On The Blessedness Of Struggle

I was mostly raised by my grandparents. I lived with them during the school year and would live with my Mother and her part of my family during most Summers and school vacations until I was in my teens.

My Grandfather was a retired airman. He served in the United States Air Force for 20 years and through two wars (tail end of WWII and the Korean War). He wanted me to serve as well and raised me to be a little airman, complete with combat training. It was definitely abusive, both physically and psychologically. I was queer (in both senses of strange and LGBTQIA) and my Father’s daughter, so I wasn’t exactly cut out for the military, especially the military of 1995 when I turned 18. So my Grandfather’s dreams didn’t quite come to fruit, but the part of me that is his, the part of me he tried to turn into a warrior…that part stuck.

I left home (I refuse to call it “running away”…that implies they tried to stop me) at age 16. First I couchsurfed at my bass player’s house (I was in a shitty grunge metal band called Cliff at the time), but by the Winter of 1995 I was well and truly homeless. Suddenly all the things my Grandfather taught me, from how to properly set up and maintain a camp to how to defend myself and others as effectively and efficiently as possible, mattered immensely. I was forced to grudgingly acknowledge that somewhere in the midst of all the abuse and neglect, I had actually learned some really important lessons and skills. I was able to put my two inheritances, that of the magick of my Father and the militarism of my Grandfather, together into a survival cocktail to keep my ex and myself safe in some truly precarious situations. For that I am truly grateful and I honor my Grandfather’s spirit every night.

But what he taught me made me see the world harshly, in terms of attack, defense, constant vigilance, and most of all the constant need to be “on-mission”, to have some overwhelming goal that orients every action and attitude. I became a Thelemite at a young age exactly because the notion of a teleologically defining “true” or “pure” will, a mission that could guide my life, fit into how I had been raised to view myself and the world. I was raised first to be a warrior, then a mage, so my training in the former dictated many of my attitudes and beliefs about the latter.

My primary teacher, the late Tony Saltana, tried to soften this harshness in me. He saw the priestess in me, the mystic, and he tried to cultivate it. He tried to get me to question the narrative of my childhood, to challenge the idea that life was essentially a war without end where I was surrounded by potential enemies and allies that I had to constantly reassess for opportunities and betrayals. He recognized my trauma reactions as what they were and refused to indulge my youthful desires for straightforward solutions and well-defined missions. In addition to directing me towards the standard writers of ceremonial magick such as Agrippa, Levi, Mathers, and Crowley, he also directed me towards the mystical texts of the Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions. Oh, I still studied the standard A.’.A.’. Syllabus, of course, but the Old Man wanted me reading St. Hildegard Of Bingen and Hermann Hesse just as much, if not more, than Aleister Crowley (who mostly just seemed to amuse him at that point).

To be perfectly clear, Tony was no pacifist. The Old Man was happy that I knew how to fight, and he was always clear with me that I was going to have to defend myself and others sometimes. He often watched me spar with one of my two magickal brothers, Raven, with great pleasure, and he applauded our skill. Far from disapproving, he liked what my Grandfather had raised me to be. But he wanted me to have some clear idea of what was worth fighting for, of what the mission really was, and for him that was always the same: love. For him, love was what it was all for, it was what we were here to do. That was what “love is the Law, love under will” meant for him. He wanted me to see that love everywhere, to see how precious it is. How fragile it is. How it needs to be protected as it goes about its work of transforming the world—and all of us—into something better. He didn’t reject the martial part of me, my Grandfather’s child, the child that Ares came to even before I was really doing magick yet, but he wanted me to understand that my true mission was to love, first and foremost, and that everything else would have to fall out of that. The books he had me read, the music he had me listen to, and the endless walks together around downtown Santa Cruz as he taught me the lessons that have made me the mage I am, were all about the same thing: love.

I have known many wise mages. Many powerful mages. Many mages who could probably run circles around me, both magickally and intellectually, on my very best day. But I have known very few good—truly good—mages. Tony was good, and he suffered for it every day until one day he just wasn’t there anymore. It was clear that it was a burden for him and now, almost 30 years later, I understand why: good takes a lot of work. Good usually isn’t rewarded. And good hurts. A lot. It hurts to care. It hurts to value people and care about what they do and what happens to them. It hurts to love the world as we find it and the people as they are while still trying every damned day to be better and to do better than the day before. And it hurts more as we grow as mages and mystics and can see more and more clearly.

This aching world just keeps breaking my fucking heart.

I have studied holy texts and books on ethics. I have sat asana and meditated. I have taken and helped serve sacraments in multiple traditions. I have prayed and fasted. I have gone to therapy and dutifully taken my medication like a good girl. I have built and maintained loving relationships that have lasted many years. And I have served faithfully at the altar of the goddess of love. All of this and more because I want to “seek and serve the Good”, a poetic phrase Tony once said to my magickal brothers and I while we were sitting at the Santa Cruz Metro Station eating cold cheese pizza. I have struggled and strived for almost three decades in this spiritual and ethical quest. And I have never been good. Not once. I have only come close enough to see the shadow the Good casts as it passes before me.

Good is a struggle. It was a struggle for Tony, a disabled gay man wheeling around a downtown in the 90s where people called him “Rolling Target”, to keep trying to serve the community as the street clergy that he was. It was a struggle for the people I worked with at Feed The People and Food Not Bombs to keep feeding the hungry. And it has been a struggle for me to find a way to honor the complexity of who I am, the complexity of being both warrior and mage, philosopher and priestess, poet and player of games, all at the same time, all so that I can continue to dedicate my life to the Great Work. To seeking and serving the Good.

To the mission.

Because in the words of my Grandfather, the mission comes first. Always and forever.

War is most likely coming. I know that this isn’t the message of love and inspiration that I normally try to convey in these homilies, but as I have said today, I am not just a priestess. The time is coming when each of us must find our own mission, our own reason to fight and to love, to harm and to heal.

We must each find our own reason to struggle.

Blessed Full Moon, dear ones. May the gods bless you all and keep you safe over the next two weeks until we hopefully speak again. I am working on something. A way for us to work together to try to help get through what is coming. I will reveal it soon. Fair warning: it’s a little bit crazy. But so am I, so that makes sense. Until then, be well.

In love,

Soror Alice

Art: Odilon Redon, “Jacob Wrestling With The Angel”, (~1905)