Iāve been feeling the need to post a short update for whoever still follows me or wanders onto my page.Ā
I think itās important to document if or how a faith and devotional practice like mine survives in our current circumstances, a practice so rooted in the underlying potential of humankind. How does one continue to find strength and hope in our collective humanity, while bearing witness to the atrocities our own hands have wrought? When the virtues and ideals that shaped me as a devotee are twisted to fit narratives so unlike His own, how does one hold true or reclaim them?Ā
I donāt know if I have an answer to these questions just yet. If anything, I find my opinion of us as a whole fading with each day. And perhaps that is the lesson in itself: āpotentialā is neutral. For so long Iāve built up this reverence for the good weāve accomplished with our stubborn insistence on rejecting the limits imposed on us. Even at our lowest, weāve found ways of utilizing trauma and despair to bring forth better versions of ourselvesāthe struggle shapes the spirit, our battle scars turned to gold.
In some stories, my god gave up all that He was to nurture that spark of divinity. And because I grew up in a religion where ādivinityā was equal to āgoodā, I couldnāt see an end where we became anything other than that. Yet there are sacred terrors as well, destruction turned holy and violence elevated into righteousnessābut brutalities all the same. He took it upon Himself to become our adversary, to prove us undeserving of His obeisance, let alone His fatherās love and respectāa father in whose image we were created, a father who built his following with blood on desert sand.Ā Ā
So perhaps this innate potential doesnāt destine us to become quite what I had once hoped. And that means I can no longer rely on these feel-good aspirations to make up the foundations of my faith. Where does that leave me, and how do I continue His work when it feels like the purpose has been untethered? I refuse to be an impartial observer to the shifting of the world, not when small kindnesses and quiet acts of resistance still exist. If these are the dying embers of the hope that once brought me to Him, I will guard and stoke them to the best of my ability.
Through this time, my god has been ever-present in new, terrifying ways. Names and aspects that I once threw out have resurfaced. In as many roles and titles as Iāve come to know Him by across varied mythos, this new iteration is perhaps the most unsettling for me as His devotee; It begs the question, what does it mean to be worthy in the eyes of a god whose duty it is to prove otherwise? If the culmination of our worth is the result of the choices and actions made with the gift of free will in this life and our response to the trials He sets for us, what is it that we are judged against on his scales of justice? I donāt know that I have an answer to that yet either. What I do know is that I still choose HimāHe who is tasked with refining us in life, and assessing us in death. Iāve seen the beauty and cruelty that life endures, and Him in every part. He is present in the giving and the taking, the joys and the sorrows.Ā
For all the names Iāve attributed to him, I think now He is best left nameless. There is a silent stillness to this part of him, a phantom pain of something torn asunder. I cannot shape my mouth around the sounds uttered by this void, nor is there any word in any language that I know that can describe the profundity of this aspect. Regardless, I will love Him as this dread god, a god who waits in the shadows of our end to render judgement, a god who has held my heart well in advance of its weighing.Ā
With this in mind, the past few years have been a process of me shifting my practice from something introspective to something much more tangible, a fusion of what I can offer my god and my community alike. While I retain my personal devotions at my home altar, I have found a vocation within death work as the heart of my practice. I will be deliberately vague on the exact nature of this work due to my role in a professional capacity, but I can perhaps be considered an inadvertent last confessor. While this has become my own form of offering to my god, I aim to respect the beliefs of those I assist and approach the practical aspect of what I do completely devoid of any religious or spiritual influence. I offer them a final voice with which to tell their stories, often in the pursuit of their own justice. In doing so, they are laid bare before His verdictāhidden truths and darkest shames alike.Ā
Amidst this, there is a question that haunts me: At the end of it all, are we worth His unbecoming?
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
janainaart
titsay
