Intentions

Does this look familiar?   If you've been to St. Matthew's Episcopal church, it should.    It's one of the cushions at the alter rail.   It's a triquetra, in this case, a symbol of the Christian Trinity.

For those of you who enjoyed the show attached to this guilty pleasure,  this next image should also look familiar. 

In this series, it's an occult symbol, and it symbolizes the three sisters the plot is centered around.   

So who does it belong to?  The Christians?  The Pagans?   The ages?    I'm going to go with humankind.  

It means what we intend it to mean in a given context.  No more, no less.    It isn't copyrighted.    Just because someone assigns a new meaning to something, or digs up an old meaning through research, it doesn't change what a symbol means in the context it was used in.  

The alter cushion predates the series Charmed.  That doesn't mean that the witches in Charmed are Christians, unbeknownst to themselves.  The neopagans didn't steal it back from the Christians, and the Christians didn't steal it from the Germanic pagans in the first couple centuries of Christianity.  It already belonged to them.  It was their culture that produced the symbol and not the other way around.  

It means precisely what we intend it to mean, no more, no less.   Paranoid folks would like you to believe otherwise.  They want you to believe that you can unintentionally worship another god.   They want you to believe that by donning that adorable ring your boyfriend gave you for your birthday with this thing on it, you can unintentionally become a witch and an idolator.   

I think that's only true if you believe it's true.   St. Paul describes this strange little problem in Romans: As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean.   If you think you're sinning by having something in common with that delightful but silly little tv series but you do it anyway, you are.   But if you've gotten to the point in your relationship with Christ (and it's okay not to be there yet, just don't stay there) where you realize that nothing is unclean in itself then it isn't "unclean".  

Making it so

“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.” ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland.

I hear a lot about what things really are, and what they really mean lately.  I've heard this all my life.  Easter is really a pagan holiday because it's English name is similar to a pagan goddess's name and the eggs have nothing to do with Jesus and the chocolate has even less and what's the deal with the rabbits? It all ends with "and if you celebrate it, you're basically worshiping Satan".   I have three words to say about that, and one of them would embarrass my mother, HINT: initials are WTF.  One of the things I've learned over the years from being in church more often than any normal human being is that a lot of things have multiple layers of meaning.   Easter is a great example.   To the untrained, unread eye that tends to swallow things as long as they're laced with a spoonful of God-talk sugar to make the *cough* medicine go down, the Easter legend seems sensible.

Here's the problem, it's not.   The date of Easter, far from being determined by proximity to Beltane, is determined every year by the date of Passover, a Jewish festival being celebrated to this day in the same fashion (and therefore the date being determined in the same manner) just like it was that week when Jesus, Yeshua to his friends, was crucified around the same time.   It happens to occur in the spring.  The eggs?  A symbol of new life and fertility.  The bunnies?  That one is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and I think it's kind of stupid.   Why do we call it Easter when everyone else calls it Pascha?   English is weird.  You want proof?  Go to an Episcopal church for the last five days of Holy Week.  If you still think it's all of a bunch of hidden worship to devil gods I don't think I can help you.

There are a lot of unhappy people in this world who want to take whatever joy other people have away from them.   Unfortunately, someone gave them internet access.  So we are bombarded constantly with messages that the things we love are really things we hate in disguise and that we shouldn't trust them.  I think a lot of them write for Chick Tracts.  (Scroll down a little bit on this one and check out the fine print on "Wassup" It's "Hi there" 'adapted for black audiences'.)  The thing is, even the symbols that have been co-opted for evil in varying ways really  mean something else, so you can take it all with a grain of salt.
Example:

The inverted cross was co-opted by devil worshipers for their "Black Mass", probably somewhere in the 16th and 17th centuries (I can't find a date on it, this is my suspicion only, it may only stretch back as far as Anton LaVey and his cohorts.)  but it was originally, and when I say originally I mean the thing dates back to 200 A.D., the Cross of St. Peter.  Legend has it that when Peter was martyred he asked to be crucified upside down because he didn't feel worthy to die in the same way that Jesus did.    I guess someone should rethink the nursery theme for Rosemary's baby, right?

Anybody want me to do more of these?