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The Grail Path
Mar. 26th, 2004 09:14 amI had a wonderful evening yesterday with my inner circle of women friends from church. Together we call ourselves WIT – Women in Transition. They have been with me every step of the way through my frustration and despair over my lack of a ‘real’ career more than a year ago, my discernment process, the discovery of my sense of vocation, my application to seminary and all that has followed. They unabashedly celebrated my step away from traditional ministry, telling me that they I was seeming much more like myself again.
Something else I had realized during my last weekend of Christology class was that while I have indeed been reveling in my classes, I was also aware of my spiritual borders contracting. I was losing touch with the Goddess energy, to put it most simply. I was losing touch with the magic, the wild, the non-rational. And that worried me. I put it down to my sustained intellectual focus on Christian theology – but there was also an awareness – perhaps the first that seriously precipitated my recent crisis – of a pressure to conform to the institutional norms of my instructors’ faith paths, to the exclusion of what was “Other.”
There are some things that are and may always be “Other” to me – but my spiritual embrace is fairly wide. And when I get down to the root of it, I am not willing to draw a box around my spiritual life. I have looked into the Void, and found the Divine Mystery beyond the Void, and no box can do justice to the Mystery. Traditions are valuable, and I certainly don’t think the less of people who find richness and nurturing within a tradition – but I can not abide within one.
The nature of the Grail Path is to be forever drawn beyond the walls of the sanctuary, no matter how much one loves and respects what is within. I read somewhere (and I wish I could supply proper attribution) that when the Grail Romances were being written, it was almost universally accepted that God was present at every Mass in the mystery of the Host. And yet there were those who were compelled to leave behind tradition, liturgy, and community, to seek for Union finding their own way through the Lands Adventurous. The Grail has never been part of the Church, but always beckons from beyond.
And I must follow.
Something else I had realized during my last weekend of Christology class was that while I have indeed been reveling in my classes, I was also aware of my spiritual borders contracting. I was losing touch with the Goddess energy, to put it most simply. I was losing touch with the magic, the wild, the non-rational. And that worried me. I put it down to my sustained intellectual focus on Christian theology – but there was also an awareness – perhaps the first that seriously precipitated my recent crisis – of a pressure to conform to the institutional norms of my instructors’ faith paths, to the exclusion of what was “Other.”
There are some things that are and may always be “Other” to me – but my spiritual embrace is fairly wide. And when I get down to the root of it, I am not willing to draw a box around my spiritual life. I have looked into the Void, and found the Divine Mystery beyond the Void, and no box can do justice to the Mystery. Traditions are valuable, and I certainly don’t think the less of people who find richness and nurturing within a tradition – but I can not abide within one.
The nature of the Grail Path is to be forever drawn beyond the walls of the sanctuary, no matter how much one loves and respects what is within. I read somewhere (and I wish I could supply proper attribution) that when the Grail Romances were being written, it was almost universally accepted that God was present at every Mass in the mystery of the Host. And yet there were those who were compelled to leave behind tradition, liturgy, and community, to seek for Union finding their own way through the Lands Adventurous. The Grail has never been part of the Church, but always beckons from beyond.
And I must follow.
