I was a month shy of seventeen years old when I decided I wanted to be a priestess. In my naïveté, I envisioned that it would consist of singing songs to the Goddess and tending to an altar and leading a coven and making special blends of oils and incenses and teaching people who wanted to learn. Nowhere in my brain were any thoughts of the sacrifices I would be asked to make – sacrifices of time, money, plans, and privacy. And even as I grew up, both in terms of mundane age and in terms of spiritual experience, I carried an idealized version of the work of priestesshood in my mind as ‘the way it should be.’
I was past my first degree initiation and well into the work of preparing for my second degree initiation – during which time I was also completing a bachelor’s degree as a nontraditional student and getting ready to go into a master’s program – before the rose-colored glasses came off. I had the opportunity to work with local priestesses and hear their stories about what their service as clergy really looked like, and again and again it was impressed upon me that the majority of the work is thankless – either because people do not realize the full extent of the work that goes into putting on an event or performing a ritual or serving individuals and families as they go through challenging life events, or because they aren’t capable of expressing gratitude for what you’re doing. The idea of the ‘ungrateful poor’ – those who are too enmeshed in survival mode of one kind or another to have the psychological resources available to experience and express gratitude – came up again and again, both in terms of actual poverty and in terms of mental and emotional resources.
Through the experience of assisting with the work of other priestesses, taking on that mantle of priestesshood myself, shooting myself in the metaphorical foot a few times, and flat-out failing to achieve my very lofty and perfectionistic goals, I came to understand what my spirit-mama meant when she said that priestessing was a vo-tech certificate not a master’s degree. It truly is the sort of work that is based in practice and real-world solutions for less-than-ideal circumstances.
I also learned, through a goodly amount of trial and error, that I am not a coven priestess. The stress of designing rituals, coming up with money for supplies, keeping up with individual coveners, and still having a meaningful personal practice is way more than I am capable of handling at this point in my life. I am better at background work, private teaching, writing, and engaging in individual ministry as needed than I am being responsible for one to three rituals a month, every month, and keeping all of that material fresh so it stays meaningful for those in circle. I have become – to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite elders, Sunfell – a Teacher Who Appears (as in, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’)
So much of my personal practice is bound up in marching to the beat of my own drum. There’s a cadence to which I clean my kitchen and fold my laundry and work with my spirit allies and keep my protective magick strong. Sometimes that rhythm is very relaxed. Other times, it is very stringent. And lately, as I’ve been coming out of a period of burnout, that cadence has been all but absent. My morning prayers are more along the lines of ‘Goddess, just let me get 20 more minutes of sleep and then get me to work on time’ than they are of the morning prayers I wrote for the express purpose of getting closer to Deity. At night, it’s much the same: ‘Thank Goddess I made it through the day. Just let me get good enough rest to do it all over again tomorrow.’
The level of guilt I felt for not being capable of working through burnout was frankly unreal. It took more than a few conversations with my friend and mentor Taz for me to let go of things that needed to be released – and then to not pick them up again at the first sign of feeling better! I came to realize that I was ‘shoulding myself’ pretty hardcore. I was so bound up in my desire to honor Sasa’s memory and keep up with the pace that Taz and other priestesses that I admire had set for themselves that I forgot that I’m allowed to dictate what I do with my own life. Duty is a negotiated concept in Paganism. You and your spirit allies decide what that looks like. It’s not all-sacrifice-all-the-time up in here. And I really had to reflect on the reasons why I thought more sacrifice was better. I ended up retreading some things that I thought I had worked through – and I had, but on a different level than what I was dealing with this time around.
‘Jesus poisoning’, as Sasa had called it, is insidious because we’re so steeped in Christian culture that some of those underlying assumptions about how things are or should be or could be seep into contemporary paganism without being properly thought through. And somewhere along the way, I fell back into the old belief that the more you sacrifice for something greater than yourself, the more righteousness points you earn toward getting into heaven. It’s an unwanted belief, certainly. But even unwanted beliefs can still be powerful because there is an internalized feeling of truth to them regardless of whether or not they are factually true. And honestly, upon realizing that I had let unwanted beliefs influence my life when I had done so much work to confront them in earlier years, I felt like I should turn in my high priestess regalia and wander off to become a hermit. It felt like all of my training and experience had come to nothing if I still believed somehow that righteousness was a good thing and heaven was a place that granted admission based on how much shit you put yourself through for the sake of the cause. It was quite a moment of endarkenment for me. But it was also such a freeing experience as well, because it lanced a wound deep in my soul and gave me the opportunity to attend to my own healing around such matters as self-worth, autonomy, and speaking my truth.
So yes, I will write that book because I want to. And I will teach because I want to. And I will let someone else do the coven priestessing because I’m not truly inclined to that type of service anymore. And I will work on that heirloom Book of Shadows one page at a time because it inspires me. And I will fill my own cup at every opportunity so I have the ability to fill others’. Because that is what I want to do on my journey.
May you be well on your own journey, and may you never should yourself.