Pagan Godspell

When the sun shines in a certain way and the wind blows in smelling of warm promises, my brain gets a little fuzzy.  I question our devotion to reason and logic and start to ponder instead the undeniable value of spending all day watching the sun move across a patch of melting snow, or the complex mechanics of daydreaming (the practical applications of which are staggering, and woefully unexamined in my not-so-humble opinion).  So, what I’m trying to say is – I have these loose threads of thoughts all happily floating around in my holistic self (some coming from my heart, some from my head, and some from the Aether…ooooo, Aether), and they may or may not form a cohesive post.  *cackle*

In thinking about relationship as the bedrock of spiritually and holistically Being in the World, I have been cha-cha-ing around with the concept of gifting and the deeper meaning of gifts in a world of exchange-based capitalism.  I’ve been reading about the idea of “gift economies” and such, and I do find all that particularly interesting – but more, I’m thinking about how a gift thea/ology might work in the context of a radical spiritual worldview steeped in authenticity, relationship, and reciprocity.

The practice of giving gifts creates and maintains relationships that cannot be sustained by mere exchange of goods.  The Earth gives and gives – it is her modus operandi – all things give and receive.  It seems like we humans have mostly forgotten how to do both.  This is partially out of a fear of obligation and attachment.  Obligation, in a sense the holy debt we incur by being in permanent, sustained and holistic relationship, binds us to place, to people, to community. 

In a 2004 interview with Derrick Jensen, Martin Prechtel, a contemporary author on Mayan spirituality, notes:

In a sense, all of us — even the most untechnological, spiritual, and benign peoples — are constantly wrecking the world. The question is: how do we respond to that destruction? If we respond as we do in modern culture, by ignoring the spiritual debt that we create just by living, then that debt will come back to bite us, hard. But there are other ways to respond. One is to try to repay that debt by giving gifts of beauty and praise to the sacred, to the invisible world that gives us life.

Prechtel also talks about the importance of debt, that to live on this Earth in true relationship with it, and with the Spirits and Powers of the other world who sing us into being (Prechtel: We are its song. We’re made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables — all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing), we must engage in giving, in paying our spiritual debts for these many gorgeous gifts, through “beauty, grief or language.”

For me, this comes back to rites of offering.  Offerings and prayers are both conversations and gifts – gifts we make in exchange for the precious gifts we receive, for the air we breathe, the seasons, all the small moments of goodness, even among the gross devastation and the sickness.  The grief we suffer is an offering – to right damage, to acknowledge pain, to connect and name.  We are in debt – beautiful, perfect and glorious debt. 

I’m reminded of a time when one of my best friends and I spent a few years waxing and waning out of financial solvency, each of us amazingly broke when the other was flush, and we happily traded debt so often – buying each other dinner and whatnot – that eventually we couldn’t remember who owed who what or how much.  Most likely we’re still in debt to each other for something – neither of us care.  This is the holy debt of real relationship – of gifts and friends.  This is the kind of debt I wish for myself in relationship with my gods and goddesses, with the spirits of the Earth, with Holy Mother Earth Herself, with my ancestors (Prechtel has some very interesting things to say about ancestral relationship: One of the ways those who remain behind can help repay this spiritual debt is simply by missing the dead. Let’s say your beloved grandmother dies. Some might say you shouldn’t weep, because she’s going to “a better place,” and weeping is just pure selfishness. But people’s longing for each other and for the terrain of home is so enormous that, if you do not weep to express it, you’re poisoning the future with violence. If that longing is not expressed as a loud, beautiful wail, a song, or a piece of art that’s given as a gift to the spirits, then it will turn into violence against other beings — and, more importantly, against the earth itself, because you will have no understanding of home. But if you are able to feed the other world with your grief, then you can live where your dead are buried, and they will become a part of the landscape in a way), with the Everything that Is and Should Be.

In gifting beauty, tears, prayers, grain, fruit, honey, bread, words, singing - I am a whole part of the whole, paying my debts, receiving my own gifts, dancing with the planet.  May I never be free of it.  May I never be square with the World.