When you don't believe in an all-powerful, omnicient or all-good god but you still believe in something
/Even though I was raised “sort of Pagan” and I only ever attended the services of monotheistic religions a handful of times for reasons of friendship or journalism, it has been hard to rid myself of monotheistic assumptions. They permeate our culture and society.
Even a lot of agnostics like to say “Oh, the universe is moving toward a higher good.” It’s like there still has to be “something” to look to as a higher power and a power for good.
The basic assumptions of the big monotheistic religions are these. God is all powerful, God is omniscient, and God is entirely and only good. And this leads to endless agonizing, confusion and misery among deeply thinking theologians—at least the ones who are internally honest.
My mother raised me in what I’d like to call “the Martin Luther King tradition,” because of his statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” She applied this both to the world at large and to her own life.
Image via Pixabay
There were hard times, really hard times. There were days when she didn’t know how we were going to eat and keep the electricity on that day or the next. She had three young children and local jobs were scarce and unreliable. It was rock bottom.
On one such day, she went down the muddy driveway to the mailbox crying, and sitting in there was a government check for back payments of SSI for her disabled child, which she didn’t know was coming. It provided just enough to scrape by.
That sort of thing happened a lot during the first twenty years of my life. It was possible for me to believe in my mother’s philosophy as long as I lived in our sheltered little valley where generally things did work out in the end, even if the working out was really hard. But when I grew up and travelled around the world, I met a lot of people in situations that did not work out.
I met refugees fleeing violence who were going to starve and whose toddler was already dying of dysentery. I met a 28-year-old mother in a Bangladeshi slum who was so broken in body from breaking bricks for a dollar a day to keep her stick-limbed children barely alive that she looked like a rugged 80-year-old. I met bright, hopeful Romani kids leaving Eastern European orphanages knowing that most of them would be in prison within a year. I met a 16-year-old girl being inducted into the lethal black-market coal mining gangs in the Eastern Ukraine. I met a 10-year-old street kid in the same country who smeared dog feces on herself every day to keep rapists away.
And I met all the kinds of people whose decisions or lifestyles or indifference or hatred kept those horrible things happening. I wrote about injustice and I joined the clamor of voices demanding change. I clung to the hope that Dr. King was right and that what it needed was for people like me to work and shout and scream for compassion and justice.
I spent all my spending money on yellow fruits for kids in the Bangladeshi slum, because a nurse told me that even just a little yellow fruit could keep a malnourished kid from going blind. But there were literally millions of kids in that slum alone and I was one shoe-string journalist living out of a backpack. I desperately wanted to believe in the arc of the universe, because things had worked out reasonably well for me and I wanted to be a journalist and travel around without feeling guilty for not dropping everything and giving everything whenever I saw desperate need and impending tragedy.
It was a philosophy that functioned like a bandaid on spirituality—until twenty years of really hard luck gradually stripped away my dreams, my opportunities, my family life, my rock-solid health, and finally, my home. I’m not saying that spirituality should rest on my experience alone. It’s just that I was brought face to face with the fact that my “arc of the universe” philosophy was a cover for a person with relative privilege navigating a world in which justice and hope is random at best and often just plain rigged.
It made me feel better a times, but it also made me feel deeply uncomfortable. And that same philosophy--and its lone omnipotent god--is cold comfort when chance leaves you crushed and broken in the ditch.
I tried asking a lot of spiritual people who subscribed to some form of the omniscient, all-knowing, for-some-greater-good God / universe idea. How could this God or universal good spirit allow the unimaginable misery and tragedy I had witnessed?
“It takes time.” “Patience.” “The arc is long.” “It takes good people…” They had answers… of sorts.
“But what about the all-powerful part?” I’d always ask. And the conversation generally disintegrated one way or another. That three-part backbone of monotheistic spirituality or agnostic universe-ism, doesn’t hold up. At least one of the three parts has got to give for me to believe in anything like a god or goddess or universe spirit—and not feel like a sham.
For the past ten years, I have been experimenting with really integrating a more polytheistic worldview. At first, I thought I was just trying to be closer to nature and even science in my spirituality. I was practicing what is called “soft polytheism.” That is the idea that ancient gods and goddesses are archetypes and meditating on them or praying to them is psychologically healthy and will help one’s internal integration and mental health.
I found that soft polytheism worked pretty well for me. I enjoyed it and did gain psychological benefits. I developed a solid daily practice. But soft polytheism has a few drawbacks. It essentially side steps the “arc of the universe” issue. It is when you get right down to the nitty gritty actually a lot like atheism. If gods and goddesses are all psychological constructs then nothing is really there. All spiritual practice is just an exercise for mental health and on a deeper level it is… well… bogus.
