As we approach the end of the Season of Communion [Link], I am contemplative…
I have been a priest in one form or another for a long time.
Long before the Cyrenaian Hedonic Church, I served as a Steward of the Night Carnival.
At the Temple of Condition the Stewards assist visitors in placing requests at the Altar of Instruments of Creation and Instruments of Destruction. There is no faith-based tradition but rather rituals meant to pay homage to the ideas of possibility and intention. Some craft gods from these concepts, others do not.
-From The Compendium
As a Steward of the Night Carnival, my role was to attend to the fires within the Altar of Instruments of Creation and Instruments of Destruction. Pilgrims would make their way to me in order to explore the between, particularly the connection between themselves and…something else. A person, a place, or a thing that they are connected to. It was that connection that concerned me. Not the subject or object, but the connection itself. Ours was to help them strengthen or weaken that connection.
I had a whole introduction for patrons, explaining this, and what the process would be. Part of it was to write the person, place, or thing on a piece of paper, focus on the weakening or strengthening of their connection to it, and then to release it into the Temple’s fires.
One year, I had a gentleman come up and listen to my introduction early in the evening. After hearing what I did, he scoffed, loudly, rudely, and walked away.
An hour later, I saw him in the back of a new crowd of people who had come to the Temple, listening to my introduction. He looked…wild eyed. But then he disappeared, I did not see him participate.
Half an hour later, he was in the front of another new crowd. When I finished, and before the ritual started, he came up to me, sounding angry, and said, “Ok, so, what the fuck is this?” I smiled, and laid out again. He scoffed again, only this time with much less conviction.
An hour later, he was back again. This time, when he came up to me, he was deflated, resigned, and said, “Um….what if I am not ready, you know, to….” I told him there was never a rush. He didn’t have to be. But I could show him how to do it himself when he was ready, and gave him a piece of paper and a sharpie.
He returned for the final ritual of the night, around 1am, stood in the back of the crowd, and waited as each participant came up, one at a time, to put their paper in the fire and perform the rite with me. He came up last and gave a kind of waverly smile, wordlessly. He had the look of a man who had been through hell but came out the other side exhausted, unsure the sun will rise the next morning, but purified, . He dropped his paper in the fires, nodded solemnly but with relief in his eyes, and walked away.
Part of the ritual is that I do not know what participants write. Mine was not to know the thing itself, but the between, their relationship to it. The ritual was about the connection itself, not the story surrounding it.
I do not know what happened inside that man that night, nor was I interested in what he had written. But I saw his relationship to it change, dramatically, over the course of the night, and I saw the relief in his eyes.
I had not told him what he needed, interpreted his pain, or prescribed what he should do with it. I had built the stage and the altar, tended the fire, explained the ritual, given him the tools, and waited until he was ready to decide what he wanted to do. Then he did it himself.
Mine was the Altar of Instruments of Creation and Instruments of Destruction, and my work was to tend its fires. My altar may be a different shape, in a different time, but my work remains the same.
-Father Ridire
The Cyrenaian Hedonic church 
Leave a comment