Two Chairs at the Table: Working With a God, Working For One

Stay awhile. We have talked about being called to a door, and about being claimed by a hand that was on your life before you could read it. Tonight the question is the one that comes after both of those, the one people usually do not know they are asking until the relationship starts hurting. Once the god is in your life, where do you sit. Because there are two chairs at that table, and they are not the same chair, and most of the pain I have watched good people take in this work came from sitting in one while insisting they were in the other. You can work for a god. You can work with a god. What you cannot do is sign one contract and demand the terms of the other, and then call the wreckage a mystery.

Working for is the older chair, and the sterner one, and do not let anyone sell it to you as the lesser devotion. To work for a god is to serve. The honor flows upward. The offerings are gifts, not payments. The question in that chair, every morning of your life, is not what do I get, it is what is asked of me, and the reward, when there is one, is not outcomes. The reward is nearness. It is being kept. It is the right to stand close to something vast and be found acceptable in the standing. The devotee does not negotiate the menu. The devotee keeps the altar, keeps the fasts, keeps the feast days in years when the harvest of their own life is thin, and calls it privilege, because it is one. I have known servants of gods who would not trade their chair for a throne, and I have learned not to argue with them. There is a kind of strength in obedience freely chosen that the modern world has forgotten how to pronounce, and it shows in their faces. They are not waiting for anything. They have already been given the thing itself.

Working with is the other chair, and it is real, and it is rarer than the internet believes. To work with a god is to stand in an alliance. Respect flows in both directions. Negotiation is not blasphemy in that chair; it is the work. You bring your judgment, your limits, your own road, and they stay on the table, and the being brings aims of its own that are older than your language, and the two of you build something neither would have built alone. But hear the part the partnership people skip. An ally is not an employee of yours, and he is not a life coach with better special effects. His wars become weather in your life. His seasons set some of yours. There will be meetings you did not schedule, in years you had other plans for, and the partnership will ask things of you that pure devotion would have asked too, the only difference being that you are allowed to ask why, and sometimes, if the why is good, to say not that way, this way, and be heard. That chair exists. I have sat in it. But it is a chair for adults, and it is earned over years of kept promises, and nobody is issued it for having a strong personality and a ring light.

Now the two wreckages, because I promised you I would not varnish anything at this fire. The first wreckage is the devotee with a ledger. I sat with a man once who served his god the way a man pays a landlord. The offerings were exact and resentful, and he could tell you, to the candle, what he had spent and what he was owed, and when the return did not arrive on his schedule he shook his fist at heaven like a customer at a counter. He was not in the wrong chair because he served. He was in the wrong chair because he invoiced. Devotion with a ledger is not devotion. It is a purchase wearing devotion’s clothes, and it rots the same way every purchase rots when the goods disappoint. The second wreckage is the partner who cannot hear no. She called it a partnership, and what she meant was a staff. The god was welcome in her life on the days he advanced her plans, and a superstition on the days he interrupted them, and when he finally went quiet, the way great beings do when they discover they have been hired, she called his silence abandonment. It was not abandonment. It was a resignation. You cannot manage a god, and the ones who try end up managing an empty room and calling the echo by his name.

So learn to tell which chair you are in, and learn it by the tests, not by the title you prefer. If you keep score, you are not devoted; you are invoicing, and you would be happier honest about it. If you cannot hear no, you are not a partner; you are a customer with candles. If the relationship only exists on the days you need something, it is neither chair, and the word for it is usage, and beings older than mountains can smell usage the way you can smell smoke in a house. And if you do not know which chair you are in, ask the relationship one question and listen like your life depends on it, because it might. What happens here when I bring nothing. The devotee is kept. The partner is consulted. The user is ignored, and the silence that follows is the most honest answer they will ever get.

One more thing before the fire goes down, because the old ones in my life insisted on it and they were right. The chairs can change, over years, in either direction, and a house can hold both at once. A partnership kept faithfully for a decade can deepen into a devotion the person would once have sworn they were incapable of, and I have watched proud people kneel at last and call it relief. A devotion carried long and well can ripen into a trust where the god begins to ask, and listen, and lean on the human’s particular sight the way you lean on an old friend who knows a road you do not. And a person may work for one being and with another, in the same life, in the same house, without contradiction, so long as they never confuse the contracts, because confusing the contracts is the whole of the injury. Know your chair. Keep its terms like they are holy, because they are. The gods can always tell which chair you are sitting in, friend. The only one who is ever fooled is you.