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I dreamed last night that I lived with a wild witch.

In the dream I am one of several people who live in a house. With us lives a witch who spends most of her time sleeping in special hidden compartments. Though the other residents of the house are transfixed by her when they see her moving about, when she goes back into her compartments to sleep they carry on doing whatever they were doing as if they can't remember she even exists. I can remember her because I do magick myself, but even for me it takes effort of will to remember her every time she goes back into hiding.

One of the other residents of the house, though, is finding she can no longer hide her awareness of the witch from herself and paints a mural depicting the witch in a wild, viny, thorny forest. I warn her that this could well anger the witch the next time she comes out. I suggest she change the face of the woman in her painting so that the witch won't know it's a painting of her. My roommate doesn't care, though; she can no longer stand to hide this knowledge from herself. I don't press the issue either, because I too can no longer stand this state of affairs.

Some other things happen; our town gets a visit from President Franklin Roosevelt and I am able to get a front-row seat at his town hall meeting. Not too long into the meeting, though, everyone stops and looks in the direction of the house where I live. The witch has come out and seen the mural, and her reaction sends a shock wave of awareness through everyone for miles around. Everyone returns their attention to the meeting then, as if that moment had never happened, but I knew I'd better return to the house, frustrated that I didn't get to talk to President Roosevelt.

I believed that I could talk to the witch where no one else could, calm down her fury and help her to understand that she is welcome to live openly with us. When, however, I arrive at the thorny thicket outside the house where she has gone, she jumps at me, and is so frightening and feral that I wake up.
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In 2002, my friend Heidi, who I knew at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in New Orleans, told me I would be attending divinity school in Boston. "I've seen it. It's going to happen. You may as well pack up right now and go."

I was like, Boston? Divinity school? What? I'd never been to Boston, had never contemplated living in Boston, had no reason to move there, and even more significantly, had no money to move there. I had an interesting life in New Orleans and had no desire nor motivation nor means to leave.

And even if I did trade New Orleans for Boston, I had no money to attend divinity school. The UUA's designated divinity school in Boston is Harvard Divinity School. Never mind that any form of school was hopelessly out of reach, divinity school was extra out of reach because all divinity schools are private and therefore expensive -- and Harvard was extra-double-hardcore out of reach.

And even if it was within reach, I had no motivation. Ever since I dropped out of grad school in 1999, I had more or less a semi-annual tradition where I'd contemplate going back to grad school, even look at a course catalog or two, look at the idea from several perspectives, and then decide against it.

And even if I did decide to go to grad school, divinity school was an option I'd considered and rejected. I feared the consequences of making a pastime out of mysticism, of what ways my message would potentially be warped if keeping a roof over my head depended on making a religious message that would sell.

So, in 2002, when Heidi told me this, it seemed like the most unlikely, outrageous prediction anyone had ever made about my future.

In 2003, even though my marriage was drawing to a close, I developed a new relationship that made leaving New Orleans even less likely. But in early 2004 my new relationship also drew to a close; plus I hated my job, my living situation became unstable... and R* and F. came back into my life and asked me to come live with them.

In Boston.

Well, not Boston, but you know, a suburb. A suburb about two miles away from Harvard. Where I finally landed a permanent job. A job with benefits that include a huge discount on tuition for courses at the Harvard Extension School. Which offers courses in religion taught at the Harvard Divinity School. Including one by Dr. Helmut Koester in early Christian history that intrigued me enough to sign up.

So, 3 years later, there I was, going to divinity school in Boston.
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I had a little fun with the weather yesterday afternoon. As i was leaving work the wind was picking up, and each second i could feel more little droplets of rain hitting me. I looked around, looked up, and this little voice inside me said, "Go back inside. Right. Now."

I turned right around, and five steps later (just as i came under the overhang) the rain started coming down. A couple more steps and it was a downpour. By the time i was back inside the entranceway the water was coming down in sheets - it looked like someone was just dumping water out of a large bucket or something. Over the next 90-120 seconds i'd swear it must have rained an inch.

My luck with storms has always worked this way. When i was five i was out in the backyard behind my parent's townhouse when the wind started picking up. The next door neighbor looked out at me through his sliding glass door and pointed at my house meaningfully, as a way of telling me "it's time to go inside." The back door was locked, though, so i ran around to the front as the rain and wind picked up. I go in the front door and run around back to see the downpour begin in earnest... and noted then a big piece of roofing tiles which the wind had torn off and which had fallen onto the very spot where i'd been standing maybe a minute before.

