Magic 501: The Beauty of Necessity

People love to talk themselves into the most complicated messes for reasons they think are self-evident, necessary, or just ‘normal.’ They will walk into entanglements that last years, relationships that should have ended after the second date, working situations that take advantage of them despite the opportunity to be somewhere their work is valued, etc. Even when they realize it’s a hot mess, they’ll still walk into it. They just might be sheepish about it, depending on self-awareness.

A priest will hear an almost endless litany of this from the people they serve. Often, our job is to listen to that litany as patiently as we can and wait for the symptoms of an incipient epiphany so we can drag the realization to the surface of that person’s consciousness and keep it there until they do something about it. Divine nagging, if you will.

Sometimes, we get to magically induce epiphany or the conditions for it to occur. We get to cut through the ornate cluster fuck the person is currently engrossed in. Sometimes, this is via possession, a spirit making the situation very simple—it’s always much simpler than the person believes it is, and often solvable by a fairly small change to their behavior. Sometimes, this is via spiritual insight. Sometimes, we get to light a candle or lamp and bring the situation to a crashing close.

This will involve the person complaining bitterly about whatever was done and how they feel about their life. No one is happy about it until they’re looking back at it.

There is enormous beauty in doing what is necessary, in being willing to do what a situation or a person needs in order to resolve it, to move everything on to the next lesson.

When people speak of love, they often think of its immediate (and most shallow) symptom. They think of their excitement to be around someone, or of the warm and/or comfortable feelings they have when they think of that person.

To be blunt, they think of themselves.

What they do not often think of is what will grow a person. What will heal a person. What will give a person what they need.

The wisdom necessary to know what will grow, heal, or elevate a person is very much a part of the mission of the divine, and evidence of the love of the divine. It is the love the lwa embody for us, and the wisdom they can grant us. Anyone who has been the subject of the pointed advice of, say, Anaisa on the topic of their lives and fuckery has experienced that love for themselves—and if you look past the immediate sting of the advice, you will be able to see the shape of her love.

Where love considers this, it has become something closer to what makes necessity beautiful. This sort of love looks ahead, instead of at the most immediate sensations and what makes a lover feel good.

The beauty of necessity is in its intolerance of what stagnates, its intolerance of people’s complicated fuckery and its resulting self-harm.

The motive is love.