“For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not that stammering, inept tradition which the people hold.”
The world seems to me to be full of stammering, inept traditions, as much as it is full of Gods. The Gods we acknowledge—Jesus and Allah and Vishnu—and the things not called holy, but treated as such—money, power, fame—suffuse daily life in the same measure.
In our house, we are trying to outrun the religious. It is no secret that I spent years in Catholic school and have been trying to unlearn everything we were taught there. Even the potential good things—charity, kindness, forgiveness—seem too tangled up with the bad to be trusted. It is also no secret that A writes poems with images, scenes, words taken from the Church. The thing about trying to outrun something that’s been with you since birth is that you can’t. It does not fall farther and farther behind you as you sprint. It is in your muscles and your lungs and your blood. It just goes sprinting right alongside you.
In our house, we subscribe to something more mystical, something less patriarchal, something more mutable. We open our chakras, we lay on the ground for gong baths, we consult tarot cards and the zodiac. It begs the question: are we the same type of person just playing for the opposite team? I could argue that the crystals on my bedside table don’t hurt anyone, but neither does eating a wafer someone said was the body of a long dead son. It is never the single person praying in their bedroom who does harm.
One day, A says that Tarot cards are just a good way for you to find out what you think about a situation. This type of statement is what keeps us thinking we haven’t fully subscribed. We don’t think they’re really magic. Except, I sometimes do. This past summer, I was confused and unsure about what to do next and so I pulled cards all the time. Big Celtic cross spreads, single daily guides, easy past-present-future spreads. I kept pulling the Seven of Swords. A man in a yellow cloak holds swords over both shoulders. He’s looking back over at the camp he’s just left and his feet and head are decorated in red. It’s a sneaky little card, one I hadn’t seen come up in my pulls ever before. For months he kept showing up and I kept believing it was the magic of the deck. The card means betrayal, deceit, attempting to get away with something you know you won’t. I pretended to be unsure of what it could be referencing, though I knew the whole time. I am constantly doing this kind of self-denial. Once I did what I thought I might need to do, the card stopped appearing in my readings. How could you not believe?
Yesterday I wrote: B asked me recently if I ever remember believing in God, and I said no. That is true but also not exactly my answer. I said, no I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the metaphysical. How could you ever explain love if you don’t believe in anything more than dirt, sky, chemicals? He laughed when I said this, told me he was sure my answer would have something to do with love, which made me feel both foolish and proud. I do not want to be thought of only as a silly woman obsessed with romance, but I have worked hard to be the type of person who could be obvious and clear about how much they love a man.
I pulled a card this afternoon. This, in some ways, is similar to praying. You repeat a question in your mind, you ask and commune with the query, and then you consult something to help you understand. But it is different than prayer in that you are provided an immediate answer. There is something calming about this for me, a person prone to anxiety. Look, I can tell myself, here’s an answer. Or at least, here's a way to frame the question. Today’s frame was the Page of Cups. He’s got a fish in a chalice and a tunic covered in flowers. He’s intuition and creativity and surprise. Trying to shape the card’s meanings to your own life’s problems can be clumsy, can be the same kind of stammering, inept tradition that God has been steeped in. But a Tarot card reader has never asked me to tamp down my own sexuality, or obey a priest, or take for truth stories written centuries ago. What a reader asks of you is much more naked. You see them, you pay them, you leave. I’ve never been told I was a bad, sinful person by a Tarot Card reader or been forced to think on my sins while someone gave me a sound bath. This new mysticism, or whatever you want to call it, is not the kind of thing I feel I need to leave, because it’s not the kind of thing that makes me stay only because of shame.
The problem with leaving behind Christianity is that it’s such a lush, dramatic world to throw away. Sure, The Empress is beautiful, the Seven of Cups mystifying, the Three of Swords mythically depressing. But they’re nothing compared to the Israelites being forced to drink the powdered gold of their false God, a calf they’d made out of their gold earrings. Or Mary Magdalene washing Jesus’s feet with her hair, pouring oil and spikenard onto him and wiping it away, leaving herself perfumed with the reverence of her task. Or Thomas pressing his fingers into open wounds on Jesus’s side. Those? Those are something else, something that runs beside me in dazzling, wicked color.
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