What, me worry?

When I burn a candle, I prefer free-standing ones, because I like to read the wax.

I'm burning a series of candles for personal power, as you can tell by the color. Tonight I melted the top layer of the wax from the previous candles - and when I had the candle affixed I noticed that it was "standing on its own two feet," "standing pat."

A coded message

Lately, since I'm still figuring out the real-life marketing thing, I've been feeling pretty hopeless about working for myself. It's the first poverty-tantrum I've had in a long time.

I was thinking of praying Psalm 23 to receive guidance in a dream (as Secrets of the Psalms recommends), but I had a powerful dream last night before I got the chance!

I was working in a big, handsome office. A homeless man was trying to get in to harass the employees. A coworker named FAITH – a strong lady whom I know and remember fondly from real life – was keeping him out. (Come to think of it, one of the most energetic women in my small business class was named Faith.) I sat down at my desk to call the library and ask for a book. Instead, a lady named "Joan Mendez" came on the line and addressed me as "Sis." Meanwhile, I noticed that a little green eraser on my desk had caught fire. Without any bewilderment or trepidation, I put it out while talking to Ms. Mendez.

So, after I found the links highlighted above, I googled "Joan Mendez," and found:

• Joan Mendez was the sound person on a documentary called After 45 Years of Working
• a Joan Mendez has a one-man contracting business in Kissimmee, Florida
• ...was an early explorer of the Philippines
• ...was a sister of the founder of the Lima Lima Flight Team, "The world's original six aircraft civilian formation aerobatic team!"

So, Joan Mendez is a signifier for independent work, an end to drudgery. Financial independence is my sister; this is what I must learn down to the marrow of my bones!

But still no practical marketing tips :)

(At 6:37 pm, it occurred to me: in my dreams, I often get names wrong. I know a real live person with the same initials, J.M., who has given me a number of punchy, inexpensive marketing ideas. In short, I already have the tools in my hands :)

"Who can stand to hear it?"

I take my text :-) from John 6:60 (Amplified Bible)

I haven't been back to Starlight Cathedral in about three weeks. The last service I attended really did a number on me. I said (see below) that it aroused "memories of far too many years of legalistic church life." That was something of an understatement.

Mother Hughes said of the Church, "This is the hospital." Healing and curing are not the only things that happen in hospitals; there is also pain, trauma, fatigue, and the prospect of mortality.

Medicine does not always work easily, painlessly, or "naturally." Medicine includes surgery, bone setting, and chemotherapy. Nobody looks forward to any of this. Nobody looks forward to pain.

Medicine also includes misdiagnosis. There are many diseases, once thought to be common and treated aggressively, which are now known not to exist. There are whole classes of treatment which are now known to be ineffective.

Maybe there is such a "disease" as "sin." That doesn't mean it can't be misdiagnosed. That doesn't mean that treatment for it can't be mis-prescribed.

I know most people need some kind of "fixing." But I also know -- from experience -- that to the pure, all things are pure.

Now, I realize that the scripture I just cited is about not overthrowing "the work of God" for the sake of physical pleasures. But I'm not sure it's that easy to overthrow the work of God, or disconnect from -- you know, a phrase like "the love of God" just isn't strong enough! But that's another Sermon I'll Never Preach :-)

What I mean to say, at least this time, is that there are other ways of overthrowing the work of God in the name of preserving it. ("We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Or, to put it biblically, "Let no one defraud you by acting as an umpire and declaring you unworthy and disqualifying you for the prize, insisting on self-abasement.")

To put it bluntly, my life has convinced me that many of the things that even the Bible calls "unclean" may be beneficial. I realize that when the apostle Paul said that "to the pure, all things are pure," he was talking about the Holiness Code of the Old Testament. He did not have in mind gay rights, medical marijuana, or religious pluralism, any more than America's Founding Fathers had those things in mind when they wrote the Constitution. But I believe history has proven that those things are latent in the Constitution and in the Bible.

I don't know how to develop this any further, not today.

It's all about the law of Love, people.

