I have a higher power. I guess I'm a bit lucky that way, I never doubted the existence of a God because all my life I've had a pretty direct dialog. Maybe I'm some kind of prophet but I think I'm just too stubborn to let the world shame me into shutting off the quieter voices in fear of insanity. I think all children hear Deity, but phrases like "what an active imagination" and "that's nuts" train them out of hearing it. Somehow I was immune to that as a child. I knew very well I was hearing God and it wasn't the Devil and it wasn't my imagination and it wasn't out of order at all.
So all my life I've had this sort of companion. This person, if you will, who's just there, any time, somewhere above and behind and just a little to the side and I can just pipe up and make inquiries.
I know, I know, that seems awfully fantastical to those of you who spend your whole life wandering around wondering all five questions at once. It may even seem awfully arrogant for those of you who think there's some kind of special priviledge in hearing God and only ordained folks of the right sort of faith can do it. Well that's ok, you can just dismiss me and quit reading if you like. I don't have a message for anyone except myself and I only share it because I like that maybe I'm helping other people sort out their own heads by watching the process in me.
So I've had this friend, and a Deity, and a higher power, all in one, all the time. I never really revered it though. Actually, I'm going to call it her. I'm not going to mess with capital letters nor justify one gender over another or one image of it over another. My image of her has changed a lot over the years because she never really belonged to any image at all, she's not a corporeal creature in need of gender or image. The only reason she ever has any such is because we need it. We aren't made in god's image but vice versa. The reality of Deity is much too big for us to be able to relate usefully.
There have been times when I've felt quite smug to have my own personal goddess in my pocket. Ask and ye shall recieve. I guess arrogant is even more appropriate of an adjective. I've been indulged in this enough to get a little spoiled. Yet at the same time as I feel somehow priviledged or entitled to ask what I like and often get it, I also am constantly beset by one challenge after another hardship. It's like my life is a series of challenges that take me to the point of despair and then one step beyond it, where I just quit trying to fight it and just put my shoulder into it and push like a good little mule. Then just when I'm resigned to disaster and death, it lets up and I'm showered with fortune and blessings and my stores are refilled and my heart is eased and my confidence built up. So then I start to walk with a bounce in my step and my head high and my eyes sparkling and a sense of priviledge because, after all, I have my own goddess in my pocket and I just ask, and I recieve.
Then when it starts to look like I'm going to get to just sail through life, my dues are paid and I can retire and quite struggling, WHAM, she sends me a new twist. I get awfully upset about that. I rant and I rave and I pitch fits that would wake the devil, if there was one (there isn't actually, you know). I conclude that, in fact, she doesn't love me or care about me, I'm just her little victim to sadistically tease and torture. I tell her I hate her and I stamp my petulant feet and cry piteously about how horrid life is and I quake and shiver and cringe at the apparent future I now see before me.
That's where I've been lately.
I have this amazing wonderful man in my life. He's my reward for loving so many sad and hurting men. Now I don't know if those men would see it that way or appreciate anything about our time together, that's for them to say, but I loved them, truly, and admired them, and gentled them to the best I could, for the time that I was there with them. I felt, time and again, that I was being delivered these men just as Sumerian warriors were delivered unto the temple priestesses for love and softness to heal their war wounds and bring them back to calmness from the warrior's beserker state. I didn't always go willingly into these love affairs, ho no. I often had to be decieved into them. I'd get lonely and beg for love and she'd deliver it, over and over. I'd ask her, "Is this one for me to keep?" Always she'd answer "Maybe." Now and then she'd add "But not likely." Most of the time, though, it was just "maybe." If I'd known the answer was "no" I'd have usually refused to continue. After all, you can't properly love a man if you know it's temporary and I wasn't loving them shallow, that wouldn't do, that wasn't what I was supposed to do.
A little background to explain my arrogance and inflate it a bit.
Centuries ago in ancient Sumer and Babylon and Ur there was a religion which followed a Goddess with a number of names, one variation of which is Innana. She was goddess of two extremes, Love, and War. For her did the warriors march forth, and to her did they return. Her temples were not unlike whore houses in that a man could walk in and for a few coins donation he could go to a quiet place and make love with a woman. They were entirely unlike whore houses in that everyone there understood that this was not profane lust but a sacred mysterious rite between a god and a goddess made incarnate in man and woman. The warriors, coming in covered in the blood, gore and fury of war were bathed and perfumed and gentled by the priestesses and when they left and went home to their families they were again fathers, husbands and farmers or tradesmen. It was sacred, it was respected, it was valued. The priestesses were valued and respected and could feel pride in their work.
