why faith sometimes feels like remembering a dream you didn’t live, but still know by heart
If you grew up inside a church, the first sound of the sacred was probably someone else’s voice — the priest, the choir, the murmured rhythm of prayer.
Mine began under the vaulted quiet of Catholic chapels: the smell of incense, the glint of gold on linen, the solemn choreography of genuflection.
But even then, even as a child, I felt something stirring beneath the ritual — a whisper that said: this isn’t the whole story.
That whisper became my compass. It led me, over time, through the iconostasis of Orthodox sanctuaries, into the desert silence of early Christian mystics, and further still — into the dreamlike realms where Hermes Trismegistus speaks in riddles and angels wear faces I recognize from somewhere older than memory.
Faith, for me, has never been a fortress. It’s a tapestry — frayed, luminous, and impossibly ancient.
I come to it from many rivers — lands and languages that never quite learned to meet except within me.
The rhythm of one hand crossing itself in prayer while the other still remembers the drum.
Each tradition leaves its echo, and somewhere in the overlap, the holy begins to speak.
And every thread I’ve found, whether it came from scripture, folklore, or the forest floor, somehow glows with the same strange light. That intuition — that whisper beneath the ritual — is what eventually led me to study the hidden lineages within faith itself.
🜍 Fragments and Continuity
People talk about “deconstruction” like it’s demolition. For me, it felt more like an archaeological dig.
I never wanted to destroy what I inherited — only to understand what lay beneath it.
Underneath the marble saints and Latin hymns, I started hearing echoes: a whisper of the pagan, the esoteric, the animist.
The Church didn’t appear out of nowhere; it grew from older loam. Its mystics borrowed the language of light from Hermetic texts; its saints stood where local spirits once did; its rituals folded the folkways of countless ancestors into a single fragile script.
That hidden continuity fascinates me. The way Catholic incense recalls ancient temple smoke. The way Orthodox icons shimmer like alchemical vessels. The way the Gnostics and Hermetists spoke of divine sparks the same way I was taught to understand m’ntu’k — the breath shared among persons, human and other-than-human alike.
Different vocabularies. Same current.
It’s not syncretism for novelty’s sake. It’s recognition — that these fragments are kin. That the divine, like light through a prism, refracts into every culture’s way of seeing. And beneath those shared folkways, I began to sense a deeper symmetry — not just of lineage, but of law.
✨ The Hidden Geometry of Faith
Manly P. Hall once wrote that “truth is not found, it is remembered.” I carry that line like a prayer bead. It explains why certain symbols feel like déjà vu — why the Emerald Tablet’s as above, so below hums in my bones like something I’ve always known.
When I first read Neville Goddard speaking of imagination as the creative act of God, it didn’t feel like self-help mysticism. It felt like a return to the oldest intuition: that creation begins in thought — in vision — in the Word that shapes the world.
The human mind becomes both mirror and participant in the divine act of becoming.
Even the Kybalion’s geometry — correspondences, vibration, mentalism — points to the same truth: that spirit and matter are simply different densities of the same idea.
These philosophies didn’t replace my faith. They expanded its dimensions.
Where Catholicism gave me structure, Hermeticism gave me pattern — the sense that every act of creation, from a sunrise to a poem, moves within a sacred symmetry.
Sometimes, when I light a candle, I imagine I’m participating in that geometry — a flicker echoing the eternal flame.
🜹 Many Faces of the Divine
That same symmetry unfolded through the myths themselves, the geometry taking form in the gods’ own stories. The geometry widened into history — toward civilizations whose hymns still hum beneath our collective skin.
The laments of Inanna, the psalms of Akhenaten, the invocations to Isis, Thoth, and Ra: each one a dialect of the same sacred language.
I don’t see these deities as metaphors. They are luminous intelligences, sovereign in their own domains, shaping the spiritual architecture we still inhabit.
To meet them is not to betray my roots but to widen my kinship.
Sometimes their presence brushes close — not demanding worship but recognition.
They say, We remember you. You remember us.
It reminds me that divinity has never belonged to one name, one book, or one nation. It has always spoken in multitudes — through every culture’s attempt to articulate the ineffable.
🕊 The Angels and the Ancestors
My relationship with angels began, as many do, with art. The Baroque cherubs didn’t line up with the beings scripture hinted at — entities of fire, intellect, and radiance. When I found Adam McLean’s A Treatise on Angelic Magic, something ancient in me stirred.
There, angels weren’t abstractions. They were radiant persons with temperament and purpose, moving through creation in their own rhythm. They aren’t symbols of virtue or projections of psychology; they are neighbours in a shared creation.