Fruit Feast

The Fruit Feast was not what I expected. (It is not the same as the Back Hawk Feast, for one thing; at least not in the Bay Area – either that or Jason Berry was wrong.) Nine speakers were invited to discourse briefly on the fruits of the Spirit, but most of it aroused (for me) unpleasant memories of too many years of legalistic church life. However, there were a few highlights that just about made up for it: the pastor of a local church, one Mother Hughes (see blog photo), said that the Lord had taken her "from the crackhouse to the church house," and underlined her few remarks by singing a spiritual: "My soul looked back and wondered / How I made it over." Later – much later – Bishop Hayes discoursed on Faithfulness, and happened to say: "When I was low down, when I was about to be homeless, when I applied to the government for everything on the books [all available social services] and they denied me – they told me No! – I reminded God of my faithfulness all these years" and the situation straightened itself out. (I didn't get a picture of the Bishop, because my camera batteries had wimped out by that time.)

See, here's where I'm on tenterhooks with the church: they hammer on "obedience to the Word" interpreted literally, on a "holy life" defined in apparently fairly conventional terms, and then they'll say something earthshaking and egalitarian like that.

Well, Miss Brenda (a card reader I met last year at Lucky Mojo) did tell me last year that the best church home for people like us is "where Moses went" – the wilderness!

I'm staying home next Sunday – possibly for several Sundays – and if/when Pastor asks about it, I'll just remind him that Jesus advised us, "When you pray, go to your own room." I'm sure he'll take that in good part. After all, it was he who told me a few weeks ago to be exactly what I am.

Bad news?

Well, a couple of days ago, the Corazon Brothers (see below) lost their balance: the top stone fell right off onto the glass plate that supports them.

I didn't do any cleansing or protective work; I just thought, "Well, you know ... gravity..."

The next day when I left the BART station on my way home from work, I discovered that my brand new bike had been stolen. I may have left it unlocked, but maybe not.

So anyway, by the end of the following day – yesterday – my darling husband had bought me a shiny new Raleigh bike, for about three times the cost of the old one. So, yeah, big financial hit.

But a much better bike!

"...and praise God ... "

Now I'm thinking where Pastor Franklin said he could walk into any church and praise God, because he had the Holy Ghost in his life.

I submit that it goes farther than that, much farther.

One of my favorite books, as a theist, is Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. But if you've been following the news lately, you'll discover that Richard Dawkins has no use for religion of any kind, and is convinced that the very idea of God is a delusion. He doesn't think that "true" and "religion" belong in the same sentence.

Yet when I read his explanation of the pressures of natural selection – by which all mutations that "don't work" just drop out of the game – I looked up from the book with a new sense of the vastness and beauty of the universe – yes, even its lovability. I was trying to be an atheist then – it didn't take – and at the time I wished God was real, so that I could compliment Him/Her/Itself on the elegance of the vast, complex universe. (Now I know better, or at least different.)

Which just goes to show that – to turn a favorite scripture inside out – anything that is "profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction," or "for training in righteousness," so that you are "completely equipped for every good work" – that is scripture, inspired of God – no matter where you find it. If "the stones themselves cry out," why shouldn't a scientist?

Starlight Cathedral, Oakland CA

Today I enjoyed (mostly) a Bible-literalist sermon with very little thou-shalt-not in it. Pastor Franklin is a long, lean man with a lively, commanding manner and an intelligent eye.

He compared himself to King David at one point: “Yes, I’m a warrior, a fighter. Don’t mess with my kids! Don’t mess with anyone in my church family! But I’m gentle, I’m compassionate [like David was].” Not in a spirit of boasting, either, because he addressed the congregation as “brothers of Jesus” several times. In fact, the first ten minutes or so was about claiming and using the power – “the anointing” – that God has already given us; a sermon that Dr. Kioni could preach off the cuff. “And that’s why I can go into any church – Catholic, Baptist, Religious Science – and praise God, because the Holy Spirit is in my life!” He went on to say more than I wanted to hear about obedience to God and the pastor.

