Wednesday morning. I need to do my holiday shopping very soon. I haven’t bought presents for anyone yet. I’ve got a lot on my mind, much of which is actionable in the next week or two. That’s refreshing. It’s nice to have things on my mind that have things I can do to act on them and not just ponder them for weeks.

The train is kind of frustrating this morning. Everyone seems very subdued and their energy is kind of keeping me down. Work is very stressful as well at the moment. It seems like everyone is going crazy trying to keep their heads above water, and that’s making us all a bit stupid. Fortunately we’re having a little holiday party on Friday, that should help us chillax some.

Maybe it’s the dark moon, but I can’t help feeling a bit overful of ideas/power/energy that wants to just flow out of me and into the world around me. That’s a good thing, but it also means there are a lot of things that could get swept away or poorly tended in the rush.

Last night we had a meeting of the Brotherhood Choir, and we talked about a lot of good things, both choir related and not. Wulfelm and I seem to be on the same page about some of the changes to process/method that I would be happy to see happen. He and I are going to talk about more of it soon I think. He’s got some time off for a few weeks so we may have dinner.

I keep thinking a lot about Kamion lately. He keeps coming to mind at the oddest times. I need to call him and talk to him about some stuff that’s happening that seems to resonate with some experiences he once described having to me. Also, I miss his presence and energy. There’s something about Kamion that almost always makes me feel more safe, more confident, more myself, more at ease. Maybe we’ll be able to hang out or go to dinner next time he’s in town.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a Priest, or a Mentor, or a Teacher, or a Leader. More and more my definitions are opening up to a very wide array of possible expressions. I’m finding that I believe what makes a person a priest isn’t how they purport themselves, or even the training or ordination they’ve had, but the motivation and purpose behind their actions. A priest is someone in service to a higher authority with a basis in Spirit or Divinity. Not all priests are meant to heal, or counsel, or lead. Sometimes a priests service may be in politics, or medecine, or hell, even in Law. The world has a wide variety of priestly people in many roles, and I think sometimes we do a disservice to ourselves as priests when we put ourselves in a box of expected behavior.

Last night I was talking to George, and we were discussing our purposes/missions/work. For him, healing individuals is of the utmost importance. He feels called to treat injuries and illnesses. To heal. I realized that I am also called to heal, but for me healing is about culture. I feel the need to heal our culture, our society, perhaps our race. I work on that in a number of ways, one of which is healing individual people and empowering them with tools to change themselves and our culture. I do that through counseling and education, through ministry and ritual, and by attempting to live up to my own expectations of our culture.

There is a romantic part of me that believes there is a true and potent nobility in the human race, that deep in the core of who we are we are meant to be generous, to be full of love, to be bursting with the strength of compassion and the desire to nourish and nurture each other. I am constantly at war with my inner cynic about that, and about how to act in a way that promotes that. I try and ask myself every day what I’m doing to encourage that nature, to uphold it, to exemplify it. Some days, some months, I don’t like the answer. Some days I do.

Some days, often actually, I feel very alone in that belief. It seems the whole world is even more cynical than I am about it. Worse, it seems most of the world is unwilling to believe that we are better than our behavior. This is one of the reasons that a lot of hard-core athiests scare me. Not because they don’t believe in a divinity that might or might not exist, I don’t care one way or the other. But because when I explain that my faith, my belief, my relationship with the divine gives me the strength and the will to try and uphold that principle of human nobility, they scoff at me. I’ve been told that my attempt to uphold a fallacious notion of nobility or grand purpose is foolish, and has no basis in rationality. They might be right, but that angle of rabid disbelief strikes me as the less helpful perspective. The idea that enlightened self-interest is the best we as humans can do seems to set the bar awful low, particularly when I think ordinary self-interest is all many people actually believe in, with the enlightened part being a myth.