me to agree to look into relocating within a year, that one of the few online friends I had at the time told me one of her room mates bounced his rent check and then disappeared never to be heard from again, she needed a new room mate and she needed one in about a month (“But I thought we agreed on a year?’ I said. No, we said within a year, he replied, a month is within a year). That coincidence is too much for me to explain away, my healthy skepticism can’t dismiss it; and having some very solid real world evidence of the gods’ influence in your life can be a wonderful thing.

Everything in my life now has his fingerprints on it, and I went through with my lifetime vows. Because of these things, I consider there to be some truth in saying that I am owned when most every aspect of my life, both by his design and my vows, do belong to him.

But my turning so much over to him has nothing to do with obligation, with feeling as though I have to because he’s a god and he’s bigger than me. It has to do with trust, Hermes has earned my trust over the years, has proven over and over again that he has my best interests at heart. Should that ever change that trust could be lost, I don’t think it will ever come to that but walking away is a possibility.

***Warning, the following contains graphic depictions of UPG which may or may not be relevant to your practice, viewer discretion is advised***

It is not my opinion that Hermes is looking for slaves, but for very independent people. Hermes is a god of freedom, as many are though what sort of freedom they each offer can be very different. I believe that Hermes, in part, offers freedom from ties of obligation. His is the freedom of the wanderer, always on the road always moving, very little that can really hold on to him or keep him down. Which doesn’t mean going through life with no ties (unless that is what you need), but that ties are not something foisted upon you, that you just owe them some loyalty and you have no choice. You need to choose your own ties, and choose them very carefully; who do you want to be a part of your life, who do you want to extend your loyalty to, that you want to be obligated to?

I choose to bind myself to Hermes, I choose to belong to him. I choose that every day. And if one day I should find that it is no longer my choice, for whatever the reason, I do think he would rather I stop making that choice and walk away rather than remain unhappy at his side because I feel that I have to. I don’t see that day coming, but I know I have that option.

If I were ever to take that option, I know I wouldn’t walk away for free and a lot of the benefits I experience in my life may well vanish. However uncomfortable some people are with that, it is to be expected; reciprocity lies at the heart of every relationship especially divine ones, its a give and take. With extra privilages comes extra work, extra responsibility, and if I were to stop giving, no longer living up to my end of the bargain, he would be well within his rights to pull out as well. It would be no different than a human marriage coming to an end, you can’t go file for divorce from your spouse and still expect everything in your life to remain exactly the same; you might end up losing your house, your children at least some of the time, a large chunk of your possessions, your income, insurance benefits, the list goes on. Ending a divine relationship can be looked at much the same way, especially one that was close, intense and long term.

I have met those who consider this another form of slavery, them holding this over your head in order to keep you in line. Even beyond the very me centric notion that the gods should be expected to give you everything without you having to do much if anything in return (like I said, extra benefits extra work), I find this insulting on a more personal level.

I am not in this for what I can get out of him, I would not deserve this relationship if I was. Even were all these benefits to disappear tomorrow (and I’m sure some will sooner or later, life can not be wonderful all the time and no deity can make it so however much they may like you or not) I would still be here. I’m here because of a deep affection I have for him that has built in the years I’ve known him, that makes me want to serve him in whatever way he needs me to. Its that affection that keeps me at his side, and will keep me here so long as it remains.

Why I am no longer a Reconstructionist

What finally brought about the death of my Reconstructionist identity was Hermes himself. He told me it was time to drop the label and take a couple steps back from the community at large (which is not to say I was ever heavily involved beyond list lurking). And since he is really the center of my religious life, what he wants he gets.

That was the final nail in the coffin. Truth be told, this was building for quite some time, perhaps even from the beginning.

I discovered the Recon community after maybe a year or so of reading about Wicca and generic eclectic NeoPaganism and finding it unsatisfying for a variety of reasons. I appreciated the respect people in the Recon community had for studying the ancient traditions, actually respecting the deities as individuals instead of treating them like genies that exist only to do you favors. I signed right up, I thought I had found my home.

One mistake that I made then, and which unfortunately many people still make now (deliberately or not) is thinking its a matter of one or the other; either you are a hard line Reconstructionist or a fluffy eclectic, either you follow tradition to the letter or you do not give a shit at all. This is not even remotely true, its more of a spectrum than two opposing sides, with many different shades and layers in between. Not having ever been a hard line Recon, or even a self identifying Recon at all anymore, does not automatically put me on the side of the fluffy thoughtless eclectics. If that is, in all honesty, what you believe, I suggest you get out there and try interacting with some actual people instead of thinking that you can decide the way the world is without ever having left your tiny corner of it.

