On a side note, death is a natural part of life. It's not entropy so much as transformation. I think that if we honor life, we must also respect death. That sounds so strange, but we need to respect the gift of rot and decay. It nourishes our world in ways that we seldom truly confront. Life and death are both gifts, and while I'm in no particular hurry to be gifted with the latter, I don't deny that it is a natural part of the cycle. Misfortune is often a matter of wyrd, sometimes inevitable, sometimes a testing ground; much can be learned and much growth accomplished by how we meet the misfortunes of our lives. Sometimes misfortune just happens. The same with illness. While I do believe that everything is spiritual and the spiritual is in everything, and while great wisdom can come through courageously meeting great illness or misfortune, I would caution against over-interpretation.
You describe yourself as a god-slave. While I've read some of your descriptions of this service, and understand it as similar to my own, I do tend to bristle at the word slave. Since a thrall was of the very lowest social order, it seems to me that using the word slave could be considered to do a dishonor to the service you do. It seems to go against the grain of the heathen value of honor. If you are important to your God, does it not honor your God more to describe yourself as something other than slave?
Spiritual commitment is a very complex thing. I think that many of us come to Paganism and Heathenry not realizing that the Gods are quite real, and that once we enter into the process of devotion, They can sometimes ask for a very daunting level of commitment. I've noticed that for some folks, the Gods are a nice idea but it's a totally different matter when one encounters what scholar of religion Rudolf Otto called the "numinous tremendens et fascinans." We're conditioned in many ways to assume that spirituality should make us feel good, should not inconvenience us, should be about what we want to do, not what might be necessary. Too many times we think that we can control the process.
By consciously using the word "slave" (as Odin directed me to) it brings home the point that sometimes we don't get to do that. It's a troublesome term, but it implies a level of binding commitment more accurately than anything else I have come up with. Part of the problem that people have with the term stems from the terrible abuses inflicted by one group of people on another throughout history, but part of it comes from disrespect for service. I have seen the term "godservant" evoke almost as heated a response.
As to value and honor -- it is an honor to serve the Gods in whatever capacity They determine to be right and proper. There is immense value in knowing and accepting one's place, which in turn allows a person to truly shine. That is not something I think that we should be setting limits on. I think it's for the Gods to define the terms of the relationship and the terms of one's service. I am many things in my relationship to Odin and one of those things is His godatheow, perhaps the core note of my service. It is a very beautiful thing and terrifying and I wouldn't change it for the world, save to learn how to do it better.
The word that comes to mind when I read of your spiritual practice and personal devotional practices is piety. Do you think a wholesome piety is something missing from the Modern Pagan movement?
Absolutely!! I write about just this in my devotional to the Goddess Sigyn. In this book (Sigyn: Our Lady of the Staying Power,) I talk about how piety has fallen out of favor in contemporary religious circles. Too often, within Heathenry at least, I've seen it dismissed as groveling, though I'm not quite sure why. To my mind, piety involves taking one's place in right relationship to all the beings in one's world, from the Gods and ancestors, to the land spirits, to one's family and community. It implies a way not only of being in the world, but of interacting with it -- something I call "mindful interaction." To directly quote what I said in my book:
Essentially, piety is the thorough, all-encompassing expression of ongoing and evolving devotion. At its best, it is quiet and forthright. True piety does not rest in broad, conspicuous gestures or flamboyant, seemingly "religious" behavior. Such things would be caricatures of this virtue. Rather, real piety lies in making one's heart open to the Gods and striving every hour of every day, as best we can to allow that awareness to govern our every deed. And we do this knowing that in our imperfection we shall fail, we shall have set backs, and we shall have to get up, retrace our steps, and forge onward again and again and again. Piety involves the grace of ongoing perseverance. It is this virtue that both informs and flows from ongoing devotional practice.
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