In the way I was taught to understand m’ntu’k, the world is a community of persons — some human, most not — all sharing breath inside one immense conversation. The world isn’t made of things; it’s made of relationships.
So when I think of angels, ancestors, or the old gods, I don’t picture them in separate heavens. I picture a community of persons, embodied and unembodied, bound by reciprocity. We meet across the currents of m’ntu’k, each of us carrying a fragment of the same light.
When I honour them, I’m not reaching upward — I’m reaching across.
And it’s from that sense of reciprocity that another distinction becomes clear for me.
I’ve never believed in reincarnation. The idea feels antithetical to how I understand being.
For me, existence isn’t a cycle of departure and return but an act of relation — of presence meeting presence.
When I speak the words I AM, I don’t mean a self that migrates through forms. I mean the spirit-in-communion — the living thread of awareness woven through other spirits, human and more-than-human alike.
Continuity doesn’t come from repetition of lives, but from the ongoing conversation of being itself.
I am, and I am in relationship — that is the whole theology.
This is why I trust kinship over return, correspondence over recurrence. Being itself is enough miracle; the sacred happens in the space between.
✴ Creating Anyway — The Maker as Witness
Sometimes the world feels counterfeit — too loud, too fast, stripped of soul.
If the old Gnostics were right, and light is trapped in matter, then maybe creation itself is an act of remembering who the world was before it forgot.
There’s a thought I return to with quiet amusement: that we’re little demiurges, not proud imitators but apprentices mending a frayed world.
When I grind pigment or shape a line of prose, I’m entering dialogue with the persons of mineral and fibre. I listen for how they wish to be arranged, what story they want to tell. Creation becomes conversation — a renewal of kinship.
In that sense, making anything is a prayer of reciprocity. It’s the work of being in right relation with all those other-than-human persons who make the world possible.
This is the heart of my theology: to create is to bear witness. Even when faith falters, the making continues — and the making becomes prayer.
Maybe the point isn’t to escape a flawed world, but to keep remaking it until it remembers it was sacred all along.
🌾 Folklore as Theology
Irish and Scottish tales of the Sídhe, of second sight and sentient landscapes, read to me like covert scripture. They hum with the same knowing I was raised to trust — that every hill, river, and wind has its own personhood.
The stories aren’t metaphors; they’re records of relationship. They remember how humans used to listen.
Hermetic and Gnostic writings speak of living light, divine emanations flowing into matter; the folktales speak of that light walking the fields.
Different languages, same conversation.
Both folklore and doctrine tell us that holiness is participatory — that divinity doesn’t dwell far away but moves through the shimmer of water and the breath of trees. Every telling is a way of maintaining relation with those other-than-human persons who still speak, if we stay quiet enough to hear them.
🜂 The Shepherd’s Tower
That same relational knowing echoes in the old Christian dream called The Shepherd of Hermas.
Among all the early Christian visions, The Shepherd of Hermas lingers for me.
A humble man sees a woman building a tower from living stones — souls fitted together, purified through their own transformations.
It’s a metaphor for the slow construction of faith, but also for community: holiness as ongoing collaboration.
We are both the builders and the material, shaping and being shaped.
That vision comforts me. It doesn’t promise certainty, only process.
And process, to me, feels truer than perfection.
🌙 The Thread Itself
All those visions, stories, and correspondences gather into something larger — the thread that runs through them all.
If I try to name what connects all these influences — Catholic liturgy, Orthodox mysticism, Hermetic geometry, Mi’kmaw cosmology, the gods of Mesopotamia and Egypt, Celtic folklore — it isn’t dogma. It’s intimacy.
Each of them insists that the sacred is relational.
That knowing God, or spirit, or m’ntu’k, or the divine mind, isn’t about mastery but about belonging.
That mystery isn’t a riddle to solve but a dwelling to inhabit.
Faith, for me, is not a creed; it’s correspondence — an ongoing letter between the seen and the unseen.
Each influence adds an accent to the same voice, each practice a rhythm in the same heartbeat.
Together, they form the luminous thread — the continuous current of divine curiosity running through everything I touch, read, and dream.
🌿 In Closing
Maybe we’re all remembering the same story, translated through our own languages of longing.
When I look at the saints and the spirits, the angels and the ancestors, the old gods and the new prayers, I see the same truth refracted:
we are meant to be in relationship — with each other, with the earth, with what breathes through both.
I carry that knowing through the borderlands I was born into — between tongues, between histories, between the river and the city.
It teaches me to listen, because everything sacred lives in the spaces where worlds meet.
And maybe that’s the real faith I’ve been chasing all along:
not the certainty of doctrine,
but the tenderness of recognition.
🌾 Quiet Reciprocity
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