Introduction

I can remember it, clear as can be, the first time I encountered Dungeons and Dragons.  Well, clear as can be expected.  Amazing what gaps appear in your life-data after three and a half decades.

I was in fifth grade, and it was the last year of the 1970s.  We were living in London, where my Dad was working for the Voice of America, which broadcast shortwave news and entertainment to the world.  As a correspondent, his work called for him to do a fair amount of world travel, which resulted in his having a mix of friends scattered all across the planet.   

One of those friends worked for the Associated Press, and because his work tended to put him in danger zones, his kids were attending a Hogwartsesque boarding school in downtown London.  Seriously.  It was near Big Ben, and right across the street from Diagon Alley.

Every once in a while, my folks would invite the boys...Andy and Chrisso...out to Golders Green, a bucolic planned community where we lived in a little semidetached.  That's English for "townhouse," kids.  They'd stay with us, and as they were years older and wilder, they'd introduce us to what was actually going on in the world.

One of them...Lord help me, but I can't remember which...brought a book with him when he came out to stay, a recent acquisition.  It was the Monster Manual, one of the three rulebooks that made up the first edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.  I found him flipping through it, and asked to look at it.

It was striking and arcane, an alphabetical dictionary of wild and exotic creatures, and it was like catnip to my preadolescent mind.   "It's for a new game that people are playing now," he said.  A game?  A game with a huge book full of monsters?  No board?  No dice?  How could you do that?

He grinned about the dice part, and then carefully explained it to me.  Some players pretended to be someone, a warrior or a sorcerer, wielding magic or a mighty blade.   One player would lead all of the other players through an adventure, battling terrible creatures and gathering treasure.

There were things called "hit points," that determined how strong a person or creature was.  There were charts and graphs and tables, and the whole thing seemed terribly complex and mysterious and utterly fascinating.  It was like telling a story, and being part of a long narrative daydream, and being with your friends, all rolled into one.

It was like no game I'd ever seen, or even ever thought of.

Being a beneficent sort, he let me borrow the book while he was there.  And so that night, I read the Monster Manual cover to cover, completely fascinated.  When he left, off to do the terribly grown up things that teenagers in British boarding schools did, the Monster Manual stuck in my head.

I wanted to play it.  But it was a game that required dice and three large hardback books, and my meager allowance meant that it would take a while to get me those things.   In the interim, I did what kids used to do in the days before the interwebs taught us that we should always have what we want instantly:  I made up my own game.  "Simple D&D," I called it.

I busied myself about making a rulebook, and a manual of monsters.

It was...er...simple.  There were monsters with hit points, which I drew and described in my own short manual.   There were weapons that did damage.  There were characters with hit points.  There were maps and dungeons.  Then, you told the story, and you battled.  There weren't any charts or armor classes or dexterity modifiers.  It was just hit points.  Period.

I played with my little brother, and most of the time we actually had fun and didn't end up fighting.  Most of the time.  

I played with my friends, for a little while.

And then Christmas came, and my wheedling and whimpering for the rulebooks and the dice began to pay off.  The Monster Manual came first...not that was enough to let you play the game, not really, but it was just so cool.  Then, together, the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide and dice, bought with all of my birthday money.  

I began playing the real thing with friends, mostly with my buddy Mark from up the street, and my friend Eric.  

My characters were all fighters at first, I think partially because I had no luck with dice, and partially because at four-eight and about seventy pounds, I liked to feel the manliness.  They were all inspired by the Narnia books, the fantasy novels that had defined my childhood and subtly inspired my faith.

The mighty Caspian gave way to Caspian the Second, following an unfortunate incident with a troll.  Who gave way to Caspian the Third, who managed not to die for a couple of years worth of gaming, finally reaching the point where he was the grizzled lord of a small stronghold, mighty and magical two-handed sword slung on his back.  I think it was a plus five something-or-other, named Stormflinger or Excalifleur or something flagrantly derivative like that.

As I got older, my network of gaming friends grew.  By the time I was in seventh grade, I found myself riding double decker buses around London to see my friends and get to gaming.  Being a kid is so much more fun when you can go anywhere you want whenever you want without mom or dad having to drive you.

I’d make my way to the homes of the spawn of American expats and diplomats, gathering to game in the basements of tony brownstones in St. John’s Wood.  

Or, rather, that was where we were physically.  In our mutual storytelling, we were on an entirely different plane of reality.

