This is the story of a holy thing I did once.
It was just before Christmas last year, in the weeks when we heard that the Post Office was losing its funding, and there was a package on the stoop of my apartment building. It had been there for weeks, as each of us paused on our way in to check the address and turned away, disappointed. I was waiting for many packages, but this one was not even addressed to anyone in the house. I recognized the name of the street, maybe a mile away, and wondered at how it had been left here. Surely the mail person would realize, when they visited, that it needed to go somewhere else.
It was almost a week before I realized that wasn’t going to happen. The small sign one of my housemates had taped on the stairway gave the package a voice – “I don’t belong here! Please take me home!” – but the mail came and went and the package remained. It was just an Amazon purchase, I thought to myself. Probably easy to replace.
Then, one Saturday in mid-December, I conscripted my partner and zir car. We gathered up the package and drove it home, leaving it on the correct stairway this time. It took no time, an unremarkable errand on an unseasonably warm day, but it sat in the base of my spine like a thrill of energy throughout the afternoon.
“Hail Hermes,” I said, and we pulled away towards our next errand.
Three letter carriers with overflowing bundles of Christmas mail, taken between 1910 and 1915 [public domain]
My worship might kindly be called unstructured. I don’t give many offerings, or keep holy days, or pray with any sort of regularity. While I sometimes go to rituals, I don’t use them on my own, or practice magic in anything other than the most essential circumstances. I have tried to do all of these things, and for each I have fallen out of practice with a sense of guilt and displeasure.
It took me a very long time to realize the kind of worship that feels most real to me is living into the energy of my gods. To me, this feels a little like a deliberate practice and a little like the forces that make pets look like their owners. If I spend my days thinking about the flow of information, of money, of life into death, won’t the patterns of the world reshape themselves to fit my understanding? If my energy is touched by the god of the market, won’t I revel in the crowds and movement of my trips downtown? If I believe that it is important to deliver messages, isn’t doing so a holy action?
I try to keep limits on this. The gods are more than I am, and I do not want to become an echo of some greater thing. It would be easy to use this as an excuse for my own bad habits, or to become stuck in some current that would make me less myself. Limits are hard when a relationship feels so natural that it’s a part of my identity. Boundaries tend to become fluid in the face of gnosis.
In practice, this means that my life tends to take odd shapes. I find myself communicating with the gods experientially, the world drawing my focus towards them. Sometimes this is uncomfortable, like the summer I found myself climbing the stairs of two separate skyscrapers and thinking a great deal about the journey into the Underworld. Sometimes it’s beautiful, like the moment I paid off a debt and the way I thought about money started to crack open, peeling away a layer of trauma and leaving me bloody, but lighter.
Often, it’s a mix of both.
The Scenic Railway at the Exposition internationale du Nord de la France, Roubaix, 1911 [public domain]
It was the last day of the season, and the crowds at Six Flags Great America were sparse, which was fine by me. I hadn’t been to a theme park in almost a decade, and I had expected cool fall air to bring rain, not lines short enough to make me question my memory of boredom and broken televisions broadcasting Looney Tunes without a soundtrack. I didn’t have any expectations of the day, or the park, and so I chose a coaster at random, wandering into a line that seemed a little shorter than the others.
The Whizzer was a historic coaster, I was informed, but I didn’t expect the cars that pulled up. Each of them was big enough to seat two people tightly or one person like a cross between a recliner and a throne. I settled into it, pulled the lapbar across my legs, and waited to see what would happen.
There weren’t any sudden drops, no gravity-defying loops, no terror. It was a ride built entirely of fast turns and swoops that pressed me into my seat, curves that I could lean into as if I was directing myself along an urgent path. “It’s like flying,” I thought, and then, “It’s like practicing for what happens next.” For a moment I was winged heels and speed, crowing with the rush of movement.
The thought followed me off the ride, and back out into the park. I knew what it meant- flying, going fast and joyous on my way, incorporeal and busy and no longer alive. I had no idea where it had come from.
Setting a god as a standard to live up to has its own problems. Taking a god as a path to live into can be destabilizing. Discernment has always been a source of anxiety and overthinking for me. It gets hard to tell whether an impulse is coming from within or from an external source when the answer can be “both.” I don’t think there’s a messenger bag waiting for me when I die, an eternity of celestial travel. I’d never considered the option – and I turned it over in my head, wondering if it was what I wanted after all. Was this a flash of insight, or a flight of imagination, or a moment of shared experience? How could I make this make sense?
A photograph from the early 1910s of the Wellston, Missouri, Jolly Pallbearers Club [public domain]
I worry, and I agonize over the boundaries, and sometimes I overlook the blessings. It’s easy for me, caught up in my own head, to build a story where every part of my life is a difficult balance, untidily defended and prone to collapse at any moment. That’s a more compelling story than the moment of joy and connection walking beneath the L tracks, watching the train pass over me with a roar. Things must hurt for me to remember them.
This fall has hurt a lot. It’s easy for me to think about death in the abstract, but it’s much harder to see the harvest come for person after person, leaving unexpected gaps in the world behind it. I’ve stumbled over those gaps this year, held others who were exploring them. I’ve come up against the helpless feeling of knowing a friend has passed with nobody to claim them, see to their safe travels. I have lit too many candles.
In my own mourning, there have been moments when I have told myself that the work of helping with death is a path laid out for me by my love for a psychopomp. In that story, I usher in the end of things simply by interacting with them, and after they pass, I will be left to provide support for the bereaved. This is the price of my faith, the story says, and the work I will inevitably come back to.
In my happier moments, I know that story is a lie. Death, when she comes, is impartial, and the forces that determine who she comes for most often are structural, systemic, and outside of my influence. People will die, whether or not I want them to. I care deeply about making sure they go well and giving those they left behind a place to mourn. Maybe that is the influence of my god in me.
Isn’t that a holy thing?
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