"Spiritual Mutts"

 A Soulful Canine © Gabe Palmer Dreamstime.com

Article © 2010 -2013 by Joyce Mason

During October, The Radical Virgo is hosting some of my favorite posts from my other blog, Hot Flashbacks, Cool Insights. See announcement. 

 
My friend Elizabeth and I have deeply spiritual discussions. One day in 2009,  I was struggling with my growing inability to feel comfortable attending my church, a liberal Catholic parish to which she had introduced me. It had been so much a part of my life at that point, but I was being called to move on—to reclaim my larger spirituality that transcends denomination or ritual.

That’s when she did it. Elizabeth called herself a “spiritual mutt,” someone who doesn’t quite fit into any one church. I knew instantly that I was the same kind of  mongrel.

The downside of this metaphor: Maybe it’s because I was raised Catholic with its historical shadow of darkness including the Inquisition. I couldn’t quite shake the idea of the Dogma Catcher coming after me.

Still, the concept really helped me sort out yet another phase of my never-ending journey. Elizabeth was instrumental in helping me find a Catholic church so welcoming and open-minded; I could go there and heal the dark side of my religious roots. I had a lot of hurt to heal. I had been away for 40 years.

My comeback was like most things I do—all or nothing. I dove into the deep end of the baptismal font. Before I knew it, I was back into the groove of weekly Mass and all the rituals I had missed for most of my adult life. I was involved in key ministries, including those that welcomed others to the community—or welcomed them back after long absences like mine.

I developed a new appreciation for the fact that the spiritual and spirited being I have become emanates from the same core beliefs that molded many of the mystics.

I was back to rediscover the good in my spiritual beginnings. I completed a circle that had been broken and desperately needed repair. It was one of the greatest losses of my lifetime, feeling that I couldn't remain in the church of my childhood. When I could once again be there—even for a while—it was heaven.

By far, I am not the only person on earth who has struggled with Catholicism (or perhaps your own, different religion) and how to relate to our religious upbringing as adults in a modern world. Most of my life I have known more “recovering” Catholics than practicing ones. By now, I have no beef with anyone who is in either camp, and not just because I’m old enough to remember meatless Fridays. It is a beautiful faith, and I envy those who can be there wholeheartedly. It must be wonderful to be a pedigreed Catholic or Baptist, Jew or Buddhist—to have a certain breed of spirituality that’s consistent with your internal beliefs that brings a community of support with it for the believer, not to mention activities and fun! I’ve had some of my best times ever in the church hall. (Catholics really know how to party!)



Jesus: Teacher and Radical

Still, a single religion isn’t big enough for me. My beliefs are more universal, and I see Jesus in a different light than more conservative or biblically literal Christians. I believe in less emphasis on Jesus dying for our sins and more on his teaching us how to live. The former is hard to take without inducing guilt for merely being alive, not a good psychological state from which to become all we can be—in the image and likeness of the divine. Jesus showed us how to put love in action. I doubt Jesus’ first choice for jobs would have been scapegoat. I believe he would have “saved” us whether or not he was executed, which was a political act. He saved us by showing us the path of compassion and universal love. The horrible way he died made his life more dramatic and memorable; we still talk about it all the time, over 2000 years later.

Even though conservatives have claimed him as their own, Jesus was a radical—a man who loved others regardless of class or status, saint or sinner. That was unusual in his day, and it’s too bad it’s still unusual now. He really rocked the status quo—why he was seen as a political threat, and why his life ended in capital punishment.

Jesus and his teachings remain the foundation of who I am; yet, I cannot deny or discard the boatload of blessings from other paths. Like an artist who wants to choose from all colors in the palette to make the most beautiful painting, I want my spiritual life to have the most color and beauty possible. That, for me, comes with universality—seeing the best in all paths and where they converge. It also minimizes prejudice. So much conflict and death has come out of religious differences; I can only feel that being ecumenical and embracing is the best possible thing I can do.