There are also, again unfortunately, some very negative and very persistent stereotypes that people on the one side will use to paint the other with wide, careless strokes. It is absolutely not true that all people who identify as Pagans (as opposed to Recons) don’t care about tradition at all, do no studying beyond books found in the New Age section with the little half moon on the spine, and basically do whatever they want because it feels good to them and who cares about the deities involved. Do such people exist? Absolutely, and they are a sadly very vocal segment, but vocal does not equal numbers (in fact, often enough it equals the opposite). I personally know a number of self identifying NeoPagans that are very well read, very devoted to their deities (as opposed to only trying to make themselves feel good)  and are very respectful of tradition whether they choose to follow it to the letter or not (and to be perfectly honest, whether someone wants to replicate tradition exactly or not, I do prefer they at least make their decision from a place of knowledge rather than ignorance). I do know of others who are … well, not so respectful. But to act as though those who are thoughtful and do know what they are doing either don’t exist or are in such an extreme minority that broad brushing the whole faith in this less than flattering picture is perfectly fine is horribly unfair.

And there can be problems in the Recon circles as well. Some have the idea that Reconstructionism is more like a religious reenactment society than an actual living faith, that people mostly just study and analyze and philosophize and talk endlessly but never actually practice, that everyone worships culture more than the gods. And are there people like that in the movement? Oh absolutely. But is that everyone, or even most everyone? Hell no. I have met some incredibly devoted people in this community, and my experiences in it have for the most part been positive.

The stereotypes and generalizations though can be easy enough to buy into, especially if you are new to things and don’t know any better. It can be easy to make the mistake of thinking, “Well, I know I’m not in that camp (whichever you may find more distasteful) so then I guess I must be in this other one.” It can make it harder to let go of labels if you believe, even in the back of your mind, that if you do so you will immediately become that other extreme that you don’t really want to be either.

I was fortunate to have come into the more, some would say moderate segment of the Hellenic Recon community, I wouldn’t brush up against those with far more extreme opinions until much later. Had the lore thumpers been my community I think these problems would have surfaced much earlier, assuming I had even been allowed to have my Recon career in the first place (and I doubt it). But even in the more moderate group, those gaps between where I was and where so many others were became apparent to me very early on. And so the struggle, between where I was finding myself and where I felt I needed to be as someone under a label, began.

Reconstructionism is not a religion, it is a methodology; it is a way to approach religion, to approach tradition. But it is also a community, it is a group of people united in that methodology. Nobody does things all the same, some things will be more important to one person than it will be to another, there are many different interpretations, theories and opinions. Still, there are some themes that do appear to be for the most part community wide, practices or beliefs that most seem to hold as a part of being Reconstructionist. And, for myself anyway, I felt there was a limit to how many of those near constant themes I can diverge from before I have to admit that I am out of line with everyone else.

Practice wise, the differences are not that deep. My rituals are very bare bones, candles and offerings and prayers/hymns and long meditation; I don’t require much in the way of pomp and circumstance, I have found simple works best. When it comes to studying ancient lore and history I consider it a must, if you wish to serve a deity now you do need to know who they were once considered to be, how that service was once done. And although I have no problems with reasonable innovation and UPG (ongoing communication from the gods is what makes this a living faith, after all), sticking to tradition as close as possible should always be the default position when approaching any deity you don’t know; these are offerings/activities they have been known to like in the past, its a reasonable place to begin; now if after the relationship has been established they tell you they want something different that’s fine, but why start out with guess work when someone else has already done the job for you? Keep in mind also I am not one of those people who believes the gods appreciate anything and everything you do for them, I do believe they can be offended, especially by those unwilling to put any real effort into a relationship or show them any consideration as independent beings that exist apart from you.

Its in other areas that I find my path just diverges from others.

1. Many Hellenic Recons believe it is absolutely necessary to worship every deity in the pantheon more or less equally; one person in particular classifies the “worship of the twelve” as an absolute requirement (there are other problems with that statement, but takes us beyond my point). I really don’t believe it is possible to worship all the gods equally, even beyond the issue of patrons there will always be a few you like and connect with more than others. But still, this does seem to be something the vast majority of the community agrees with and observes to the best of their abilities.

