A recent post has inspired me to discuss another topic that I don’t see very often - what to do when you don’t feel called. When we spend a lot of our time on social media, in other witch groups, and around a lot of spiritually connected people, we have to remember that the negative or neutral often gets left out.
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Is it a sign?
Maybe. Maybe not. Signs can be an extremely personal thing, and no one is going to be able to tell you if something is a sign or not. Take, for example, the idea of butterflies I talked about in my post about a Book of Mirrors. For my family, butterflies are a sign from the heavens that someone is watching over you - either someone that has passed on or a guide, depending on the person. What might be a sign to me will not be a sign to others.
When interpreting signs, you also have to take the event into context. Using the butterflies again, if I were to encounter a lone butterfly in the peak of spring, I would call that a sign. If I were to encounter several butterflies multiple times a day in the peak of spring, I would call that nature. Knowing that butterflies have a season and a migration pattern help to determine if what I’m seeing is a sign or not. This is true for any other possible sign as well.
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What if I don’t hear anything?
We might feel left out if all we see is posts and stories about how people are being reached out to be Gods and Goddesses. I want to reiterate something, though. It is perfectly normal to not hear the call of a God or Goddess. It is perfectly normal to be attracted to a God or Goddess but never hear from them. There is nothing wrong with this.
Look at it in a few different contexts. In ancient Greece, do you think the average person heard the call of the Gods they worshipped? Or do you think they saw the Gods in the world around them? Sometimes the Gods don’t have time for us. Time is relative to our human nature and society and time moves differently on different realms and dimensions.
You may not hear anything from a God or Goddess, but that doesn’t make you any less a witch, Wiccan, or pagan.
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Is everyone called by a deity?
Absolutely not. Like I said above, the average ancient Greek person was probably not worried about whether or not they could hear their Gods speak to them. I think this is a completely modern construct for a few reasons. The first reason being that one person saw another do it and so they decided to do it, too. The second reason being that hearing a God or Goddess is subjective. I hear Brighid in the crackling of the candle, in the words of my daughter, and in the call of the animals outside. I hear Her in my voice when I sing and in my yarn when I crochet. That has nothing to do with physically hearing Her.
The third reason might strike a chord with a lot of people. Many of us come from Christianity and, in a lot of Christian denominations, the emphasis is on your personal relationship with God. That carries over into any other faith when we leave, especially if we grew up in Christianity. That takes a lot of unlearning because we may see it as difficult to separate our personal relationship with a deity from our reverence and worship of them.
Whether or not you’re called by a deity is irrelevant, in my opinion. Someone may be called by a God but that doesn’t make them a good person. Someone may never be called on personally by a God or Goddess but live their life with reverence and still achieve a level of spirituality that the other may not.