Later he exhorted us to challenge the devil, because “I don’t mind if the devil’s on my track, as long as he’s not on my back – ’cause he doesn’t belong there. If you give the devil a ride, he’ll want to drive!” He called our attention to the story of the Gadarene swine, when Jesus begins the exorcism by demanding: “Who are you?” Which is precisely the question I ask of any unpleasant spirits I meet!

Earlier in the sermon, he redefined “brainwashing” as “being washed clean of pessimism!”

All this time I sat in a chair by the door, meek as a church mouse and conspicuous as a rat in a punch bowl. I was intimidated by the silken rope across the aisle. Even when it was unhooked shortly after I arrived, I didn’t move...

Until the minister invited us to come up and be blessed and prayed for. I was about third in line. The women in front of me were looking for help with finding housing for a large family, health problems, and getting a foster care license (the pastor recognized her as “a visionary” who “could be an inspirational speaker”).

I assumed he knew them all, intimately – but then it was my turn. As he anointed my hands with olive oil, he said, “I see things that you have lost are being restored to you” – which pretty well describes my feelings about Christianity at this point. “I see that you are a wise woman; a humble woman; a woman of God. Be exactly what you are. God’ll work it out. (Which addressed my concerns about being ensnared by obedience again.) Are you trying to move?” I remembered my husband’s desire to leave the city. “Yes, but it’s not on the front burner,” I said. He rubbed the olive oil into my palms and prayed: “Lord, break the shackles on our sister’s business.”

And all this without ever having spoken to me, or overheard me, before.

After me came a woman who was trying to get her son released from Juvenile Hall. The pastor was inspired to tell her what kind of candles to burn: “a red one – the red represents the blood of Jesus; a white one – the white is for purity; and a purple one – for power! The First Lady (his wife) will give you her phone number; call her and she’ll tell you how to dress them.” (Later in the service, the Queen Mother – Archbishop’s wife and pastor’s mother – interrupted her shouts of praise to tell this same woman how to arrange those candles.)

After this, the spirit of the service became more comfortable and informal. First-time visitors to the church where thanked sincerely for coming (and special note was taken of the fact that I had sat down among the congregation after I was prayed for). A final song was sung by the children (all the choir they have, apparently), a collection was taken (the church lined up to contribute, rather than passing the plates), and announcements were made: the Harvest Feast is next month – and it is, apparently, the same Fruit Feast in honor of Black Hawk that was mentioned in Jason Berry’s book. Black Hawk was not mentioned, but the First Lady explained to me: it’s a celebration of the “fruits of the spirit,” at which nine people get up and say a few words about one of them (“We’re looking for nine people,” she told me meaningfully) and the congregation is given blessed (literal) fruit to enjoy. It reminded me of the Unitarian Universalist flower communion, and I told her so. “Well! That’s something we could do here,” she said.

The Corazon Brothers: front view

The Corazon Brothers: front view
Originally uploaded by Miss Michaele

This is a pair of lodestones that was sold to me by Miss catherine yronwode of the Lucky Mojo Curio Company on August 19 of this year. Together, they weigh about 2 pounds. Their purpose is to attract good things into my house. Their heart shape traditionally suggests that they are most effective for love work, but as miss cat told me, "I think they'll do anything you want."

My initial impression was that they are keenly interested in money work, as am I. In fact, they have paid for themselves more than twice over in the first week!

I haven't tried doing any love work with them yet. I haven't had any signs -- dreams, casual omens, or psychic impressions -- to rule that out.

Further progress reports will be available here. Assuming these gentlemen don't declare things to be secret or something.

Clicking on the picture will take you to my flickr.com account, where you can see a back view. Do look at it, for these boys were originally one piece of rock.

Jesus and John ... no, not that John

Last week, in circumstances that have nothing to do with conjure at all, I met a wonderful, powerful woman who turned me on to the Friends of Negro Spirituals. She also alerted me to an upcoming event, their Fourth Annual Negro Spirituals Heritage Day, an awards ceremony. The speechifying was brief, informative, and to the point. The atmosphere was respectful, courteous, and friendly; not only to me, but to each other.
But here is where Jesus and I inch a little closer together:

Anthony Jerome Smith, baritone and composer, sang three spirituals, including one that was new to me: “I Got a Home in That Rock.” The chorus runs:

You got a home in that rock, don’t you see?
You got a home in that rock, don’t you see?
Between the Earth and sky
I heard my Savior cry,
“You got a home in that rock, don’t you see?”

