My father and I got to talking about the idea of transactional relationships versus transformational relationships, both in terms of spirituality and in relationships between people, and it occurred to me that it’s really applicable to pagan spaces as well.
In a transactional relationship, you expect that if you do the right things, you’ll get the right result. You work the hours you agreed to work and so you get paid. You commission a piece of art and pay for it, and the art is delivered to you. You put in the hard work and turn your essay in on time, and you get a good grade. Effort in, result out.
But a transformational relationship is completely different. If you approach a romantic relationship like it’s transactional, things fall apart pretty quickly – or you end up at the ‘nice guy’ conclusion of assuming that because you put in the effort, you’re owed the desired sexual/romantic contact in reward. In healthy romantic relationships, you don’t do something for your partner because you expect they’ll do something for you in return. You do it because you love them, because you want them to be happy, and because being together makes you both better people.
I think far too often we can fall into the trap of treating our relationships with our gods as transactional. I build the alter, I give offerings, I give prayers of praise, so I should be rewarded with the blessings I ask for, or signs, or a clear godphone connection. Effort in, result out, right???
But it doesn’t work that way. When we work with the gods we’re dealing with real, intelligent, individual beings with opinions and wants and needs of their own. They aren’t vending machines. The gods aren’t obligated to respond to us any more than a person is obligated to date someone who was nice to them.
Rituals, ceremonies, offerings, prayer, meditation, etc can all seem really pointless and hollow if you don’t understand the point behind those actions. The point is not that you’re putting in the effort for the expected result. The point is that in doing these things, we transform ourselves into better versions of ourselves – whether or not the gods actively respond to our actions.
Within the Tumblr pagan community, it seems like there are a lot of people who worry about doing things the ‘right’ way to make the gods like them. It carries with it the ‘nice guy’ implication that if you do everything just perfect, the god or gods in question will like you, will give you signs and blessings and a clearer godphone. My experience has been that there is no ‘right’ way to do things, there is only the relationship between you as an individual and the god as an individual.
When I try to explain my relationship with my gods to someone who isn’t religious or spiritual, the response seems to mostly be “Wow that sounds like a lot of work, what are you getting out of it?” For awhile it frustrated me that I didn’t have a solid answer to that, but this conversation with my (religious but definitely not pagan) father really turned it on its head.
What I get out of my devotion to my gods is a better me. My time thinking about them, talking to them, praising them, that changes me, gives me a better idea of how I fit with the rest of the universe, where my value comes from, what I’m capable of. It helps me to be more forgiving, and slower to anger, with a longer perspective than the problem-of-the-moment perspective we so often get stuck in in our modern world.
I think with the emphasis (particularly on Tumblr) on godphone-type communication with one’s gods, it can be really easy to lose sight of all the ways we can feel the gods’ presence in our lives. Focusing more on how I have changed, how I am actively changing now, where things would have troubled me before but don’t anymore – focusing on that makes it clear how much I really am getting out of my relationship with my gods, in a way that isn’t at all transactional.
Even on days when my godphone has nothing but static, I can absolutely feel the influence of my gods on my life. Not because of the things that they give me, but because of the ways I am transformed by devoting myself to them.
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