I've had near misses from hurricanes, too. Well, okay, Hugo wasn't a near miss. But i've had several. Hurricane Andrew was to have made landfall right along the part of the coast where we lived, in Delray Beach; instead at the last hour it swerved south and hit south of Miami. We lived less than a mile off the coast and if Andrew had hit us directly we'd have been wiped away along with our entire home, the way the storm did to many of the folks in its path. Then there were Isidore and Lili in 2002, which somehow didn't rain doom down on New Orleans. I also... for various reasons do not believe it was chance that i had moved away from New Orleans before Katrina.

Maybe there's a storm goddess watching out for me.
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Reading Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel. I'm glad i'm reading this now, it's a Beltane story and i can use a few glimpses of spring to come. (Yes, technically it's here, but the continuing cold and crappy weather kind of belies what i think of as "spring.")

The theme, halfway into this book at least, seems to be encounters with the numinous, which is a worthy topic. I don't know if they are proof that we don't understand reality as well as we think we do, or hiccups in the process of consciousness, or what, but each of us can probably tell a tale or three of things which have happened in our lives which we can't explain, or moments where we have touched a greater awareness than we usually enjoy.

When i was young my moments had a very Christian feel to them. Around the time i was 13 they began to take on a much more Pagan and occult feel. This was not something i chose, it is just the nature of things which i've seen or dreamed and felt.

When Kay writes about these kinds of encounters his work takes on an unusually powerful aspect; it goes from good to gripping. Crispin's encounter with the bull spirit on the road to Sarantium; Alun ab Owyn's encounter with the fairies in Last Light of the Sun - these are among the most memorable moments in his books. These overtly pagan moments are set against the backdrop of the prevailing religion, Jadism - the equivalent of Christianity in his fictional universe - which he depicts as legalistic and spiritually devoid. Anyway it's exciting to see that he's given this type of encounter center-stage in one of his novels for a change.
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This is the second part of my first entry a couple of weeks ago on the decay of meaning over time as reflected in scripture. It ties together a number of things i've written over the last year or so on my ever-evolving relationship to religion, belief, faith, meaning, discourse, scripture, doctrine, and compassion.

A little over a year ago i wrote about the tension between my own few encounters with the numinous, and my inability to describe them to anyone else without employing religious terminology. This is a concern to me because of all the agendas, past and present, inexplicably tied to these terms; but it would be useless for me to create my own words, because any new words i coin would not resonate in the minds of any listener the same way as will happen if i use the word "goddess."

And so uneasily i refer to my raw experiences using terms that will make it all too easy for someone else to hijack them, to make them into simultaneously more and less than they are. I could remain silent, taking the position that the only way to ensure that my mystical utterances do not carry any unintended religio-political connotations is to make none at all. Or, i can struggle to untie the knot as i use these terms, an effort in which i have been engaged off and on for at least the whole time i have been keeping this journal.

I have long believed that this struggle resides at the heart of all faith traditions - on one side, mystics who set out to distinguish their expressions of faith and numinous experience without being misunderstood, and over against them the functionaries and legalists, people whose relative lack of faith or mystical experience drives them to latch on to scriptures, traditions, and concepts, in the hopes of capturing some of that faith for themselves.

And all of us are, to one extent or another, driven by self-interest; there are those who use positions of influence in the edifices of religious institution to benefit themselves at the cost of someone else's suffering. This is what i mostly mean when i refer to 'agendas' within religious doctrine, practice, or law.

To make this even more complex, there is no one who is 'pure mystic' and no one who is 'pure legalist.' Each of us who participates in the grand struggle of faithful expression carries a bit of both. I don't want to couch this as a clear-cut "us vs. them." But in general we can distinguish between people who primarily project a mystical outlook, and those who primarily project a legalistic approach.

I have described legalism and the agenda of self-interest as causes for the decay of meaning over time. It is hard to define what i mean by that phrase, 'decay of meaning over time,' and unless i am certain that you know what i mean by 'meaning,' i'm not sure my purpose in writing this will be grasped.

So, to revisit: 'meaning' is, for this purpose, the intended reaction one has when contemplating an utterance. That encompasses all aspects of your reaction: your interpretations of the definitions of the words employed, your emotional response, any changes to your ways of thinking or acting which result directly or indirectly from it. Meaning decays over time because a lot of our reaction is rooted in the cultural context of the moment when the utterance was made.

For example: For those of us who were children when the movie "Jaws" was released, the movie possesses a lot more meaning than it does for those who had not been born yet. A lot of that meaning relates to our cultural environment at the moment we first saw the movie. Someone who first sees the movie ten or fifteen years later may see an enjoyable movie, but wonder what the fuss was about. The meaning of "Jaws" has decayed over time.

Most mystical utterance is the attempt to resurrect the spirit of meaning which a mystic perceives was once carried by a prior religious utterance. All mystical utterance is, in some way, an act of religious reconstruction. The fullness of mystical meaning comes from having grown up in or spent a lot of time immersed in a living faith tradition.