I ignored the other deities initially because Hermes was the one dancing for my attention and I felt instinctively that it was important to really establish that primary relationship, so I gave him my full attention. Later on I tried to expand that, I found Dionysos to be friendly enough although far in the background from where Hermes was. But the other deities mostly weren’t there, there were some I found impossible to relate to (as a mostly rootless wanderer, how do I connect with Hestia?), and two told me very clearly to get lost and don’t come back.

I do agree that it is never acceptable to disrespect a god, and I respect all deities for what they are and the place they hold in the world whether its a place that touches me or not. But respect and worship do not necessarily go hand in hand. Just because God X from whatever pantheon likes you is no guarantee his sister Goddess Y is going to feel the same way. And if a deity has repeatedly shown a total lack of interest in you, is it really respectful of them to continue pushing up on them against their obvious wishes?

2. Reconstructionism is, for the most part, modeled on the religion of Joe and Jane Average, and most people in any given religion are going to be general practitioners. The modern Recon community is designed to encourage those who come into it to be general practitioners; the word enforce can always be used for those people who firmly believe this is the only way to be and do not understand that not every person is necessarily supposed to be on the exact same path.

I am more a spiritual specialist, in that my focus is narrowed to one particular field of the human spiritual experience, as opposed to the broader picture. This is not something that I planned on or asked for, I was fine with being a general practitioner, but plans don’t always work out the way you think they will and you can’t always choose your gods. It wasn’t even something I fully realized for a long while, it took time before I started to see the themes and patterns. Some may argue that this is not very balanced, I think that can be debated (for one thing not everyone’s balance is going to look exactly the same), but I do believe it is part of the overall balance to have some people be so focused, it wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t necessary somehow.

Because mindless accusations do get made, let me state for the record: there is absolutely nothing wrong or inferior with being a general practitioner. Before you decide to assume this is all about feeling special with me, I challenge you to find where I ever said that having an “average” devotional life was inferior, or where I ever made anyone feel less than me for not having the same experiences I do.

3. I have contacts in the Norse pantheon as well as the Greeks. Now how offensive or not being dual trad is will depend on who you are talking to, some absolutely deplore the idea while plenty of others have no issues at all. Of course I hesitate to call myself dual trad, as the situation with the Norse deities seems to be shaping up much the same way the Greek gods did: my contacts are with two very specific deities while the rest of the pantheon mostly leaves me alone (although I have been informed Freya thinks I’m cool shit).

Now here some might throw the eclectic label at me. I can’t stop people from forming their own opinions, but I personally don’t feel the label applies. For one thing, I’m not making my own choices here, these are the being that are coming to me and the others are staying away for whatever the reason, its just the way it is. Though you can choose to believe me on this point or not. Also its hardly a random mishmash system I’m just throwing together, there is nothing random about it. Its all very tightly focused, all very well tied together in any number of ways. Its rather frightening actually.

4. While I do think its agreed upon that understanding ancient culture is important in truly understanding how and why the religion worked a certain way, it may be more debatable how many people actually think adopting the ancient worldview yourself is necessary. Though some think that it is.

I’m not going to pretend that our current culture is perfect, it isn’t, but nor do I hold to some romanticized vision of the past either. News flash, no culture at any point in time has ever been perfect, nothing will ever be perfect so long as people are involved. I am not in ancient Greece, nor do I honestly believe that the worldview would have remained exactly the same more than a thousand years later had the ancient faith survived. Naturally a person’s faith can and will influence their behavior and the way they see the world, but this should be a more organic process and not something dictated to you by others. I have never gotten the impression that my deities want me to reject everything I ever was or believed in in the twenty plus years I was alive before finding them, light it all on fire and automatically adopt someone else’s idea of the world wholesale. My gods prefer me to think for myself, thank you very much.

I’m not overly influenced by the culture that I live in now, I’ve always been pretty far outside the norm and my total lack of desire to fit in and be accepted makes it hard to make a real impression on me. My place in the world is as an outsider serving a liminal god, it wouldn’t make much sense of me to take on the cultural norm of any place or time. Though it doesn’t mean I can’t attempt to understand it intellectually, just like I try to intellectually understand this culture now (so difficult to do).