One thing I’m sure of: God has no religion.

Whatever way you perceive the spark of the divine, I believe Universal Love is so all encompassing; there couldn’t possibly be a “Catholics Only” heaven like I was taught in the 1950s. And if heaven’s truly a state of mind, which I also believe at many levels, then it’s also full of diversity—and not full enough!

Great Scotty!

If there’s a patron saint for spiritual mutts, in my mind, he’s Rev. Scotty McClennan. While his name might not exactly be a household word, a character based on him may have been to your house a lot in your life. Scotty is a good friend of cartoonist Gary Trudeau, and the character Rev. Scot Sloan in Doonesbury was inspired by him.

Scotty McClennan is a Unitarian Universalist minister (a denomination where I spent five years as an adult). He’s author of Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost Its Meaning. That book has been a godsend for me, no pun intended. One of its neatest features is a spiritual evolutionary timeline. It goes from Stage 1 (Magic), where spirits, demons, fairy tales and a vision of God making everything happen through Stage 7 (Unity) where you feel community with all traditions and sense the divine in everything. As you can probably guess, spiritual mutts tend to be in Stage Seven or in 7th Heaven, as I like to think of it. I can’t recommend this book enough, if you’re struggling with how your religious roots fit into stretching your spiritual wings.

Another concept I heard at a Catholic women’s retreat also speaks to stages of spiritual evolution through the three persons in one God or Trinity. When we are young and need a simplified look at life, love, and God, we are likely to resonate most to God the Father. In the mid-stage, we spend much time identifying with Jesus, the Son. In the third and final stage, we resonate to the Holy Spirit—see God and signs of God everywhere.

Finally, there’s one more Great Scotty, his newest book, Jesus Was a Liberal: Reclaiming Christianity for All. It takes a new look at who Jesus was and how his teachings apply to all the big issues in modern ethical dilemmas and social justice.


Vocations

As an astrologer and a writer on spirituality, I sometimes I think of myself as a missionary on the frontiers of outer space. I help many grateful people; it is moving, gratifying work. I feel privileged that people trust me to journey with them to the deepest, most magnificent parts of themselves. These places of purest possibility are often hidden by our own evolutionary limits and unexamined habit patterns.

This mission is hard to do from most religious traditions because many religions condemn astrology. At least my favorite, open-minded Catholic parish says every Christmas—out loud!—that the Magi were astrologers. I find it paradoxical that the Three Wise Men who attended the birth of the Christ child were Zoroastrian priest-astrologers, yet astrology tends to make the religious hierarchy nervous. I suspect they fear it has something to do with giving one’s faith over to something other than God. On the contrary, I see God and Creator in the movement of the stars, planets, and the power behind the astrologers motto, “As above, so below.” The Bible is full of references to the stars as signs, not to mention heaven/the heavens, starting with the Star of Bethlehem. Yet, sadly, many people have not gotten out of the Dark Ages with their vision of astrology. As most modern astrologers practice it, astrology is about following divine hints and an actual, personalized roadmap of how to get to heaven—metaphorically, becoming all you can be as embodied spirit.

I have noted before in other articles my discontent, growing up, with the word “vocation” being used strictly to denote a call to the religious life as a priest, nun, monk, or similar dedicated life path with formal vows. (That in my mind is “vowcation.”) Vocation, more broadly, is whatever pursuit contains a divine calling for you. Mine is astrology and eclectic spirituality. Given the “faith of my fathers” has not been very friendly toward either astrology or women in leadership roles, there’s not a fit.

But I don’t have to have a fit. In the past, I would have bemoaned and groaned about this as small-minded on the part of the Church. Now, thanks to Rev. Scotty and others who have re-attuned me to the concept of spiritual evolution, I recognize that both institutions and people are on different roads or stages of their spiritual quest. I knew many Stage 7’s (Unity) in my Catholic parish, but the institutional church is more Stage 3 (Dependence).


