Prayer for a Prayerless Morning

Melek Ta’us.
Melek Ta’us!
MELEK TA’US!

My mind is void of prayer, yet I pray to you, nonetheless. Fill my head with your voice!

My heart is absent of prayer, yet I pray to you, nonetheless. Fill my chest with your pride!

My stomach is empty of prayer, yet I pray to you, nonetheless. Fill my belly with your power!

Stand watch over me.
Brush away what clings upon my Fetch.
Fill my Shining Body with your breath.
Join me in song as I call down the Sacred Dove.

I am your mirror. May your beauty by reflected in me.

Ha! Behold, how beautiful I am!

No More, No Less

You cannot be anything more than human.
You cannot be anything less than divine.
But what potential, a human life! And what terror, in even the smallest God!

What does it mean to be human today? Where do you hold your divinity? Do you attempt to surpass your humanness? Are you hiding your divinity out of fear or shame?

For me, today, being human has meant feeling pain, sorrow, and anger. And a whole host of other “negative” emotions. Sometimes, when life comes at me hard, I get stuck there in spite of all of my practice and my best efforts. And I remind myself that that’s okay. I try to let the emotion flow through me. But, as always, there are some blocks.

Being divine, having the power of choice, means moving into the moment and embracing the power to change. My power to choose influences the power of change all around me. Today I remember that it’s one thing to choose, and it’s another thing to claim, to act. So today I chose to heal, to fill up, to revitalize my Shining Body. Today I chose to sing! Literally.

Singing loosens things in me, helps me to step back into the flow. It is a unique meeting of my human and divine parts. Oh how the Fetch loves to open up the mouth and belt out a melody! And the Talker revels in the twists and turns of lyrics. And the Godsoul moves through those very human sounds, those very human words, and imbues them with sacredness and the power of change.

That’s what works for me. I used the tool of song, along with the tools of ritual, cleansing, and a host of the Feri tools, to awaken myself to my divinity and reground into my humanity. What tools do you have? What choice can you make? What brings you back to center?

You are no more than human, for you are in human form. You are no less than divine, because the divine moves in you, through you, and around you. And you are also animal, wild, free. Can you connect to each of these? Can you bring them together today?

Knowledge, Self, Shadow, Light

I talk a lot about Shadow Work. I haven’t talked about it much (if at all?) on this blog, but it’s a big part of my spiritual philosophy. It’s also something that’s been on my mind a lot for about the last three months.

There are many ways to engage Shadow and do the work of healing and (re-)integrating the darker, wounded parts of self. Some of them are deep, involved, difficult, often scary. There’s also the simpler everyday task of self-observation.

Last week I was having a talk with an old friend while sitting on the beach under the peculiar mix of night’s sky before us and the harsh lights of street lamps and the various buildings looming behind us. As is usual with this friend, we were talking about the world, its ills, its wonders, and where we fit in all of that. We were talking about changing the world. Of course this led me to the topic of self-knowledge and integration. His reply? “I don’t think people have any business trying to ‘know’ themselves. It’s pointless. That’s something you’re never going to figure out until like the moment right before you die.”

He had a good point: you can do your work and be effective in the world without ever really “knowing” yourself. But I wonder, if you don’t know yourself, what kind of effect will that “effectiveness” have? So do you spend your time trying to learn who/what/why you are, or do you spend it taking action? As I explained to him, my opinion is both.

As with all things, balance is necessary in the quest for self-knowledge and effective action, integration and banishing, Shadow and Light. We don’t have time to get it perfect before we make a move, but that’s no reason to not keep aiming for a little bit better than our current best.

Shadow Work is an important tool in this process. So is ‘Light Work.’ So ask yourself:

• What am I afraid of? What is that fear trying to protect me from?
• What am I passionate about? Where will that passion lead me, if I let it?
• What am I hiding? Who am I hiding it from?
• What do I have to offer, and am I utilizing that talent?

We each have our specific gifts and our specific challenges. Can we rise to meet them all? Pick one today and see where it leads you!

P.S. It’s soooo late. I hope I was coherent!

Brigid in the Blogoshphere 2009

This is the fourth annual Brigid in the Blogosphere. I love it. This is my frist entry on this new blog. May there be many more.

I’m wandering
and the tide ebbs in and flows
the world is spinning, spinning
and the warmth of sex returns to grace the land.

I’m wondering
where is this lonely path leading? and
who is this Woman who calls to me? and
what is this Bright Lady’s name?

I’m faltering
starting and stumbling only
to start again, clearer, cleaner, and
with a little more frustration than the time before.

I’m altering
deep in the crevices of mind and heart
the ways in which I step
the roughness of my touch.

