Full moon thinking

So this is what the new year looks like then, all grey skies and wind and sirens.

While I often pride myself on not being superstitious (I'm not sure how that squares with faith but let's move swiftly on shall we) last year pushed me to the limit of my belief in the random nature of events. Things got so terribly farcical that I reached a point where I refused to make any large decisions or take serious action until January the 1^st because I genuinely thought that simply by virtue of having been done in 2010 it would somehow go terribly wrong. I mentioned to a friend of mine (who has the same name as I do so let's call her Other Jane) who happens to be a pagan that in the interests of inter-faith dialogue we should do a joint ritual on New Years Eve just to make sure that 2010 did not attempt to haunt us for another year.

Now Other Jane has the same pull towards her particular pantheon as I do towards Christianity however we prefer to worship in similar ways so I was reasonably confident that we could pull it off without compromising ourselves. The process of putting the ritual together was enlightening in and of itself, I adapted a form of the invocation used by The Church as I feel that if I'm making them my spiritual home I should start to work their ideas into my practices. We started out a month or so before the date by tweaking things as serious as wording (because no-one likes to have it implied that they should consider another faith as a duty for them while they're trying to worship their own) and as seemingly inconsequential as the fact that I use salt as the base for my incense coals but as it's sometimes considered a purifier for pagans it would have rendered Other Janes work moot. It gave me an interesting perspective on the way that Christianity is structured to reject anything but itself which I am often uncomfortable with when it is made crudely obvious but perhaps should be paying closer attention to in the smaller things. While I am aware of the historical reasons for this bias and I respect the use of the Bible as it is currently considered not just as a holy text but as a vehicle for the tradition which we live in that's no reason to be sloppy with my analysis.

As to what I feel about this sort of thing, whether you call it a service or a ritual or a prayer or a spell, on a more academic level I'm almost in the “prayer is a way to increase mindfulness and mindfulness is how you effect change” school of thought. I feel that they are a cry for help without a guarantee of assistance or if it does come for it to be unexpected or even unwanted, they are a sacrifice of time and attention and effort not bargains to be struck. In the same way that you should never gamble, invest or lend more than you can afford to lose you shouldn't spend time or mindfulness (there's that word again) begging God to fix a problem when you could be directing that towards working it out yourself. If nothing else they give me space to be calm, to push everything else away, and that can give me time to come up with new insights or to use as a touchstone in times of trial.