Many have observed that Hermes seems very at home in our modern world. Indeed there may be many elements to our current culture that are very Hermetic, for better or worse (that will largely depend on who you’re talking to). Though I do agree with this, I also believe that Hermes, being a deity of change, would be able to adapt to just about any culture at all. He has never struck me as being too terribly traditional, and others have had this experience of him as well (though your mileage may vary).

Hermes seems to prefer me to be a free agent, not become overly involved with any specific organization or movement. He wants me free of labels and the constrictions they bring. I got my beginning there, the label pushed me to focus on the studying that I needed to do, and now that I have my grounding it is apparently time to move on. Which is not to say that I ever stop studying, but that it may be time now to broaden focus to include things often left out of the Reconstructionist movement, like mysticism or magic (both things Hermes specializes in, like it or don’t).

I don’t fit in with the Recon movement, though there remains enough similarities that I can still hang in the background on the lists and groups that I was involved with before, I’ve maintained my same contacts through the massive changes I’ve made. I don’t fit in with the NeoPagan movement either. And no, its not up to some arrogant Reconstructionist up on his high horse trying to pin a scarlet “ENP” on everyone he doesn’t like to decide what is NeoPagan and what isn’t; self identifying NeoPagans can decide for themselves who fits in with them and who doesn’t, and they don’t recognize me as one of their own, the differences between me and them are just as great if not greater. Too liberal for the one, too conservative for the other, I find myself somewhere in between. Which is probably perfectly appropriate for me.

Playing with Tricksters

There are several distinct patterns that continually come up in my spiritual life, certain things that all or at least most of the beings that come into my life have in common. One of those commonalities is that of falling under the modern archetypal classification of Trickster god.

My divine boss, Hermes, is a trickster. One of the deities he introduced me to, Loki, would be another very notorious trickster. Odin has more than a few trickster traits, and while I wouldn’t say Dionysos is a trickster his intensity and complete dissolution of boundaries can make people uncomfortable with him in some of the same ways. The two animal spirits that have emerged so far, Spider and Raccoon, both likewise have trickster qualities.

My divine line up makes some people nervous, and many have commented that they are glad they are not me. I frankly do not blame them. Tricksters represent that which is foreign, they stand outside of the normal social order, can open doors that let that which is outside into the center and create fires that destroy everything in their path. They represent sudden, massive, sometimes violent and destructive change, something that humans in general have a pathological fear of. They are chaotic and unpredictable, and play by no one’s rules but their own. Naturally, this and the roller coaster like existence that comes from serving them, is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea.

I have been known to argue with those who insist tricksters, or any chaotic being at all, are just simply evil and not to be worshiped. Leaving aside for a moment my personal dislike of terms of moral absolutism such as “good” and “evil” I am not certain that such terms can be rightly applied to such ambiguous beings. Human being are not the center of the universe, merely one part of an overall whole; the world is not here to cater to you and the gods aren’t either. Something making you uncomfortable does not mean that something is evil, or that it has no place or purpose (which is not to say I believe every being out there was meant to be worshiped by humanity, there are many beings which stand too far outside and should not be approached, but this takes us far from the purpose of this article).

Tricksters are threshold beings, and as such serve a very clear and very necessary function in the maintenance of the social order; they exist in all pantheons in all cultures for a reason, because their existence is necessary to keep the whole intact (for an excellent study of tricksters and their relationship with society, please check out this wonderful and highly recommended book). I would be willing to bet most people will at some point in their lives need the interference of a trickster in order to instigate a needed change. Change is something people are afraid of, and I have known many that remain willingly in the same toxic and empty circumstances, however miserable they may be there, because these circumstances are at least familiar and they don’t know what else to do. Those that are most frightened of the tricksters and what they represent are sometimes the ones that need their influence the most.

The modern Hellenic community, in my own opinion, tends to minimize and water down Hermes’ trickster aspect, turning him into the equivalent of a divine dancing monkey. He is here to do cartwheels, inspire all sorts of random goofy shit, and make you laugh, and that is the full extent of his trickster side. On this I must violently, and irritatedly, disagree. Hermes is not a harmless sprite or a bumbling clown, everything I said above in regards to trickster gods applies to him as well.

