Nearing the Finish Line

Written by thehouseofvines

If I keep up at this rate I should probably have the Prayer Book completed by the end of the week. Since I’m sure that there are topics I’ve missed, are there any prayers that you would like to see included in the collection? Comment below or email me with your suggestions.

19 thoughts on “Nearing the Finish Line”

  1. Could you write a prayer for consolation after pregnancy/child loss? I’m sure many people could use it. Thank you.

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    1. Having seen my wife go through it (quite a few times), and be able to do nothing about it, I’d agree.

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        1. We’ve made some inkling of peace with it. We have two boys now, and are they a handful. Had we gotten kids when we wanted them – we’d have not been ready. Gods and God in their provenance have assigned us a lot that patience rewarded.

          I only say these things now because we try to be open to helping those who know a pain which for them is now as raw for us as it was then.

          But, I’m not here to virtue signal. Just do right and keep the ladies swimming in cake.

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      1. It’s such a touching take, how Dionysus was reared by Silenus after being spared by Zeus. It makes sense he would tend to the little ones. I’m glad to hear it, given the “attitude” most Pagans have towards prolife anything.

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        1. And you, sir, know more about Dionysos than the mouth-breathers who predominantly inhabit the Hellenic Polytheist and Dionysian online fora. Any time the subject of abortion and the Gods comes up (usually based on an article I wrote) it’s inconceivable to the majority of them that Dionysos would be anything but pro-. Now I have never sat down and asked the God his political beliefs, but I do know that his was one of the only cults that consistently prohibited it. And considering that he was a premature baby, who spent his youth fending off attacks, that he is the protector of all young life, his Mainades nursed wild animals, revered him as an infant in a wicker basket, the primary way he punishes his enemies is by having them kill their own children (and often eat them) in a fit of madness, etc etc I can see why that prohibition was in place. Though I’ve also considered that this necessitated that the women undergo rites of purification before they could participate in his cult again, which may have had a cathartic/therapeutic purpose in societies that didn’t always put much value on women’s emotional well-being or otherwise have means for them to mark and transition through the grief they had around losing a child. (The word for abortion and for miscarriage is the same, and in some of those cultures it was up to the father to formally recognize the child, otherwise it would be abandoned on the trash heap or left in the woods for kindly wolves to raise or something. Either way, the woman’s feelings were irrelevant and it was the man’s choice to keep it or not — the man often being 10-15 years older than his beloved bride.) These cultic inscriptions that considered the fetus/infant’s life of equal value to an adult’s and speak favorably about pregnancy really are eye-opening when compared to their dearth in other cults, which I think tells us something special about Dionysos. It was certainly enough to get me to change my position on the pro- vs con- abortion debate.

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    1. Also a great idea! And you shouldn’t feel green. Quality trumps quantity. And I say that as someone whose primary virtue as a writer is my prolific output.

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  3. Your comment on abortion and modern Greek Neo-Pagans is interesting. I think we all like to move our ancient religions to modern sensibilities, whether they can be compatible or not. I think of the Neo-Pagans who discuss “America’s Original Sin” – usually along the lines of stealing Native land and enslaving people and White Supremacy. However, as a Roman Polytheist, I do not believe in Original Sin since that is a Christian concept along with the Fallen World. The Neo-Pagans also seem to allude to America as the Fallen World, that they need redeem and start from the beginning.

    I know this may be further from the Starry Polytheisms, but it is hard to keep a Polytheist sensibility when the Monotheistic Filter lurks. How do you maintain your sensibilities?

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    1. I’ve never really felt like part of modern American society, since I was reading epic fantasy and heavy philosophical texts while my age-mates were chasing each other around on the playground, was constantly on the move growing up so never really put down roots anywhere, only voted once shortly after I turned 18, didn’t pay taxes for most of my life, and in my teen years I really connected with my Native ancestry, and we not only kept the Whites out of our territory, but engaged in wars of conquest against our fellow Natives, not to mention held onto the slaves we acquired for another 20 years or so after the practice was abolished in the United States. Pop culture, consumerism, egalitarianism, etc. were things I disavowed, not aspired to be more a part of. I kept this attitude as I studied and integrated concepts from the ancient Greek city-states and Rome (which usually involved discovering words for concepts that had already long been central to my ethics and worldview.)

      I imagine this process is a lot harder for people who weren’t as much of an odd duck as I was growing up, and believe(d) themselves to be part of the American experiment. I suspect most of them adopt the elements they like, reject or ignore the ones they don’t, and try to argue that it’s the religion that interests them and not the entirety of the cultures in which they were embedded. (Separating religion from culture like this being a product of the Enlightenment and something as utterly inconceivable to most people in the West before then as it is in most non-Western countries today.)

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      1. I guess we both grew up outside of the regular culture – Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic – the everyone else seems to be a part of. Growing up in the North Woods of Maine, we were sort out of the mainstream. We had Abenaki neighbors and heard stories of being nearly killed off by them. Indian Wars in New England was a matter of surviving for both groups. Intense is the word.

        I read everything I could read which was anything. My family were lax Christian or Spiritualists or Atheists. So the dominate culture did not infiltrate.

        Moving as a teenager from a tiny town of 60 people to the City of Bridgeport, CT, was a major cultural shock that consumed my teenage and early twenties.

        But the question remains, how do you leave go of the Enlightenment to reach back to the ancient sensibilities? How do you live Greek or Roman Virtues in a WEIRD society? Or maintain that world view?

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        1. Ah, yeah. That insulation really helps. But for those raised without it I think you start with discontent. Do you like the culture you’re living in? More specifically, what parts do you like and don’t like, and how essential is being part of Western and more specifically American culture to having those things? Can you, for instance, have technology without the underpinning of modernity which is concerned with our attitudes towards that technology and its place in our lives. Once you start pulling at threads, the whole thing can come undone. It’s probably smart to start doing this now, and coming up with alternatives, as the experts suggest we’re approaching the peak, and everything from that point on will be either a gradual or steep decline.

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  4. About writing, I write daily because I must. It is a part of my being. I just feel envious since I have limitations. But they do help in keeping me focus on my readers.

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    1. And that is essential. I’m really not disciplined. It’s more of a feast or famine kind of thing with me. You’re also much better about reader engagement. I pretty much do all the things you’re not supposed to if you want to generate a strong following. (I.e. the feast or famine thing, discussing subjects that only interest me and often go above the heads of most readers, blowing shit up rather than building bridges, etc.)

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        1. It’s all perspective, really. These days I tend to get around a thousand to fifteen hundred unique hits a week. At my height that was my daily average. But I like what I’m writing and the engagement I have with readers more these days than in the midst of the P-people wars of the 2010s. The best was probably before we had any social media, online personalities and influencers, and it was all just email lists and personal websites.

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          1. Well, I am lucky if I get 500 people in one week. But then again, I don’t promote my site and all of that. People just find it, if they are meant to. I despise the personalities and influencers simply because they all become cookie-cutter in their writings and views. Usually, following the trends which these days is Progressive WEIRD. I know we talk about a few popular bloggers from time to time and wonder if they ever had an original thought. Most are repetitive in their writing but readers eat every word up.

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