Her most recent post<\/a> (Ruby\u2019s blog posts are, in her own words, long and infrequent) uses a visit to a Christian church and participation in their spiritual formation class as a jumping off point for a discussion of gods and God. I\u2019m not about to try to summarize it \u2013 go read it for yourself. Just make sure you give it the attention it merits \u2013 it isn\u2019t something you can appreciate by scanning through it.<\/p>\nMy own experience is similar to Ruby\u2019s. I consider myself a polytheist because I\u2019ve experienced individual gods and goddesses \u2013 and one god in particular I\u2019ve experienced very intimately. Yet I have also had classic mystical experiences: a brief but overwhelming feeling of Unity, that All is One. To call those experiences \u201cfeelings\u201d does not do them justice \u2013 they were very close to certainty\u2026 and my threshold for certainty is extremely high. <\/p>\n
When I speak of Unity, I do not mean the \u201csoft polytheism\u201d argument that all gods and goddesses are merely aspects of one God\/dess. The one God\/dess of soft polytheism isn\u2019t all that different from the God of monotheism \u2013 s\/he is a distinct being with whom we can communicate. I will occasionally use that language (\u201cthe God\u201d and \u201cthe Goddess\u201d) in conversations with monotheists \u2013 it is useful for emphasizing that the Divine is female as well as male. But my prayers and meditations are done with and for individual deities \u2013 I practice \u201chard polytheism.\u201d<\/p>\n
When I speak of Unity, I mean The All. Everyone and everything. You and me, plants and animals, mountains and rivers, stars and planets, ancestors and nature spirits, goddesses and gods. We are all One. We are all related in ancestry and connected in life. <\/p>\n
And if we are connected in life, it stands to reason we will remain connected in death. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know what that looks like. I can\u2019t explain it. It is, for me, anyway, the example of an ineffable mystery \u2013 something you can\u2019t speak about because words can\u2019t describe it. <\/p>\n
I like Ruby\u2019s metaphor of an onion. Reality has many layers. Reality isn\u2019t just the layer of the material world. Its bounds aren\u2019t limited to the layer immediately above and immediately below us. <\/p>\n
Reality is the whole onion.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ruby Sara has shut down Pagan Godspell and started a new blog she calls Onion Work, subtitled \u201clayers and tears.\u201d The first few entries on the new blog sound a lot like the old blog: deep, conversational, and mystical. But the emphasis in Ruby\u2019s life has changed and she felt like making a clean start […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a><\/div>\n