How do you like to worship?

I worship mainly through prayer, I suppose. I’m real big on prayers of thanksgiving, basically showing my gratitude to the Divine for a pretty good life. I have a great job, clothes on my back, a home to rest my head, and food to eat everyday. I have great friends and family who support me and believe in me. And my wife….. she is truly a gift from above (not sure how I got so lucky!). Really, I consider any conversation to the Divine as prayer, but I’m sure others would disagree. I also have an altar set up (so far it’s pretty lackluster since I’m not able to afford everything I would like to have on said altar, but it is functional!), and I use that as my space for ritual work. Again, my ritual work is very simple and is mostly prayers of adoration and thanksgiving. I try to turn off anything that is distracting, and light a candle to focus my energy. Ritual time is for me and the Holy Ones, without distractions, so I try to create an environment of quiet. That’s surprisingly hard to do– I live close to an airport, so there’s a lot of airplane noise around the neighborhood. But I think I should get an A for effort, right?

I’ll talk more about prayer later this month (there’s another question about it in this series, so I don’t want to give too much away), but I will say that I use prayer in formal and informal settings, pretty much anytime and anywhere I feel the need to do so.

I always imagine myself doing grand, formal ritual (like at night, under the moon, with people in cloaks and “the grandest of wordsmithing” to cast a circle and call the four corners and it would be beautiful and tears would run down my face because of the intense moment I shared with the Divine. But yeah, that never happens (not that it will never happen, I still have hope). But I try to at least try to make a habit of doing some kind of ritual at home, even if it means lighting a candle and saying a prayer. I would love to perhaps meet with a group for Sabbats and Esbats, but that is a whole other conversation, for another day.