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I recently wrote about what it meant to priest for the Goddess. In it I quoted, noted Buddhist roshi, Pat Enkyo O'Hara, who once said, "When asked of all the wisdom traditions why Zen, I said, because I live a life of Zen."  In a reframe, I suggested that I live a life of Goddess. Many have messaged me to clarify what I mean by that?

Goddess is the everyday constant in my life. She is the immanent divine within me, around me, the all and the vast nothing; but also the transcendent manifestation standing before me. She is the totality of my life experiences, regardless of circumstance, and I manifest the life I have in Her service because She is worship for me. I confess worship is one of my favorite words. When I was growing up my grandmother would say, “Worship is a verb!” Meaning that there was more to being a Christian than just showing up on Sunday morning or worse, just at Christmas and Easter! She was not wrong, as worship is in fact both a noun and a verb.  But what is worship? 'Worship is the action of religious devotion often directed towards a deity."

“Holiness is not a personal achievement, It's an emptiness,” says theologian Brennan Manning, “holiness is an emptiness you discover in yourself. Instead of resenting it, you accept it, and it becomes the free space where God can create anew.”

Please read “God” as shorthand. For years, I understood to mean “God” as “love,” as in 1 John 4:8 and 16: “God is love.” Coming out of difficult orthodoxy of my childhood religious experiences, god is love worked for me. I think it works for many. How many look past the bindings of orthodoxy and just say love? Even when love is predicated on dogma, like love the sinner and not the sin, many still slide into the love paradigm.

In the last post, I suggested naturalists can connect to something greater than themselves.  Without literal belief in deity or afterlife, they can achieve transcendence.  How?