RCG-I Seasonal Salon Summer Solstice 2006

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Ritual from a Guardian Perspective

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Ritual from a Guardian Perspective

My long service to Goddess has come in a variety of Guardian roles. I spent nearly a decade stewarding the animal nation by housing, rearing and caring for homeless and injured wildlife and assisting in reintroducing most back into the wild. I acted for several decades as a community ambassador and mediator within large family group settings; and for many years I worked to protect the environment by writing and implementing city laws and regulations on conservation, reparation and mitigation. But throughout all of this time I continually performed solitary ritual or served as a community group ritual facilitator in a Guardian role.

As the first Ritual Guardian Minister ordained through RCG-I, I have a unique perspective on ritual study and practice. As with most Guardians, I not only intimately connect with plant, animal and peoples energies in my immediate vicinity, but as my knowledge and experience with the seen and unseen grows I have become personally connected with global and universal energies. I have always sensed when a woman, an elder or an animal is out of sorts with the energies around them. I now feel when our Earth is in some way out of sync as a physical dis-ease.

This common connection and natural sensing allows Ritual Guardians to work with relative ease – to see through women’s verbal claim of Perfect Love & Trust to their heartfelt reality; to serve as energetic containment keeping away the myriad of negative entities that are attracted to magick from other realms of reality; and, if needed, to follow and protect those women who travel through trance to other planes and bring them back safely when their work is done.

Against Structures of Oppression

As women within ritual space, we face oppression with the combined strength and support of our entire community; we step forward and speak with the voice of all women sounding together. Our sisters empathically share in our pain and suffering, assisting us in expressing our righteous anger, healing our souls and adding strength to our personal transformation and empowerment.

Goddess Spirituality in all of its lineages within the United States was re-established specifically to empower us as individuals, to meld and infuse our spiritual power with a political twist in a way never before seen in our country. We have diligently worked for decades in seasonal public and private ritual to break the bonds of oppression, not only for our selves and our immediate communal sisters, but for all women - for all oppressed.

In practicing daily, weekly or even seasonal rituals on a regular basis we, as Goddess-women, are faced with an opportunity to repeatedly prove to ourselves that we are manifesting our own reality. Thus reinforcing within each level of our own consciousness how truly powerful we are. With this expansive understanding of our personal empowerment cultivated within a ritual setting we can heal our psychic, energetic and physical ills, ritualistically break the chains of oppression and transform not only ourselves and our understanding of cosmology, but effect change in the world around us. Will we step up to this challenge?

Ritual as Prayer and Provider

Ritual can easily be described as a form of prayer. It is the action we take regularly within our chosen tradition of Goddess Spirituality to communicate with Divine. Ritual as prayer does three basic things – it honors Goddess, it thanks Her and/or it presents to Her our petitions.

Most daily ritual is performed as a formal request for Divine intervention, an ask for a little assistance on our behalf or on the behalf of another. We light candles that She in Her infinite wisdom will grant our requests. I know Guardian surgeons who set ritual containers about operating rooms and invoke Goddess even during surgery as ritual – healing on all levels of being.

The majority of our seasonal rituals are set as an honoring of Divine in Her many forms and names. Although often we tend to throw in a few petitions at our seasonal gatherings, the overall themes are honoring Her ever present transitions.

At times we set ritual to thank Her for our gifts of abundance and fulfillment. These may also be interwoven in our seasonal rituals. However, Guardian rituals tend to be more physically connected with Earthly duties as a form of thankful honoring. Some Ritual Guardians walk, hike or bike in Nature as ritual. Others garden, ritualistically perform clean up projects, or tend to sick animals as a form of thankful ritual but at times this last one becomes a petition for health and wellbeing.

In essence, ritual can be the provider of all our spiritual needs. As such it would meet our three basic needs – nurturing, sustenance and transformation. Bellezza Squillace once stated in a ritual workshop in 2005, “Just as a baby cries to be held, fed or changed so then do we cry unto Goddess to meet our three basic human needs.”

Through ritual we cry for Her to pay attention to us, to nurture us in Her ever-loving embrace.

We cry for Her to provide for us that which we lack, be it food, shelter, health, love, wealth, etc. – Goddess will sustain us with Her abundance.

We cry for Her to take away pain and suffering and replace it with joy and fulfillment, to elevate us to a higher consciousness, to change what we are to what we will become, She as the dark womb of creation and transformation says to us Change or Die - thus Changing.

Gathering is Political

It used to be that a gathering of women in and of itself was a political act in any society, but times have thankfully changed here in Western society. Women in business and women in political office have opened doors for women’s organizations of all types in the United States and in parts of Europe and Asia. These bold steps are still in process by women around the globe.

Religious freedom, however, does not go hand in hand with freedom for women. Now in many areas of Western civilization, performing public ritual outside of mainstream religious organizations is still a buck to our very patriarchal, political system and one male god society. If we use every gathering as an opportunity to educate any curious passersby that we are not that which they fear, we will move one step closer to escaping our broom closets.

The work we do as public ritual planners and facilitators is truly amazing and transformational. We provide direct access to the eternal mysteries of life and death for each participant in attendance at a public or large semi-private ritual. We plan with the knowledge that what is within is without. As we set and hold each ritual container, Ritual Guardians know that whatever women bring with them to ritual, however rancid and caustic and hidden even from themselves, will flow through us. For this we must support each other, we must come to ritual clear of our own crap. We must be free of blockages to ensure an even flow in and out with no means for the energies of others to stick to us or stay with us.

As a participant in any transformative public ritual, each of us takes whatever touches us the most, whatever reaches deep into our individual psyche. We reclaim our human potential, our balance, our whole selves by sending or pulling energy. We become one with the whole group, and if we fully participate we have the potential to become one with all. Do we dare?

Solitary Ritual and Community Connection

With private solitary ritual, the mystery centers and connects us to the cosmos around us. It serves as a means for us to make contributions to the whole. It helps us reach out (in a non-manipulative fashion) to people or aids contact with other individuals by energetic projection toward others who welcome our contact be it supportive or healing.

Solitary ritual alleviates the possibility for any competitiveness or judgment that may be made by other community members who may not fully understand our experiences and hardships. It allows our inner strength and reliance to develop and flourish. However, it also has a very great price. Solely practicing ritual in a solitary fashion limits our growth potential. It eliminates our ability to be individually challenged or stretched by the experiences of others.

By pushing our envelopes in a supportive and loving ritual environment, by having others rely on our strengths and assisting us in growing out of our weaknesses, we evolve into the fullest potential of our beings. Those of us who limit our ritual experience to solitary ritual may be reinforcing our own addictions and faults without even knowing it. We may not only be missing great spiritual transformation and growth but limiting the growth of others within our community by not sharing our own personal powers, experiences and skills.

For those of us who have never been to a gathering of like-minded women, now is our chance. Most of the world around us has evolved. Mediums, witches and other odd birds have regular weekly television shows. It is time to get out of our broom closets, strut our stuff, show off our colors and participate in the rituals of Summer. We may live more than once but each life has a time limit. Don’t waste a second of it! Stretch and Grow!