This tendency I think is fueled both by Hermes’ overall positive treatment in surviving lore and ancient culture (as opposed to other tricksters like Loki, who is sometimes spoken of as though he were the Norse version of Satan, which is of course ridiculous), and a certain resistance in much of the community to see the gods as anything other than glowy balls of serene perfection, embodiments of pure morality (which usually translates into something like the gods would never do anything I personally do not like, the assumption being once again that humans’ sense of morality governs all things). This is not a world view that I agree with or one which is supported by anything that I see in the workings of the universe as I know it (indeed, often this is argued as I wouldn’t want to worship gods that are anything less than moral perfection, therefore gods that are not morally perfect do not exist, which of course is proof of nothing; I won’t say that a more reasoned argument can not be made, only that I haven’t heard one and I doubt my mind will ever be changed on the matter anyway so please, don’t attempt it). I do not hold the gods up to human moral standards, nor do I think morality is solely, or even mostly, what they are all concerned with. The gods are not always nice, some less so than others, and they don’t always do things that you would consider to be nice. Seeing them as flawed both makes sense to me and represents no conflict in worshiping them, actually I find that idea somewhat offensive; the gods deal with you in all your flaws after all, where do you get off being so high and mighty?

Unlike some others, Hermes does seem to have a very well developed public face, he does move more freely from fringe to center and does deal in the everyday life of the community more than what seems to be the usual. This is the face that most people will see, and indeed it is one where many of the classic trickster traits are more muted (which is still no excuse for thinking him the god of stupid jokes and inane pranks). Which is still not to say that invoking him will ever be a hundred percent safe or that he will ever necessarily behave in the way you expect he will or even in a way you might approve of; how many times do I see people ask him for some luck and then stand there facing the front door waiting for him to come in, when he has already snuck in the back door and left you a small gift on the table don’t ask where it came from.

Those that more closely work with Hermes, who have been claimed and actively patronized by him, tend to see a different face. It tends to be a darker one, one far more aligned with that classic trickster image. One that is far more foreign, more unpredictable, more chaotic and a little less nice in the normal social sense (although he is still hopelessly likable in a strange sort of way). Zeus’ Hatchet Man, as opposed to his Herald. This is something I have discussed with other Hermes’ people who have noticed much the same thing, the few of us that there actually are.

Because Hermes does not appear to patronize that many people, and this is something I have been noticing since I first met and began my relationship with him. He is friends with many people certainly, widely liked and actively involved with the modern community. Often times I see him appear in a secondary or even tertiary position behind a different deity, very often Apollon or Dionysos, sort of as a support figure to the primary relationship. But very rarely is he the primary relationship, very rarely does he reach out and outright claim someone as his own. One reason for this is the simple fact that trickster deities do not claim that many people as it is. Even if all of us need them some times, or can form casual relationships with them, most people are simply not equipped to stand that close to these beings for very long, not equipped to handle the roller coaster ride that life with them always ends up being.

I did not choose my deities, they all came to me, and it is not an accident that I wound up with the line up that I have. There are many things about me that are different from the norm, things that make me unusually fit to live the trickster lifestyle, to walk with and serve these beings. I can not promise that this will be true of everyone grabbed up by tricksters, but it is true of me and may well explain why I was made into the spiritual specialist that I am, why I have the relationships that I do.

* Along the spectrum between order and chaos, my natural balance point is much closer to the chaotic end than it is for most people. I thrive in chaos in a way that isn’t often seen, I like lots of movement and background noise and clutter, and I like things to change on a very regular basis. Rather than avoid change I embrace it, I encourage it. I have had my whole life torn down and remade more than once (which, by the way, is par for the course in serving tricksters; they will do that to you, they will do it often), and I still need to break routine and go to new places, do new things, change my surroundings (which does involve moving frequently) every so often. I will not pretend that I require no level of stability whatsoever, that is true of no one (anymore than someone can live entirely without chaos), and in some aspects of my life stability is the order of the day such as in romantic relationships (that’s right people, I am a monogamous Pagan *gasp*). But most of the time a little stability goes a very long way with me, and it doesn’t take much for me to become bored and fall into a depressive rut.

So many people make it their goal to settle down somewhere, buy a house and live there forever, find a career and stay there until retirement. Most of my blood relatives all live in the same area, they are born there and never leave, my father held the same job for over thirty years. This is considered a normal part of life, a successful life. I can’t remember a time when the thought of ending up like that didn’t fill me with panic.

* I have been a social outsider my entire life. There is a difference between people that really are outsiders and those that are going through certain phases, rebelling or playing with their identity and will eventually grow out of it and blend back into the crowd; I am one of the former. Some have accused me of deliberately trying to be different, and that might have carried some weight except that this began when I was five years old (and I have the documentation to prove it). A five year old is not trying to be different, a five year old doesn’t even realize that there is a norm for them to differ from. Even if I now live in a place where people consider my various eccentricities to be charming (at a distance) rather than horrifying, what was true of me then is, for the most part, still true of me now.

