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I start to get ideas.

Okay, I can’t have a parish. I can’t have a congregation. But these homilies, the ones that God is giving to me, I can still preach them. I can write them down and post them on the internet. I can do it on a blog or social media. I can video them and put them on YouTube or even TikTok. I have the capacity to get out this message, the one that feels as if it’s being put on my heart by God himself. And I feel like maybe the world needs to hear about alphas and omegas. Maybe betas need to hear it. And maybe alphas and omegas need some path to spirituality.

I know going public like that is something Coltrain won’t like, so I don’t want to spring it on him.

Instead, I make an appointment and go to his office and tell him I’m exploring options, but that this is something I really want to do.

He flips out and forbids it. He yells at me, like he can tell me what to do, like he has control over me.

I don’t take it well. I don’t yell back, but I get angry. I stalk out of his office feeling furious.

Calix comes and finds me, because of course Coltrain sends Calix to keep me in line.

I want my mate, this man who I love, to support me.

Calix, on the other hand, I feel through the bond, has been traumatized by religion. His Goddess is the same thing as God, in my opinion. God is bigger than gender. God is neither female nor male, but both. God is big enough to encompassthe Goddess, to encompass the Polloi religion. I have always believed God is big enough for all religions. If I see God as Allah or as Shiva or even as not really God, just the teachings of Buddha… it’s all just seeing God from a different perspective. God is just God.

And what God is? Love, joy, peace, togetherness, justice, and every other good thing under the sun.

So, there’s room for the Goddess there, but Calix doesn’t have room to see religion as anything other than oppression.

“I can’t believe you still believe in those kinds of fairy tales,” he says to me.

“I don’t believe in fairy tales,” I say to him.

“They won’t take you back in the Catholic church,” he says to me. “And you still somehow want to believe in their God? That God does nothing except discriminate.”

“God is bigger than that,” I say. “I don’t judge God by the way humans interpret him. Humans get God wrong all the time. God’s bigger than our mistakes.”

“But you can’t deny science,” he says. “How can you believe that the world was created in seven days by someone speaking it into existence and—”

“I don’t,” I say.

He blinks at me.

“I don’t know how God did it,” I say. “But I don’t believe in a God who flies in the face of scientific fact. Evolution is real. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t real, too.”

He folds his arms over his chest, like he’s never heard anyone say something like that, but it’s not a crazy thing amongst educated Christians to hold stances like this. One does not have to give up God because of science. It’s possible to have both. In fact, I’m convinced we need both.

Even when I speak to dyed-in-the-wool atheists, I often feel as if there’s a spirituality to their beliefs. They have the sameawe as I do when we both look at the natural world—from the intricacy of a spider’s web to the vastness of the galaxies. In my opinion, that awe is God. They don’t have to call it God for it to be God, you know? We both feel it.

And I think humans need God. We need that feeling of something bigger than us, something that connects us, something that is within all of us. If we try to live without it, I feel like we always feel empty.

In fact, this is one of my homilies, wherein I draw parallels to the peace and togetherness that I feel in the bond with my pack to the peace and togetherness we can find in spiritual tradition.

Calix just sputters. “It’s nothing but pain,” he says. “Why would you want to ally yourself with that?”

“It was pain for you,” I say. “I see that. I see that there were people in the Polloi who twisted your natural desire for God and used it badly. They used God to hurt you. But blame them, not God. God loves you, Calix. The Goddess loves you.”

He laughs, this long bitter laugh. And then he says that he can’t talk to me about this, because it’s like we’re speaking different languages.

Maybe so.

But I can’t help but feel as if I’m trying to speak his language as best I can, and that he won’t give me the courtesy of even trying to learn the one I’m trying to speak.

knight

IT’S SLOW, BUTI notice.