Symbols and Spirit

I think most of us realize that the true divide, when it comes to religion, is the chasm of Literal and Figurative. It’s difficult to argue with people who view the Bible as literal. I don’t try; I just respect their view from a different place on the spiritual spectrum.

Symbolism is the life’s blood of my own spirituality, and because writing is where symbols meet communication, I write.

My own spirituality is a sort of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof speaking to God meets the Cosmic Bonfire of Creativity or the Tao in the channeled Michael Teachings. The latter contain one of my favorite ways of seeing the spiritual world, a creation myth I paraphrase in a December 2007 holiday blog post, Turn on the Lights!

Symbols, to me, are sparks of the God stuff everywhere; synchronicities, omens, hunches and inklings all are Spirit, taking whatever form it needs to leave a message. Spirit is a shape shifter, after all, and when she leaves messages in writing, it doesn’t matter if it’s on paper, a coffee cup, or graffiti on a construction site fence. I have found guidance in all those places.


Theological Outlaws

Recently, I learned a more humorous vision of Spiritual Mutts from astrologer Steven Forrest. He calls us Theological Outlaws. (See The Mountain Astrologer, June/July 2010.) That certainly matches my self-image as a missionary on the frontier of spirituality and outer space. Actually, the trait of being a spiritual outlaw is one of nine for people who have a special characteristic of their Moon in astrology. It’s called Moon out-of-bounds (OOB). Without getting into all the technical astrobabble, it means you have an overdose of lunar characteristics and no bounds to where you’ll go, because your feeling and spiritual life are colored limitless. We are mutts that can’t be collared or confined to a dogma run! And let’s not forget; dog is God spelled backwards, and multi-breed spirited types just get to God from a different direction.

(See my post Moonwalk: Cancer on the Radical Virgo, if you want to learn more bout OOBies.)


Pack of Mutts

The one thing that religion provides that spiritual mutts sometimes miss is the convenient access to community the church structure provides. The denominations where I’ve most spent time as an adult are Unitarian Universalist (UU) and Unity. I think I like religions that start with a U because it reminds me of a smile. Also, the word Unity fits my Stage 7 unity consciousness.

Even when I get my most spirited match when it comes to a church, I still find myself not quite fitting in. That used to make me sad, but I finally had this epiphany, and it wasn’t even January 6th. There are all kinds of ways we wild dogs run together. Some examples are Facebook, Twitter, our spiritual mutt blogs (astrology, spirituality), and our local metaphysical centers. So, we don’t have bake sales. But the community is still there, even when it’s often virtual. (Upside: No plate is passed and there are no committees to draft you.)

I’m starting to realize that I have community as a spiritual mutt/ theological outlaw. Indeed, it’s mostly on the frontier of the Internet.

The other important insight: I used to feel I fit in nowhere; nowadays, I’m more apt to feel I can fit in most anywhere. Of course, like anyone else, I’ll choose to spend most of my time with people who are like-minded, but one of my favorite activities is church hopping. I love to go to different services, study various religions, and see Spirit from all angles.


Religion and Spirituality: Same or Different?

I’d love to hear your experiences in the Comments. Are religion and spirituality the same thing for you? (I think it can be “either/or” or “both/and.”)

One of my favorite sayings is, The best thing we can give our children is roots and wings. For me, religion is my roots, the recognition from baptism that I’m in communion with All That Is, everyone and everything under the sun and stars.

My wings span that God Has No Religion place, and yet, coming to terms with the part religion has played in molding me has been one of the most important passages of my life. While my ideas are dotted with Buddhist and Jewish concepts (I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and absorbed much Jewish culture and perspective), my Catholic Christian core most fully formed who I am today, spirituality.

