Recognizing the Borders
This post follows my one of last week, ‘We Are Not the Goddesses,’ which caused such a great flood of response from you all. I hope that this means we can talk about this and other related topics in a wider forum, because the consequences of not discussing these distressing estrangements and disrespects are too awful to contemplate for our world.
Women discussing themselves as if they were goddesses (rather than devotees of a goddess) show us the lines along which understanding of divinity is breaking down. What may seem like nonsense, on the surface, hides profoundly deeper splinters of harm, beneath that. All kinds of autocracy, self-aggrandisement, and abuse come with this unstructured identification with a divinity, ultimately, and it really harms those who follow any spiritual leader so identifying, because our humanity will be the casualty every time. Like tectonic plates sliding over each other, divinity will always win out over humanity for those identifying as a divinity.
When people are not brought up in a spiritual tradition, they are ignorant of its usages and borderlands: they simply do not see any boundary, nor can they recognize one. We can all understand how city-dwellers might leave field gates open in the countryside: it is because they cannot imagine the consequences of not closing them – nor the lost herds and strayed flocks, the danger to traffic, nor the result of sheep getting into a clover field, where they may gorge, swell up, and die – these dangers are just not present in their consciousness. The same sense of invisibility attends the duties around spiritual reality for those who have not experienced the immensity and reality of a divinity. Respect is required as part of our devotion to a divinity, so we need to recognise the borderlands of the holy.
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