Taking Responsibility for the Work

“Your work should move you closer to your goals, closer to the current that moves you forward. If it does otherwise, a change in course is in order. Magic is taking responsibility for all aspects of your life, and the ability to make a decision to change it is the most basic freedom of all.” — Wachter 

I have no idea if I’m getting better. 

What does that even mean? What does it look like? 

I have no idea if I am stronger. 

I do know the more I want to become “holy” the less I feel it is even possible. 

The closer I try moving toward God the more unworthy I feel to be in His presence. 

I have no idea if I am getting better. 

The closer we move toward Divinity the more abhorrent we look by contrast, the more my sins look grotesque… The more wretched I feel. 

My mistakes feel worse. Hurting others feels worse. 

I have no idea if I am getting better. 

I can see myself a lot clearer these days and I can’t be sure I like what I see, which is good, right? Things to work on, but sometimes it feels like the things we need to work on are impossible to fix. Maybe we are all just in our fallen state where we’ll be forever. 

Forever falling, forever making the wrong choices, forever hurting ourselves and others. 

I have no idea if I’m getting better. 

If there is such a thing, I don’t know what it looks like. 

It seems we’re all just struggling no matter what we do. 

And I wonder what the point of all this is.

A year ago, I moved to New Mexico and I had one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life on a Thursday morning, in the back of an Episcopal church, as the Eucharist was celebrated. 

It was a really beautiful spring day outside and I, of course, was dressed in all black, sitting in the farthest pew from the altar. I sat and listened to the sermon given to the mostly empty church, I closed my eyes, and I performed the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram for the last time. 

The lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram is a ceremony that can be performed individually or as a group; it makes up the core curriculum in the Golden Dawn tradition of ceremonial magic. The effects of the ritual are compounding, much like going to the gym, and the basic understanding of this ritual is that it is a walking meditation. It is something done in the physical realm, but as stated above it is possible to perform it mentally.

I performed this ritual and opened my eyes to watch the celebration of the Eucharist. 

I saw it in all its splendor for the very first time. It was at that moment that I knew whatever was happening on the altar table, whatever was happening in the Sacraments, it was all real. Not real in the sense that I can show empirical data proving the reality of these things, but real in the sense that…  

They’re real. 

Christ is the living God. 

I have more doubt about who I am than the truth of that. 

I left church that day after my Bible study group and decided that I would devote my life to whatever I had just witnessed. I want to be around the altar, always; I want to serve. There’s no other vocation out there that will satisfy me. 

I brought a medallion of St. Benedict home with me and put away all my occult books and magical texts from my altar and replaced them with Saint cards. I bought a few books on prayer (the PCB) and the works of Cynthia Bourgeault. 

My life had changed, my life was focused. 

In short, what magic allowed me to do was step into a world that was greater and more expansive than myself or could ever hope to imagine, a world that is imbued with a Divine presence. A presence that loves each of us dearly. The Lutheran theologian Paul Tillich refers to God as the “Ground of Being Itself.” This presence is ineffable and personal.   

I realized that magic cannot be detached from a system of faith. Faith does not only move mountains, but it is the creative force behind all movement. 

“Faith is the intrinsic working-in-advance of that which we hope for, an inner proof of that which still rests, unseen, in the lap of the future” (Hebrews 11:1).

Faith is an act of love.  

There are countless magical texts out there that teach the lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, but none of them prepare you for what approaching Divinity means—that it entails moving past yourself, allowing the Divine to set us ablaze, tempering and molding us in its image. This is the New Man being born out of surrendering to the Divine, to God; the death rattle of an old, outdated system and the birth pangs of a new mode of being. 

The reason that no book touches on what approaching Divinity is like is because this is the hard stuff, this is transformation and it freaking sucks. This is why there are spiritual directors, they are a necessary tool in doing the work that God calls each of us to do. It’s a slow process, chipping away at the beam in our eyes, lowering our defenses and dissolving our egotistical way of seeing things. 

