I Loves Me My Messiah

(Note to the RoF: The reason for this post I will discuss later.)

Probably more magic is done in my part of the world invoking Christ, Mary and the saints than is done in the name of any other pantheon. This is not the sort of thing for which real statistics exist, but I know, because I've been at the site of so much of it -- despite the fact that my particular, early indoctrination denied flatly the existence or religious permissibility of such things as a whole.


The day when I was twelve years old, dressed in my favorite (although embarrassingly tacky in retrospect) dress, white cotton bodice on top of a primarily fuschia tropical print skirt, with a hat I'm probably better off not remembering -- this was the early nineties -- and "went forward" to be baptized, and then to receive Communion (from my own father, although that wasn't the standard practice), in an auditorium full of 500 families, was the day I first understood magic -- first understood how the mundane (getting wet all over, which I had done at least once a day from childhood -- I've been a bathtub reader since I was old enough to bathe myself) became the magical, and changed you. I was a lot too young to know the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation, young enough that I had started to get curious about the other, "incorrect" faiths -- especially the entirely forbidden Catholics, whose rituals and churches had appealed to the aesthetic and historical senses I was just beginning to develop. But that was the day I understood that magic is real, even if I didn't call it that, or know that name for it.

After that there were "games" that weren't, quite -- games where Mary's name came up. The first written, intentional ritual I ever did, as such, performed in tense and unneccessary fear at the back of my mother's garden, involved a rewrite of the Hail Mary I wish I hadn't burned in a fit of adolescent pique. I can't date that experience to anything other than "adolescence", but I can still see the moon and feel myself naked under my bathrobe, my legs shaking not from cold but from Fear of Being Found Out. I had read the anti-Satanist scare literature that enjoyed spurts of popularity amongst the parents of Christian teenagers, and I knew that this would definitely be misconstrued. Even then, I knew it wasn't wrong. I still didn't call it magic.

Since then, after the discovery of a lot of history, literature, and concepts, and after getting rid of the anger at the flaws in the institution that had raised me, I began to see the individual goodness. More psychically aware, I began to see the Godliness in the people who still love me, on the rare Sunday I show up with my mother and father. Eventually the universe started dropping Jesus in my path until I had to reexamine Jesus entirely.

When I was 16 years old and on a school tour, the central statue of Sri Ganesha Temple in Nashville spoke to me. I learned of, and eventually saw made flesh, Cernunnos. The cycle of the God-that-dies was a part of my year, after a short while, once I linked my fascination with the moon to the Wheel of the Year. But I bore resentment for Jesus -- Jesus who, in my mind, had become wholly associated with the repression of women, the fall of paganism, the ill-treatment of ethnic group after ethnic group, the inherited racism of my parent's generation.

I am a student of philosophy, however, and studies in logic eventually made that mental association untenable, once I had become able to forgive the wrongs done to me personally in the name of Christianity. I was a hot pick for Bible Bowl back during my Church Camp days, and I had too much information about the mythical Jesus to not, eventually, be forced to examine Jesus just as I had examined other regenerative gods. (My corresponding fascination with Mary is another matter that will be dealt with later.)

When I divorced Jesus from his cult -- the original ones, the post-Crucifixion interpreters and Church founders (with St. Paul foremost -- I must say in the interest of full disclosure that he will probably never grace my altar) -- I found the power of my religious understanding strengthened by the reconnection to the deity to whom I had sworn, over ten years before, my allegiance, and to whom I had been bound in the first act of magic I had ever actively participated in. It was as if Christ and Mary -- Mary who remains the first representation of the Triple Goddess who ever made herself manifest to me -- threw the rest of my belief in magic into high relief. It broke a barrier I wasn't even aware of.

I discovered a man who was well versed enough in the religion of the day to successfully contend with both elders and politicians about the meaning of the commandments, yet whose views were sufficiently divergent to make aforesaid groups uneasy -- much like myself. I found a man who told stories that boiled down to "Heaven is when everyone treats one another decently." I found an egalitarian. I found a man with views on racism and sexism that converged with my own, a pacifist, a man who mostly got pissed off at hypocrites and corporations -- a guy like me. Most importantly, I found a pagan Christ -- that Christ did and continues to die and be reborn as a lesson about the nature of the Universe with which he was one being. I could make the statement "All Gods, which are one God, and all Goddesses, which are one Goddess, and which God and Goddess are also One Being" along with my Wiccan sister and speak Truth, a truth I had given lip service to, and possibly even thought I believed...while mentally discounting the deity to which I had first been exposed, an act of hypocrisy I hadn't even recognized as such until I stopped, like Peter, denying Christ.

Everyone encounters God in a purely individual way, and practitioners of magic tend to draw the deities they need. As most of the aforesaid practitioners have found, those deities can be somewhat insistent about needing to be recognized. With my Christian background, it was inevitable that I either accept Christ, or lose faith -- because I could not continue in a lie of unity while making exceptions based on bigotry and fear, even my own. I grok my God now, more fully, because Jesus is contained within it.

Hail Discordia.