Pulled
There has been a rash of articles recently, posted mostly by Protestant Christian pundits, claiming that the falloff in mainline church attendance is due to the fact that yoga, tai chi, "spirituality" and the occult are easy, whereas Christianity is hard. Ofttimes Gnosticism is explicitly counted among the easy.
Easy?
Part of the reason I identify as a Gnostic is that firmly around my right wrist is the inexorable pull of the Roman Catholic Church; its solidity, ubiquity, liturgy and aesthetic. I could be so Catholic it's not funny: and not one of those tie-dyed chasuble guitar-Massing Vatican II theowobbly neo-Caths either, but a full-frontal SSPX Tridentine UberTraddie.
A similarly continual but contrary tug around my left wrist is Judaism; its wit, iconoclasm, spiritual literacy, and humanity.
My brain well it thinks like a Buddhist. I trained it that way; to doubt, and to doubt my doubts, to suspend, detach, examine. and defer always to compassion.
But at the very center of these forces is my Witch's heart; my blood is salty with poetry and sex and lunar magics and imagination. The turning of autumn leaves brings out cravings for bonfires and woad and howling to the Great Mother.
Needless to say this agon, this ongoing negotiation of forces, is for the most part crazy-making, and it's little wonder that in any conversation I undertake I come across as a dilettante bibliophile, with either too much Kerouac or too little; either an overdose or tragic deficit of Aristotle. An ADD-addled molotov-hurling William Burroughs vs. my inner pipe-smoking tweedy Victorian Latin-spouting harrrrumph!er. Easy?
So how do I, personally, equilibriate these opposing forces? By identifying, fighting for, and championing common ground in Her name. Shekhina. The Holy Spirit. Sophia. By the understanding (Gnostics don't have beliefs, we have understandings), as in Theodoto, that what makes us free is the gnosis of who we are, of what rebirth truly is.
And what it is, is work.
Easy. Pffft.
