My 94 year old grandmother has had a stroke. She's compos mentis and can get around with a walker. She's currently in a rehab facility and my mom is trying to get her into a home closer to where my parents live. The home is run by nuns. My mom and grandmother are both very pious Catholics, and my mom's aggressive pursuit of the EWTN version of the religion is one of the things that makes it easier for me to have severed ties with it.
This has left me in a little bit of a bind. I love my grandmother, I want her to get better and I want her to live closer to my parents. Asatru only has little bits of lore about healing left. There's the goddess Eir, "best of physicians", the Merseburg charms and some rune work. That's extremely sketchy, but humans being humans, the medieval Germans and Scandinavians must have had prayers to say or rituals to perform when a relative or friend was sick or injured.
It then struck me that it wouldn't be right at all to invoke a goddess or spell for the benefit of a sick Catholic. After further reflection, it dawned on me that since my grandmother is devoted to Jesus and Mary, as a polytheist who doesn't deny their existence as deities, I can simply pray to them for her!
This is why renouncing a god or holy figure one revered in the years before converting to paganism is not a good idea. The gods of your past or not, they're still gods. Like people from your past who may unexpectedly be interviewed for your top secret clearance, you hope they are at worst neutral on you. I may not be Latin Rite Christian anymore, but my living family and serveral centuries of ancestors are. I want my mom to be able to place grandmother close to her, and for grandmother to get better, so off to their patron deity I go.
This has left me in a little bit of a bind. I love my grandmother, I want her to get better and I want her to live closer to my parents. Asatru only has little bits of lore about healing left. There's the goddess Eir, "best of physicians", the Merseburg charms and some rune work. That's extremely sketchy, but humans being humans, the medieval Germans and Scandinavians must have had prayers to say or rituals to perform when a relative or friend was sick or injured.
It then struck me that it wouldn't be right at all to invoke a goddess or spell for the benefit of a sick Catholic. After further reflection, it dawned on me that since my grandmother is devoted to Jesus and Mary, as a polytheist who doesn't deny their existence as deities, I can simply pray to them for her!
This is why renouncing a god or holy figure one revered in the years before converting to paganism is not a good idea. The gods of your past or not, they're still gods. Like people from your past who may unexpectedly be interviewed for your top secret clearance, you hope they are at worst neutral on you. I may not be Latin Rite Christian anymore, but my living family and serveral centuries of ancestors are. I want my mom to be able to place grandmother close to her, and for grandmother to get better, so off to their patron deity I go.
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