A homily for the Full Moon on December 15, 2024.
Dearly Beloved,
Blessed Full Moon, dear siblings. I must confess to you that I am going through an ordeal at the moment. I am helping care for an aging and injured family member, and this work has left me triggered emotionally, in great pain physically, and exhausted on all levels. Again and again, my limits are being pushed. And through it all I am working with everything I have to be loving, to keep an open heart, and to be of use.
Because of this, this month I am moved to speak of that act that has been at the core of my spiritual practice for several years, that approach to others that starts in the heart and ends in the hands and muscles, that way of being in the world of which so many great mystics and saints have spoken.
I am moved to speak of service.
Sometimes people are confused by me spiritually. I am clearly very devout. But I am also clearly very syncretic in my beliefs. I believe that every deity that has ever come into contact with humanity represents a genuine spiritual formula, a way of being with and connecting with the Divine. I also believe that we are guided to the Divine through resonances that we experience by interacting with the world…the Divine is always reaching out to us through nature, through our relationships with each other and our relationships with everything else in the world. The stars, the trees, the other animals, ourselves, other people, spirits, the gods, every quanta of energy and field of fundamental forces, every aspect of the world both ideal and actual, celestial, earthly, and cthonic, is an expression of the Divine, and we are all in constant relationship. This, to me, is what it means to be pagan…to see all of reality and everything in it as an unfolding dance of divine life and meaning in constant relationship. To see the Divine as both transcendent and immanent, both always beyond us and always right with us.
But while all of this is very poetic and holds great meaning for me, my theology and spiritual practices have changed a great deal over the course of my life and I expect them to change again. I have worn and still wear many labels and move in many communities, as witch, ceremonial magician, mystic, and clergy. So what, other than my physical body, unites all of these different aspects of myself? How do I pull it all together so that I am still one person, even as I deal with these complexities in my identity?
In a word: values. Ethics. The way that I walk the walk and the way that I talk the talk. The things I commit to doing and the things that I swear to forsake. My values guide the way I live, and everything else falls out of that. And my values, what I have sworn to do, can be summed up in three phrases, three maxims just as defining for me as the “Lord’s Prayer” is for Christians or the “Shema” is for Jewish people. Anyone who knows me personally has heard me say them, and they show up in my writing again and again:
I seek and serve the Good.
I serve, I suffer, and I love.
I do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Notice none of these maxims, these defining values that tell me who I am every day of my life, is about the theology, mythology, or doctrine of any spiritual or magickal tradition. They are about what I do, not why I do it. The reasons for my commitments have changed over the years, the visions I have of the Good and what it means to love have evolved and grown, the ways that I get the job done have become exponentially more sophisticated yet ever simpler, and even the nature and quality of my suffering have shifted and changed in the many years since I first came to these values. But one thing has remained a constant. One thing has been at the core of my values since I walked beside the wheelchair of my teacher down the streets of downtown Santa Cruz 29 years ago. One thing has guided me even when I was unsure of everything else: service.
But what do I mean by service?
I have said again and again in my writings that I believe in a naturalized theology, a vision that meets the Divine through nature, through ourselves, and through our relationships with the other beings with which we share the world. I believe that reality is literally the face of the Divine smiling at us, the mouth of the Divine speaking to us, and the arms of the Divine reaching out to embrace us. I see a world that is full of spirit, bursting at the seams with holiness, a reality that is a living fire that dances with us always. And I devoutly wish to serve that Divine that I see everywhere in love and faith. So how can I do that?
By serving you, my siblings. By serving the plants. By serving the animals. By serving every atom of creation. By trying my hardest every day to help, to heal, and to mend this beautiful world, this heartbreaking world, this world that is the Divine made manifest.
Now, is this always easy? Of course not. Sometimes the faces of the Divine that we meet out there in the world may be pretty horrible. They may hurt us or each other. They may cause needless and horrific suffering. They may just not be very appealing, either aesthetically or ethically. And here is where the “faith” part of “serving the Divine in love and faith” comes into play. Because I really do believe that it’s all divine, that even the obviously evil or destructive people that we encounter are still instantiations of the Divine, that even the microbes that cause disease and the foods that cause cancer are absolutely aspects of the Divine. So I serve, even as I suffer, and I do my absolute best to love, even—no, especially—when it’s difficult. Because behind the face of even the worst monster in the world smiles the Divine. I may have to fight them sometimes, I may have to thwart them sometimes, but I must always seek to help, to heal, and to mend the world, and the world includes the monsters, too.
However, this does not equate to some self-sacrificing vision of service that throws myself under the bus for everyone and everything else. I am also an instantiation of the Divine, and so are you, my dear siblings. We all participate in the Divine, and thus we must also serve ourselves. We must also do our best to help, heal, and mend ourselves. We owe ourselves service just as much as we owe it to each other.
So let us reach out to each other and to the world around us. Let us reach within and without with embracing and loving arms. Let us reach up into the celestial heights and reconcile them with the cthonic depths. Let us help, heal, and mend ourselves, each other, and the world.
Let us serve.
Blessed Full Moon.
In love,
Soror Alice
Art: Ford Madox Brown, “Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet”, (1852-56)
I wanted to take the time to comment here because you mentioned that you’re currently caring for an “aging and injured” family member. In 2018 I began taking care of my father who was slowly becoming paralyzed from the waist down. Interestingly, it happened at the same time as my own back problems left me on temporary disability from my job which turned into me leaving said job. Luckily, my dad’s a vet and the VA was willing to pay me to take care of him.
By 2022 it had become a full-time job as he had become completely paraplegic and my mother’s health had also deteriorated, so I sold my home and moved in with them to provide around the clock care. For the past two years I’ve left the house for, on average, an hour a day.
I say this because I genuinely want you to know that I understand.
Thank you for sharing your experiences. And thank you for reading.