Surrendering to Service has taken me quite some time to come to terms with, to be comfortable enough with to actually see what surrendering to service looks like versus what I thought it looked like. It is as though, like Perceval, I started out on my journey thinking and believing it was one thing but realising that it was, while something similar, actually quite different to what I originally thought and believed. This all of course, was one of the things that came about during the workshop on the Grail Quest I did several weeks ago, which I have posted about previously.
So what is Surrendering to Service and for that matter what is this Service, and whom is it service to? These are quite complex questions to answer, never mind that I had to understand that Service was not servitude. It was an entirely different view and understanding that I was being encouraged? asked? to surrender to.
I can remember a friend of mine back when I knew not that much, talking to me about surrendering to the will of the Gods, to which I pulled a funny face at that thought, ‘No Gods are going to be telling me what to do?’ I suspect now that this was a reaction, to a now outdated framework that I had learned from my various accidental interactions with Christianity. You see I had attended Sunday school as a young child. At the end of the street where my Nana lived was a Catholic church, and one of the nuns who taught at the school there, which I didn’t go to, was called Sister Pauline, and given that was my name, I thought she was very cool, thus I invariably turned up on Sunday mornings for her Sunday school classes, even though I was not enrolled or Catholic.. but there you go Sister Pauline was pretty awesome.
I also went to an Anglican boarding School during my High School years, while only being nominally Anglican. My family only ever went to church for funerals and as Kiwis were not particularly religious anyway. I certainly was never christened, and this was brought up by the Father of said Anglican boarding school several times, but I always refused. In many ways the Anglican faith is a lot more ridged than the Catholic faith, sort of *wiggles hand* However the point here is, that while spending time in these strong Christian institutions I apparently learned that surrendering to God was in essence Servitude to God. After all, Nuns had to give up everything, sex, money, possessions, personality, (although Sister Pauline had a truck load of personality from what I remember). Nuns gave up everything to marry God. Thus surrendering to God, and indeed service to God, in my mind was servitude, in that kneel in front of and tell him how unworthy you are kind of way.
But as it turns out I’m such a Heathen, oh wait, no that’s not right, I’m a Witch *coughs*. I never had to recite any lords prayers backwards, or have sex in a graveyard, although there was that Convent fire- escape once . . . left funny bruises, and I still grin when I think about it, *coughs* but that is besides’ the point to.
The point we are talking about here is surrendering to service and how it is nothing like the image I had in my head of Nuns surrendering up themselves to servitude just so they could marry God. Surrendering to service for a Witch, well for me is nothing like that. But having said that this Surrender is certainly not easy, nor is it simple or everyone would be doing it.
Also why on earth would the Gods want a simpering subservient submissive sleeping bumpkin when they have spent a lot of time putting things in my path that has caused me to do some very deep personal psychological and magical work on myself which has meant that I have become a very strong, confident and outspoken women who can swear like a pirate when sewing, and stare down the most uptight business man until they yell uncle… *coughs*.. Actually to put that in a less egotistical seeming nut shell, why would the Gods expect you to be somebody you are not in order to surrender service? This is not to say that being submissive doesn’t have its own power, but that is a whole other kettle of fish, and today the fish is Spiritual Service.
This all brings another thought to mind. For years I have been telling various people who I have helped in a spiritual sense, be that house cleansing, card reading, or just passing on those messages you sometimes get, that its “part of the job description” or more to the point “it’s all part of the service” could it be that I have already being unconsciously serving? And perhaps this time it is about serving more consciously. About stepping with conscious thought into service, or choosing to Surrender to Service.
Cross Posted here
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