I’m coping
stirring the coals that sustain my fire
adding the dross and debris as kindling
boiling the waters into a potion of change.

I’m hoping
praying to my own soul for forgiveness
speaking the truth with compassion and courage
growing delight in my inner dark places.

Imbolg is here once more.

-Jonah

Check out some of the other entries by following links to the blogs in the comments here:
Invitation to the Fourth Annual Brigid in the Blogosphere Poetry Slam

End of the Year

Holy Mother,
In whom we live, move, and have our being,
from You all things emerge
and unto you, all things return.*

A lot of people see the new year as a clean slate – a chance to start over. This year, I’m choosing not to see it that way.

Midnight will come and go. My problems will not depart.

2008 will end. My complexes and addictions will persist.

2009 will begin. My past will remain intact.

People all over this time zone will shout “Happy New Year!” with joy. My transgressions will not dissipate.

Everything I have done will remain in the Earth’s long memory. Everything I’ve experienced will still have shaped who I’ve become.

This is not a clean slate, no. But it a new opportunity. It is a new chance to take what I have and to make it clean. One more chance to put my house in order.

Everything that has hurt, everything that has healed, all that has brought me sorrow and all that has brought me joy… they will all make the transition with me. Now is a chance to take the painful lessons and compost them, to use them to help grow my next year with each of them as a solid reminder of who I was, who I am, and who I am becoming.

This is not starting over. This is something better.

This is the beginning of setting things right.

*Holy Mother prayer by Victor Anderson

Prayer is Listening

You may have heard that prayer is when we speak and meditation is when we listen. A long time ago, when I first heard that truism, it seemed right enough and I took it for what it was. Over time, however, as my practice and connection to deity deepened, it became clear to me that putting prayer and meditation into those terms was really an oversimplification.

Stillness and Silence

Meditation is about mindfulness. It is an opportunity to slow down, to be relaxed and alert, and to create space within ourselves in which we can just be. When I was younger, my “meditation” involved visions and communication with gods and visualizations designed to clear me of negativity. All of these things are good and helpful, but I wish we’d call them what they are instead of lumping them all under the catch-all category of “meditation.” Sometimes even now my meditation sessions are hijacked when one of my allies has something pressing to get across – but that’s usually because I haven’t given myself adequate time for listening and my guides jump at the first quiet moment I get. But for the most part, meditation, for me, is about cultivating stillness and silence. I wouldn’t call cultivating silence “listening.”

Tuning In

The other part of this prayer : talking :: meditation : listening analogy is the explicit assumption that prayer is all about getting our little thoughts up into some big ears. This may be true on the surface, and it’s undoubtedly how most people approach prayer. But if we are praying properly, something deeper is going on.

At the heart of prayer, if we don’t make our prayers out of greed or hate, is the desire to come into alignment with deity. Grant me your wisdom! your love! your prosperity! your compassion! The words or actions of the prayer are only important inasmuch as they relay to our bodies, hearts, and minds which aspect(s) of deity we want to accept into us. A prayer, felt fully, is not about transmitting our desires to the gods. It is about tuning in to our gods bringing our desires into alignment with theirs.

Prayer is listening. The best form of listening is active listening, which involves two-way communication. Your lips may be speaking pre-written or impromptu words, and your fingers may be clicking away at mala beads, and your brain may be focusing intently on what it is you’re asking for, and your heart may be filled with love or reverence or gratitude or need. In other words, you may be talking an awful lot. But if it’s a true prayer, all of that talking is only a means to tune in so that you become receptive to divine will and purpose.

As an example, let’s look at a very famous prayer.

Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.

This is such an excellent example of a prayer designed to bring the supplicant into alignment with their god. Taken in pieces, it could also be read this way:

Our Father, who art in heaven: Dear God,
Hallowed be thy Name: I come to you in reverence and awe.
Thy kingdom come. They will be done, On earth as it is in heaven: Align me with your Will and  your Purpose.
Give us this day our daily bread: Continue to care for me, as you always have.
And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. Look favorably upon me, for I have done what is right.
And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. May I live in a way which honors you.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen. Everything I do is for you, towards your ends.

Desperate Times…

Perhaps you’ve heard a story or two about prayers offered in desperation which are answered quickly and definitively. Desperation, by the way, flies in the face of good magical practice. By focusing on the problem or the need, we will create more of it.* Well, good thing prayer and magic aren’t the same thing! Anyone who says that “spells are just our form of prayers” either hasn’t looked very carefully into the matter or is trying to downplay the significance of magic in their religion to placate the masses. If they were the same thing, desperate prayers would never be answered.

