The Heavens Declare The Glory

Let's be honest. In a different place and time, in a different world, in my heart of hearts, I would be me, but someone else. I would be a medicine woman in an ancient tribal society. Or I would be a healer, a fortune teller, living with a traveling band of nomads, wearing big flowy skirts in bright crazy colors. 

Living under the open sky

But I was born in the 20^th century into a Southern Baptist family in the Deep South in America. So it's not surprising that I have spent much of my life feeling “out of place”.

I identify as a Christian. I was an evangelical Christian for the first half of my life, and I’ve been an Orthodox Christian for the second half. My earliest memories are of praying, reading the Bible with my mother, going to church and listening to my father preach, singing hymns with all of my heart, sitting in Sunday school and vacation Bible school; you name it.

God was very real to me, not just a “Being” in the pages of a book. I was a true believer. Still am. I was so steeped in my religious upbringing that once when I couldn’t find anyone in our house when I was five years old, I assumed that “The Rapture” had come and I had been left behind, and I was terrified and devastated. My mother came home from the neighbor’s house to find me keening and wailing in grief. (I think I need to spend some time writing about why in the heck I believed I was such a sinner at the age of five that Jesus would take everyone else to Heaven but leave me behind...)

Anyway, today I’m writing about something else. I need to just get it out and put it on paper and release myself from the weight of this statement:

“Being a Christian” wasn’t enough. The Bible didn’t answer all of my questions.

There. I said it.

You see, I believed that if I prayed enough, and obeyed my parents enough, and trusted Christ enough, and read the Bible enough, and listened to the religious leaders enough, I would know where I belonged, I would find my place in His world, and I would understand my gifts that He gave me.

Instead I spent my entire life believing something was inherently wrong with me because I had a personality, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and visceral knowings that didn’t jive with my upbringing.

I can’t even tell you how many times I was told by a parent or religious authority figure to just trust God. And pray more. And work harder at doing the right thing. And just hang in there.

None of those admonitions are bad or wrong. They aren’t. But they also just aren’t enough. As answers, they fall short.

I didn’t understand me, and how I relate to the world around me, until I learned about... 

My horoscope.

Me, hiding from the fallout

I can hear it now. Shocked gasps of terror coming from all the good people worried about my eternal salvation.

But it’s true. It just is.

I’m not an actual student of astrology, but I’ve had a few appointments with people who are experts in their fields, and are greatly respected by many in and out of the astrology and mystical communities. The first time I trusted God and myself and another person enough to have a conversation about me and the interpretation of the placement and movement of planets and stars in the heavens when I was born, I finally made sense to me. I made sense. To me. And my intuitive thoughts, feelings and behaviors that I had spent a lifetime begging God to do something about, to take away, to just change damn it, all of a sudden made sense. And I cried tears of relief. I wasn’t crazy. And I wasn’t evil.

Because you see, that’s what I had been taught. If you even read the horoscope in the morning paper, you are “opening your heart to the devil.” That’s a quote from my dad. Yeah. I was terrified of the devil.

I was so afraid of him that when I had a true “out of body experience” when I was almost 13 years old that had the devil attacking me, and me calling on the name of Jesus, and the devil disappearing at the power of Christ’s name, instead of rejoicing in the protection of Christ and the knowledge that I could call on Him myself, I lived in terror that the devil wanted my soul so much that he came straight into my subconscious to get me. And since I was so weak and helpless I better hide myself from any place he might be.

I didn’t recognize until many years later that what God was actually telling me in that experience was that He is in and with me and I am safe in Him, and that I can call on Him for protection. Little Old Me could call on All Powerful And Mighty Him. No, I was sure I was going to hell, even though I had the power to scare the devil away with Jesus. I missed the point. (But I digress...and will probably write more about this story later, too.)

All of that to say, it took a lot for me to look in another direction for some answers. I “believe” in astrology. I don't worship the stars, nor do I believe the stars control my life. But I do know that “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1), and that there is truth to the idea that they can and do influence our attitudes and behaviors. I see astrology as another tool to study and understand personality traits and behavioral science, not as a religion.

Believing that God can work through His creation to help humans understand the world in and around themselves shouldn’t be a bad thing. But it took me more than 50 years to gain the courage to seek those answers.

I’m glad I did. I’m still learning. Mostly I’m learning to trust myself, and trust the Holy Spirit in me. I wrap myself in the arms of Christ and His light, and I seek truth. If in my quest for the truth I keep my eyes on God, I now believe that I can rest in what I find. I can discern the difference between truth and lies.

This is a comfort to me. And makes me feel like the strong woman God wants me to be. And gives me the courage and the protection to seek Truth no matter where I may find it.

Let's Start a Conversation About Intuition

I should probably get a disclaimer or two out of the way.

This blog is my blog, these stories are my stories. While memories that include my family will obviously be written on this page because, hello; I am who and what I am because of who and what I come from; these words are about my experiences. Just mine. 

That look on my face...why, tho?

