By Relationship, Not by Right
On delight, theft, and the long work of spiritual belonging
Welcome, friends.
The first time I heard the Goddess Chant, something in my chest broke open like my heart had expanded a thousand times.
Isis. Astarte. Diana. Hecate. Demeter. Kali. Inanna.
I had been raised under a single God. An old judge in the sky who watched and weighed and, I felt, mostly found me wanting. In Bible school the holy had one face, one voice, one verdict. And here, suddenly, were seven names in a single breath, and behind them a hundred more. The divine was not a courtroom after all. It was an ocean. I wept the first time I sang those names, and I want to honor that weeping, because it was true. The expansiveness was real. The freedom was real. Something in me that had been starving finally was nourished.
I tell you the joy first, because what comes next could tempt me to be ashamed of it, and I will not be. The hunger was holy. The door was real.
But some of the hands that opened it were not clean.
I met the plastic shamans. The workshop leaders and weekend teachers, most of them white like me, who sold me practices they had no right to sell. Sweat lodges for a fee. Sacred pipes as merchandise. "Ancient wisdom," lifted from living peoples and repackaged for my spiritual consumption, with the price tag still on. I thought I was being initiated. I was being marketed to.
In 1993, five hundred representatives of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations gathered and passed a Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality. They named the New Age movement. They named the shamanism workshops. And they named neo-paganism, my own new home, among those who had desecrated what was never offered. I did not get to be the innocent seeker in that story. I was, however unknowingly, among the named.
So I did what seekers do. I went looking for what was mine.
And oh, the romance of it. I have Scottish ancestry, and I fell in love with the standing stones and the sea cliffs, the old gods of the Gaels, the idea that somewhere in my blood a door was waiting that no one could accuse me of forcing. I even changed my name (though I had the sense to spell it like my French ancestors would have.)
Surely this was mine. Surely DNA was a key.
Then some wise and generous Scottish and Irish voices told me, kindly and firmly, that it was not. That a genetic test is not a relationship. That their gods and their practices belong to a living culture I did not live inside, a language I did not speak, a land I did not tend. Blood, they said, is not the same as belonging.
I felt orphaned. I had fled the sky-God's narrow house, was cheated by the marketplace, and now told that even my own ancestry would not hand me a tradition on demand. I grieved. I am still, in some seasons, grieving.
It was an elder named Ama Lee, Haudenosaunee, in upstate New York, who first loosened the knot, though it took me years to feel it give. She taught me that the Corn and the Beans and the Squash still need people to tend them. That the land I live on is in relationship with me whether I notice or not, and that I owe it my attention. Later I found her teaching echoed in Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, in a Potawatomi understanding of land as gift and as responsibility, a reciprocity that asks something of us in return for what it gives.
But here was my knot. I am an inheritor of colonization. I live on the privileged side of a theft that is still happening. How do I answer the land's invitation to relationship without taking, one more time, what has not been offered? How do I receive a gift from people my people have robbed?
The answer, when it came, did not arrive as a new practice to acquire. It arrived as three words. Relationship. Consent. Sovereignty.
And the strange grace of it, the thing I did not expect, is that these were not fences built around my spirituality from the outside. They were my spirituality, deep in the heart of my spirituality.
I am a womanist in my theology, and womanist thought, in a thinker like Monica Coleman, holds God and the ancestors and the living community in one symbiotic web, where salvation is relational or it is nothing. I am a process theologian, and process thought knows the divine works by invitation and never by force, a lure that must be offered and freely received. I am a panentheist, and if the sacred truly indwells all things, then it indwells this people's living love for this god, and to override that is not to reach past the holy but to trample one of its dwelling places. And I keep a little Jung in my pocket, enough to remember that I never touch the archetype in its totality anyway. I only ever meet the image, and the image is a particular culture's accumulated devotion. It was never generic. It was never free.
So the boundary I had felt as exile turned out to be the truest expression of what I already believed. Not a limit on my faith. Its fruit.
Here is where I have come to rest, and I will not pretend it is comfortable.
I can delight in the gods of my neighbors on this earth. I can celebrate them. I can learn from the people who love them, when those people welcome me. But I cannot unilaterally take a deity into relationship without a relationship with the people, the tradition, the consent, and the sovereignty that god lives inside. Not by conquest, the way the sky-God's church took the world. Not by purchase, the way the plastic shamans sold it back to me. Not by blood, the way my Scottish romance promised. But by relationship. Offered, and received.
Even in the traditions that are closest to me. I do have a living thread to my Slovak kin. I know family, food, and ritual. There is some real relationship there, and I can tend it. But even that is not mine by right. It is mine by relationship, and relationship is a practice, not a possession. The Celtic romance, the one that never had roots beneath it, I have had to set down. That setting down is a small grief I carry on purpose, because carrying it honestly is more faithful than pretending it away.
Now I live in Portugal. A new land, where I have neither ancestry nor, yet, relationship. So I begin where the only honest beginning is. As a guest. Learning the land, its people, its history, the living and the long dead. Asking, slowly, whether I might be received. Hoping for something better than extraction. Hoping for mutual flourishing, which is the only kind worth having.
I am at the threshold still. I expect to be here a while.
May you find the door that is truly yours to enter.
May you love the gods of your neighbors without needing to own them.
May you know the difference between a gift and a taking.
May you grieve, honestly, whatever you must set down.
And may you be received, in time, by the land and the people and the holy, into a belonging that no one had to lose for you to have.
Blessed be.
GROUNDING: https://abeltaine.blogspot.com/2026/08/grounding-for-approaching-pantheons.html