Yesterday, on the Dark Moon, I prayed for all evil to be turned away.
At first glance, it certainly didn’t feel that way. My joints still ached. My left hip was still bone-on-bone. To add to it all, one of the red bumps on my nose began bleeding after my shower. My GP suspects it may be rosacea. A few weeks earlier, my doctor prescribed a cortisone cream and told me to come back in a month if it hadn’t improved. So I found myself back at the surgery, only to hear the same advice again: “Come back in a month.”
Later that afternoon, I limped to the crossroads to leave my monthly offering for Hekate’s Deipnon. At the start of my walk, I asked for a sign that She was with me. Not a specific sign, just one that was clear enough for me to know it was Her.
I had planned to leave my offering at the first woodland crossroads on my route, but another dog walker came along with a very large dog that has never liked my Jack Russell. The feeling is entirely mutual. Both dogs started barking, so I decided to keep walking.
At the next crossroads, I left my offering and limped on.
A few hundred metres further along the lane, I found a large owl feather. I thought it was the sign I had asked for.
As I walked home, another thought slowly emerged.
Perhaps averting evil doesn’t necessarily mean preventing pain.
If it did, then my prayer had seemingly gone unanswered. My hip still hurt with every step. The inflammation throughout my body didn’t magically disappear. I’m back on the carnivore diet because, for now at least, it seems to be the only way of eating that keeps the pain from becoming unbearable.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
The more compassion I seem to feel for all living beings, the more my own body appears to demand food that comes at the cost of other lives. I don’t celebrate that reality. I grieve it. Every meal is a quiet reminder that life is sustained by sacrifice in one form or another.
Perhaps averting evil was never about removing every source of suffering from our lives.
The greater evil is allowing pain and suffering to harden our hearts.
Over the past few months, life has humbled me in ways I could never have anticipated. Chronic pain strips away our illusions of control. It slows us down and teaches interdependence. It makes us more aware of the hidden burdens carried by everyone we meet.
Looking back on yesterday, I began to wonder if my prayer had, in fact, been answered.
Not because my circumstances had changed, but because something within me had.
That realisation also helped me understand something else.
Over the years, I have found comfort in many different expressions of the Divine. Sometimes it has come through Christ, sometimes through Hekate, Mother Mary, or Santa Muerte. Each encounter has met me where I was and, in its own way, called me towards greater compassion, greater humility and greater love.
Those experiences haven’t erased my questions. If anything, they have given me more of them.
But uncertainty about belief doesn’t cancel out faith.
These days, my heart is less interested in deciding which tradition is “right” than in recognising the fruits of an encounter with the Divine. Does it make me kinder? More forgiving? More compassionate? Does it help me love God and my neighbour more fully?
If the answer is yes, then I receive it with gratitude.
Because who am I to judge anyone’s experience of the Divine when that presence has graced me in so many different forms?
Looking back, I realise I received not one sign but two.
The first came in the form of a barking dog that prevented me from leaving my offering where I had intended. At the time, it felt like an inconvenience. Now I wonder if it was simply the first answer to my prayer. A gentle nudge to keep walking.
The second was the owl feather lying further along the lane, waiting where I would never have found it had my original plan worked out.
In my experience, that’s how grace often works. We pray for a sign, only to discover that the first answer is a closed path and the second is the gift waiting beyond it.
Yesterday I prayed to Hekate Alexikakos, the Averter of Evil.
This morning, I find myself wondering if the greatest evil she turned away wasn’t my pain, but the temptation to become bitter because of it.
If so, then perhaps the owl feather wasn’t the greatest sign I received that day.
Perhaps the greatest sign was returning home with a softer heart than the one I had set out with.