I’ve always been told by psychics that I’m an Old Soul. Wonder how that translates in dog years?

~~~

Photo credit: A Soulful Canine © Gabe Palmer Dreamstime.com

Are you on The Radical Virgo mailing list? If not, join in the upper right of the sidebar to be part of a drawing on Halloween for a signed copy of Golden Prose & Poetry, which contains Joyce's short-story, "Cruel Embroidery." It reminds some people of a modern-day Salem witch trial, just in time for All Hallow's Eve.

The Magi and My Last Jupiter Return - Part 2 of 2

Coming Home to My True Beliefs

© 2011 by Joyce Mason

All Rights Reserved

N

  ow that I’ve shared my previous post with set-up and background, I can finally tell you the details of what happened during my last Jupiter Return and everything it set in motion. The exact date was October 28, 2006, but as I said in Part 1, I started sensing it coming as early as June of that year.

By August, I was in full spiritual quest mode. I felt what I was missing was ritual, as much as that can be missing for a Radical Virgo with a Cap Moon who works hard to make mundane, repetitious acts almost holy. I had been leading celebrations at the solstices and equinoxes for almost two decades, even performing marriages with my Universal Life Church credential. Suddenly it wasn’t enough.

Happy Epiphany!
The Coming of the Three Astrologers …

The Church Steps

My first stop was my local Greek Orthodox Church. This would be an opportunity to better explore my Greek roots, as everything revolves around church in the Greek community. If ritual was what I wanted, Orthodoxy had it in Jupiterian proportions! My birth mom had already exposed me to the complete pomp and circumstance of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and its extreme length, 1.5 hours. I treasure liturgical music, and this would remain the hook to get me to look at anything that provided me with that sacred sound.

Of course, I should have known anything with “orthodox” in the name could not pass muster with my Uranian Sun, even though my Saturn-ruled Moon was in hog heaven. I even took a class and read a book my mom had bequeathed me in her large collection on the history of Orthodoxy. After three or four class meetings, the rigid ideology crossed the line of my sensibilities. Everyone was warm and wonderful to me, and I definitely loved singing the liturgy in both Greek and English. I got that ritual was still “it” for me, but I knew it was time to bless this brief experience and move on.

Next stop: An Episcopalian service, the church comedian Robin Williams calls “Catholic Light.” There I could go to communion just for having been baptized Christian as a baby, no strings attached. In the Greek Orthodox Church, I could not, because I was not baptized into Orthodoxy. We second-class spiritual citizens did get to have blessed bread at the end of the service, a consolation prize unless or until we decided to join the fold. In Catholicism, I’d have to go to church and confess four decades of “falling away” and every sin I could think of. This would be difficult, as I lived my life by a strict moral compass in my own mind, and anything I had learned to confess as a child would truly be trivial compared to the real issues of my life.

The Episcopalians were also warm and welcoming, but the Protestant version of Mass just did not feel right to me. It was like drinking near beer. I guess I’m not a Bud Light or a Catholic Light. I finally figured, if I’m going to do ritual, I may as well do the real thing. I knew it was time to face the biggest abandonment I had ever experienced, even bigger than my birth mom giving me up for adoption … the abandonment I felt by Mother Church. My inability to rectify my sense of what was right with the church of my childhood was a bitter loss to me. It never stopped hurting.

St. Godsend’s

I had known for decades that if I was ever going to be whole, I’d have to heal the residual pain from my Catholic childhood. I dreaded it and put it off as long as possible. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. Me, Joyce, the Queen of Reunions. If I could only have one t-shirt with one word printed on it, it would be Gutsy. Yet I trembled emotionally at facing and healing this last loss.

Most but not all my negative experiences with the Catholic religion happened at the hands of the “good” sisters. They were well meaning spinsters who often practiced child abuse in the psychological, if not physical sense (some did both), thinking they were doing God’s will. To be fair, I had gone to two schools in communities forty miles apart. One had a much more painful impact on me, particularly at the most raw-nerve time of life, puberty. I was a very sensitive child, serious about being in good with God. That’s the problem. While other kids could let a lot of the doublespeak nonsense roll off, I took it way too seriously.