A person serving a deity who is all about community building will likely find themselves presented with a community to be a part of. Tricksters are more liminal figures, they exist at the boundary, and if you serve one you will likely have to do so from the position they themselves occupy. Although I would never want to be anywhere else in life, I do not pretend that life on the fringe is easy (anyone who tells you it is is a liar), and it must be ten times harder for someone that was not born to it. There is a good reason why those who serve liminal deities were almost always liminal people to begin with.

And of course, Hermes does not exist entirely outside of the social order; there is a degree of interaction, and so there is with me as well (which is not always easy or comfortable for me, frankly, I am naturally anti social). I maintain a fringe involvement with various groups, though never as a full community member and there are always important ways in which I remain not one of them, and after a time I inevitably move on.

* I am a very ambiguous person that doesn’t fit neatly and easily into any category, stereotype or subculture. Perhaps because of this (or maybe this is a symptom of the other)  I am predisposed to see the world in varying shades of gray, believing that, in general, absolutes do not exist (what I like to call a realistic view ). I tend to judge things on a situational basis relative to the circumstances, which is really the only approach when dealing with deities that blur boundaries (they’ll have way too much fun with you otherwise).

* One of the most common accusations against tricksters is that they are not trustworthy. I am not certain that that is really the case (not always, anyway)  but more that, as I said above, they do not play by the same rules that others do. You may come in expecting them to do one thing based on your own usual experiences, but as far as they are concerned they never promised you any such thing. Most of them will keep their word, the letter of it and no more than that, it is up to you to close the loopholes.

I experienced a lot of emotional and physical abuse growing up, and the end result of that is my ability to trust was almost completely destroyed. As a teenager my brain clicked into survival mode and developed a very lone wolf mentality: I look out for myself first and foremost, because there is no one else looking out for me. That was my reality for a very long time, and though things have changed and I have softened to a degree that I am able to trust (though admittedly, I can count the number of people I have ever trusted on one hand), much of that mentality still remains and likely always will. It is not completely necessary that I am able to trust you in order to form a relationship (barring intimate ones) or be willing to deal with you, because I probably don’t, and can’t, trust you out of hand.

For several years, I sought out the company of people that were considerably less than trustworthy, and quite open and proud of that. After years of being stabbed in the back (always by seemingly nice people that smiled to my face and swore up and down they would never do such a thing), there was something almost refreshing about such people, who at the least didn’t pretend that you could trust them. There was a degree to which I felt safer with people willing to lay their darker cards out on the table where I knew they were there, and spending time with such people taught me how relationships with them are negotiated.

One mistake I think many make is expecting that people will behave in the way you prefer they would, instead of paying attention to who they are and how they themselves act. There isn’t always a malicious intent there, just expectation projected on to them that it isn’t in them to fulfill. Never expect someone to behave in a way that is against their nature; if someone tells you they are not reliable, then do not put yourself in a position where you must rely on them. Most people will tell you who they are, the signs are there if you are looking for them, but most aren’t until its too late.

We all have a world view of our own, a list of rules and ethics we live by, and have a habit of assuming that everyone else sees things the same way that you do. That is not a good idea, and that goes triple when dealing with trickster deities who, by their nature, operate under their own rules. You need to be willing to set your own expectations aside, and negotiate on their terms and from within their world view as best you can.

Now, can most people do this easily? Probably not, and that is a good reason for the approach with caution advice. And this is of course not to say that tricksters can never be trusted period, but that is something to be seen over time. I trust Hermes completely, because he has proven over the years to have my best interests at heart (I never took that as a given, and it took a while to get to that point, and it certainly doesn’t save me from getting messed with every now and then); many who are close to Loki report that he is very loyal to those he considers to be friends, though not necessarily to anyone else. And hey, even a normally unreliable person can come through for you every now and then, you just shouldn’t expect it. Never expect more than they have told you, and shown you, that they are willing to give.