Why are these types of prayers seemingly answered more readily than others? Because when you are down and out, when you’ve tried everything there is to try, when you have nowhere else to turn, you are much more likely to actually be willing to “try anything” and give in to the will of deity. So often we pray for this and that, whether it’s health or money or wisdom, and then we don’t change to allow that gift into our life. We fight our own prayers. We deny our own requests! At that point, we’re just talking, and we’re forgetting to listen. But if we’re desperate, we may just get out of the way. “I’ll do anything!” Even give up a little ego so I can step aside and finally accept the help I’ve been asking for all along.

If we acknowledge our prayers from the start as attempts at listening, perhaps we won’t have to wait until we’ve hit rock bottom to allow them to be answered. If our prayers extend not just outward beyond our lips but also inward, resonating within our very cells, perhaps we will be able to release our stranglehold on our lives and allow ourselves to come into alignment with a higher intelligence, a deeper wisdom, or a more holistic mode of thinking.

Listening

Having said all of this, I would like to add that taking time to just sit and listen is equally important as prayer (active listening) and meditation (cultivating stillness). Maybe it’s time we add listening to our checklist of foundational practices and allow meditation to stand in its own right.

In closing, let me offer one more prayer. You may address it to whomever you see fit.

Beloved one,
who gives me strength and beauty and joy,
walk with me this day
and teach me to be as you.
I open myself to your wisdom.
Make me wise.
I open myself to your power.
Make me strong.
And when I shall learn that final lesson,
may my life have been lived as you would have lived it.
Make me ready.
Make me able.
Make me yours.
Blessed be.

*To be clear: No, I don’t subscribe to the tenets of The Secret and I don’t think the law of attraction is a total and adequate summation of the mechanics of magic.

Prayer of the Day

I honor the light and the beauty.

I honor the darkness and the shadow.

May I be the ever-changing balance between them.

Cages

I recently did a short ritual as part of a class I am taking. This ritual led me to literally come face-to-face with my own anger. I won’t go into the details of how this happened, or why. The important part is that I gave my anger a face, a consciousness of its own, so that I could speak with it and find out where it comes from and what it wants.

Oh man. That was an interesting experience! One I will not likely soon forget. It wasn’t especially intense. It was, in fact, profoundly simple. I was able to understand something that, looking back, seems so obvious. Why couldn’t I see it before?

I looked at my anger, standing before me, bound in place by a magic triangle, and asked it what it wanted. I don’t know! it said. I don’t know! I don’t know! I just want OUT! Let me out! Let me out!!

Had I not been prepared and in a place of total openness to the information I might receive, I may have severely misinterpreted this request. Let me out? I’m sure we’ve all seen the horrors that can be wrought by unchecked rage. The aim of this ritual was not to appease the negative trait that was brought up; it was to honor it, understand it, and learn how to work with it.

The key to understanding my anger came not from its words, but from its actions. The triangle containing Anger acted as a type of force shield, keeping it at a safe distance and keeping it from roaming free and running amok while I had given it its own consciousness. But Anger did not like being caged. It clawed at the walls of light frantically, trying to escape. It yelled out its demand to be set free. It spit and snarled, scraped and scratched, insisted and pleaded. Let me out! I’m in a cage!

I’m… in a cage…

There was a moment of clarity within me. I began to realize how trapped I feel, and how that feeling seldom recedes, and how it creates a base of frustration like a low hum that my ears have begun to tune out. Frustration unabated slowly builds into anger. Anger unreleased boils into rage.

I had turned myself into a pressure cooker!

I am not an angry person, by nature. I had been struggling to understand my anger and disconnection, not knowing where it could be coming from, not knowing why I felt so unlike me. All it took was to ask, and the answer was presented.

Cages do not always have walls and bars. Far more often they are a woven mesh of words, expectations, and guilt. We can be bound in cages of thought which can restrain us far more effectively than any physical barrier. We can be locked in cages of responsibility that keep us from realizing our dreams, and our potential.

I’m still working out how to free myself from some of these self-imposed cages, but just the knowledge that they are there is a huge help. I am also extremely grateful for my tools: meditation, Iron Pentacle, Kala, Soul Alignment, and continual lessons and messages from my Gods.

How do you cage yourself? What makes you feel trapped? What frustrations do you struggle to let go of? Just naming them is a start towards finding the key to free yourself.

Fluff

So if you’ve read this blog up to this point,  you may have noticed it’s a little… fluffy. Yeah. It’s not over the top, but it’s been very love and light. Well, fine, that’s just the mood I’ve been in. Things in my life have been much less than fluffy love and light lately, so I’ve been counter-balancing a bit.

