C is for the Craft

Mostly when I write religion, I write reconstructionism. I write books and research and the joy of finding a little nugget of something somewhere and bringing it out and polishing it until it shines and fits into the whole of the system. I write ancient theologies and stories written in ruined stone buildings.

The thing with recon, even the kind of deeply mystically oriented and extrapolative stuff that I do, is that it's fundamentally all known things. You could, if you got a burr up your arse, go read the same things I do and do the same work, and you might even come to basically the same conclusions. It's all out there.

It's not all that I do, of course, but that's the nature of icebergs.

Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because, as a student, I'm not fully qualified to do so. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because what I do there is not that interesting to people outside my head - or I *do* talk about it, but I don't explicitly label it as religious work. Sometimes I don't talk about the Craft because the Craft doesn't want me to talk about it.

Silence is a crocodile.

Someone asked a group I was in recently what the "goal" of the Craft studies was. They compared it to an idea that the "goal" of Christianity is salvation, is reaching heaven.

I don't trust goals. Too much gets lost along the way.

The Craft is about getting my ass moving, not getting my ass to a specific location and then being done. The Craft is about relationship - within myself, with others, with the Powers, with the cosmos. The Craft is about the edges of things, the twilight space at the edge of a knife.

It's not about where you're going. It's not even about where you are. It's about how you choose to proceed.

Since I'm all about the quotations lately, let's do a bit of poetry. This is one of my favorites, and I think its relevance is obvious.

pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go E. E. Cummings

I got the formatting from this site because my HTML skills are not up for attempting to convey Cummings properly.