And shit kept happening in my world—things that demanded something real in the spiritual arena, if I was to keep my sanity or at least keep suicidal thoughts at bay.
So, I leaned into hard polytheism a bit. And then a bit more. Hard polytheism is broadly the idea that gods are real in one sense or another.
It is often defined as “one name one being.” It is fashionable among hardline “hard polytheists” to insist that Odin, the one-eyed Norse god who sacrificed himself to gain ultimate wisdom and the Norse runes, and Woden, the one-eyed Anglo-Saxon god who sacrificed himself to gain ultimate wisdom and the Anglo-Saxon runes, are two completely different real entities, and it is a kind of blasphemy to behave as if they are the same god.
But in truth, hard polytheism broadly doesn’t necessarily mean a strict interpretation. It just means that you are not on the “gods are archetypes in our subconscious” bandwagon and you believe there is some real power or being on some level of something that can be called upon as a god and you are at least open to the idea that there are likely to be more than one of them out there. And it includes everything more strict and specific than that as well.
In this polytheism I have finally found something that, although a bit shaky, holds water for both my spiritual nature and my overly literal brain.
I started six years ago with the goddess Brigid or Brighid. And no, I’m not a hard enough polytheist to insist that the Irish Brighid and the Scottish Bride and the more widely recognized Brigid are all separate goddesses. I don’t have an answer on that. At least, not yet.
I am willing for now to let that be a matter that humans don’t know because we are not gods. I hold my concept of her both whole and separate, in an openness that asks understanding over time rather than demands certainty right now.
I have studied the various faces and names that are at least associated with this goddess, memorized many of her traditional prayers and devoted a daily spiritual practice to walking in her footsteps as healer, poet, craftswoman and social justice defender. I have come to call myself a bearer of Brigid’s flame as many others do today. And in the process I have developed a sense of her influence in the world and in my life.
So, then if I test my polytheist spirituality against the old monotheist paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good god in a very screwed up world, it goes something like this.
Is Brigid all good?
Well, from my perspective I’d say, “Yes.” But mine isn’t the only perspective. Brigid is a healer. She does care more about humans and animals than about the lives of the bacteria that make us sick. On the other hand, I’m not sure that she cares as much about humans as she does about trees. She is good to me and to my animals, not necessarily to bacteria and viruses, even though she acknowledges that they are also alive and needed in the ecosystem of earth. She is good but she does not contain all goodness. Her focus is on creative work and social justice. She is not all that focused on sports competitions, winning battles, making money or pure enlightenment. Could she influence those things? Maybe. She’s a very powerful goddess, but she might well choose not to.
Is Brigid all-powerful?
No. That’s the simple answer. Yes, she’s a goddess and she has a main line on the greatest powers of the universe. But she cannot redo the laws of nature or society. I can feel the benefit of her protection, healing and inspiration in my life. But she does not fix things like the fact that my family is on the other side of the ocean. She does not heal my congenital vision impairment which causes me to be nearly blind. And she is definitely more able to influence things in her areas of expertise than in unrelated areas.
She is known for protecting against house fires and I have had a number of close calls in which Brigid’s image occurred to me in time to catch something smoldering that could well have resulted in a house fire. But clearly she doesn’t stop all house fires and won’t stop even my house from burning if I’m careless.
Is Brigid omniscient?
Not in the general, knowing-everything-all-the-time-everywhere-in-the-world sense, the way children in Christian Sunday school are taught about Jesus. But she certainly has a wider and deeper understanding of the world, time, interrelationships and possibilities than I can fathom. I personally feel very unqualified to guess at the limits of her knowledge. But I do find that calling her attention to a need for healing or protection appears to help. Maybe that’s just Brigid being reciprocal with me, since I devote a lot of time and energy to my service to her. But it is possible that calling her attention is also helpful in an of itself.
Here is an example, which is actually the thing that prompted me to write this post.
I have called on Brigid to protect my family many times. According to lore, she has a particular interest in orphans, fosterlings and adopted children. So, it’s a natural fit beyond the fact that my interests in healing, creative work and hearth keeping mirror hers. Both of my children have faced massive challenges over the past several years and there has been plenty to ask help for, including mental health crises, bullying, the disintegration of the local school under the pressure of Covid and so forth.
After my son started American online school in January, things improved for him. He started learning and slowly improving in emotional areas. But with all organized sports closed he took to learning stunt riding on his BMX bike with a couple of local boys. There were several gangs of bullies specifically on the look out for my son because even though he left the local school, he is still one of the few people of color in our small town. I worried every time he left the house—about the bullies and about the stunt riding.