I don’t bring up any of these points to suggest that I am special, merely to speculate on why I may have wound up where I have spiritually speaking. There are many different places in the world, many different deities representing those different places, we’re all naturally better suited to some than others; many of the more community oriented deities that are the cornerstone of so many people’s personal practice are unreachable, if not outright barred, to me; you can’t have it all, there is always a trade off, that is just the way it goes. It is interesting for me to see how many ways in which I was suited for this, how much of my life almost seemed to prepare me for it; it lends a certain amount of confirmation to things (for me that is, your mileage may vary).

I also post it to be helpful to others. If you should decide you want to play with a trickster, these are some good points for you to keep in mind during your dealings with them. Maybe you can come out of it, not with the upper hand but at least with a few chips still in your pocket.

Destruction of Labels: Spiritual Crisis part one

As I am now ready to officially restart my blog (one new page, two rewritten, may be a good idea to check them out), I think my first new post should be something expanding on some of the problems that I have been having that have kept me away from the Internet for so long. Starting with the issue of labels.

As I have said in previous posts and in my information pages, I at one time, not long ago, considered myself a Hellenic Reconstructionist and that I have since stopped using that label. Exactly why, and what went into that decision I will explain in more detail in a future post, because I would not want anyone to get any number of wrong ideas based off of that. For the moment, it is enough to say that the destruction of spiritual labels, one I held for the entirety of my religious career and also the fact that I have not been able to find an adequate label to replace it, affected me more strongly than I may have at first thought. It made up one part of my current, slowly fading spiritual crisis.

Now, why would the loss of a particular label affect me so strongly? Its likely not for the reason that you may be thinking.

For many, labels are a tool that they use to define who they are, both to themselves and, I’d say more importantly, to the rest of the world. Its a sense of identity, and a sense of belonging in a particular group of others who share that identity. For that reason alone, humans being in general social creatures who function best within a community structure, labels hold a place of powerful importance in their lives. The loss of that label, and the sense of identity that goes with it, a devastating blow to one’s psyche.

For me though, much of this just simply does not imply. I am one of those exceptions that prove the rule in that I am not for the most part a social creature, I am not community oriented (note that does not mean anti community, but again this should probably be a post in and of itself) and I function best being mostly solitary interacting with communities when necessary (indeed sometime it is necessary) from the position of an outsider. As such, my relationship with labels is different than it is for many other people, as a means to define myself they are neither useful nor really needed. I’m not looking for catchphrases I can use to describe myself to others, to see if I belong in their club or not; for personal use I do not need them, I’m perfectly content to just let myself be and not worry about what to call it (a good thing because I don’t fit neatly and honestly into most any solid category).

I never fit perfectly into the Hellenic Recon box either, and thus I often qualified it by calling myself a “liberal Recon” and freely explaining that I may not do A, B or C that many other people seem to do. I connected more with certain individuals within the community as opposed to the community as a whole, people that for the most part I doubt are going to turn their backs on me merely for the loss of a label (mostly because they got to know me beyond mere labels). Anyone that would stop talking to me just because of that, well, to be perfectly frank, if your concern for me is based entirely around what I choose to call myself then you likely weren’t important enough to me to miss.

As a matter of identity and group identity, labels matter little to me, its loss made no real impact. Thinking only on this level, I didn’t consider it to be a problem. And yet, there is was, growing the longer I went without finding something new to call myself.

Labels, particularly religious labels, serve another purpose besides group identity. They are a way to define the world around you, to try and make sense out of a senseless mess. Its a way to create boundaries, decide what’s important and what’s irrelevant to you, what you can expect to happen and what never will, who are your allies and who is … well, if not an enemy outright at least not a friend. Established religious traditions come with a map of the terrain, offer you a place of shelter where things make sense and you pretty much know what is around the next corner and there is always someone there with who can guide and support you.

The thing of it is, these maps, these boundaries, are artificial. Laid out by people; inspired people perhaps, but it still doesn’t make their image an absolutely true and universal one. The world operates under its own rules, and that includes the spiritual world; people’s understanding of these rules, and their many exceptions, is far from complete. The world does not care how you think things should be, and though most people can go through life safely inside their walls, some of us for whatever reason get to find out the hard way just how fragile those walls really are.

This crisis really started for me when Odin and Loki entered my life very suddenly, at Hermes’s invitation and remained with his approval. Being a Hellenic Reconstructionist gave me no context in which something like this could happen, but instead told me that it doesn’t. Furthermore, it tells me that such a scenario is not a good idea.

