Applied Theology and Current Events

[kiya]

TNH wrote about it in makinglight.

papersky wrote about it too.

As did other people.

The National Museum of Iraq was effectively destroyed by looters.

I feel weird. I felt weird. There's nothing, nowhere to be done. I don't feel weird anymore, quite in the same way. And this was one of the bits that make a body feel better, I guess, the stuff that comes in around the edges of taking up the burden and release of a faith, a set of practices with their own feel and their own reason.

Now I don't feel weird. I feel . . . sort of detached, dissociated, but in a comfortable sort of way, a place from which I can look at things from a distance. Not Darkhawk's distance; this is Lightweaver's distance, the looking for harmonies and balances and how the pieces go together.

One of the things I'm finding I needed in a theology was a way of affirming places that things go. Where they belong.

The incense is still burning. There are times that the smoke curls towards me in small caresses of infinitely complicated gossamer, winding against me before they disappear into the trailing battery of Brownian motion.

It took me a while to find it. I knew we had some, and I was talking to people about the things I was finding instead of my incense. Which I knew I had, sweet-smelling, potent stuff from a salesman in Hynes who lurks there in the cold and spilling the essence of his wares onto the street and down into the subway where it mingles with the must and mothball smell of the T. Eventually teinedreugan found it, and I brought that downstairs.

I never did find the music I was looking for, but I suspect Beethoven's Sixth Symphony is just as good as what I wanted.

I assembled things. A candle my aunt gave me; my meditation bowl, the one I threw with my own hands, one of the reasons I want to make a statue for Khnum with those same hands; a metal goblet; the incense burner. I cleared away a space for them all, then took the goblet and my natron upstairs for a shower.

It occurred to me after I was in the water that I didn't have something to wear when I got out; my shirt, while loose and white, was dirty. I decided to snag a piece of my SCA garb, the chemise I use sometimes as a nightshirt when I'm in places I need nightshirts.

I'd put the goblet, full of water, and the natron on the end of the tub; I made a few decisions about how I wanted to go about the sequencing on this, and that worked out all right. Something about the combination of ritual concentration and the shattering shock of the cold water poured over my head sent me into a rather odd mental state, which I suspect was entirely the point. (And someone who wasn't front at the time, probably Darkhawk now I think of it, started work on the question of what particular ritual forms have what sort of efficacy.)

I got the chemise out of the closet, talked with teinedreugan, and then came downstairs, turning out lights as I went.

By the light of a candle and the dim glow of my laptop -- I am such a technopagan, and the suggested words for the rite are on the web and I don't have them to memory -- I lit the incense. It flamed, and I blew it out, and it smoked gloriously, filling the room with scent.

I had thought a bit about what I wanted to say while I was in ritual space, in the shower and while I was preparing that space, but it was still improvisational, still just what . . . the words were that were there. This is what they were, as best as i can remember:

O my ancestors
Known and unknown
From the beginnings of our time
When Djehuty first taught man
To make marks in the mud.

O my ancestors
I hope . . . that you can forgive.

O my ancestors
Whose names may never now be known
Know . . . that you are remembered
That you may live forever.

I sat and watched the smoke, as it billowed around and curled. As I finished speaking, it swept towards me -- rather than going off to the left, it twisted and shifted around and wound itself around my face. And after doing that for a while, all the billowing stopped, and the smoke went straight up, unmolested by air currents.

It felt . . . done. I put out the candle.

Comments

[elynne.livejournal.com]

thank you.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Those are beautiful words. May I borrow and adapt?

[kiya]

Of course you may.




(Incidentally, at some point I might wind up wanting to talk to you about reconstructionist stuff, by which I mean that I have nebulous thoughts that might coalesce at some point potentially in your direction. If I ever get coherent, do you mind if I drop you a line?)

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

You're always welcome to do that :-)

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

This is why I long for theology and ritual, sometimes. Any why I derive so much of a sense of rightness from reading about other people's. But. I've still never found anything that can produce such feelings in my own head, if even I am capable of them.

And so, I suppose I envy you a bit, in the most positive of manners.

Thank you.

[kiya]

I'd suspect that if you get rightness-resonance from reading other people's suchlikes, there probably exists something that could give you right-feelings of your own, somewhere, even if it hasn't been invented yet.

Personally, I'm all in favor of ritual practices that involve setting things on fire. (That's a flippant comment, but it has a lot of entertaining truths in it; once, when I was melting-down furious, a bunch of my friends found a candle, lit it, and thrust it into my hands. Instant calming effect, just watching the flame.) I think that sort of thing is probably a place to start, if one were inclined towards starting.

[nashiitashii.livejournal.com]

That was beautiful... and it also reminded me of what I envision my own ritual to be like when I can finally begin doing it again. Cramped dorms and weirded out roommates are reasons why I don't currently have a ritual on a regular basis. I guess right now my ritual is found when I get the opportunity to wander out into nature, or even when I'm walking amongst the trees on campus. Finding the next turn on my path will be easier once I get a space of my own. For the time being, I'm collecting items that have a special significance to me for later use.