When the moment of truth came and I knew I had to “just do it,” to borrow the Nike slogan, I was ready to put on my cross-trainers to pound the pavement and find the right parish. I had to feel safe in the right place to put a toe back into the holy water.

Then I remembered a church I’d heard about more than once, supposedly very liberal. To protect the privacy of everyone concerned, I’ll simply call the church St. Godsend’s or St. G’s and change the names of individuals associated with it. A friend had attended St. G’s in the past and raved about its open-mindedness. She also turned me onto Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim by Edward Hay, a book of often cosmic poems, prayers and rituals by a Catholic priest that got me in touch with the idea that Catholics might have changed since 1966, when I had last set foot in a church unless forced to because of a wedding or funeral.

By then the exact date of my Jupiter Return was days away. I talked a friend into going with me to the weekly Taizé service. For those not familiar with it, Taizé, it is an ecumenical community, started in France, that brings together people of various faiths and beliefs, primarily though a unique and simple form of meditative chanting. Churches all over the world offer Taizé gatherings. Here’s a sound clip to give you the idea. My birth mom loved Taizé and had lent me several audiotapes with the chanting. As I’ve already mentioned, the word enchantment is very literal for me.  

  

However, being out of touch with the liturgical calendar unlike the days when I had it memorized, I didn’t realize that I was arriving on the doorstep of St. G’s on November 1, All Saints Day. (If you also realized it was the anniversary of Chiron’s discovery in 1977, go to the head of the class!) When we arrived on the church steps for the 6:00 singing, I learned that Taizé would not be happening that night, but rather a regular Mass. It was what they affectionately called at St. G’s a holy day of opportunity. I stayed anyway. They had me at opportunity instead of the traditional holy day of obligation. St. G’s passed my Uranian test in the first five minutes.

Not only that, I’d learn that they had a ministry supportive of gays, fed the homeless, and walked the talk of the life Jesus asked us to live more than I had ever experienced in any church of any denomination. I was in love. I dove into the deep end of the baptismal font.

In nothing flat, I had helped restore a Returning Catholics program that had not run for years. I was soon on several important committees, including welcoming and communications. The people I met were beautiful, and the community was amazing—everything I’d ever hoped for.

By Christmas when they read a version of the Gospels that actually referred to the Wise Men as astrologers, I felt I’d found my own Bethlehem Star.

In 2007, Tim and I had our marriage blessed or convalidated in the Church, repeating our vows in the Sacrament of Matrimony. I am still touched to this day by that step. It’s our favorite wedding. (We’ve had three: eloped to Reno in ‘98, vows repeated with a Unity minister at home the next year with closest family and friends, and our sacramental marriage in late ‘07.) Both the wedding and after-party were perfect, attended and in part created by our closest intimates. (My small women’s spirituality group, the metaphysical one, provided the music.) I think we both felt “more married” after that because of the Catholic view on divorce. It completed a circle. We had met and fallen in love as adolescents in a Church-run school. Now we finally had the wedding I had dreamed of back when I was a young girl in a place with stained glass windows where sacred things had happened for nearly a century. I truly did feel my marriage was more blessed. We had done the ultimate marriage ritual!

The Church Ladies

Around the same time, I also became involved in an online group of women bloggers I’ll call the Bloggirls. It wasn’t long into this adventure that I realized they were primarily conservative Christians. There were more prayers flying than howdy do’s, and sometimes I actually felt like I was at a revival meeting. (I’m not kidding, we’re taking “Praise the Lords” and talk of the devil!)

The atmosphere was so Jerry Falwell; one Jewish woman who joined the group asked innocently if it was only for Christians. I was learning a lot about my new career as a blogger, and I was willing to let this experience stretch me for the education, including the expansion of my tolerance for religious conservatives, the one place my own relationship to the Golden Rule could have used a little tune-up.

