(Don’t try to read this if you don’t want to be in for a whole lot of personal blah blah blah - can’t say I didn’t warn you)
Hey guys. I haven’t been super active here lately and once of the reasons for that has been the alarming fall in health of my grandfather. Now, what cause is there for excess of emotional disturbance in a black magician? If something doesn’t suit, well, change it and so forth!
Well I had to consider my grandfather, and my regard for him. He is a Christian, you see, and that doesn’t diminish my love and respect for him one bit. Actually, that -is- him, that’s who he is. And, this is not what he needs to hear, but his particularly mystical personal emphasis of Christianity is what first got me closer, I think, to investigating the old gods. We would go for a walk or a ride through the woods or the mountains, and he would point out to Young Me: “Young Him, all of the trees: these are God. These rocks over here, they are God.” And so forth. But I digress.
I know I wanted very much to actually do something. But in this case my love and respect (I’m not just a black magician!) had me consider that there was more in this than just my feelings and desires. The world for me wasn’t quite this tunnelled polarity between what I wanted and what I didn’t that might very well make of the entire outlook of the elite, stimulus-reaction black magician of pinnacle evilness (lol). I was looking not just at my universe, but how it touched those of people that, as a truly free person and magician, I can care about if I damn well please (I’ll never make a Buddha at this rate!).
I had to ask myself - and I’ll just go out there and say I’m not the only one here who has asked or will ask myself so I’ll keep typing - since I know for a fact that my grandfather is not afraid to die, will I truly be doing him a favour by extending that life with magick that is wholly against his beliefs? And I know, Christian hogwash blah blah ungrateful blah if it works blah blah noone bats an eye over prayers blah blah - but that’s the same kind of ridiculously condescending attitude you see in the unsavoury variety of Christians everday, and that’s the simple truth. Everyone is “right”, to the extent that they still believe in things like that kind of “right”. But we’re talking about how I reconciled my beliefs and ideals, and those involved being respectful, shoring up someone else’s universe with a bump from my own, and doing so in a way that we both could call “good”. That was really important to me.
My grandfather worked in a field called in these parts ‘hospice’; it involves working with the terminal and patients that have pretty much been goven over to death, and making their time as comfortable and rewarding as possible (proto-psychopomp much?). Often this would involve people of other faiths, and that didn’t matter: it wasn’t an excuse to preach at the fearful and desperate or (my personal goal) the ornery and obstinate. I remember him telling me one time about a Buddhist lady in his care.
When her time came and she passed on, she wanted him to head the funeral. Relatives of hers flew all the way from Japan to East Texas dirt-farmer country, and in the months before her death he had talked to her a lot of about her faith just as much as life, death, and everything in between, trying to learn about their beliefs so she could have a good funeral. When the time came, he had to resolve within himself a way to pay proper respect to what she and the bereaved family actually believed, and what he believed, without selling out or speaking empty words. When the funeral was over, he said that her relatives were extremely touched that he had taken care to remain genuine to himself while paying proper respect to the departed and bereaved. That they would have been appalled at an empty oration to hollowly placate their beliefs and fulfil a few requirements for (x) Buddhist funeral, but instead he had done what they would have never expected an American to.
Sorry for the long story, shit this is worse than that Oprah character my mother insists on watching so she can pay good money for books that make her feel terrible. Westerners. Well I realized that that approach was exactly what I needed to adopt in order to be respectful - but DO something! I just knew that Raphael was exactly the angel for the job, too.
I…don’t really work with angels much. Like, at all. But if I can, hey, there’s hope for anyone, and Raphael really didn’t seem to give two nut-hairs on a fly about my black magick thing - he was there to do two things: 1) Heal, and 2) Kick ass doing it!
I used the sigil for Raphael in Evoking Eternity; faced east with a pair of candles burning (black was all I had, and really neither of us involved gave a shit). I sat down in my UC that I use for special occasions (and goddamn is that thing powerful, I should just use it more and more!), lit the candles and began.
While I opened the sigil up, I called vocally to Raphael, and when I could feel the presence I actually just stated my situation plainly, how I felt that he was the perfect one to help with this, while not cataclysmically overturning my grandfather’s whole universe around him. Yes, I ordered Raphael as I was the God in the Centre, but it has no diminished respect. Instead, I recognized that Healing and Comfort are what Raphael does - having to convince or coerce him to lend a healing hand never even approached the realm of possibility! I stated my case, gave my order, and then dismissed him to do what he does best. That was yesterday.
Today I had run and run and run until I just had to crash on the couch for a couple of hours, I just overwhelmingly had the need to knock myself out for “a few minutes” and let go of everything just for a second before picking it back up again when I woke.
When I woke up, my pm box on facebook that my family’s been using to group-message everyone was filled to the brim with astonished reports of the most rapid recovery! Everyone was so surprised…everyone but me.
The road to recovery still goes on for a spell, and he’s not wholly “out of the woods” yet, but this is a hell of a start! Miracles and other angelic shit (am I over-compensating on this whole ‘angels’ thing?).
So long story short - just kidding you’ve already read this far - if you’re in a similar situation, or just need a go-to for some serious healing with the gentlest touch, I urge you: look no further than Raphael.
Thank you, Raphael, from the bottom of my heart.
