...finds goodness in everything

[angela_n_hunt]

So, my darling husband wrote an amazing post over on his blog last night. It's on the nature of Christian Grace.

It got me thinking.

I'm a Witch. Yes, capital W. And when I cast my mind over my spirituality, because it's about as far from religion as it can get (religion gives me hives), I realized that by and large, pagans in general don't really have something that we call that. Grace. Not directly.

I don't think of it as a gift, though it is. I don't think of it as being anything other than the nature of the Universe. I don't feel the need to call it out. When I open my Sight and look on the World, I always see so many connections. And not just because of the two spiders who landed on me this past weekend.

For me, you don't move without vibrating a thread.

So it's less a gift and more an Is.

Unlike my husband, I write about serious things and often. The World matters to me. Deeply. By and large, I'm up for most discussions. To a point. I've seen so much intolerance lately, that my hand doesn't really leave the Mallet of Loving Correction. But I am blessed in readers, who rarely need it. I think I've used it twice in the last year.

So. Fellow Pagans, Witches, Jedi, what or where is our Grace?

Don't get me wrong. I don't feel a loss. If anything it's another thing where I both see the beauty of it, but also it leaves me deeply confused.

I don't feel a need to be forgiven. I didn't do anything wrong when I came in to the World. I've done shit since then, but She knows it and has kicked my ass accordingly. Karma's a bitch and never sleeps.

So even from the beginning and before I was ever a Witch, I always felt like I'd been given a gift that left me holding it asking, "What do I need this for again?"

It made me feel stupid. It also made me angry, because the ones who talked to me always demanded that I accept a generational guilt and sin that I had no part of. I'll be the first to own my own shit. But you don't get to pin the sins of my fathers on me. I'll kick your ass from here to New York if you try that. My childhood was a litany of that. Paying for crimes I never committed, suffering under the prison of a madwoman.

No. No Grace then for me. Not if it meant accepting Sin as First Cause.

Unlike my husband, I was never religious. The few times I went to Sunday school as a small child, the entire structure struck me as so ludicrous and amounted to a bunch of grown ups telling lies. Being in the madwoman's prison, her mantra to me was a constant, "Never lie to me!" while she lied wholesale to me. I had no understanding of metaphor. No understanding of myth. I was a child. But I had been told not to lie.

Myths, stories, are lies.

It took years for me to discover that there's truth and there's Truth and sometimes you can't tell either of them without telling a Lie.

Which is a rambly way to say that organized religion lost me and lost me early.

I have no frame of reference for my husband's experience. I know it was deeply meaningful for him the way that Sundoor changed my life.

I could go on and on, but I'm not going to. I'm going to wrap up quickly, or at least attempt to.

What I'm trying to say is that we all find our paths to Grace or whatever we call her. My husband found his path.

I found mine at the foot of a seven foot coal bed.

The World is wide enough for all of us.

For me, that is the ultimate Grace of all.