I was one of these women. My soul was awakened in my initiation to Innana. After however long it was that this civilization flowered and then died, I remained her priestess. I did not always serve her as my path in life at times diverged from her service, but since my dedication to her and awakening I have always belonged to her.
In this lifetime I continued my service to her. Loving all those whom she sent to me for love. Loving them as truly as I could with as little reservation as I could. I could not heal them but I must assume I had some value to them for something or she would not have brought them to me. Maybe even I did heal them.
The hard part, however, is that if you love someone, then the love affair ends, your heart breaks. It doesn't matter who did the breaking up, you both suffer heart break. I've had a broken heart far more often than anyone could expect and far more often than anyone I have ever met. Most folks give up at half as many heart breaks. My lady made me strong, though, and I kept healing. Sort of. The scars remain and you do get more and more fragile. After all these centuries of being in her service I have run out. I truly believe it. I truly have become gunshy. When I look inisde myself, I cannot stand another heartbreak and still love again. I am certain of it. So I told her, I'm retiring. I don't want anymore and if you bring me anyone else, he'd better be for keeps or I will turn him away.
So she brought me another one. As always, I asked her, "is he mine to keep?" This time, she said "yes, if you treat him well, you can keep him."
She said he was for me, crafted and cultivated and carved just so and just right for me. She didn't say he was whole or ready though. He isn't. In fact, he's ill enough that I can't have any confidence he'll survive to be with me. It seems an awful joke. "Yes, you can have your heart's desire, but it's broken and doesn't work anymore."
Oh and he is so very perfect in so many ways, if you overlook the minor point that he's broken. Can he be repaired? I have no idea. I mean, in theory, yeah, he can, but it's like looking at a priceless vase in pieces on the ground and you don't have any glue and you've never done that sort of restoration and even trying to pick up pieces cuts your fingers to ribbons.
Now if that ain't frustrating enough, he's not a vase or a broken thing to be repaired, he's a person, he's his own person, and he doesn't have to be fixed or healed or repaired or anything if he doesn't want to be and if he does, he will damn well do it himself and it's none of my damn business anyway and where do I get off thinking I can decide what's broken and what's not? It's out of my hands entirely.
So here I am. I am spinning out of control. I am hurting and terrified and confused and angry and full of doubt and self pity. I feel so completely out of touch with anything good in myself that I cannot imagine myself useful or worthy of anything. The only thing I know for sure is I am hating my goddess. I don't want her in my pocket, I don't want her in my head, I don't want her in my life. I blame her for setting me up to hope and dream dreams I can't have. I blame her for keeping me alive enough to suffer another day. I blame her for making me so flawed I cannot succeed alongside my fellow men. I blame her for breaking my precious man. I blame her for everything I am unhappy about.
But she's my higher power. It's to her I'm supposed to turn for solace and hope and some sense of security.
That means I have to ask her why this experience is so good for me, what will I gain? What is her plan? That means I have to believe again that she loves me and intends the best for me and that the best in life is always found alongside the roughest roads.
That also means I have to eat my words. I have to take back all my fury and anger. Chagrin. Shame. Humiliation. Apology. Bend my shoulders and take the weight and shut my mouth and quit feeling so hard done by.
I never had a goddess in my pocket after all. No priviledge except that of having a friend in God and isn't that just ordinary? I'm not special. We all have a friend in God, nothing unique about it.
I'm starting to see how maybe this whole damned mess is ultimately to the better. It's forced me to reach out and find new community when I had lost mine through attrition and neglect. It's still too new to be sure it's not just another fake and dodge. Sometimes I feel like Charley Brown and God is Lucy with the football. She's trying to tell me some shit about how all this dodging and kicking and falling is making me stronger so when I do finally kick the ball it'll be the best kick anyone ever took at a foot ball and that ball will fly into orbit. I don't believe her.
I guess I do. But not yet. Not today. I want just a little more evidence before I let go of my anger and disappointment because if I'm going to feel ashamed and humiliated I want to be sure it's not just so I can be made a fool of for divine amusement.
I want my soulmate, dammit. I'm so tired of waiting.
Patience sucks.