That’s about as universalist as you’re going to get.

Pretty as that was, I was going to let that roll off my back, until Diane Ferlatte got up to tell a story. Her subject was the mysterious High John the Conqueror, and how he brought the gift of hope where there is no hope. His sign, indeed, is laughter, just as Zora Neale Hurston says. As Ms. Ferlatte told it, he fell on the slaves like the Holy Spirit and took them off on a tour of the cosmos which included a stop at hell – “just for a minute!” – and a visit to heaven itself. The voice of the slave master shook them out of this vision, but they were left with gifts of song and laughter that were not dependent on outside events, but could be called up whenever they were most needed.

As soon as I heard that, I realized: High John and Jesus are cousins!

I offered this insight to several people there, and they didn’t quite get it – but neither did they contradict me. In fact, one gentleman told me, “Well, we each have to approach these things in our own way.”

Psalms and honey

Here's a cute little candle spell that you can use if you want to be thought well of at work.

Write out your intentions on a piece of paper. Make sure to include both your boss's name and your own. Place a few of the appropriate herbs on the paper – patchouli is good, so is gravel root – and wrap them up, folding the paper toward you.

Empty and wash out a baby food jar.

Place the paper in the jar with, perhaps, a John the Conquer root or a piece of Master Root, and fill the jar with honey. Screw the lid closed.

Now, this jar will serve as the candleholder for the candle spell you're going to do to complete this process (and now you know why I specified a baby food jar; they have nice, fireproof metal lids!). Light a candle every day and let it burn while you read Psalm 34. After reading the Psalm, state your desires out loud, for instance: "[Boss's name], you see nothing of me except what you would approve; you know nothing of me except what you would approve; you remember nothing of me except what you would approve; and that is what you will write on my evaluation."

Light the candle, read the Psalm, and state your desires every day for a month before your employee evaluation, especially if the last one was bad. After you have achieved the desired result, do the candle-and-Psalm thing once a week to keep it humming along nicely.

Lord Buckley vs. St. John of the Cross

Well, some good idea-candy today. I've been reading about the sins of mysticism tonight, and I see this:

Purgation is the cleansing stage which begins with self-examination and penitence and leads to a holy life. Sixteenth-century monk, St. John of the Cross, is best known for his description of this stage which he called the “dark night of the soul.” During the dark night the soul of an individual feels abandoned by God, spiritually dry and at the point of despair. John saw this as a way in which God purified the soul by suffering, for only when the soul has been purified is it in a position to experience a rapturous union with God. This purgation involved detachment from the things of the world including material and physical desires; and mortification, the building of new paths to replace the old ones now rejected.

But I wonder. Watch this clip of my favorite preacher, Lord Buckley, and see if you don't catch him describing the love of God overtaking someone right in the middle of a sinful act.

A spot of pronoia

So I was thinking about the alleged extinction of the honeybee today -- a topic that's been frightening me for weeks now -- and somehow or other, my mind wandered onto the topic of Al Gore -- you know, the man who lost the last presidential election.

Do you remember (those of you who didn't vote for George Bush) how crushed you felt when the wrong party won? Do you remember how permanently lost it all seemed? I am far from a political expert, so I will simply gloss over the slow-motion train wreck of the past four years, and remind you of this:

Al Gore went on to accomplish something else he has been trying to do for the past 30 years: revolutionize the political will on the subject of global warming. I wouldn't be surprised if he has already accomplished much more out of the White House that he ever could in it. This is just the latest example of the principle: sometimes the Universe knows better than you do.

Working the practical side: a place to research

Here's a little post to help you work the practical side.

