Devotional Witchcraft 101, Part 2 – To Whom Do I Pray?

Strap in, this is gonna get a little wordy.  I’m not going to cut too much though because this is important.

I used to be your bog-standard Wiccan duotheist – God and Goddess, Moon and Sun, all that stuff.  Before that, I spent time as what we used to call Dianic (I have no idea if that’s still the term) meaning I only revered the Goddess.  I was influenced by a series of novels that still affect my spirituality today (The Strands of Starlight series by Gael Baudino). 

By the time I was working in a coven I’d returned to duotheism, and for a long time had a relationship with a particular face of the God, whom I called Jeff (just for expediency among humans since He didn’t really have a name).   I also had a yearlong experience with a dark face of the Goddess that started out amazing but ended very badly.  

When I wrote The Circle Within I espoused a form of panentheism, although I didn’t know the word yet (people were very happy to tell me after the book was published, lol).  I described it as the belief that Deity is within the universe as well as outside it – that everything is Deity, that nothing can be disconnected from Them because we They are us and everything beyond us. 

In the years leading up to my return to Paganism and my adoption of Unitarian Universalism, I went through all the usual questions and doubts one does when one is a thoughtful believer in a dark decade of the soul.  Is God good?    How do you account for suffering?  Do we really have free will? And so on.  I wasn’t satisfied with any of the answers, let alone how they would apply to duotheist Paganism (which was quickly distilling back down into something more like monotheism).

Then, quite unexpectedly, thanks to my UU minister, I ran headfirst into Process Theology, and realized that, holy shit, it has a name!

I won’t go too deeply into the subject as it would become very dry very quickly, but I have come up with my own take on it that adds in more personal stuff I’ve experienced.  I’m still exploring the entirety of process theology, but the basic concepts have helped me to crystallize a lot of what I already felt about how the sacred works.

The essence is this:  Deity is a verb more than they’re a noun.  Revelation and creation are continuous, and that Web I mentioned in the post about “what is magic” – the Web that is all possibilities and probabilities – is the Goddess’s being (Or God, or Goddess/God, whatever lights your candle).  Since She is that Web, and the Web is in constant flux, that means deity also evolves.  It does so through us and through creation.  In a universe like this we are subject to a lot of circumstances based on our lives intersecting with others, but all beings have some creative freedom or free will.  We simply don’t act in a vacuum where free will is so cut-and-dried.

Deity in my way of thinking has a different character from the mainstream  – She is by nature benevolent, but not omnipotent or perfect.  Omnipresent, and omniscient more or less, yes, but as Her creation is a process that never ends, that means She is subject to the Web as much as we are.   This helps me settle the question of whether or not God is good – to me, I’ve always sensed Her as loving, even if it’s not always pretty, but with the evil in the world I couldn’t reconcile Her nature with reality.  Looking at it from this angle I can.

She knows everything that is happening in the Web at every moment, including the millions of possible outcomes for our choices, but because we have freedom, She can’t know which of those possibilities we will choose until we choose them. 

She may not be omnipotent, but she’s still pretty damn potent – Deity works primarily through influence, showing us beauty and joy and love and the value of compassion to encourage us to choose those paths, rather than thundering down domination or intimidation.  She doesn’t force us to do anything.  Therefore the answer to “God, why do you allow suffering to exist?” is, “Well…why do you?”  Humanity didn’t wake up one day and decide the world should be like this.  Millions of choices got us here.  That same divine creative freedom is the only thing that can save us.  

There is an element of randomness at work in things as well; in most cases you can trace how something happened back through the choices of the people connected to it, but sometimes rocks fall and everyone dies.  The chain of events that led those rocks to fall is far too long or distant for us to see, but She sees.  There is causality for everything, but not necessarily inherent meaning.  Humans are the meaning-makers, so it’s our job to take what happens in our lives and make it mean something to us.

All of this is very brain-intensive, and that may lead you to think my relationship with the Eternal Unfolding is something purely intellectual, but you’d be mistaken.  She speaks and moves through everything that exists and through all our potential and creativity.  We can work together to shift the waking world in ways that are positive and benefit myself and others.  

Deity itself is formless, genderless, faceless; but They are more than happy to enter into symbols and images humans have created so that we can relate to it.  To my view that means your god could be YWVH or Thor or Quan Yin or David Bowie  or Dream of the Endless or all of those at once; they all stand for the same force, and act kind of like an icon in that the picture you click on connects you to something a lot bigger.

Relationship is key in process philosophy and theology.  We exist in a web, remember, not each dangling at the end of a single string.   In this sense God is also in how we treat each other, how we interact, and how we codepend.  All beings live in relationship; that includes humans and nonhumans.   Everyone contributes to the Web and makes small changes with their lives that can ripple into big changes.  Everyone is inherently worthy and of value.

I’m sure there are plenty of nice theological arguments against the way I see things, but honestly?  I don’t give a damn.  I’m learning as I go, experimenting and experiencing.  This way of looking at Deity and the universe makes sense to me and to my spirit.  I feel like if it’s a positive influence on my life and helps me to grow, who the hell cares if God is one or two or the Seven Dwarfs? In the end, someone’s belief about God is less important to the larger world as someone’s behavior based on what their God persuades them to do.  

As for my Goddess?  She is essentially dual – one dark half, one light, each governing different times of year.  The two facets bleed into each other quite a bit. There’s not a hard division.  I separate the two just to give me a more useful seasonal calendar.  Most of the time we meet in a forest during either a Full or New Moon, and in that place the sky swirls around like the Aurora Borealis combined with Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.  What does She look like?  Honestly? Kind of like Sara Bareilles.  

If this sounds a lot like the Persephone in the Shadow World series, well…it should.  The books and my life draw from each other.  The Web, the Forest of Spirits…yeah, that’s all “real.”  Did I make it up?  Hell yeah I did.  But as I was getting into the symbolism in the novels, those images began to bleed over into my practice, and finally I realized that She had been there all along, waiting for me to put it all together.  The “real” one isn’t a vampire goddess, of course, but hey, Nobody’s perfect.