It was just an amazing way to spend hours and hours with people, immersed in a world of shared imagination.  It was awesome.

In 1982, we returned to the United States, and I went into middle school as the new kid.  Being introverted, it took me a while, but eventually I found a circle of people who were less interested in “borrowing” my lunch money and more interested in the things I enjoyed.

Meaning, gamers.  We’d gather at my house for the multi-hour sessions of AD&D, or the nuclear post-apocalyptic variant Gamma World.  And for the first time, there were girls playing too, included in as part of a circle of gamer friends.  That was unquestionably a significant improvement over the prior state of affairs, although it did prove a little distracting.

But something else happened when I returned to the United States.  I became aware, as I had not been in England, that there were people out there who hated Dungeons and Dragons.  They were afraid of it.  They were loudly, aggressively, intensely against it.

And they were Christians, in the most loud, aggressive, and intense way one can call oneself Christian.

I simply could not understand that.  I’d been a Christian all my young life, attending church all over the world.  I’d gotten my first bible when I was confirmed, which I promptly read in its entirety.   I’d attended Sunday School, and learned about the teachings of Jesus, which I’d then read for myself.  Yes, I was questioning, and yes there were things I struggled with in my early adolescence.  But I was down with Jesus, no question, 100%.  

I could see nothing, nothing at all in what he lived and taught, that would lead to a sane person to the conclusions about role playing gaming that my co-religionists were loudly proclaiming.  And Lord have mercy, were they proclaiming.

It was demonic!  It was the gateway to the occult!  It was warping the minds of our youth, and turning them from Jesus!  It was the 1980s, remember.  The Moral Majority was on the rise, spreading with a fervor that bordered on hysteria through the panicky minds of stressed suburban parents.  

Nothing like today.  Not at all.  Ahem.

Not a single one of these people had ever played the game.  Not one.  They hated it anyway.  And they obviously hadn’t read C.S. Lewis, either, books filled with imagination and wonder and the subtle heart of the the faith. They probably hated them, too.  They were angry, and frightened, and ignorant, and they were poisoning the name of Jesus for others by coloring it with their hate.

I just couldn’t process this.  Here, a game that taught imagination and fostered community, a game that let us explore what it might be to be a different person...and this was somehow wrong?  How could you for a moment believe that imagining yourself as someone different from who you are was antithetical to Christianity?  Isn’t that the whole point of our faith?  If you can’t imagine yourself ever being different, real Kingdom repentance is just not possible.

Because I’d spent my childhood sheltered in churches that cared about justice and service and grace, and were both thoughtful and open, it was one of the first times I realized that people who call themselves Christian could be evil.

It would not be the last.

That, in part, is the inspiration for this book.  I feel, as someone who has dedicated his life to following Jesus and teaching others about his path, that perhaps it is time for someone to write a love letter to D&D on behalf of the church.  One which says, you know what, I’m sorry if I was stupid.  And you’re awesome.

Because it is awesome, and it can be the friend of a maturing faith.

Maybe it’s been done already.  Most likely it has.  “Nothing new under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes says.  But even so, I haven’t done it, and I’d like to.  So that’s part of the “why” of this little tome.

The other inspiration for this lil’ book came a couple of years back, after I discovered and blogged about a California based parachurch organization called the Bethel School for Supernatural Ministry.

Really.  That’s what it’s called.  Google it.

It was one of those random internet connections, stumbled upon, but it amazed me.  It was sorta-kinda pentecostal, and big into spiritual gifts.  Amazing, magical, supernatural things were happening in the world, they said, and for only a couple of thousand bucks and a few weeks of your time, you too could learn to harness “the prophetic,” meaning the power of God.

Here I was, right out of seminary, and I’d learned none of that.  Oh, I’d learned about the Bible in depth, and theology, and how to counsel and help lead communities.  But I’d never been taught the “Flame Tunnel.”  I’d never had sparkles fall from the sky during a worship service.  I did not know the magic words Sozo and Zanzibar.  Well, not “Zanzibar,” but the first one was definitely part of the magic. 

So I wrote a blog post, one that in retrospect was perhaps overly snarky.  The Bethel School for Supernatural Ministry, I discovered after further research, isn’t evil. They do not teach hate, or cruelty.  I reserve my anger for spiritual teachers who are cruel and/or monstrous.  I don’t think it’s quite magic in the way it thinks it is, just good ol’ shamanic fervor, the kind of thing you learn about in anthro classes.  

