In recent months, I’ve been exploring what it means to me to relate to the Divine. I’ve been grappling with how to be in relationship to the Gods and Goddesses (one way that I see the Divine) without adopting a stance of constant supplication in a desperate attempt to win favor.
This all started with an audiobook that totally pissed me off. I was listening to Caroline Myss’ Your Power to Create, and I found myself getting more and more ticked off by the second. Something about her tone, which I experienced as grating and aggressively confrontational, wasn’t working for me.
Right before I turned it off, she described how most of us tend to relate to power, in her view. We think that as long as we “do the right thing,” then a benevolent overseer will grant our wishes. I’m paraphrasing, because it’s been a few months since I’ve listened to the book, but I clearly recall her likening this to a “pagan practice” of “leaving trinkets under your pillow” in hopes of earning the Gods’ favor.
I stewed on this for awhile, getting all huffy and indignant. And then…I stopped and asked myself, “Now, why are you getting so worked up about this? Plenty of people have opinions you’d rather not hear, but not all of them get under your skin like this. What makes this one so different?”
In the coming weeks, through meditation and journaling, I realized that Myss had a point. And a damn good one, too.
I looked back at my interactions with Divine Beings, and I noticed a trend: I was often worried about offending them, of doing the wrong thing, of being rejected and abandoned. Hmm.
“Doesn’t this sound familiar?” I thought.
The way I was relating to the Divine, not surprisingly, mirrored the way I have related to my parents for much of my life in response to the message, “Be a ‘good girl’ and you’ll be loved. Be ‘bad’ and you’ll be unloved and abandoned.”
And also not surprisingly, I felt like I was walking on eggshells around the Divine, like She was a super-powered, omniscient version of my parents who could ground me for my next three lifetimes.
In the coming weeks, with this question holding fast in my mind, I began to ask for Guidance. “What would it feel like,” I asked, “to relate to You with utmost respect, and not utmost fear?”
A week later, I received an answer (and I say “an answer,” because I’m sure this is only the beginning of a much longer journey). I had just finished reading a book about the Oracle at Delphi by William J. Broad (a fascinating read, by the way). My head was swimming with images of an ancient spring-fed temple where the Pythia channeled Apollo, changing the course of history with her Divine pronouncements.
So with that in mind, here I was, hiking in the woods, looking for a place to do a tarot reading al fresco when I heard gurgling water, far below the trail in a ravine. Peering over the edge, I saw a small creek, but it wasn’t moving nearly fast enough to create that amount of noise. I had to be missing something.
I felt powerfully drawn to this creek, so I decided to attempt scaling the hill and investigating. Thankfully, no one was there to see me daintily skid-fall down to the ravine bottom, and once there, I paused to locate the gurgling noise.
Splashing down the creek to my left, the water suddenly became ice cold, as in, cold enough to hurt, so I picked my way over to the bank. And there, I saw the source of the rushing water: an underground spring was flowing out into the creek, rushing out through a small cave in the hillside.
It doesn’t look like much here (thanks, crappy camera phone), but out from beneath the three large boulders you see below flows a powerful stream of ice-cold water.
Standing here, listening to the crystal clear water emerging from deep within the earth, feeling the warm sun on my skin, I felt alive with the energy of this place. It was absolutely intoxicating.
I don’t know how long I stood there, mouth hanging open in a very dignified manner, completely in awe. But I then had a strong urge to leave something, an offering. I dug through my pack and found an apple, and I placed it reverently on one of the boulders (where perhaps a sacred squirrel will later hit the snack jackpot).
It wasn’t until I was climbing the steep hillside, returning to the trail, leaving this magickal, sacred place, that I realized how different this offering felt. There wasn’t even a sliver of, “If I don’t leave something, I’ll be punished” or “I have to leave something out of respect.”
Nope, it was just a spontaneous offering from the heart, free of ulterior motives or grasping. I felt immense gratitude that a place like this even exists and that I was able to experience it, right here, right now.
And that, I believe, is what it feels like to relate to the Divine.
