Guest Post by Ash Rowan (they/them, he/him) is an autistic artist-poet, and a culturally Mormon Unitarian Universalist. Birds To Bones (mentioned in the essay) is coming soon—hopefully in 2023.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? 

Yes? or No?

This question on a survey I’m taking takes me aback. Not even a qualifier? Where’s “sometimes,” “maybe,”  “I don’t know”? 

Or, for my case, a “well, yeah, kinda. But… it hasn’t been the same ever since the moon stopped talking to me.”

 I know how that sounds. It was a whole thing—actually, a lot of smaller things at first, but so many synchronicities piling up had me in a frenzy, convinced that some divine universal force actually had my number. In fact, I could detect and manipulate the coding inside the matrix. Did you know: antidepressants can trigger mania in bipolar brains? It was either that or Heavenly Mother—in the form of goddess Selune—really did want to unlock my latent moon magic. 

For the record, I do still think there’s something special about the moon, and I do still know there is magic in this world. I’m not willing to throw out every mystic experience I had, while under the influence of my own psyche meeting with psychiatrics. But now that I’ve sobered out and readjusted, it’s clearer to me that some otherwise-subtle thoughts and inherent beliefs just got extremely exacerbated.

Did you know that faith lives in the brain, too? Did you know that psychosis is a brain injury?

Once my fervor had faded, the moon went back to being a faceless glowing orb in the sky. (Which, again, is still pretty cool.) And that also meant my Goddess’s voice was no longer thunderous. The last thing I heard Her promise was that She would give me words, if I would promise to share them. So under the light of a full moon, on a holy Hallow’s Eve, with my witch-powers at their peak, we covenanted; and then parted ways. She got distant, and I got writing. Her spellbound prophet in wilderness.

(By the way, although I do have a manuscript on its way to publication—thanks, in part, to a lunatic’s goddess—I cannot in good conscience recommend manic psychosis as part of a healthy authorial process. I’m also not sure where the line is between that, and revelation. Or if there is one. Are there any hard lines anywhere, or is it all kinda spectral?)

I had another, smaller spiral, this time from the realization that I no longer believed in an afterlife. Actually, for a few solid hours—which felt like years—in that hospital crisis unit (because apparently you get a ride to the hospital if you start speaking in tongues), I had taken it for granted that I’d already died. While painfully conscious, but unable to move or speak or recall anything about my existence, I watched angels and fractals coalesce in infinite hellish spirals. Eventually eternity ended, and they resolved permanently into a long-suffering nurse, a gleaming hallway, and an unlit room lined with supply cabinets. The comedown, while a relief, also came with terrifying letdown. Somehow, feeling like I’d seen “behind the curtain” and come back from it had broken my immersion.

So, God had withdrawn from me, and made my mortality all too stark on Her way out. Where did that leave me, but to pick up whatever pieces I could, and forge ahead anyway?

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? 

Okay. Let’s make this a fill-in-the-blank. Here’s what I think now; I could be wrong. 

If this planet is an organism, we humans are each a microorganism, and our animal and mineral and plant friends too. Everything in this macroorganic universe is spirit or matter and it all weaves together, breathes together. Something bigger than us, that we depend on, that we are made of and came from and are heading back to. For me, that’s Holy Spirit. That’s what Paul calls a body of Christ, if we extend the metaphor. (Is Christ God? Did we ever figure that one out?)

Heavenly Parents…? Sure. We were all birthed materially. We all carry ancestral memory, encoded into the very fibers and fabric of us. Who’s to say that generations of a pattern repeated don’t start to form into figures, like shadows we cast on a cave (or nursery) wall, and then reach for in the night?

And when I die for real, I know what happens next. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another. So my body gets buried (and recycled and reused, I hope), and all the love I poured into this whole cosmic soup goes on echoing forever and ever and ever, a ripple in the bowl always making tides on some shore somewhere. My spirit rejoins the family tree, and I get a turn at being someone’s ancestor, someone’s prompting whisper, someone’s heavenly parent. Sounds pretty damn holy to me.

It’s definitely not what I used to believe. It may not even be what I believe tomorrow. But for now…?

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?

Let the record show, I checked “yes.”

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This post is part of a series, Contemplating Heavenly Mother. Find more from this series here.