I feel asleep early. It's past three thirty in the morning, and I've lit a half stick of incense and a candle, preparing to sit and breathe a little before going to bed. Or sit and commune. That's what I do. The word "meditation" is so dry. My blood and my practice is either Celtic or African. It's not clean and sterile with new agey socially acceptable words.

It is the time before dawn when the birds begin to chirp to each other. They belong to Math, and any druid, witch, or one who had read the Mabinogion will vaguely know who that old spirit is. He sits at the door of beginnings and endings. The gate of enchantment.

There was a song out a few years ago. (A Christian contemporary one) called "Time to Believe". But I am thinking of what Ly de Angeles, an Australian witch, has said about belief. Belief implies doubt. This is true. you have only to hear most Christians, especially the stridents ones, talk abotu thier beliefs before you realize that a great deal of modern, Orthodox Christianity hinges not on actual faith or experience of the divine, but on a set of "beliefs" about what someone else has said. Many Christians are full of doubt and void of the actual experience of anything divine. I'm sure I'll talk more about this later.

And God help you if, in some well appointed church before the well dressed establishment you begin to talk about the ACTUAL experience of something, SOMEONE real. For some reason Christians, especially the orthodox ones seemed to be more troubled by the prospect of an actual Jesus than anyone else.

It is not time to believe. No. It is time to KNOW. It is time to stop being afraid and encounter. The truth is Western culture inside and outside of the houses of worship is becoming atheistic. A true atheist says can say there is no God because he has no recognizable contact with the divine. Nowadays neither do religious people. The sympathetic religious say that atheists are well reasoned people entitled to their opinion. The conservatives, afraid that this out loud and outspoken atheism will remind them all too much of what they already fear deep in their hearts, beneath all the rhetoric, react loudly and vociferously.

Both reactions are wrong.

To be atheist, to deny the wholeness and the soundness and holiness of the universe is not a “reasoned opinion” nor is it something to rage against. To deny spirit is senseless in the truest sense of the word. It is the ultimate symptom of the main sickness in Western society: our divorce from our universe.