Ultimately, I found many warm and creative people there, despite our differences in spiritual expression. However, it just got too hard to muffle myself. I felt I couldn’t be me. It was one of the primary reasons I decided to leave the group after less than six months.  I dove in. I swam. I jumped out.

Evolution—Written in the Stars

I truly thought I’d found my permanent, spiritual home at St. G’s. The retreats and workshops were so liberal and liberating. We did Soul Collage and Sister Angie even mentioned openly the parallel between these self-created spiritual art cards and tarot cards. Another nun, Sr. Meg, had studied with the likes of Brian Swimme, cosmologist and director of the California School of Integrative Studies. She even hinted at astrology’s role in the huge cycles of human evolution. Nuns had really come a long way from the penguins who taught me the 1950s! When their habits came off and their street clothes came on, some of them became both more worldly and more cosmic.

During this time, I discovered a book by Rev. Scotty McLennan called Finding Your Religion. The Introduction was written by cartoonist Garry Trudeau, an old friend of Scotty’s. Scotty was in part the inspiration for Trudeau’s Rev. Scot Sloan character in Doonesbury.

Finding Your Religion was all about the struggle I was having between my childhood faith and adult spirituality. One of its most helpful chapters contains a Faith Stage Checklist. It describes seven stages of spiritual development from Stage 1 (Magic, full of spirits, demons and a God that makes everything happen, good or bad) to Stage 7 (Unity, a sense of community with all traditions and seeing God in everything).

Another evolutionary idea I picked up in one of Sr. Meg’s retreats: As we grow in spiritual consciousness, we tend to evolve in three broad steps. First, we identify with God the Father (more childlike). Second, we look to God the Son (a mid-step that literally brings heaven down to earth). Third and finally, we perceive God more in his/her Holy Spirit persona. (God is everywhere and in everything.) I was so Scotty’s Stage 7 and Sr. Meg’s Holy Spirit Stage. Free as a bird/dove—still. ^[1]

The Magi and My Last Jupiter Return - Part 1 of 2

Coming Home to My True Beliefs

© 2011 by Joyce Mason

All Rights Reserved

E

 very twelve years, Jupiter returns to its natal position in our charts. My last Jupiter Return was so dramatic; I want to share it as a case study. In doing so, I hope that you’ll Comment and share some of your own stories about your Jupiter cycles and the personal impact of these homecomings. My latest Jupiter Return was very relevant to the ultimate creation of The Radical Virgo, even though I had no idea where I was headed at the time. You can almost think of this pair of posts as an extended “About” section that tells the background of this blog and how I got here. I’ve coined a word for this mixed genre of writing, “astro-memoir.” The only way I’ll ever know if it works for readers is to try it. These posts are also about as open as I’ll ever be on the public wall about who I am, because who I am is directly related to what I believe. Any form of memoir takes courage. Thanks for being gentle!

My Jupiter is at 24+ Scorpio on the Sabian symbol, An X-ray. There can be no Jupiter in my life without deep probing into life’s mysteries. With its placement in the 7^th House, my “religion” is relationship.

But it is so much more. Before we launch on my Big Journey (everything with Jupiter is BIG), I want to talk a little about how beliefs are the most central factor that color our world. This may be the reason why Jupiter also rules travel and multicultural influences. Mixing it up with others different from us expands our minds to consider other ways of living and being. Travel widens our world, challenges our beliefs, and reminds us that our view isn’t the only one in town or on planet.

January 6, The Feast of the Epiphany: The Magi were Zoroastrian priest-astrologers said to practice magic in its highest expression …

Beliefs are central to who we are and affect how we organize our thinking, as well as how we feel. My mind operates in overdrive every waking and sleeping moment, judging by my dreams. What would I do with all that swirling raw input without some beliefs to organize it and put it to good use? Life would be utter chaos. Observing my double Gemini birth mom helped me see how much thoughts are related to feelings. (She was plagued with mind chatter and feelings out of control.) It’s what we believe about what happens that triggers our feelings. Perhaps you’ve experienced this at a family get-together when someone brings up an incident from the past. Your siblings may each have a different memory or take on it—and often a completely different set of emotional reactions. Sometimes I think we couldn’t possibly be talking about the same situation!

