Clergy, if you are feeling like a secret psychopomp of the Death Mysteries right now and no one really gets that, I get it. We are called and trained to be present to these mysteries but no one signed up for doing it on behalf of an entire planet. Thread!

You're not just taking care of your local community. If you're a known religious leader and spiritual person, COVID-time has been about being contacted by everyone who needs ministry. Everyone. Random folks. Old high school friends. Your mother's maid of honor.

Lady Death is out in her scarlet gown partying in the streets and running around laughing with a butcher's knife to the throat of young and old. This shit is DEEP. Most people don't live very deeply. You do.

This has nothing to do with being a Christian or a Jew or this or that denomination. It has to do with your being someone who practices the old ways, who is of a lineage of ritual leaders and pray-ers. People are flying through the air onto you like paper clips to a magnet.

Any ordained person who is indulging in petty ideological spats right now is just trying to divert themselves from the fact that to the general public, we are all magic-adjacent.

We live around an ancient fire and know sacred stories by heart and by academic training. You're Dumbledore. I'm sorry, but you are. You're Gandalf. (I'm Endora). You're Friar Lawrence, you have the potion to keep the lovers from being parted.

You wonder why you can't set re-opening schedules and goals and stuff? Because all of that is external and horizontal, and we have been in the Underground hosting huge huge groups of unexpected company for a YEAR, just about.

The church is the laity, we know that. The congregation is theirs. But we are the ones who are walking up and down the stairs all day and every week, up and down, up and down, answering the knocks at the door to those who are shivering and need to get in.

If you've read this unedited stream-of-consciousness this far, I hope you get what I am trying to communicate: there is a shamanic function that we, coffee-drinking, sarcastic, meeting-going, texting, irreverent westerners have been thrust into

As a Christian who also identifies as a Witch, I'm a known wyrd soul lady in my super-rationalist religious community. If anyone could roll with plague time psychic material, it would presumably have been I. But WOW, the duration and intensity of it!!!

I have been steeped in Greek mythology (I wrote my master's thesis on Persephone and Christ as twin avatars of resurrection), folklore (mostly through art and opera), Tarot & Jungian archetypal models for two decades --

I attended my father's funeral one morning when I was 17 and opened in a musical that night as the leading lady in a comic role. I know about mediating communal energy. I know catharsis.

But this past year has required us to try to step out every day into a psychic blizzard of fear, confusion, rage, and trauma holding nothing but a Bible (for most of you) and an experience of one funeral at a time.

If you are just done opening the door to that blizzard every day, if your Bible is across the room on the floor where it got blown again and you don't even remember how to close your fingers around it any more, just be where and how you are.

We can meet on the floor. It's fine. Have some tuna casserole on the floor. Let someone bring you a pillow. Be silent and dream dreams.

Look at someone and say, "I have no idea, I'm in shock. I'm afraid anything I say will be a massive cliche. Let's just be together. How are you."

I have been praying for so many sick people, so many scared people, so many beloved dead, so many dead, so many exhausted, so many furious, so many many many and that is what I promised to do and it's a privilege --

Those prayer requests come with emails, phone calls, texts,cards. Facebook messages, conversations. From all over. Because we promised, because we know it's real and it matters. So my eyes are owly and my bones are clacking around a bit and my spirit is halfway out there

Yours probably are too. The praying is real. The sending out your spirit is real. The energy that comes with the requests is real. The way you move through your day not quite clear where you are and what you need to do is understandable.

That is my word for tonight, spirit people. It is 10:10 pm on the night of the full moon. The winds are high, I have made lemon tea, and I bid you a blessed rest.