In that post, I compared the assertions of that community to the spells I’d not learned in seminary.  “Why not Flame Strike,” I said.  “I only know the less showy spells.”  And then I listed the “less showy spells,” going to my old Player’s Handbook and finding the spells in the Cleric section that I actually sorta kinda knew how to cast.

As I read through the descriptions, I found myself struck by how closely my own actual skillset matched the ways those spells were intended to be cast.  Meaning I suddenly realized, you know what, I can really do some of this stuff.  

Not pretend.  I can really do it.  

Without too much conceptual stretching, I could see how I...well...kind of was a level five Presbyterian Cleric.  

Which I am not, of course.  

I’m level eight now.

The idea has popped and hummed along in my subconscious these last few years, surfacing now and again.  Why not write a book for the acolytes and fellow clerics who share my love of the game?  Why not write a book for those Jesus folk who have delighted in the game, and might enjoy reading a real-faith-and-AD&D mashup?  Talk about the Way in terms of being a Cleric, as if it were part of this world and part of the gaming world, as if it were real and you were teaching it.  

And include a spellbook.  I’d have to include a spellbook.  What’s the point of knowing about the Deep Magic from Before the Dawn of Time if you can’t share it?

So that’s what you’ve got right here.  It’s based on original AD&D rules, those old books from the late 1970s.  I know gaming has come a ways since then.  There are other editions, and rules upon rules upon rules.  

But when my kids reached the age I was when I first played, it was those old and well-worn manuals that I brought out on a summer day.  It was the Monster Manual, that very same one I bought as a boy, that I shared with them, and said: do you guys want to play this game?

Of course they did.

And so we did play, the boys and I, dad as the DM, they caught up in the adventure. They’re among some of the best dad-and-son times I’ve spent with my guys, which I cherish as they’re rapidly growing up.  So, yeah, I’m kind of obligated to use the old school rules.  Just out of gratitude.

This might prove be the single geekiest book in all of Christendom.  But we all have to aspire to something, right?

So for you, who have gotten this far, enjoy.  And keep on leveling up.

Level Four Spells: Detect Lie

Oh, but this one is useful.

Lies and falsehoods are things some think you'd never encounter when you're deep into the thickets of our Order.  We walk the Way, the Truth, and the Life, or so the Master taught.  Surely falsehood isn't something we have to deal with regularly.

And if you believe that, I have a plus twelve Elvish Mace of Mental Clarity you might be interested in buying.  Just hold still while I hit you in the head with it.

Lies and falsehood are an inescapable and unfortunate part of our reality.  Humans and dwarves and elves, you name it, they'll twist and bend reality to serve their interests as often as not.  They will proudly and certainly declare something to be so, even when it is not.  Sometimes, they'll do so reflexively, without even thinking about it.  Sometimes, they'll do so seductively, speaking half-truths to charm and delight you.

Sometimes they won't even know they're lying, as they confidently repeat a lie they've heard told them by a source they've mistakenly trusted.

However that lie comes, and in whatever form it comes, you need to know that it's a falsehood.  As Christian Clerics, our primary duty is to the Deep Real, that fundamental Truth that rests within, under, and above what we can experience in this plane.

Lies tear at that truth.  Lies make it harder for that truth to be expressed.  The lie is the enemy of the Good, because it is not real.

Understand, lying is very different from having hope or being guided by faith, which both focus on the realm of the not-yet-realized real.  The lie asserts that something has been when it has not.  It misspeaks, and it does so by intention.

As such, the Lie is the primary tool of the dark alignments, which in their desire for power hate the Real.  Lawful Evil-tending folks will use them to justify their dark power, integrating carefully crafted falsehoods into their tightly woven systems of control.  Chaotic evil-tending folks will lie the way they live, sloppily, inconsistently, and with wild and manipulative abandon.  Truth?  What does it matter so long as they're getting what they desire?  The neutral evil folk?  They'll do both.

And here's the thing.  Not just evil beings lie.  Neutrals will do it.  Even those committed to the Good will stumble on occasion.  You can't trust a Detect Alignment spell to work in place of this one.

You will be lied to.  Period.  Even if you're a Cleric.  Sometimes especially because you're a cleric.  If you can't tell when another Player Character is spinning out something that is not grounded in the Real, you're going to be in a world of hurt.

