The Song and the Flame

Sometimes, I doubt. Sometimes I look at the things other people say about their religious experiences and think, “That’s so different from what’s happened to me. How can we be experiencing the same thing? So many people report this experience differently than I remember it, maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe I’m just deluding myself.”

This often happens when people start talking about being “godbothered”–called personally by a particular deity. I have considered myself more or less in this situation with Apollo for years now. I feel myself to be called by Him and until very recently have had a pretty close personal relationship with Him. (And even now it’s not like He’s gone, or like the relationship is dissolved or anything, it’s just not… so immediate anymore.)

But my relationship isn’t what they’re describing. They say the Gods are rough on the godbothered. They say the Gods require more of us, that we have to do more in Their service. They talk about the Gods getting angry over certain behaviours or wanting more of us than we can give as human beings. They talk about this relationship making it hard to be in a normal job. It’s been years now, and… Apollo hasn’t been tough on me. I’ve been required to do things, sure, but it’s been more in the way of changing myself than anything. I’ve felt that anger, but never directed at me; if I wasn’t doing enough or something there was just… silence. I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to do more than I could. I don’t have trouble with my average, normal, 8-hour-a-day, cubicle-environment job. (Or if I do, it’s nothing that seems to be at all connected to this.)

And so, occasionally, the question comes: Am I deluding myself? Is this too easy to be true? Is my experience so different from everyone else’s that it must come into question?

Then I remember that moment, for which “thwap” is possibly the only accurate term. The calling, the Name, hitting me mentally so hard it almost did feel like a physical blow. The Presence, the times when I absolutely knew this relationship to be real and true. The love. The certainty.

I don’t know why things are so different for me. I don’t know if they really are, or if they just seem different, or if they are different but there are other people out here who have relationships with deities like this too and they just don’t speak up. I don’t know. I also don’t know how this could possibly not be real.