Pagan Godspell

Oh beloveds.

I’m a trifle wordy (you may have noted on occasion).  Yet…. yet.  There are moments when the Mama does her best to shut my mouth.  Today, today, today…was one of those moments.  I’m still struggling with what to say…I’m a hot mess. A grateful, prayerful hot mess, lifting her palms as an offering in the evening. Unto, as ever, the coming of tears.

But first, I explain a bit about me.  Sees, I’m weepy (friends reading this are having themselves an affectionate chuckle at the understatement, I’m sure).  Indeed.  In fact, the past few years, if Paganism was the sort of religion to postulate a mystical theology of tears, I might be a candidate for canonization at this point.  Now, before you take this and a few other veiled references to my unbloggy down time and fill them with dreadful speculation, I assure you: don’t fret, doveys.  I’s fine.  I’ve just spent some time these past few years struggling with some depression and anxiety…a not uncommon affliction.  That’s all.  It’s not a subject I choose to dwell on, it’s just something to know, and I do improve…I am blessed by good friends and loving ones and sometimes gratitude alone is enough to float my emotional raft.

But more to the point, even before and beyond this, it does seem sometimes that I have done and most likely will continue to do a fair share of work towards Unification with the Great-Silent-Shout at the Expanding-Hugely-Tiniest-Pinpoint-Heart-Forever of the Universe, by bawling my eyes out.  Some of my most spectacular mystical moments have indeed arrived both after and before, and in the middle of, tears.*

Today, for instance, I burst into tears because I was in love…my cells were in love, and my breath was in love, and my heart was on fire,  sacre couer, and I could do nothing else but burn silent livid sweet and raw, my eyes blurry and my mind full of singing. And really, it was just the weather. Just the weather, and God.

But perhaps I am ahead of myself (look at me back there). Let’s begin at the beginning (too late).

It’s fall, see.  I’m sure you’ve noticed.  And all day here in the pretty-wild urban midwest, it rained…a lovely blustery autumn rain.  T’weren’t nothing special…. all I did was leave the building.

And the Mama knocked me down.

The sun had come out, fast on the heels of the rain, and there were these enormous, wealthy clouds whorling and spinning in the clean sky, and the wind was fierce and savage, and beads of water clung to every leaf, and oh and oh and oh…the world was a diamond.  A diamond, friends.  But better.

I climbed into my car and watched the wind rush its arms through the reeds and the cottonwood trees and the dry rattle of old thistles, and I thought….yes, this is how I want to die.  I want to be standing on a hill on a day like today, with the wind blowing through my bones and the world sparkling and glittering and the grass rushing like water and my heart turning to leaves and smoke…and then maybe some enormous rock, launched unexpectedly from a bizarrely impossible, distant volcano, falls from the sky and smashes me flat.  BOOM!  Sudden like a fast star, and just before then, standing unmade on fire in love oh holy holy with the Mama.  Wholly alive.

I drove home, swimming in that astonishment. Every song that came through the radio had a message, and it was that Life is Mama is Grace is Unspeakably Brilliant is Beauty is the Golden Ticket, and that there may be no greater purpose than to break that Beauty like a fresh loaf of good bread and give it to everyone you meet.  I thought of a teacher in junior high who once shared a favorite, inspirational, numinous song with us, and how we’d secretly (or not-so secretly) laughed at the emotional lyrics and high musical drama of Bridge Over Troubled Water, and how deliciously the Mama was humbling me now by playing it in the car as I drove through glory, shaking me down to the dust from which I Am (so thank you, Mr. Jones, these 20 or so years later…adolescents can sometimes be an unforgiving lot, and it was a brave thing).

Now, at home, after dinner, my intrepid spouse reads me a passage from Return to Warden’s Grove by Christopher Norment that floors me, and we share that in a cozy room while the night wind rips the lamplight outside the window and plays its dark music.  And I don’t know.  I don’t know.  But that Beauty is, and will be, forever and ever.

Hours of prayer.  Fresh tears.  Forgiveness, breaking and mending.  What next, what next.  I am a little match, struck daily against the rough world.  This planet, this one.  My body, the vast reach of time.

Grok prayer, grok wonder, grok sky.  Grok heart.  Grok Earth.  Pray pray pray, ever without ceasing.

*No, no.  Do not, ever, suppose that I am conflating depression with mysticism. Depression and anxiety are very real and very awful, and I am extremely skeptical of those who dismiss the gravity of these disorders with pseudo-spiritual babble. I’m merely commenting on my own personal experience with crying as the result of an overwhelmingly spiritual ephiphany, or occasionally as an act that brings about a spiritual epiphany.  There are biological reasons for this of course, endorphins, etc.  And there is some really interesting work out there by those pursuing the spiritual dimensions of the emotional body.  But all this is very different than dismissing real suffering or the need for therapy and/or medication by hiding behind a veil of  judgemental pseudo-spiritual posturing.