Well, this is me saying that I’m not all that fluffy. Sure I delve into it now and again. Sometimes it’s nice to take a bubble bath, put on a soft, thick robe, and drink hot cocoa while watching Cinderella on Disney DVD ™. Sometimes we need a hug from the Big Lady in the Sky (er, of the Sky?) It feels nice. It’s reassuring. It makes us feel safe and hopeful.

But there’s a reason I’m a Witch and not a Whitelighter. And I have nothing against Whitelighters, per se, nor the New Age movement or any of that. They’ve got some good ideas and some good practices. They help a lot of people to feel nice and reassured and safe and hopeful. For some people, that’s enough. That’s what they need. That’s what they want.

Personally, I don’t have the luxury. I know there’s a dark side to the spirit world, and that it’s Big, Bad, and Scary, and absolutely vital. And I know that the Big, Bad, and Scary stuff is in me, too. And you. And that other guy.

The thing is, I actually enjoy that side of being a spiritual person. It’s fucking interesting, for one thing. More importantly, there’s no getting around it. You can try and dump as much white light and love on your Shadow as you want, but it ain’t going away. To use a cliché, if you cage the beast it just gets angry.

I’m sure you’ve all heard this a million times. I’m not getting into it now. But I did want to point out that, yes – I work heavily with gratitude; yes – I do my best to stay optomistic in the face of opposition; yes – I acknowledge and appreciate “universal love.” However, I also do Shadow work, mirror work, and invoke darkness into my self and my circles. I acknowledge that there are things out there that can hurt me, and some that actually want to (people aren’t the only jerks in the universe!), and that most of them just want respect and privacy and we’ll get along fine by learning to live and let live.

…self-exploration is occult activity. By searching out the seldom-plumbed depths of soul and psyche, we shine our consciousness on what has been obscured. We are seeking the hidden: the sources of our strength, our danger, the neuroses that shape us, the power that guides us, our soft and vulnerable spaces. Until we can walk into the deep spaces, we cannot soar into the heights. Balance is the key. Not a static balance, but a shifting balance, with a fulcrum that, through practice, can become both strong and supple. This is part of the dance of our evolution as human beings.

-T. Thorn Coyle, Evolutionary Witchcraft, pp 76-77.

So I encourage us all to bring a little light into our lives when we are feeling too dark, and a little darkness in when it feels too bright. (Ooo, that reminds me of one of my songs. Maybe I’ll post it sometime.) And you know what happens when you mix up that light and dark really well? You get a whole new kind of shine!

A Prayer to Tehuti

I just got back from the beautiful Balboa Park, the largest park and art center in San Diego, California. What a beautiful day to be outside! The sun was bright, the air was warm but not hot under the shade of the trees, there was a gentle breeze, and the tree I was under got a visit from a couple of squirrels looking for their dinner. What follows is what I wrote in my journal while I was there.

I came here to Balboa Park with the specific intention to write. Now that I’m here, I still can’t think of anything to write about. I read a little, and I’ve been sitting here people-watching and enjoying being outside in the late summer air.

I notice that I’m halfway through this book now. I can see the binding threads between this page and the last. The first half has seemed uneventful. Hopefully the rest will have somethig more to offer.

But right now, I feel so drained of Sex.* I don’ know where my creativity went, or what I sold it for. Whatever it was, it was not worth it. But sitting on the grasss under a tree in the shade, listening to the fountain and the children and the wind and the bells in the clock tower… it feels gently rejuvinating. Losing myself in this way seems to have been a slow process. Why shouldn’t replenishing myself be slow and gentle as well? Why try to force anything? All my lessons this year have centered around relaxing and just letting things be. Set boundaries, but let go. Things will grow on their own.

Thoth told me that last bit at Samhain. Here it’s almost Samhain again and I’ve been hearing that lesson all year long. It’s definitely starting to sink in.

So what I’ll write today is a prayer to Thoth, in gratitude and apology for a year of lessons and avoidance.

Mighty Tehuti!
Wise Lord of time and magic
God of scribes and keeper of Law:
I honor you with my very breath
and the ink which flows from my pen.
I have known your Love
and felt unworthy.
I have known your disappointment
and responded with guilt.
But you have remained -
my silent teacher.
Your glory has surrounded me
though I was unaware.
For it is You, my lord,
who drive me towards greatness
who inspires my growth
who guides me in my quest
for knowledge
for understanding
for wisdom.
Your bright eyes smile upon me;
I feel them.
With the reed in your hand
you write blessings on my heart.
And when that heart shines,
I shine it for you,
Tehuti,
bright Lord of Wisdom,
whose magic has led me
and whose star guides me still.

Have you written any prayers to your Gods? I’d love to read them. Please feel free to share or link to them in the comments section.

*Sex in the sense of the Iron Pentacle point of Sex.