That religion thing

           When it comes to Gods and Goddesses, I go a different way than my birth family and a different way than my neighborhood. Might be that Uranus in the third house has something to do with it. Might be the transits that came along to highlight that Sagittarius sun and retrograde Jupiter that were in opposition.They didn't cause it, they recorded it. They told the story and I played it.
           Anyway, you can't believe what you don't believe. One time, one of our brilliant daughters, (about twelve years old at the time) asked me if a person could make themselves believe something they were supposed to believe.
           Come to think of it, no. You can't.
           So I didn't.
           None of us knows the nature of Supreme Beings, but each of us have our understanding. Some adhere to what has been taught and never go beyond that, finding safety and assurance in the ways that surrounded them as children. Others experiment with ways foreign to them and eventually find their way past them or within them. Often, what we believe is not within our own vocabulary.

          So it was with me. I believed there was a power from which everything emanated. I tried to write about this in a little novel called HEARS THE WIND. The only other religion besides Christianity which was acceptable in my neck of the woods was that which belonged to the people who first lived on this continent of North America. I wrote the book in that light, about a young man who knew a different way than the Christianity which was forced upon him, but his way was lost to words. His way was that of his ancestors.

Just as Manny, in HEARS THE WIND, I didn’t have words to tell my own story. Perhaps I still don’t. It may be the only way to find our Gods is to find our own story. For much of my journey, I didn’t have the words for what I knew. When I read Dion Fortune’s THE MYSTICAL KABALAH, I understood, in words, what I had understood in spirit.

          All the Gods and Goddesses whose names we adore and whose ways we follow, from Jehovah or Eloheim, to Odin and Frigga are met in Tippereth. None are the “ALL THAT IS” or the energy of Kether. No one has the name of the All. Yet we argue over the concepts, each from our own station, like the blind men seeing the elephant.

          Yet, the Gods and Goddesses we call on, even Odin, even Jesus, though being part of the ALL, are not interchangeable. All Gods are not one God, though all may be part of what some call “God”. Thor is not Jupiter, Jesus is not Neptune, Frigga is not Venus. Each holds a station, having been either discerned or created by the dreamers and visionaries of an age long gone.

          In Kindergarden, we teach a child to form the letter A. This is something he can see and identify. The symbol is not the sound. It is a placeholder for the sound. In other languages, the sound is different. The sounds are formed together in different ways to create words which, themselves, are symbols of a concept. T-R-E-E is not a “perennial woody plant”. It’s only a placeholder which calls to mind our memories of trees. The rune, Laguz, is not a lake, but many of us visualize lake when we see the rune.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name…Lao Tzu

          Who holds the place for that sound you hear? Who do you speak to when you are alone? And who speaks back in the still, small voice within you?