I guess I'll never completely stop being Catholic
and peace be with you.
In case you don’t read the rest: Please consider donating (even a few dollars!!) to help this family escape the onslaught in Gaza: https://www.gofundme.com/f/suzan-barzak. The fundraiser is vetted by people I trust who have already gotten one family to safety and anything you can offer will make a real impact.
Taurus New Moon and a happy Mars: The main things this week are pretty straight forward.
Yesterday we saw Mars move out of Pisces and into Aries. This is like Mars getting to return home, finally, after many months of doing lots of things in lots of different places. These are things Mars needed to do and he got to see people he wanted to see (both for friendly reasons and fighting reasons), but he is now home. For Mars, this is good. That means for the rest of us it’s a mixed bag.
Trying to give you a general horoscope for what this means isn’t super meaningful, but what I will say is that it’s worth considering what house Aries falls in for your chart and being extra intentional about the energy you’re giving to that part of your life. Mars is ready to take care of shit, but he can often be overzealous. Don’t overdo it and don’t bring aggression to the table that you don’t need.Next Tuesday night (5/7), around 11:10 PM ET, we have a New Moon in Taurus. This is a lovely place for a New Moon. The Moon is celebrated, exalted in Taurus. We expect success for the Moon here, fed by Taurus’s fertile soils. Remember the metaphoric planting of a seed that happens with a New Moon. It’s a good opportunity to set some clear intentions and make manifest the goals you have for your Taurus house.
Note: I said “make manifest”—this is different from “manifesting” in the sense that I’m encouraging you to plan, take action, and begin moving toward. What you take action on now will pay off later. We won’t see the Taurus Full Moon until November 15, so you have time for this plant to grow, but remember what they say about planting a tree. The best day to do it is yesterday.
About a year from now I’m going to ask you about your spiritual beliefs…
When I think about spirituality in my life, I think about Catholicism. I was baptized at Our Lady of the Mountains in Estes Park, Colorado in 1995. From that point on, I attended mass nearly every Sunday until I moved away to college in Austin in 2013.
I was always in some kind of spiritual formation program or another. First there was the Montessori-inspired Good Shepherd program where we used paper dolls to act out the parables of the bible and mixed yeast with flour and water to grow under a heat lamp. Even though at the time I wanted desperately to be home watching SpongeBob, I have really good memories of this time. It was based in self-directed inquiry and questioning, values I hold close to myself now.
A screenshot from the Good Shepherd program’s website. With or without the catholic underpinnings, this articulation of childhood spirituality feels expansive:
Unfortunately, nothing gold can stay. Eventually, I moved on to the evangelical inspired LifeTeen program with a youth leader named Wyatt. I realize now he must have been in his twenties. He came to Kerrville from Texas A&M and brought some of that young white man fiery Christianity back to us. This was the first time I heard someone say that it was our job to convert other people. I’d always understood that only you could build your relationship with God. Answers to your questions didn’t exist in someone else’s rulebook. As I understood it, you had to arrive there yourself.
The bulk of my spiritual formation came to a close when I finished the Good Shepherd program around twelve years old. After that point, Sunday school or youth group became much more about uncomfortable social dynamics and tamping down adolescent impulses than it did about symbolic inquiry. What had been a time of ritual and exploration became a weekly commitment to fit into a religious box. It was not comfortable and it didn’t feel fruitful. I remember clearly one of the last meaningful rituals we took part in, something like a graduation from Good Shepherd.
We’d recently learned about the concepts of “charisms”, gifts of the spirit that helped you to serve God on Earth1. As a part of our spiritual growth, we were expected to identify with one of these gifts. Using our little developing brains and hearts we were meant to pray and discern which charism offered a path forward. There wasn’t a right answer and I don’t think there was a wrong answer, but I know at the time it felt like a significant moment. It felt consequential. I’ve always been a person who believes in symbolic action and this symbolic action felt like it would determine to some extent who I was in the world.
I had to look up a list of them for this newsletter. Apparently there are different approaches to this and lots of different beliefs about what constitutes a charism versus some other kind of virtue. Thinking back to what we used in my program, it’s clear I’m cobbling lists together and leaving some out. I like to believe this list was pulled together with us, the kids, in mind, understanding where we were in our growth and how we’d be affected by this. That may or may not be true, but, in any case, I know our list left out some that I found online like “celibacy” or “administration”. Another place that I feel grateful for the kind of Christian I was raised by, something I don’t take for granted.
I remember seeing “love” and “faith” and “giving” and “mercy.” I remember seeing them and knowing that they weren’t mine. I saw their value and, probably, felt a little guilty that I didn’t connect more with them. But I also remember seeing “knowledge” and “wisdom” on the list. Immediately I was torn. I don’t know if there were accompanying descriptions, but I know that immediately my twelve year old mind was made up that one of these was my charism. I just didn’t know which.
It wasn’t until I was sitting cross-legged around a rug with heavily breathing children around me and our parents sitting quietly in chairs behind us all that I knew. We held pearly white, unlit taper candles and, one at a time, shuffled on our knees over to the lit candles at the front of the room. Each was stamped with a word, one of the charisms, and we were supposed to light ours from the flame that reflected the gift we thought we could offer the world. When it was my turn, I knew I was going to skip past the candle glowing with the flame of knowledge and claim the light of wisdom instead. I returned to my spot on the carpet, crossed my legs, and stared into the flickering wick while the ritual continued. I’d chosen wisdom.