[ETA: to illustrate i offer some of my previous attempts to reconstruct what i believe was the meaning of utterances attributed to Jesus (culminating for example here and here), which were in turn his own attempts to reconstruct the mystical and spiritual heart of his own Judean tradition and to respond to the realities and injustices of his day.]

So when i use words like "god" or "spirit" or even "compassion," i am speaking to people who live immersed in a culture and faith tradition more or less like my own. Someone twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now will only understand anything i've written to the extent that they can reconstruct my contemporary cultural experience. They also, in commenting on what i write, will add their own new meaning to it. This is okay; this is the way the mystical tradition operates. Spirit is not dead, it is life and breath; so too, attempts to describe it should live and breathe.

Frequently, mystical utterances bear political and religious implications. Any utterance which may tend to subvert the status quo - which i would assert is typical of mystical (as opposed to legalistic) religious utterance - can be perceived as a threat by anyone in a position of authority, who stand to lose if the underpinning of that authority is undermined. They will then attempt to silence the mystic (by labeling them a heretic), or they will misappropriate the religious utterance, stripping it of political meaning and leaving only an 'approved,' authority-safe version.

Anywhere you have a mystic, you have people calling him or her a heretic - and this is why. It is not accidental. It is not mere resistance to change. The people at the bottom of a stratified society greatly outnumber the people at the top, and nothing can rile the masses like religious fervor can. The struggle for the heart and soul of religion is one of the great theatres of the ongoing struggle against tyranny.
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In conversation with [livejournal.com profile] lady_babalon this morning, she was surprised to hear that, while i consider myself a godless atheist, i do not renounce my experience of communion with the goddess, the meaning of my dream of the green man, or many of my other mystical or esoteric experiences.

This is not an inconsistent position, and i'll explain why.

The trajectory of religion throughout human history is to co-opt and misappropriate peoples' mystical experiences, to essentially steal and mislabel them and claim them in support of various power agendas. We learn early on that mystical experiences are "encounters with the divine," and are taught to correlate our various experiences with the concepts that other people, and institutions, have about the divine, and further, with the political and social ramifications connected to those beliefs.

One who has a mystical experience is told to tie this experience to a massive edifice of ideology, and offer it in support to the authoritarian institutions which speak in religious terms.

Consequently, i don't know what the word "god" means. I don't know what "divine" means. Yes, i know the dictionary definitions, but i don't know what the words really mean. We don't know what god is made of, or what clearly distinguishes god from the rest of the universe. What makes god stand out against the rest of existence? I don't even begin to know what god is supposed to be.

So all i know about god is what people say about god. And almost all of these comments are driven by some sort of personal, political, or institutional agenda. The word is nothing but a psychological pressure point, a button which institutions press to make us bend to their will.

I don't believe in or have faith in gods, divinities, deities or spirits -- by which i mean, i don't give any weight to what other people say religiously. (ETA: well, let me temper that. I react to other peoples' description of their experiences and frequently see parallels to my own experiences therein. What i discount are proclamations of doctrine or over-arching interpretations.)

In rejecting what other people say about "god", i am not going to also reject my experiences. My experiences are all i have. The mystical experiences i have had were profound and transformed my life. But i do not offer them up for institutional or ideological sacrifice.

Unfortunately, the only vocabulary i have to describe these experiences is a religious vocabulary, which makes them all too easy for other people to co-opt and speak about, as if they knew what was going on in my head or in my part of the world.
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I was typing this as a response to something [livejournal.com profile] seraphimsigrist wrote for me, and then realized it deserved to have a place in my journal proper.

I have met one or two people like Sedir's "unknown man" that have shaken me to the core, the most notable being a woman I encountered at a Greyhound station whom I surmise was schizophrenic. She was babbling constantly, and when she turned her attention to me her comments mirrored my thoughts and inner fears so well I could only conclude that she was able to read me literally like a book.

The French Quarter here in New Orleans is a place where one is almost certain to encounter life-changing individuals, each having their own unique effect, and often providing exactly the message I need to hear at that precise moment. One more unusual encounter of this sort occurred the first week I lived here: I was sitting at the Good Friends bar and chatting with a short woman with wild white hair, when after a few moments she offered me a dab of 'magic' perfume. It was designed to bring love or affection, she told me. Then she left. Barely minutes later I met a guy I wound up spending the night with. In retrospect I cannot imagine a more fitting welcome to New Orleans.

Such 'chance' encounters make me doubt my own intellect and reason. As soon as I'm in danger of thinking I have it "all figured out," I have but to remember how anyone, often someone who because of social status I might be inclined to think little of, could give me a pearl of wisdom -- and this forces me back into a state of awe at the grand mystery of the cosmos.

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