Mother Father God,
We come to you today, seeking wisdom so that we may all be in your
divine will. Help us to learn the way of Love. For you are made of Love.
Assist us in ways to show your love to all those in your daily path, as an
example of you. We pray for those affected by fires and storms around
the world, that you would help them find your Love and Grace within
these tragedies. We pray that your love would comfort the grieving and
enlighten the lost. We are grateful that we could all come together today
to enjoy fellowship. We are grateful for your many blessings our lives.
Those who have ears let them hear, and eyes let them see.
And so it is.
A Practice of Prayer
As a practicing pagan of over 10 years now, and a former Christian for
most of the rest of my life, I feel that there are practices that I dropped
intentionally because I felt they were exclusively Christian. Some of
those, like singing hymns, are obvious because the hymns are to deity
that I do not profess to follow. I loved singing hymns when I was in the
Christian church, and it is one of the things I miss very much. Most of the
great classical composers wrote music for the church including J.S. Bach
(and some of his children), Purcell, Hayden, and Handel. Being a musician
and a trained singer, I loved singing those pieces. But felt strange singing
my devotion to a god I did not personally profess to follow. A
conundrum. Pagan music and chants are lovely, and I absolutely sing
these, but it’s not Bach.
Another holdover from Christian days is prayer. When I was a Christian,
I prayed a lot. I think most Christians do. But it’s not something that I
have continued to do in my pagan practice because it felt too Christian.
I think a lot of my fellow pagans who often come from Christian
backgrounds can relate to this. Of course, we pray to the Goddess in
ritual. Whether public or private ceremony there are prayers to the
particular Goddess we are working with, and invocations to the elements
as well. But personal, daily prayer? Not so much. At least for me. I think
Meditation counts as prayer. But it’s certainly not anything like a
Christian prayer life. Of course, pagans could pray like Christians do and
simply change the god or goddess, rework the wording and I’m sure
some do that. It hasn’t been my practice though. But I’ve been thinking
about it. Thinking about prayer, communing with my goddess, in a very
personal way.
A while ago now, I stopped meditating because I could not quiet my
mind. My life was taking a transformative step in a new direction and the
old ways were just not working for me anymore. I was in a battle for my
husband’s life, and we lost. Grief, loss, and total change were the watch
words of my days. I’m over a year from that event of terrible loss, during
a pandemic as well. If I use the phrase, threw me for a loop, many of you
will understand. In reality, the ground beneath my feet was no longer
there and I was in free fall. The passage of time has helped some, but
what has truly helped was traveling to beautiful, sacred places in this
country (USA) and becoming more and more grounded as I went.
And now, as I travel, I am looking at my pagan practices and pondering
them. In the past, the concept of prayer has come up for me here and
there, but I did not want to look at it. I am ready now, I think to look at
prayer and how I can incorporate that into a daily or nearly daily practice
for myself that might be as powerful as meditation once was.
Recently, I read the book The Book of Love by Kathleen McGowan which
is Magdalene centric and has a lot of Christianity in it. But it’s not the
Christianity practiced today. It is the first, the oldest Christianity which is
the duality of Christ and his bride, the Magdalene in sacred marriage.
That male energy must be balanced with female energy and that the
Catholic church has completely covered this up since nearly the
beginning. While this book and the other two in the series are written as
fiction, so much of it rings like truth to me that I can’t discount it. As we
all know, history is written by the victor.
In The Book of Love, Kathleen writes of a practice of praying the Lord’s
Prayer within the center of a labyrinth. The six petals in the middle of the
Chartres Labyrinth to be exact. Each petal stands for a concept to be
prayed about. As I was reading this, it occurred to me that I could modify
this prayer by De-Christianizing the language to make it more my own and more
palatable to a non-Christian person who might need to pray using more
of a process.
Here is an example of the Chartres labyrinth design with the 6 petals in
the center. 
The concepts for each of the petals are:
1. Faith
2. Surrender
3. Service
4. Abundance
5. Forgiveness and
6. Strength.
I love labyrinths and have walked them
wherever I find them. Once I got lost driving
on a trip, had to turn around and managed to
turn around in a vacant lot that had a
labyrinth in it. So, they even find me. But this
prayer thing is not something that has to be
done in a labyrinth. It is simply a process, this
prayer, a method of Divine connection. As
such, it is definitely possible to do without a
This Photo by Unknown Author is
labyrinth. What follows is my alteration of the text from The Book of
Love, pgs 219-221.
Faith: Our Mother who Reigns in Heaven and on Earth, All
your names are Hallowed and Sacred. I have faith that the
Great Mother hears me and attends to my needs.
Surrender: Thy will be done becomes; Surrender to the plan put into
place before you incarnated here. The Universe and our Spirit guides
know what needs to happen in our lives even if we have to forget it in
order to have the free will we need to accomplish our goals. Listen to
your guides so that you can accomplish your goals in this life without fear
or fail.
Service: Act always from a place of truth and love. Create Heaven here
on Earth wherever you go. This doesn’t mean you give to others until you
have nothing left. First and foremost, we must love ourselves fully and
completely before we can ever give to others. Creating heaven on Earth
is a way of making a positive difference in our troubled world. There will
always be strife and conflict here and we can not hope to be rid of it, but
we can make our own little corner of the world a more beautiful, kind,
and loving place.
Abundance: Give us this day our daily bread, the Manna. In the Bible,
manna only lasts a day. The traveling Israelites found this out when they
decided to save some ‘for tomorrow’ and it turned wormy. This is about
staying in the flow of what the Universe and our Mother Goddess wants
us to accomplish. Living in harmony with the plan that is in place for us.
Nothing you need or desire will be withheld from you while you live in
this grateful place of grace. Living in a state of Grace says that today I
have what I need to survive and be comfortable. Look at your blessings
and have gratitude for them. Just for today. Tomorrow hasn’t come yet.
Forgiveness: In this part of the prayer, list all those who have harmed
you, or otherwise caused you pain. Forgive them and ask that they will
one day understand the truth of living with Love and Acting with Love.
Then you must forgive yourself of the wrongs your may have done and
harm you have inflicted on others as well as on yourself. “For while all
forgiveness is the balm of our compassionate Mother, Self-forgiveness is
needed most of all.”pg.220
The final petal is Strength: Keep me on the right path and do not allow
anything to tempt me off of it. In the book it talks about sin and
temptation, I don’t actually believe in sin. I think it’s a concept that the
Christian church developed to keep the faithful in line, tithing and
dependent on the church hierarchy as a whole. But I do think we can be
tempted by pretty shiny things into falling away from the path we have
set before us. Especially when it gets difficult or frightening. This is when
we turn to the Mother Goddess and ask her for strength and perhaps call
a dear friend that can talk us down from the ledge.
I believe these six concepts when strung together in a prayerful way, or
meditation, can encompass a great deal of what we might need to say to
our Goddess on a daily basis. And while it is essentially based on the
Lord’s prayer, I think I have successfully created a pagan version that is
usable to most. I plan to begin praying again on a regular basis using this
template and I’m hopeful that it will ground me in my practice and in my
life.
And so it is.
~Marie Wilkes