As a person kicked out of Catholicism2 (whether or not I’d have ever been able to stay is a bigger question than I can answer in your inbox today), it’s sweet to remember the first times I felt on fire for the divine. Have you felt that? A belief in something external (but also internal) that is good and larger than what fits into your brain/body/heart? I’m fighting the urge to caveat and undermine the feeling, because, reading it back, it is very cringey. It was what I felt at the time. I was also already pretty much an atheist, if that matters. Both thoughts and their accompanying feelings were bouncing around in me, not that differently from today. Mostly though, as I think about that little boy holding that freshly lit white candle, I want to give him a hug or show some tender care that he wouldn’t know how to handle but that I bet he’d appreciate. He believed in wisdom.
In about a year, we’ll see Neptune move out of Pisces and into Aries. This is going to be an interesting shift, astronomically, because Neptune has been in Pisces since 2012. There was some shifting back and forth between Aquarius and Pisces early on, but at least since 2012 it (she?3) has been slowly swerving through Pisces, three steps forward and two steps back.
Neptune is a modern planet, first identified in 1846, and has since been associated with spirituality, utopianism, imagination, boundarylessness, and the subconscious. While I don’t work with the modern planets as much in my day to day astrology, I find Neptune’s significations to work really well. I’m not going to argue the case here (read Cosmos and Psyche if you want to learn about the modern planets and their patterns through history). For our purposes, I’d just ask you suspend disbelief (wow, so Neptunian…) and consider Neptune to be a distant, watery force of confusion and divinity, a mirror reflecting our most dreamy ideas back to us from distant space.
Neptune is a planet that spends about 12-14 years in a sign, so we consider her a generational or a social planet. We don’t expect to feel Neptune in an acute sense (she’s the opposite of acute). According to Howard Sasportas, gay astrologer and personal gay hero, “Neptune is a boundary-dissolver, and by transit, Neptune blurs or dissolves the boundary between ourselves and others.” He describes the time that Neptune spends moving through a chart as reflecting moments of confusion and diffusion—you might lose your sense of differentiation. Like Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, you could forget who you are in these times and run the risk of drifting away into a place (or mindset) from which you can’t return. On the personal level, Neptune wants you to forget what is happening and simply experience what is happening. Yes, that is what I meant, not a typo.
What I’ll be interested in watching is how we see religion and spirituality move within our cultures the next decade-ish. We’ve seen an explosion of “new age” and spiritual acceptance in the past twelve years—based on the number of astrology-based tech companies, it’s safe to say the Market Men™ believe it is valuable to know your planets. I’d expect this kind of thing with Neptune in Pisces, a spiritual planet in a sign that welcomes dissolve. We could say that Neptune has had a bit of a free range in recent years.
Thinking backward, from 1998-2011, we consider Neptune’s movement through Aquarius. Here, in a sign that moves energy from the center to the outside, we saw a precipitous drop in the ubiquity of organized religion.4 The twelve years before that period saw religion used as an organizing principle, a tool to construct boundaries and make sense of chaos. Reagan was a man who used the brand of tightly organized Christianity to slide his way into the White House. This makes sense for Neptune’s time in Capricorn.5 Neptune moved into Sagittarius (the prior mutable sign to Pisces) in January of 1970, when the new age and non-institutional religious movement first peaked in America.
If you want to argue that you can fit the symbolic nature of any sign to any lived experience of religion, then I’d agree with you, and I’d ask you what you get out of reading my emails, because I’d be genuinely very curious. And if you find this articulation of the recent history of religion in the West to be interesting then I do too. Neptune demands a slippery interpretation, she does not like certainty and, if she has a say, will encourage you to be a little less certain too.
As for what I expect from Neptune’s time in Aries, I wonder if we might expect the end of the honeymoon phase with this “anything goes” spiritual culture. Aries is a sign that encourages the action impulse. Reactivity and conflict. Where Capricorn (the prior cardinal sign) used religion and spirituality as an organizing principle, building clear boundaries and calling for lines to be drawn in the sand, Aries could carry a similar demand for differentiation without the tendency toward order. Neptune in Aries might say “fuck your lines in the sand, let’s wash it all clean”.
I don’t think any predictions about Gaza and the Isr*eli occupation will be helpful, so I won’t make any. But I will say that I don’t see religion and spiritual affiliation offering the foggy cover that it’s given for so long. We’re looking at a Neptune that’s living in Mars’s home, a boiling Neptune, a fast Neptune. This might be a Neptune that wants to cut to the core. What are your values? What does your faith look like in action? Forget structure, who are your spiritual leaders and do you really stand by them? These are the kinds of questions I expect from a Neptune moving out of Pisces and into Aries.
We have a good year ahead to prepare for this. Don’t worry any more than you already are. Worrying doesn’t help, but there’s value in mentally and emotionally and spiritually preparing.
If you have any spare money at all, please consider donating to help this family escape the onslaught in Gaza: https://www.gofundme.com/f/suzan-barzak. The fundraiser is vetted by people I trust and anything you can offer will make a real impact. No matter the astrological significations, you can always bet on helping those suffering on this planet we share.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
P.S. Send me your Enneagram and astrology and random questions why not?
I’ve since heard from friends they experienced similar but more harmful concepts, both in Evangelical churches and conservative Catholic churches. These ran roughshod over complexity and tried to turn them into mindless tools of a church. This is sad to me for a million reasons, not least of which because I think the idea that we connect deeply with some aspect of divinity and can share it with our community is beautiful. That it has been used to dehumanize people and shoehorn them into socially determined roles (how many young girls have been told their spiritual gift is caretaking?) is gross.
While I wasn’t ever officially kicked out, I feel that I functionally was. I’m not allowed there, basically, and I’m holding onto that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Today, I’m going with “she” for Miss Neptune…
From 2007-2014, the group of those who aren’t affiliated with an institutional religion grew the most in America while Catholics and non-Evangelical Protestants experienced the greatest atrophy.
By the time Reagan was president, it wasn’t weird at all to see the marriage of religion and governance, as much as that’s crazy to say.
This is gorgeous ❤️❤️