Finally, before I tell this tale, I have to make this disclaimer. No transit happens in a vacuum. When I sensed the beginning of my Jupiter Return Journey, transiting Jupiter wasn’t even close to the “official orb” of home plate. It was 15 degrees out—a whole half sign away. Pluto was squaring my Sun and I was zeroing in on my second Saturn Return. Chiron was conjunct my Part of Fortune and waxing into the lower square to itself for the second time in my life. T-Neptune was exactly trine my Mercury. All these transits were instrumental to the symphony of growth taking place. They all orbited around my Jupiter Return which felt very much like the center of the universe to me at the time. It's the Jupiter story I want to share. The reasons will be obvious.

Longing for Something More

In 2006, my first year of retirement from my 31-year government job, I was still on a long hiatus from any public work in astrology, doubtful I’d ever be back. That summer I began to feel an emptiness and need for something new or something more from a spiritual perspective. Maybe I finally had time to deal with the pain of my losses. There had been several long years of hard times with my husband’s health that also affected us economically and in every conceivable way. They were rough times for us both. During those dark days, for the first time ever, I felt totally out of touch with Spirit. My sense of connection to All That Is wasn’t. This was highly unusual for me—the first time ever. It scared me. My sense of faith, hope, and joy all tanked. I guess when the worst of the hard times lifted, I felt a need to plug back into something even more spiritual than ever in hopes this horrible sense of disconnection would never happen again.

Personal and Spiritual History

When going on a spiritual quest, an individual has to consider the context, namely his or her background—religious or spiritual—and personal history. Raised Catholic and adopted through Catholic Charities as an infant, my religion was both a lifeline to my new future and the mechanism that cut me off from my roots and heritage.

I went to parochial school through 8^th grade. There I met my future husband when we were only 12 years old. His mom would force us to break up two years later, worried we were too serious for our tender age and concerned an early marriage would derail her  promise to her husband on his deathbed that Tim would go to college. After 36 years, following a dream I had in 1996, I looked Tim up via the White Pages on the Internet. He lived near Dallas and within a year, he moved to Sacramento. We married in 1998. It was my third major reunion with a lost love.

The other reunions were with my birth mother in 1986 and my other long, lost love, “Keane” in 1987. Keane was the love of all my awakenings, the one after Tim—the one  I never got over. To say I had a lot to work through regarding him is the understatement of the millennium, maybe of all time. My relationship with Keane was as Plutonian as his exact Pluto/Moon a degree from my natal Pluto in my 4^th house. For better and worse—combined in a sticky gob of pain and pleasure—both being with him and losing him rocked my world for decades.

But Keane and I didn’t end up together; Tim and I did. It was the happier ending, even during its most challenging times. This story isn’t about Venus or Mars; it’s about Jupiter. Yet they are somehow related.

When Keane and I first saw each other in 1988 after nearly 20 years (I found him on the same day he started looking for me—and he worked for the FBI), our differences in belief were stark. If you can imagine an FBI guy with a “metafoofoo,” you can begin to imagine the comedic possibilities.

I was at the enthusiastic beginning of my public career as an astrologer at the time. Never known for subtlety, Keane asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that most people think you’re crazy?”

“It doesn’t bother me an iota,” I responded and meant it. Ultimately, the gap between what we believed by then and who we were was just too wide. He had grown into a very conservative person who wasn’t exactly open-minded on issues of diversity of any kind. His religion was himself.