While a soft polytheist would declare that the gods I made contact with are really one and the same as Hermes (this is a view point I never agreed with instinctively and this experience proved it as far as I am concerned; Hermes, Odin and Loki all have a great deal in common and a lot of over lapping areas of concern, but there is also a great deal of differences there, and those differences can and do effect the way the god comes through to you, the feel of their presence, their personality, on those levels they are most definitely not the same)  and Hellenism does have plenty of that, hard polytheists might argue it doesn’t happen. The Greek gods are the Greek gods, the Norse are the Norse, and there is a firm line between them that is just never crossed.

I will not argue that the Greek gods are a family in and of themselves, and the Norse deities are their own series of tribes. I agree that work generally occurs within the family. But the notion that the different tribes of gods are not aware of each other, that they have never interact with each other, it doesn’t strike me as terribly logical and, judging from my experiences and those of others, its not the case at all.

Just because a god from one particular pantheon initiates a relationship with you, is not to say that deities from other pantheons are never going to come around (likewise, just because a deity from a particular pantheon likes you is not the say all the others gods from that pantheon will feel the same way, but that’s a whole other issue). But specific traditions, especially cultural tradtions, do not generally address this; don’t introduce you to the possibility, don’t tell you what you should do when and if it does come up (now it seems logical to me that ignoring a god’s call for no other reason than because they come from a different pantheon is not a wise move, but just because its logical to me is not to say that it will occur to everyone).

Even more confusing for my Reconstructionist background is not just that a new pantheon had shown up, but that my patron had invited them over. And though I initially tried to keep worship very separate, I kept feeling a very strong sense of disapproval whenever I did. The message I kept getting was that this careful and deliberate separation is really not very necessary. This runs completely counter to everything I learned in my time in Recon circles, which says pantheons must never be mixed, that this is always a bad idea.

I want to state very clearly here, that I am not in any way endorsing the sort of irresponsible eclecticism that runs rampant in some Pagan circles. Research should always be done, cultural differences and divine preferences respected. And there is a very good reason why that no mixing pantheons rule is there, and why it should always be the default position. The good thing about having myths is that it shows you how deities generally interact with each other, how well they get along; so you know, for example, calling Loki and Heimdall into the same ritual space would be a spectacularly bad idea. These myths do not exist cross culturally, and thus its not known how these two personalities might interact if I call them together. Just because two deities may govern similar things is no guarantee. I would say in fact, unless they themselves tell you its okay, separation is the way to go.

In my circumstances, I was told its not a problem; though in practice I often don’t call more than one god in a ritual at a time because I find it easier to focus on one, though they do all share space in the temple room with no ill result. I had run the situation past several people personally involved with at least one if not two deities from the group, none of whom had problems with the conclusions I came to. The gods in my group were all travelers used to dealing with strangers, boundary gods that blur lines, tricksters that don’t pay attention to rules, the idea that they would interact outside their pantheons and all get along with each other was not impossible to believe in fact it almost seemed to make sense.  Though I was glad to have my UPG confirmed by others whose opinions I respected, accepting that UPG, which ran right in the face of things I have been taught before, was probably the first step in my losing my connection to my religious label and the well ordered safe haven that came with it. By making me a spiritual specialist focused on liminalty (whereas Reconstructionism is designed to encourage everyone to become general practitioners), by insisting on certain other vows and other practices, Hermes hammered away whatever was left of that connection before ordering me to drop the label altogether.

Leaving religious labels behind is like being left standing alone in the middle of a vast, uncharted wasteland; you don’t know where you are, where you need to go, who you might meet along the way. And there is something very freeing in this, which I’m now at a point that I can begin to fully appreciate; but its also a little frightening to admit that the walls you thought protected you do not actually exist, that the map you are holding is of some place you’ve never been to. I don’t have a path laid out before me, I don’t have access to clear cut answers about what I should do, and I have no idea what might be coming next. Its an intimidating position to be placed in.

It is helpful to know other people in similar circumstances, never the exact same but similar; I am not the only person who was so rudely ripped out of more comfortable surroundings. No, I’m not completely crazy, not as far as this is concerned. There is no one single correct way to worship the gods, what they ask of one or even most people they may not ask of everyone. Reconstructionist faiths are mostly designed to reflect the religion of Joe and Jane Average, and there is nothing wrong with that, but its also not where all of us are meant to be. Tradition remains important, and my studying of ancient cultures and incoporating what I can has not changed, my relationship with tradition is not as all encompassing as some have it, and in certain areas of my spiritual life I am very much on my own.