Priest(ess) Prayer

Goddess, keep me mindful that a priest(ess) is a servant.

Help me serve Your plan.

May I always know Your plan is best implemented by the means You ask, not by my short-sighted approaches or addiction to unremitting activity.

May I know that serving others is a vital way to love myself.

May I know that care of myself is a vital way to serve others.

May I do work I love as a way to serve.

May I remember: Serving mends those of my wounds that cannot be healed by anything else.

In all exchanges, may I focus on bringing peace, compassion, and empowerment.

When bothered by difficult or even terrible people, may I remember that we are all in this human journey together, doing our best, no matter how poor that best might be.

If I start to match someone’s anger—so that I shift into their myth instead of my own—may I instead hold my own anger within me lovingly, to heal it and make it whole.

May I do the same when starting to match anyone’s other troubling traits.

Self-development can be an important goal of one’s spiritual practices. May it never waylay the equally important purpose: To be made immensely capable of serving.

Goddess, make me Your finely crafted tool, shaped precisely to the work You ask.

But keep me mindful that I’m not the ultimate tool, no matter how well you have honed me. Goddess, help me willingly, happily, and peacefully get out of Your way when You—and You alone—must act.

Let me remain mindful that, paradoxically, self-development is sometimes the same as being made most capable of serving.

I am a priest(ess)—Your servant.
I am a priest(ess)—servant to community.
I am a priest(ess)—servant to Gaia.
I am a priest(ess)—servant to World Tree.
I am a priest(ess)—servant to the Cosmos, its rhythms, and its Love.

I am a priest(ess).

The above 2013 poem, written for my own private devotionals as a priestess, lists some of my core principles regarding service. But I decided to share it here. A major proponent of inner wisdom, self as Deity, and maximum self-development, the courses I teach focus on attaining fullest self expression. But it is not the only focus: The greater the self becomes, the more one must humbly know one’s limits and live in surrender. This paradox is a crux of my teachings. In this seeming contradiction resides ecstatic priesthood. I fully address enlarging the self elsewhere; this prayer mostly focuses on aspects in the other side of the equation.