I'm in the midst of starting a (not-conjure) business, thanks to Women's Initiative for Self-Employment, as described before. A classmate of mine, Dream Doula, turned me on to a website that is a mine of information:

"City-Data.com"

There you can find out all kinds of surprising things about any town you might want to work in: where are the richest neighborhoods? How many gay households are in your town? How much money does city government spend on services? How clean is the air? What is the racial makeup? Is the economy growing or shrinking, and why?

You can advertise your business, too.

My Own Particular Strait and Narrow Path, Part 6 of 2

My apologies for the long delay between the last post and this one.

I've had my plate full – and happily so – with a little thing called the Women's Initiative for Self-Employment. Long story short, I'm building myself another day job. Anyhow, nothing more now about my own attempts at Coincidence Management ™; here's another entry in the "Narrow Path" series.

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A French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, once wrote: "Oh, will you not give me, who has suffered so much, the life of adventure found in children's books?"

How many of us get into magic or other spiritual quests for this reason? And is there, or is there not, an element of guilt in it? Is there nothing more in it than escapism? (Why the hell did T. H. Lawrence do it?)

Are our poets at fault? Was Plato right to warn against poetry? (But he advocated geometry, the measurement of the world, instead. I think I've got hold of the wrong dichotomy here.)

I have discussed before the Declaration of War against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, and Eoghan Ballard's cogent exposition of the imperialism that underlies white middle-class America's embrace of ... well, spiritual gaudiness generally.

But is there a way to do all this innocently – without running roughshod over other people's spiritual treasures?

How did the Cao Dai Church do it in Vietnam? (If you click on the link provided, the first picture above the cut is of an edifice that reminds me, just a little bit, of the Missionary-Independent Spiritualist Church I visited yesterday. You can't google it yet, but it exists due to the hard work and conviction of my main mentor, Catherine Yronwode.)

Anyhow, check out the Wikipedia link to the PBS story about Cao Dai, which is as deliberately syncretistic as Unitarian Universalism now is. After the communist takeover of North Vietnam, séances were forbidden to the hierarchy; now, this was a central practice of the Church. However, a Vietnamese-American author describes the current situation this way: "We don't see the necessity to have a séance anymore because we have direct from the Supreme Being to people by returning inside to our heart to see the Supreme Being in there, to see God in there."

I see a comparison to the Roman destruction of the second Temple at Jerusalem in 70 CE; just as that resulted in the development of rabbinic Judaism and the relocation of spiritual activity to the synagogues of the world, the shutdown of centralized spiritual communication via the Cao Dai hierarchy spreads, rather than dissipates, spiritual power. I mean to say that spiritual power is democratized rather than dissipated!

Hasn't the same thing happened in the African-American Diaspora? Isn't hoodoo, conjure, the Pentecostal movement, the Holiness movement – in which the manifestation of the holy spirit bears noticeable similarities to the highly prized spirit possession of African religions – and the black church – isn't it all the American Cao Dai?

Another question suggests itself: why have not those people subject to religious imperialism contented themselves with be mild and tepid religious observances of the West? Why have they developed nothing similar? (And no fair comparing Buddhist monasteries to the bland tedium of a second-rate Protestant sermon; there is no comparison with an intense bout of, say, Vipassana meditation.) Let us not underestimate the value of amazement and splendor in spiritual life.

But this still leaves unanswered the question of spiritual imperialism. I'm not callous enough to say that there is no such thing; but the white folks' story is much more complicated than some conjures or medicine people are prepared to believe. I think the next thing to investigate is something I've only heard of, but have not yet been convinced of: "bourgeois emptiness;" the so-called "hunger for meaning." Maybe I'm not as high on Maslow's ladder I thought I was. Or maybe it's just my conviction that I already have so many of the things money can't buy.

slowly getting back in gear

Like most conjures, I also work a day job. It's not a very nice day job, and neither is the paycheck.

Anyhow, I'm in the process of fixing all that. Part, but not all, of that process is about moving "Sparks From the Crucible" over here to blogger.com. It'll take a while.

More later about what else I'm doing for myself in the way of Coincidence Management™.