But what can you do? Parents in so many places know the struggle. I kept him safe as long and as much as I could, but there comes a point when restricting a kid becomes less and less tenable and the more you try to exercise direct control the less real control you actually have. So, I supplemented physical safety measures with petitions to Brigid for his protection and empowerment.
And then last month, the day came that I knew was going to come in some form. My son came home injured. I heard a clatter in the hallway and him weakly calling for me. I ran out to see him collapsed against the wall, still in his biking gear. He had the breath knocked out of him so that he could only breathe in short gasps. He managed to explain that he had raced down a steep hill and gone off of a new extra-high jump and come down wrong and flown over the handlebars.
I checked his arms and legs and head and neck, all the things a parent does. He gripped his left shoulder and winced. I felt it carefully and found it to be the right shape and size. I felt his ribs and found only the bottom most ribs tender. He claimed he hadn’t hit his head or punched the handlebars into his abdomen. The bike had flown up behind him and come down on the back of his head, but he was wearing a special stunt helmet that covers the back of the head. It looked like he had been very, very lucky.
I can’t drive. I believe I would have taken him someplace to get checked out if I could have. But as I watched him over the next hour he improved. I could have called for an ambulance. We have universal health care here. But the last time I had called an ambulance 12 years ago, when my husband thought he might be having a hearth attack at 4:00 in the morning I was yelled at and shamed by the ambulance crew because he was much better by the time they arrived. I was scared and my son wasn’t visibly bleeding or unconscious or broken.
My husband rushed home from a distant worksite and by then my son had taken an ibuprofen and felt significantly better. He mostly didn’t want to sit up because it made his stomach hurt. He said he had bellyflopped on the ground and it made sense that it would hurt. And as we thought it through we realized that if my husband took him to the emergency room, he would have to sit upright in a hard chair for at least three hours waiting to see a doctor. Since he wasn’t bleeding and had no head injury, he would be their last priority. And that would clearly be agony. So, we made the decision not to go.
Thirty-six hours later, his stomach pain was worsening, so we took him to a local pediatrician and then to a small hospital and then to a big hospital. After six hours of dragging him through hallways and around large hospital corridors and waiting rooms on foot, he was found to have a torn spleen. The internal injury to the organ was classified as severe, though it had not fully ruptured, which was the only reason he hadn’t bled out internally by that time. We soon read about the case of a local boy who had fallen on a stick and complained of abdominal pain just like our son had and the parents hadn’t taken him to the emergency room immediately and by the time they did, he had bled too much internally and he died.
My son spent the next three days in the ICU and another ten days in the hospital, during most of which he couldn’t even sit up to eat or use the bathroom. He’ll recuperate over the next several months with strict doctor’s orders to avoid physical strain and any sporting activities.
He was a lot more than lucky. The fact that with the severity of the injury, he didn’t bleed out despite our delay in taking him to a major hospital where the correct diagnosis could be made might be characterized as a miracle. If we had taken him to the small-town emergency room and he had not had profuse internal bleeding yet, it is very possible that the extent of the injury would have been missed with lower level scans and his spleen could have burst later, when we thought we had done due diligence by going in to the small local hospital immediately.
So, this is where I’m at with gods and omnipotence and all that. I can accept that there is some power of help and comfort in the universe. I personally feel that Brigid helped to keep my son alive, despite the fact that there is no power on earth or in the spiritual realm that could have kept him out of dangerous sports activities, since that was all he wanted to do. Something like this was bound to happen eventually. So, it happened. But my son was protected from the worst outcomes.
Because the injury was so painful and the recovery is likely to be long, he may actually take a warning from it. And we will be moving away from this country and the roving gangs of bullies by the time he is out and about again. No god or goddess can change what is most basic about our world. If a kid insists on high-risk sports, injury is going to happened eventually. If a society is deeply ravaged by racism and hate, violence is going to happen. My goddess has an interest in protecting the vulnerable, but not absolute power.
Once I had a solid relationship with on deity for several years, I found my awareness and heart opening up to others in different but also profound ways. Those are stories for another time, but for now the crucial point is that polytheism, a philosophy derided as “primitive” and “backward” for centuries by monotheistic religions is coming back precisely because it offers reasonable spirituality connected both to heart and to the day-to-day world. I’m perfectly content that it isn’t for everyone. There are many gods and it isn’t my place to tell anyone else what to rely on, even if they rely on the dry and heartless god of science or on a god who knows all and controls all in this hard world.
