V is for Vanity

It’s not been a good year.

L is for Luck

Photo Credit: a five-leaf clover via Sunfell on Flickr.

It’s been a bad week. The moral is probably something like “never buy a car during Mercury Retrograde”, but I honestly don’t have much of a choice.

A phone call to the insurance company on Saturday resulted in nothing going through except for charges—which meant paying to insure a car without any coverage. I had to call on Monday to do it all over again. So many errands just for misplaced paperwork. Yesterday, I went to register the car at the DMV, but didn’t have proof of the seller’s status as executrix of the deceased owner’s estate. So I ran off to get such proof from her and returned with a photocopy, only to find out that the DMV would only recognize the security-embossed original document.

And this is just buying a car—when I sat down to write this post, internet service completely ceased for an hour.

Mercury Retrograde. Bad luck. Whatever you want to call it, it’s unpleasant. But it is also, to some extent, both inevitable and without guarantee.

Make-up Monday: G is for Godspouses

I confess to having set a few unspoken rules for what I would and wouldn’t write about in this blog, and I am breaking quite a few of them by writing this post. First, I had sworn to try to write about topics I did not think anyone else would be writing about. Godspouses are a topic written about frequently, usually in the form of a rant (whether for or against them), though for some reason this year saw only one post about them. Second, I wanted to avoid writing about any controversial topics if I felt I had nothing new to add to the conversation. Godspouses are about as controversial as you can get.

Even so, it turns out to be an unavoidable topic. Godspouses are an integral element of faith in my practice. I am not a godspouse, but godspouses are present in what little lore I have to practice from. I cannot in good conscience accept as true the experience of those who are written about while dismissing the otherwise identical experience of those who are not in lore.

L is for Labradorite

Photo Credit: UCL Geology Collections via UCLMaPS on Flickr.

Gemstone and other mineral associations with deities are hardly uncommon among pagans. I’m no exception—I strongly associate labradorite with the god I worship. Labradorite is well-known among those who do crystal work, with a reputation for strengthening intuition and dispelling illusions. Still, this is not why I have my association. The real reason is the property of labradorescence—the shining blue luster that appears at particular angles with a piece of labradorite.

A demonstration of labradorescence in a sample modeled by Prokofiev on Wikimedia.

K is for the King

I’ve mentioned before that my god created a land of the dead for his two sons after they died, and that it is a temporary residence for most. When the land was new, the first of the dead chose the eldest son of the god as their king.

I is for Immanence and Transcendence

The words are long and latinate, but the concept itself is simple. If gods exist, where are they? Where do spirits dwell? If you believe they exist within the same world that we exist in, you are saying they are immanent. If gods and spirits dwell completely beyond the physical realm, and we must leave the physical to interact with them, your belief is that they are transcendent.

I is for Illness

I went to lunch today with Beloved Family Member, the first time since he got out of the hospital with his new mitral valve and pacemaker.

“You know, your mother saw the white light,” he told me. “Did she ever tell you about that?”

I nodded. “More than once.” When I was about ten, she was in emergency surgery for a perforated colon. It’s a very standard Near Death Experience story, with the white light at the end of a tunnel, dead family members waiting within sight, and so on. Then she heard a voice, which she identified as God, ordering her to return for my sake.

On the one hand, I have heard the tale so many times in the context of a guilt trip that it has lost most of its positive sense. On the other hand, I love her dearly, and had she died, I would have been left in the care of a physically abusive father without the only person who could reason with him.

H is for Henotheism

At the time that I am writing and publishing this, it should be Good Friday by the Western Catholic liturgical calendar. It’s also one of the very few years in which it aligns with Great Friday for Greek Catholics and Eastern Orthodox churches.

In the past, this was legitimately a holiday capable of bringing me to tears. I honestly cannot even say for sure if it was the conflation of my god’s son and his death with the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, but it is not, in my experience, a common time for Catholics to respond with actual grief. Even for clergy and monastics, it is a time of contemplation of sin, the mystery of his sacrifice, and so on. From what (admittedly little) I have gathered of the practice of Charismatics, even the great swells of overwhelming emotion that define such practice are stemmed in the inherent sinfulness of humanity requiring the sacrifice of a god’s son.

It is, in other words, very humanocentic. The event of the holiday is a death, but the remembrance of the death is not to grieve, but to solemnly give thanks for the benefit that death is said to have provided to humanity. Solemnly, because it was made inevitable by human sinfulness.

H is for the Honored Dead and Hereditary Reincarnation

I apologize for this being a day late. My health this week is better than it was, but I am still not 100%.

G is for Gravity

I feel I must apologize for going so long without writing. Even if it is because of my health failing, I feel it is my fault, and that I should apologize. I am a perfectionist—I began to write “I am a perfectionist by nature”, and then I had to pause, because if I am completely honest with myself and with you, it may not be natural at all.