So how do you cast Detect Lie?  Like Know Alignment, Detect Evil, and most spells of discernment, it requires a decent wisdom score to cast effectively.  The cast of Detect Lie requires you to exercise that wisdom, and to be aware of of the warp and woof of the fabric of the material plane as it shifts around you.  Know the Real.  Be a part of it.  The more you've intentionally committed yourself to engaging with the work of our Maker, the more easily you're going to be able to pitch this spell out there.

When casting Detect Lie, what you're really doing two things.  First, you are looking at an assertion relative to the fabric of reality around you.  Does it seamlessly integrate with the Real?  Does it connect with things, and relate to others, in a way that reflects the perceptions and intuitions that rise from wisdom?  If it does, then you're fine.  If a statement stands in peculiar disjuncture from the Real, singing disharmoniously with what wisdom can discern, it is likely a falsehood.

Second, you're testing its power orientation.  What does that mean?  It means you're looking out at the network of relationships you encounter, and asking: Does the statement seem to primarily serve the power of the individual or group making that claim?  Not all such statements are false, but remember: lies are inherently evil, and evil is about individuals and systems seeking self-serving power.

When an assertion does not fit easily into the real, and seems to primarily serve only the material interests of an individual or group, it is typically a lie.

An example:  A few years back I found myself working in a monastery alongside a particularly charming cleric who was filled with stories about his endless escapades in goblin country.  He'd spin out tales about his battles with entire armies of goblins, about how he'd vanquished one goblin shaman after another.  His adventures starred him as the noble hero or suffering victim, and the battles he'd claimed he'd fought had gathered him a small following of acolytes.

I didn't bother with Detect Lie at first, but as the stories continued and grew wilder and wilder and his influence spread, I realized that perhaps that might be a good idea.  His statements failed both aspects of the casting.  Time and time again, the spell indicated falsehood. Not always.  But mostly.

I began to be more cautious around him, and was more careful with the gold in the monastery treasure room, and more wary about his advice.  Eventually, this cleric made the mistake of telling one of his wild stories in front of a baroness whose child he falsely claimed to have rescued from a goblin raiding party.  He ended up humiliated, and had to serve penance as her hireling for a while.  Quite the mess.

Detect Lie has another, equally important use, one that Christian Clerics need to regularly practice.  You don't just cast Detect Lie on others.  You need to regularly and systematically cast it on yourself.

The reason for this is simple.  Falling away from the True and the Good can happen to any of us.  Lies are potent, and lies are seductive, and the most dangerous lies are the ones that we want to believe.

There will be times when you want to believe something so desperately that you'll do almost anything in your power to ignore the truth.  There will be times when you've become so personally vested in a thing that you'll craft the most elegant network of interlaced falsehoods to prop that thing up.

Casting Detect Lie on yourself is a ward against the terrible, soul-rending choices you'll make if you fall into that trap.  It's a basic part of the discipline of our Order, something we need to attend to regularly if we want to maintain the integrity of our vocation.

Finally, and this should go without saying, remember that while Detect Lie is reversible, and can allow you to utter totally robust falsehoods, such a casting draws power from Baalzebul, the dark Lord of Lies himself.  There are plenty of fallen clerics out there perfectly willing to cast Undetectable Lies on a regular basis, lies that tear their followers further and further away from the Deep Spell and the Real.

I've seen this happen, and it does terrible and ugly things.  Such communities live in a land of shadows and fear.

So even though we wish we didn't have to know this one, learn it.  Practice it.  Because the Truth matters to the Good.

Level Three Spells: Speak with the Dead

This spell is a specialty of mine, one I can cast well above the limits of my eight levels.  I've focused on vigorously and aggressively on developing this spell over my years of pursuit the Way, primarily because it is one that's a particular requirement of my own Presbyterian Order.

I really do commend it to you.  The Dead hold knowledge that we Living need.  They are, in many ways, the key to successful living...and a vital part of the Way.

Now, I know what you're thinking.  Or, rather, I know what you're visualizing.  It's a circle of candles in a darkened room, with a cloying pall of strange incense and arcane mumblings humming through the eldritch light.  In the center of the room lies a dessicated corpse that may or may not have been human.  The spell is cast, and the corpse strains, moaning out a foreboding answer to an unspeakable question.

Either that, or you see Billy Crystal working some bellows, and hey presto, "To blave," says the Mostly Dead Cary Elwes.  Or words to that general effect.

But in this branch of the material plane, finding the answers that dwell in the souls of the dead takes on a rather different form.

It's called reading.