Furthermore, the dissolution of the false self, our egotistical way of viewing things—how we protect ourselves through habitually thinking about past pain caused by others—this is an act of faith, embodying the love that God has for us. “This is the unitive seeing we are all called to: the secret to Jesus’ great commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ Not as much as yourself, as egoic consciousness always interprets, but as yourself: interchangeably One in that great vine of love which is the mystical body of Christ” (Bourgeault 155).  

This is a part completing the Great Work, the Magnum Opus, of the Western Magic tradition.

Recognizing that there is no difference between every man, woman, and child and that we are all one: Every man and woman is a star. 

Love is the law. 

This is faith. 

A buddy of mine recently reached out to talk through a crisis of meaning-making in their life. He knows I am Christian and interested in the priesthood. We have good conversations about mysticism, magic, and the Allman Brothers Band. 

We all need a friend like this guy. 

He’s looking for a model of the world and spiritual life that makes sense. The kind of thing that makes the traumas, pain, and loss of life coherent with the ability to integrate them as a part of a larger narrative. He’s looking for what we all look for. 

He asked me why it seems Christians are the most judgmental people he’s come across—as if our whole religion revolved around pointing out the flaws in others and making ourselves feel devout by comparison. 

I told him this is exactly the kind of thing that simply will not do… As much as I want my life to be focused on attaining union with God, service to Him begins in the world; if I want to be around the altar, always, then the altar comes with me, always. And that goes for everyone, the altar lies before us all, always. 

The Great Work, θέωσις, divinization—whatever we want to call it, to accept and devote our lives to this vocation binds us to certain responsibilities. One of those responsibilities is doing what we can to change the minds of people like my friend—not to convert them, but to fully embody the eternity of The Way. 

On the topic of why Christianity, to outsiders, looks like a religion of sanctimonious fault-finding the conversation started slouching toward the Resurrection, ‘tis the season. 

I wondered if we Christians, us Followers of the Way, don’t really appreciate the Resurrection for what it is—that it kind of goes undiscussed as a quality of the Christian tradition that it is just… unbelievable. 

And you know what? 

It is unbelievable.

However, that is a strength rather than a weakness, because that is what makes Christianity such a profound confession of belief, it requires us to take such leaps of faith as to believe that the Son of God—not just a man, not just Divine—was killed and rose from the dead… even typing the words I’m not sure if I need to say something else to make it… relatable? I’m about empty on analogies and this is the type of thing that feels disingenuous to make light of, mostly because to joke about something implies some understanding of it to which I really don’t have any when it comes to the Resurrection. 

And the fact that it is difficult to relate to is kind of the point, you know? 

The Resurrection stands parallel to the Transfiguration for me, as the most important aspects of the life of Christ. So many of us look at our lives through the Cross that I am afraid we have lost the thread of our own faith, on the journey itself and I’ll be the first to admit that I feel like I have completely missed the point of The Way. 

Theologically and practically, I am not sure it is our best effort putting the Crucifixion forward as the central embodiment and representation of Christianity. The Passion and the Cross do help us to move through our own our betrayals and our pain knowing that God is with us. We must carry our cross to Golgotha, because we must die to ourselves; it is integral to the Christian life.

Nevertheless, this is not where the Christian story ends, nor was it how Christ left this earth. 

It seems more likely that we’re all afraid of death so much that it’s easier to carry our cross forever than it is to truly die to this world. It is a part of the problem with our faith that we just won’t allow the victory of Christ to become a reality in our lives. And make no mistake, the Christian victory is not in our savior—crucified.

The Christian victory is in God—risen. 

We’re not supposed to walk through this world lashing ourselves every time we stumble. We are not supposed to hold up our cross as a symbol of our self-righteous, self-flagellating, and self-centered struggles. 

The cross is no longer a symbol of death, but life.

God took what was familiar and rendered it unfamiliar; He took what was certain death and breathed life into it.