Winifred Hodge Rose
Gebo / Gift
Gift is, to everyone, honor, splendor, and praise,
Support, and the acknowledgement of worth.
To every needy person it means dignity and provision,
Who would otherwise have nothing.
(Anglo- Saxon Rune poem, my rendition)
I’m offering here a perspective that may be helpful for modern Heathens: a way to understand and work with the prayer-and-response relationship that we undertake with the Deities who are closest to us, and to whom we turn, when we are in need of help. Many of us tend to over-analyze things, to doubt our intuitions, and find it hard to trust the Holy Ones and our interactions with them. This essay is offered as a way to work through such doubt and mistrust, and find a deeper source of connection with our living Deities.
Problem, Prayer, and First Response
Let’s work with a hypothetical example of a Heathen, upset and facing difficulties, who has prayed to a Heathen Deity and been given a response: an immediate sense of deep inner peace and confidence. Their inner turmoil stabilizes, and they feel stronger, more resilient. There is a sense of hope.
For simplicity, I am addressing this person as ‘you’, but of course, this is an example I am using, not actually you or any specific person.
Being a typical person living in today’s world, you immediately begin to question what happened. “Did the Deity really do anything, or am I fooling myself? Is the Deity going to ‘fix’ this problem for me, or is this wishful thinking? Is this all just my messed-up psyche? Should I accept what I think happened, or not trust it? Am I totally naïve if I do trust it? Was I really promised anything, or is this all fairy-dust?” And on and on.
So, you have a choice now: to accept or reject the belief that your prayer has received a response from the Deity, and proceed accordingly.
The demands of this world we live in often force us to examine everything, to distrust sources of knowledge and other mental / spiritual inputs, to second-guess everything and psychoanalyze ourselves and everybody else. We feel like we can’t trust anything, not even our minds and souls and their perceptions, and are fools or naive if we do.
This is a really dysfunctional space within which to try to grow relationships with anyone–human, Deity, other kinds of spirits. Without trust and faith, it’s really hard to create a deep and stable relationship of any kind.
The phrase ‘a leap of faith’ is germane here: faith and trust, just like love, need to be acts, decisions, stances that we take, and not only that, we need to commit to maintaining them over time. They are not just ‘feelings’ or vague states of mind that we somehow fall into. We have to work at them, accept their risks, take the rewards on faith and see what happens.
A Cost-Benefit Analysis
Here’s one technique that can be used when one falls into a state of second-guessing, hyper-analysis, distrust about a spiritual experience: a cost-benefit analysis. This is designed for today’s analyze-everything-to-death culture! Let’s analyze ‘your’ experience this way.
1) You are in an upset state, your inner environment is roiled up and you are suffering.
2) You call on your trusted Deity, and they respond.
3) Their response is of great value to you, just what you need. Your inner self is comforted and stabilized, and you shift off the falling-apart trajectory, back into a stabilized position.
4) This is the ‘benefit’: your prayer answered, your inner self stabilized, your trust in your Deity and your relationship with them is enhanced.
5) Now, what is the ‘cost’? There are two parts to this: (a) the ‘cost’ if you accept the answer to your prayer in trust, and (b) the ‘cost’ if you refuse to accept it.
5 (a) The potential cost of accepting the answer to the prayer as given, is that any assurances you might have received could turn out to be inaccurate; things don’t work out the way you think you were told that they would. Trust fails, or seems to, and this is an extremely painful position to be in. Many people would rather avoid it by never trusting in the first place, thus, they don’t want to trust deep spiritual contact with Deities or other spirits. This ‘cost’ involves loss of trust.
5 (b) The cost of refusing to accept the answer to your prayer, second-guessing and analyzing it to death, is of course that you remain in the upset and disrupted state that started the whole process, and perhaps even more upset. No help is available to you, because you refuse to accept it. This ‘cost’ involves closing yourself off from potential support.
6) Now let’s weigh these costs and benefits against each other, and see which one ‘wins.’ To do this, we need a closer look at the true nature of the benefit, and we need to take into account ‘amortization,’ or the effects of Time on the costs and benefits. In doing so, we may come to a deeper understanding of the effects of prayer.
Weighing the Benefits and Costs
7) The immediate benefit you receive from your Deity is powerful and deep: inner reassurance, stability, vindication of trust, strengthening of this divine relationship. This is the true, undeniable benefit, occurring in the sacred Now of lived and living experience. To maintain this benefit, all you need to do is accept it. I would place a very high value on this benefit.
7 (a) The potential cost of a failure of trust is a ‘future’ cost. You don’t know yet what will happen in the future about your difficulty; you don’t know how things will work out. If you focus on this future desire, insist on ironclad guarantees, if you imagine how you want it to be and demand that very thing, or spend your time and energy fearing that it won’t happen, then what?
Your present benefit, your inner state of peace and trust, is disturbed and lost, and you have likewise not gained what you want in the future, because you’re not there yet. Your benefit of inner peace in the Now has dissolved, and your cost of being upset about possible futures is all that’s left. ‘Cost’ wins this game, benefit loses.
7 (b) Refusing to accept the gift of the Deity, the answer to the prayer, means that the benefit is never realized, it never happens. Cost wins all, benefit zero.
Learning from this
Here’s how I wrap this up, the lesson I myself take from this analysis and try to apply in my life. Answer to prayer is in the Now; it is a state outside our normal churn of worries, fears, resentments, demands, that focus on the future and the past. We need to learn to step into this present-state, to place our deep awareness in this Now, which is suffused with the blended powers and qualities of the Deity and of ourself, as the result of our prayer and our trust in the response.
Runic Wisdom
This blended power, the result of our prayer, is the Great Gift, Gebo, that is given in response to Need / Nauthiz. Look: just a small adjustment of the runic lines turns Need / Nauthiz into Gift / Gebo. Nauthiz, the rune of need and necessity, is one-legged, askew, easy to throw off-balance: we face things alone, standing on one leg. Gebo, the rune of gifts and reciprocity, is solid, balanced, with a stable base, reaching to the heights: we face things with the strength of a God/dess stabilizing and empowering our own abilities.
(The Nauthiz rune is like a capital I with a short, slanted line across the center of it. The Gebo-rune is shaped like a capital X. In rune-work, we can think of Gebo’s shape not as two lines crossing each other, but as two shapes, > and <, converging upon each other at a point in the middle. This indicates the reciprocity, the sharing and giving, between two persons or beings meeting face-to-face at the middle point.)
This Gebo-Gift is what prayer and response to prayer truly is, and taking the stance of Gebo during deep, serious prayer when we are facing a problem, is a good reminder of it! And what do we give the Deity in return, gift for a gift? The very best offerings: our trust, friendship, attention, and cooperation with their purposes in Midgard. When we pray in Gebo-stance, we commit to working in partnership with the Deities.
As we stand, together with our Deity, within the Great Gift in the stance of power, our strength, personal power, determination, wisdom, foresight are enhanced. We become better able to act on our own behalf, whether that involves bringing about the solution we want ourselves, finding a different solution, realizing this wasn’t what we actually needed anyway, or having the strength to accept things as they are, if that is required of us.
We can do this through the power of the Gift, Gebo: our prayer, Deity’s response, stepping into this space we and Deity have created through this process, and taking action, in partnership with Deity, from this base of power. This is one effective way of understanding Heathen prayer when we are in need of help.