This is for my mother in law, who I love dearly even if we rarely see eye-to-eye and have a tendency to drive each other crazy.
After nearly twenty years with my partner, she asked me yesterday: do you believe in God? It was a bad place and time for the question, and I didn't handle it well (blame the shooting pains in my shoulder and arm if you will, it'd be a nice out for me if not an honest one), starting down the road of what I don't believe instead of what I do believe. Never a good way to begin, nor to win friends.
So, here's a distillation of what I believe.
- I do indeed believe in God; several in fact.
- I believe in God the unknowable, the ineffable spark of all life and creation.
- I believe in The God and The Goddess, our Divine Parents... the first division of the ineffable spark, the dynamic opposites of Male and Female, Positive and Negative that the Universe shows us are the basic building blocks of all things.
- I believe that the Divine has many names, wears many faces; that it exists within all things, and especially within us, Their Children.
- I find the Divine in the World and Universe around me, and also in the deep, still spaces within.
- I believe that the Names by which I call the Divine were revealed to me for a reason: Hermes/Thoth, Isis and Osiris, Horus.
That's just a list of things... it barely touches upon what moves me. I pray, not every day, but I pray. Most often I pray to Holy Mother Isis, because I have felt Her wings about me in times of need and genuine despair. When She moves within me, I am a better person.
In the end, the fundamentals of what I believe are not so different, really, from that espoused by the Christian faiths. We have many things in common, and hold many of the same things in esteem. We call The Divine by different names, and outwardly worship in different ways, but we're really not that much different.