On God, Devotee, and Power & Autonomy
This is a (rambling) collection of thoughts from my personal praxis and practice; by no means is it a prescriptive rule book for anyone else's practice.
A thing that's been a common point of internal and external contention amongst witches/magical practitioners who ascribe belief to a higher power that has much higher authority than them (like a god/dess, etc) is the 'conflict' between them having power and authority, but also the higher power having ultimate power and authority
The conflict inevitably arises when it's time for the practitioner to grasp their own power to bring things to pass: "how can I wrench power to make things happen, when my God is above me and ultimately has the final say? Should I not entreaty Them instead?"
Which in turn brings about the notion that "in actuality I can't do magical things myself, because there's the possibility of it being vetoed by ny higher power, so I should just go to them instead". Unintentionally, setting the practitioner up to not rely on their own (ironically) god given power and authority, and at times abdicate it completely.
Super pertinent when you're trying to speak things into being via your own power, but ending up sounding like you're just begging the God of Your Understanding to make it happen
I suppose it's a hold over from religious conditioning; in most religious faiths the idea is that you cannot rely on your own 'human' wisdom because God's is much greater is drilled into adherents. And the consequences for not sticking to this idea are said to be severe: your whole life goes to shit in a myriad ways
But my rebuttal was "well if we weren't supposed to rely on our own wisdom, why GIVE it to us? Telling us God gives us the power through Jesus Christ/prayer/meditation of texts/pranayama etc and then in the same breath telling us nope you can't use that according to your own insight, you always have to follow what Head Office says"
Which, I get it. Ultimately, all of Creation is the Creator and Creator is Creation, so the diva IS inescapable, but that's on the super-macro level. Right down here in the micro, it feels like there's a definite difference between "This is what I want, by my god given right of power" vs "Thy will be done" (even if striiiictly speaking, it's the same thing, via the earlier point)
How I personally navigate this precarious terrain is by acknowledging both:
The Creator is ultimately the ultimate power, higher than all; all power and authority is held by and flows from Them, as the Progenitor of All.
AND! I am His/Her/Their Creation, endowed with His/Her/Their power brought to scale within Creation. Meaning whatever They can do I can do also, just on a smaller scale within the scope of Creation.
And because Creator and Creation are One, I don't need to necessarily do what would be understood as "asking for permission".
In practice, this looks like acknowledging the power and ultimate authority that the Creator has, acknowledging our Oneness, acknowledging my own power and authority, then getting to whatever working I need to do