That said, I am the daughter and the daughter-in-law of ministers. My dad pastored in many different churches and communities over his years of service: he was a Southern Baptist preacher, a giant of a leader in an international campus ministry, a pioneer of the Jesus People movement, a well known House Church starter, and a convert to Orthodox Christianity in which he was ordained and served as an archpriest for almost 30 years by the time he passed away 3 1/2 years ago. My father-in-law has a very similar story, except he wasn’t a Baptist minister; he was first ordained in the Covenant church. He is the only remaining grandparent to my children, and we are so glad he is still with us.

I am sure that my parents and my husband’s parents did the very best they could, and I know they loved their families very much. I’m not telling their stories, I’m telling mine. In telling my stories, if I’m going to be honest, I have to write about them.

When I was three years old, my dad was in a terrible plane crash. I grew up hearing the story of how my mother begged him not to go on that particular trip, and in fact she was pleading and crying so hard about it, even hanging onto him physically and trying to stop him from walking out the door, that he reprimanded her and chastised her for being a hysterical woman. About an hour later, the private plane he was a passenger in crashed on takeoff, and my dad was severely injured, almost killed. I actually do remember my mother praying and pleading with God to protect him after he walked out the door. And He did. My dad should have died on impact. For the rest of his life when he retold this story, my dad would laugh and say that after that event, he never doubted “women’s intuition” again. (Not true, by the way. He continued to doubt.)

A number of years later when I was a teenager, my dad was working in the yard when he suddenly dropped his tools and jumped in the car and took off. I wasn’t home when this happened, but I later heard the story many times. He drove to the house of a woman we knew, and he found her in time to save her life. She had attempted suicide, but due to my dad’s timely intervention, she lived. He said later, when he frequently retold this story, that he felt a strong urging from the Holy Spirit to GO to this woman’s house NOW. Because he obeyed the voice of God, her life was spared.

Isn’t it interesting that when my mom had a premonition of danger, he called it “women’s intuition “, but when my dad had a similar premonition, he said it was the “Holy Spirit speaking” to him? Hmmm... That makes me wonder about intuition and the Holy Spirit, and about a woman’s experience that is discredited, and a man’s experience that is elevated. The words used to describe almost identical events changed the story about them. Because, after all, intuition is not holy, but listening to God’s voice is. Right?

Wrong.

I don’t like that distinction at all.

So let’s talk about intuition.

I remember attending teachings and meetings as a child and later as a young adult where I was actually taught by my father, and also by the man who later became my father-in-law, that I could not listen to nor trust the voice inside of me. I was told that Jiminy Cricket was a liar, and that if you let your conscience be your guide, it would lead you to unholy, ungodly, sinful and evil places.

Really?

The conscience, the inner voice, the intuition that God built into us is inherently evil?

I bought into this “truth” as a kid, and for way too many years after I grew up. I don’t buy into it any more. I know I was taught those things in good faith (at least I hope so), but I now see that narrative as being just another way of keeping me and my unruly spirit controlled. I actually spent way too many years believing that there were a few “godly men” who could hear God’s “true voice”. I couldn’t and didn’t trust myself.

That makes me sad now. And not just a little mad.

The truth is that I’ve got buckets of intuition and spiritual insight. I am filled to the brim with it! My bullshit meter is finely tuned. I can actually read the energy of and hear and feel the emotions of people around me. I “know” things that I “shouldn’t know”. During the many years that I worked in the world of modern medicine, I often knew immediately what a patient needed before a doctor even walked onto the floor. I just thought I was a really good educated guesser.

I told myself that I was a good guesser because to even begin to look at the possibility that I might just “know things” because my intuition (or the Holy Spirit?) was telling me these things meant I had to admit that my head and my heart were open to the spirit world, and that meant I was perilously close to falling into the occult...can you see how ridiculous this line of thinking is? Just writing it now embarrasses me a little. But I was so convinced that I couldn’t trust what was in me, because if I did I was “opening my heart to the devil”, that I grasped onto the “really good educated guesser” excuse like a lifeline.

Things are different now. I don’t believe any of that BS. But it took me more than 5 decades to come to realize that I am a talented and gifted child of God. My gifts are FROM God. My spirit is pure. And as long as I wrap myself in the arms and protective Light of Christ, I am in a good place. Always.

And there is great relief, and joy, to know this is the truth. The. Truth.

Opening myself up to my intuition and the gifts and talents that come with it has been life affirming. I’m so grateful for the healing of this part of my soul.

Some years ago I was introduced to a beautiful Orthodox prayer service known as the “Akathist of Thanksgiving”. It is so lovely, and it gives me so much comfort. Part of one of the verses in it goes like this:

“My God , Who knows the fall of the proud angel, save me through the power of Your grace, do not let me fall away from You, do not allow me to doubt You. Sharpen my hearing so that every minute of my life I can hear Your mysterious voice and call to You Who are everywhere present:
Glory to You for Providential coincidences,
Glory to You for the gift of premonitions,
Glory to You for the guidance of a secret inner voice,
Glory to You for revelations in dreams and when awake...”

I’m OK. I’m better than OK.

I am blessed.