Tim and I, on the other had, were born in the same city only ten days apart and were reared in the same religion, parochial school and value system. Even though neither of us had been practicing Catholics for years, we looked in the same direction—and still do—on everything that matters. We value family, devotion, fidelity, and ritual. We are an odd pair, both freedom loving Uranus-square-Suns yet traditional in some of our most basic values because of his Saturn conjunct Moon and my Moon in Capricorn. Living with someone whose ethical upbringing is so similar to mine—plus coming from the same time and place in history—creates a shorthand between us that rarely requires explanations. At some level, we are each other. And we certainly are grateful for having what we would have quaintly called “our morals” in our baby boomer youth.

Judeo-Christian

Now it’s time to talk about other belief systems I have explored in the past, so the Jupiter Return I want to tell you about has its own specific context. I grew up Catholic in a Jewish neighborhood. (Double your pleasure and guilt). I was spiritually bicultural. I attended seders and bar mitzvahs. My language was peppered with Yiddish expressions, and I was usually as up on the high holidays as the holy days of obligation.

During high school, after Tim, I rarely had a gentile friend or boyfriend. I would have married “Marshall Lefkowitz,” but his mother wouldn’t let me. Seriously. I was Charlotte on Sex and the City. Conversion wasn’t good enough for Marshall's mother. The only thing that would do in her eyes was being born Jewish, something I couldn't go back and fix. And unfortunately, Jews aren't into the concept of "born again." Marshall's mom would have made his life miserable had he married me. Not only was I not born Jewish, but who “knew from” who I was, really? I was adopted and my background was sketchy in her eyes at best.

I have often wondered why I didn’t just convert anyway, Marshall or not. I have always been attracted to Judaism in a big way. Jesus was a practicing Jew. To tell the truth, I finally figured out recently that I’m most like a Judeo-Christian, the Jews who practiced the new ideas Jesus introduced, before Christianity split off into a separate religion. Tim actually came to this conclusion about himself before me. He, too, had many Jewish friends and we share a deep appreciation for this faith. When I found my birth mom, I found out within minutes that she, too, deeply resonated to Jewish people and culture. My best Jewish girlfriend growing up reacted to this information by saying, “Oy! Another Jewish goy! It’s genetic!”  In fact, I was surprised to find out there weren’t Jews in my family tree.

Instead, there were Orthodox Christians. My birth father was Greek Orthodox. My birth mom was Byzantine or Greek Catholic. Byzantines practice the same rituals as Greek Orthodoxy while remaining part of the Catholic Church. Because they practice a different rite, they are not considered Roman Catholic but have their own modifier, Byzantine or Greek.

New Aged

By 1977, the same year Chiron was discovered (later to become my astro-specialty), I longed for something to fill the hole in my heart left by my inability to relate to my childhood religion. I met a woman—a true catalyst—who turned me onto my first spiritual teacher, Betty Bethards, and to Unity Church.  Betty was a down-to-earth modern mentor of meditation and generic spiritual principles. I was on my way to being metaphysical to the max. I had no idea that there was a metaphysical version of Christianity. The name of Betty’s non-profit organization also portended the new view of spirituality I would develop, The Inner Light Foundation.

I also did a five-year stint as a Unitarian. I sang in the choir of my local Unitarian Universalist Society, something that remains one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done. Our local UU Society was full of drop-outs from Judaism and Catholicism. I felt at home. I loved having all the positive aspects of a “church"—community, events, a built-in network of caring people. Ultimately, I missed spirituality. At the time, the Society was also heavily populated with intellectuals, agnostics and atheists. The services were more head than heart. I needed Neptune!

That brought me back to Unity. I guess I like churches that begin with the letter U because it's shaped like a smile. Eventually, even Unity did not quite fit for me—at least not as a steady fare. I kept finding myself in the painful place of having to be a freelancer when it came to spiritual pursuits. I found small clusters here and there of other astrologers and generically spiritual people that gave me glimmers of hope that some day, I might find a larger community where I could really belong. These feelings of finding a spiritual home were always short-lived. Their fleeting nature left me sad. During those times, spirituality didn’t feel very Jupiter, upbeat, and expansive at all.

~~~

Tomorrow, Part 2:  The Church Steps, the Church Ladies and the Stars at Church

Photo Credit: Nativity Scene, Adoration of the Magi © Zatletic | Dreamstime.com

REFERENCE

Magi, Wikipedia