When I first started work in the Craft, as a solitary, I hadn't
much use for the God. The deity Who attracted me was the Goddess.
I remember communing with Her in candlelight, before an altar
of old telephone books covered with blue-figured silk. I felt
incorporated by Her, supported.

My concept then of the God was the God of the Christians. From
my ninth year to my thirteenth, I attended an Episcopalian church,
where everyone was too polite to save me, though I did enjoy singing
in the Youth Choir. I found the Episcopalian services pretty on
the outside, but within they seemed dry as dust. I tried to be
moved, but I ended up yawning, more taken by my walks to church
through the quiet, sun-splotched Sunday mornings than by the ritual.
The most of God I sensed among the Episcopalians was the echo
of a long-ago voice.

When I did feel a presence from the God, that presence was of
God the Father. Jesus I always saw as a person, a visionary you
had to respect; I never got in touch with the loving Christ. We
see our gods through the archetypes we've found in life, I think,
and I was reared in a patriarchal household, from which I wrenched
fight by fight over a period of years. In that household, the
looming male figure was my father, grey-haired before my birth,
the raging patriarch. Though my father and I patched up our relationship
as I started serious work as a witch, my wounds were still raw
enough I wanted nothing to do with fathers.

One of the first books I read that spoke of witchcraft as a spiritual
path was The Spiral Dance. I remember Starhawk's descriptions
of different versions of the God: the gentle, loving Blue God,
the viny Green One, and the Horned God, the Hunter. But for me
none of Starhawk's gods rang true. They seemed merely constructs.
The Blue God appeared too girlish, and for me green was female.
I felt the Horned God as the most real, but frightening and lumpen,
as if one would want to mate with a bull. I shrugged, paid lip-service
to the God in the group rituals I attended, and on my own worshipped
the Goddess.

Meanwhile, life went on. Though I had no vision of the God, I
managed to enjoy His sex. In Ireland I had a fling with a 21-year-old
boy with dyed black hair, who wore a black shirt his friend's
sister made; we drank too much ale and richocheted against the
painted stone walls of his village at 2 a.m.. Back in Seattle,
I dated a photographer, also younger than me, slender as a brown
sapling, sarcastic; I eroticized the smell of developer. I dated
men my own age, too, but I kept reverting. Take my intersection
with the surly boy, a singer in a band: I fell in love with his
pumped chest and pierced nipple, though we never once held a conversation
without arguing. Or take my e-mail flirtation, which went on too
long and was never consummated: spiky, poison-sweet, dysfunctional
as a car crash.

That one finally brought me to full stop. Some of the others had
been obsessions, too, but this one patently made no sense. He
had a girlfriend; we'd seen each other in the flesh perhaps five
times; we'd never touched. What was it about him that sent my
head spinning?

Those attachments you get, which are too strong, in the end seem
to have little to do with the persons who inspire them. We tend
to worship the gods we see in our lives, and the corollary is
that if we don't see the gods, they try harder and harder to reveal
themselves.

I came to the God slowly, through His fauns.

Luckily the gods will teach you lessons many times over. But even
when you've learned a few things, nothing is for sure. This story
I'm telling you now, none of it is "true"; it's just
the explanation I'm giving myself.

Right now for me, the God is a muse. He comes on as a lover, but
he is not a husband, nor even exactly a friend, more a capricious
mentor. Our relationship is only sometimes about satisfaction;
mainly the point is longing.

The God inspires my fiction; the characters I find most fun to
write are usually fauns. They're not portraits of boys I've known,
though on occasion they've started out to be. Often they begin
as minor players, who then take on a life of their own. The God
inspires them: fills them with His breath and sets them moving.
As they move, they draw me into the work, and their touch inspires
the other characters.

This particular God-energy seems to work better for me driving
fiction than real-life relationships. My fauns were never good
boyfriends; I don't think the Muse makes a good partner. His and
my relationship is about tension, a pleasurable discomfort that
makes me itch. I wouldn't want that tantalizing, unfulfilling
energy in an ongoing human relationship, but it feels right in
relating to a god. It keeps me writing.

But the God will not be bound only into fiction.

At a festival, I saw a boy all in leather, crouched among greenery,
looking up at me: black eyes, black hair, trembling lips with
a fringe of mustache. I knew for certain I wanted him when I saw
him take off his shirt. At the firepit, I maneuvered to sit next
to him, warmed my cold hands on his thighs.

The Aphrodite shrine was full, locked, so we found the Pan shrine.
Under a fake-fur pelt, we made love by candlelight. Something
there was intoxicating as whiskey, something glancing, a bit heart-rending.
I remembered him a long time, and I wrote him letters, though
no permanent connection came.

It was only later I saw the God was laughing at me.

In the Pan shrine? Melanie, don't you get it?

So it is often, I think. The gods don't just come when you call.
They make cameo appearances, and later you wonder why you remember
that scene.

To see Him in your life, use your peripheral vision. Some people
He comforts, some He teases; it depends on what He thinks you
need from Him. But never doubt the God is there.