Over the last few months I’ve had a lot to think about; I’ve been on this path now a pretty reasonable amount of time, perhaps 10 years, if you count all the years in which I was a substance in search of a form! In that time, I’ve spent most of my spiritual energy embracing the feminine in the divine, in the most amorphous sense, and attempting to reconcile and balance Her with the masculine Deity I have been familiar with my entire life. She hasn’t really had a name or a face; My Lady, Nature, Gaia, the World.
I’m starting to think that I need to go further. For me, I need attributes, I need a personality. I need to at least explore the possibilities more deeply. Actually, I have to thank Aleq Grai for this; had he not made a comment about possible weakness in generic ‘Goddess / God’ worship a few months back, I might not have reached this conclusion quite yet. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but there can be no harm in exploring the concept.
If we look at why Christianity accepts ‘God’ as a ‘generic’ deity (Aleq’s other point), then we see that it can stem from the belief that they have the ‘One True’ god, that others are superficial or have been superseded. It’s not a nod to a generic, all-purpose deity, far from it; it’s a clarion call to proclaim the primacy of the God of Gods, who needs no other name in this time and place. For the same reason, us humans call the Earth, the Sun, the Moon by no other names than the ones that give them their form. We don’t need to; they are the only ones we have.
In fact, the Christian god is anything but generic. He is, for a start, a triple god, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and is worshipped in His different manifestations in different ways, as well as together.
Generic is not necessarily unchallenging, in any case. As I said to Aleq, the challenge in worshipping the Goddess, for example, is to define for yourself, or to allow to be imparted to you, the attributes that concern you at that particular time and place. Goddess / God is everywhere, is everything. If you manage to grasp the hem of the robe for a fleeting second you’re doing well.
Once you label, you are seeking to negate, no matter how you try to dress it up. By calling Goddess by a name, we are trying, even subconsciously, to limit what we need to understand so we can concentrate more effectively. It’s a filter, if you like. Trying to corner the might and the mutability of the divine in a way we poor humans can comprehend. It’s like capturing a butterfly and nailing it to a board. In our case, of course, once we’ve done this, the butterfly remains alive and we try to communicate with it.
Perhaps this analogy has been taken a little far! But I think it makes a good point. Perhaps my need for a definition, for attributes, is a retrograde step; perhaps I’m ‘wimping out’ in a spiritual sense. However, I believe the challenge is to try to see as much of the bigger picture as we can - and to fully understand the whole, we must study the parts that make it up. Hence my delve into the Faces of the Goddess.
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…and my dear Seshat’s Voice has made her point on this topic as eloquently as ever!