Not In Kansas Anymore (24 page)

M
y magical experiences were too little to convince me and at the same time too much to dismiss. Together they made a pretty good list: the mojo bag that reassured me about travel; the Jesus dream in which I was paralyzed and the voodoo book with its ceremony of paralysis; the cold that had fallen on me when Michelle the vampire fed off me; the change in the werewolf's touch when he put emotion into it; and the voodoo head washing that brought about the end of the big banana curse. What did it all amount to? I didn't know.

When Christmas arrived, I was in London with my husband, who was attending a conference. One of my oldest friends and her eleven-year-old daughter joined us for the holiday. None of us attends church, but Westminster Abbey was only a short walk from the apartment we rented, and so Christmas morning we went there for a service.

Throughout the singing and the reading and the sermonizing, I felt puzzled and out of sync, as I often do in church. I remembered my days of fervent, unquestioning belief, but the emptiness I felt
made those earlier times seem odd, like the imaginings of a child. At the end, when it came time to take communion, I went forward. My friends and my husband stayed in their seats. I suspected that the eleven-year-old was staring at me with disappointment and perhaps disdain. A tenderhearted, passionate girl of great idealism, she was in a terrible struggle with life's inability to live up to what it promises. She was furious with Christianity for harboring so many hypocrites. Perhaps having learned that good is good and bad is bad and never the twain should meet, she was caught in disillusionment, as I have been so many times. It had taken a lifetime and a trip deep into the magical community to deliver me from that error. I hoped she would find an easier, quicker path.

I was aware that my young friend might think me a hypocrite for taking communion, but, despite the coldness of my heart, I had some dimly understood aversion to sitting while others stepped up for that ancient sacrament, and so I took the blood and body of Christ with its promise of forgiveness and new life. To anyone who doesn't share that heritage, it's a strange thing to do, every bit as strange as any magic I'd seen. What happened next will seem like pure imagination to anyone who has never felt it, but anyone who has felt it will know precisely what I mean.

After solemnly taking the wafer and the wine, I returned to a seat in that arching cavern surrounded by stone statues and tombs and other living humans who like me are only on this earth for one bright, burning moment and then will be gone. We were all completely alone in the universe with not even an echo to keep us company, and in the next instant I was connected. To what? I don't know. It came into my consciousness like a shaft of light, only it wasn't light; like warmth, only it wasn't warmth; like understanding, only it had no content. The vampires might have called it energy. Siva the Satanist might have called it Kali. Kioni and I would call it God.

Taking communion had been an act of magic for me, a technology of the sacred. I had believed just enough to step forward for the ritual, and that was enough. First, the voodoo head washing had changed a deep-seated part of me. Then Christian communion had connected me to something that was bigger than myself. Nothing happened until I took some action. Action and results—the two go together. You can call it religion, you can call it spirituality, you can call it magic. Maybe what you call it doesn't matter. What matters is that you don't settle for being cut off, that you take the power, that you demand the completeness of human experience. To taste fully of all that we perceive, to expand our hopefulness beyond the heavens is our birthright. We aren't here only for confusion and disillusionment. We aren't born merely for death. We are here also for transcendence, to savor the numinous, to wander through the shifting corridors of meaning, and to follow them wherever they take us. If we go too far, we can stop. We can backtrack, we can recant, we can be inconsistent, illogical. What we must not do—no matter what the scientists tell us—is allow ourselves to be cut off from our own experience of life as it presents itself to us. If we do, we will have lost the very ground beneath our feet.

I am not saying that we must believe that a spell can turn a frog into a prince or that bewitched dolls will blink and move their heads. Many of the magical things I witnessed and even those I believed to have happened might have been coincidences or the result of suggestion. Those two factors could be enough to explain everything. But I believe it was no accident that Jesus showed up in my dream during the days when I was most avidly pursuing magic, and it was no accident that I interpreted his appearance as encouragement to go further. It was also no accident that Bible verses came to me again and again during my investigation. Those touchstones of my earliest faith led me forward when nothing else could have.

One verse that hadn't occurred to me would have helped me understand what I was seeing at the very beginning, on that night early in my travels when I attended Mistress Tracy's Vampire and Victims Ball. It was something Jesus said. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.”

Some people thought he meant that the world was soon to end, but I don't think he meant that. I think he meant that the truth of life's wonders is constantly revealing itself all around us. The sacred text that waits patiently for us to read it is life itself. The rituals, the magical workings, the symbols and incantations of magic, the writings of religion, maybe even the ponderings of personal just-make-it-up spirituality are the technology that opens channels for what might be called life energy, or God, or virtue, or—I like best of all how the elf Silver Flame put it—the sacred retort. Whether those things exist outside the human imagination or merely inside it doesn't matter as much to me as it does to some people. If the Jesus who showed up in my dream lives only within my heart, he's still there. What matters to me is that we can allow ourselves to participate in the richness available to us.

All we have to do is choose.

 

A
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