the last several years of our life have been, among other things, a series of lessons, often very painful and shameful lessons, in the value of ritual.
ritual has been beaten and hounded and driven out of mainstream U.S. society and culture, for the simple reason that U.S. society is authoritarian and thus the authorities want to be the ones telling human beings what they should be doing regularly. anyone who has sincere rituals of their own that aren't consonant with the artificial rhythms imposed by the authorities—U.S. society isn't far different from Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time, when you think about it—are ostracized and ridiculed and punished for believing in the wrong things. The world is full of religions and faiths and sacred practices that are anathema to the ways of the United States and "the West" generally. the regular prayers of Muslims, whose religion is (let's face is) considerably better organized and better civilized than Christianity has succeeded at, especially terrify the U.S. but American authorities have taken revenge on just about everyone with inconvenient rituals. Jewish actor Steven Hill got drummed out of "Mission: Impossible" because the producers didn't want to accommodate his religious worship. Try asking for a day off work for a religious or spiritual occasion that's not Christian and see how far that gets you!
the thing that defeated my earlier attempts to move towards polytheist spirituality in earlier decades was my inability to understand, at a fundamental level, why ritual was important. why was it important to do something over and over and over again, no matter what your mood is, no matter whether you're feeling into it or not? I needed to be taught this in painful stages. the gods, the "divine surgeons" to use Orual's evocative phrase from C. S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces, have been patiently whipping a sense of religious duty into me. I needed to learn how to do this thing from scratch.
it was once a source of tremendous guilt, during earlier Christian wanderings. I knew there was a duty to prayer, and yet prayer felt like a dead and pointless activity; I could not make myself stick to it even though I was fully aware that shirking prayer was wrong. only by painful experience did I learn that even if it's a mistake to manufacture feelings about prayers (as so many Christians do) it's also a mistake not to listen to one's feelings during prayer. if it really seems like there's nothing there then...maybe there isn't! among the many things I've had to learn is how to interpret my own spiritual feelings, and tell the difference between a genuinely glimmer of the numinous and wishful thinking. and there IS a difference...at least, in my personal experience.
I can now look upon my altar at home with a slight sense of pride. it's pitiful, inadequate, far short of what I feel I owe. but at least I have managed to get us all this far. Kris is starting to understand, starting to get it for themselves...
...my job as the Pnictogen Wing's sibyl and unofficial priestess has not been in vain, then.
~Chara of Pnictogen
