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Lying Awake Again
Nov. 6th, 2012 12:32 amI've got to stop reading interesting stuff before bedtime.
So, via a thread about neo-paganism on Ravelry's 'Lazy, Stupid and Godless*' forum, I wandered onto the Liminal Nation forum site. So far it's a pretty sane occult site, in that the members tend towards "well of course none of this is quantifiable, but on a subjective level here's what's worked for me."
Except now I'm all thinky and correlating Julian of Norwich with Harvey, and wondering whether the saint/shaman/superhero narrative of initiation by trauma/ordeal (or Wound as Superpower, as I've heard handful_ofdust call it) is really the narrative I'm most familiar with, or the just the one that resonates with me.
I hope it's not a case of being drawn towards the suffering-is-good-for-you end of things; I think it's more that I agree with the implication that anyone who *wants* to be a saint/shaman/superhero is probably someone who shouldn't be one. The numinous finds you, and God help you if it does; for one thing it's more responsibility than power, and for another it works by taking you apart and reassembling you. Or perhaps it gets in after other circumstances have taken you apart, and while you're trying to reassemble yourself, I'm not sure.
There's a novel that's a kind of alternate take on this: I can never recall the title, and looked it up just now to find that coincidentally it's called Lying Awake. I say it's an alternate take, in that the protagonist's ordeal was, initially, the twenty-odd years she spent in a convent waiting for enlightenment to strike; and at the end of the novel, her decision to have the brain tumour removed that turned out to be the cause of her long-hoped-for religious fervor; because she concludes that both faith and intellectual honesty demand she reject false visions and go back to the daily grind of waiting in the dark for a real one. Even if it takes the rest of her life.
(Wasn't around for the name's origin, but they usually call themselves LSG, while admitting they're generally neither L nor S, and not necessarily G.)
So, via a thread about neo-paganism on Ravelry's 'Lazy, Stupid and Godless*' forum, I wandered onto the Liminal Nation forum site. So far it's a pretty sane occult site, in that the members tend towards "well of course none of this is quantifiable, but on a subjective level here's what's worked for me."
Except now I'm all thinky and correlating Julian of Norwich with Harvey, and wondering whether the saint/shaman/superhero narrative of initiation by trauma/ordeal (or Wound as Superpower, as I've heard handful_ofdust call it) is really the narrative I'm most familiar with, or the just the one that resonates with me.
I hope it's not a case of being drawn towards the suffering-is-good-for-you end of things; I think it's more that I agree with the implication that anyone who *wants* to be a saint/shaman/superhero is probably someone who shouldn't be one. The numinous finds you, and God help you if it does; for one thing it's more responsibility than power, and for another it works by taking you apart and reassembling you. Or perhaps it gets in after other circumstances have taken you apart, and while you're trying to reassemble yourself, I'm not sure.
There's a novel that's a kind of alternate take on this: I can never recall the title, and looked it up just now to find that coincidentally it's called Lying Awake. I say it's an alternate take, in that the protagonist's ordeal was, initially, the twenty-odd years she spent in a convent waiting for enlightenment to strike; and at the end of the novel, her decision to have the brain tumour removed that turned out to be the cause of her long-hoped-for religious fervor; because she concludes that both faith and intellectual honesty demand she reject false visions and go back to the daily grind of waiting in the dark for a real one. Even if it takes the rest of her life.
(Wasn't around for the name's origin, but they usually call themselves LSG, while admitting they're generally neither L nor S, and not necessarily G.)