Yeah.  It's just been right there in front of you.  Because the knowledge and wisdom and answers of so many long passed are etched onto the pages of thousands upon thousands of books.  They're downloadable to your Kindle.  They can be found in your library.   In those words, some from the recently passed, some from souls that have been gone for thousands upon thousands of years, you'll find an amazingly rich resource of answers.

Within the Presbyterian Order, we place a great amount of emphasis on this particular spell.  We use it to study and interpret the Rule Book, of course, which is filled with voices that go back sometimes even deeper than recorded history.  The long passed souls who helped craft that book are well worth listening to, because they...as we...had their ears open to our Maker.  Listening carefully to their voices teaches us about the Master and how to make our whole lives reflect that Good Spell he came to teach.

But we also make a point of engaging with the thousands of fellow travelers who have walked the Way before us, the Patriarchs and Saints and Matriarchs who have left us with the echo of their wisdom.  Listening to those voices really can make a difference.  Standing in relationship to those souls and their teachings really can give you the answers you need.

To get those answers, though, you need to know the difference between just plain ol' reading and really casting a potent Speaking with the Dead spell.

There are three key differences.   The first has to do with what you are reading.  If you stick only with a particular genre, or only with whatever is selling well, or only with writers who tell you Seven Ways You Can Be [Fill In The Blank,] you're not going to get anywhere.  Oh, those books are fine, in that they sell a whole bunch.  Nothing wrong with reading for fun.  But if you stick with the book of the hour, you don't stretch yourself back to other times or other ways of thinking.  They don't expand you.  They don't enrich you.

Plus, generally speaking, they're written by living people.  Those authors are your contemporaries, the people formed by the same culture and set of cultural expectations that shaped you.  Oh, you should read current folks, sure.  Read the cutting edge.  Read some page turning trash now and again.

But to cast Speak with the Dead, you need to let yourself read wildly and wantonly, both those writers present and those whose voices sound from deep in the past.

The second has to do with where you are as you're reading.  Well, I'm sitting right here reading, you say, knowing full well that's not what I meant.   I mean, are you actually listening to what that soul is saying, or are you listening only to yourself?

If you're listening to yourself, you'll learn nothing but what you already know.  You'll project your own biases and assumptions into the words before you, and amazingly enough, you'll come out absolutely certain that the individual who wrote it believed exactly what you believe.  This feels great, but it invariably gets us into trouble.  We learn nothing.

If you're really Speaking with the Dead, though, you're really open to who that person was when they lived and breathed and walked the world.    You understand why they said what they said, knowing it from tone and context and the way they play with language.  You hear their voices.  You start to know them, as you'd know those around you.

Those voices, once you're really hearing them, can change your life.  They can give you answers to questions that are tearing you apart.  They can save your soul.

Like, say, my own reading of a particular bare knuckled Scots cleric.  Over the years, I came to know him, the ferocity of his spirit, and how deeply he understood how to overcome suffering.  When I found myself caught in a trap set by a particularly devilish incubus a few years back, and my mind was reeling, and there were no answers to be found, I knew him well enough to find the key out of the trap hiding in his poetry.

It wasn't data he gave me.  It was a far deeper answer, the kind that rises up behind the words when you really know a person.  Was it "just for me?"  No.  But it was the answer I needed, and I would never ever have found it if I'd been relying only on my own abilities or knowledge.

The third key difference relates to the second.  The relationships you establish when you really listen to the voices of those who have gone before are not short term relationships.  As with so many of the spells cast by Clerics of our order, they have to be cast and recast.  You have to Speak with the Dead again and again, making it a regular part of your discipline.  You have to get to know those who have  come before.  Know them as you know your friends, as you know the living.

And in listening to them, you'll find yourself with richer and better answers to those questions that vex you.

So crack that book.  Read widely and deeply.  Respect the souls you encounter.  And know them as your teachers.

Speak with the Dead.  It's a great way to spend an evening.

Level Three Spells: Remove Curse

This one is a tough one, and of the spells I've learned to cast, it has the highest fail rate.  Perhaps others are better at it than I am, but man, is this one tough.

That's not because it is unworthy.  It's just really, really hard, and its success is inherently not guaranteed.

Curses, as we know, rest heavy on this world.  Individual souls, blighted communities, and entire cultures can be utterly consumed by them.  Sometimes, there are slighted Romani magic users involved.  Those curses tend to involve percussive flatulence in the presence of particularly attractive members of the opposite sex.  But usually, the curses we encounter in this branch of the material plane are of a rather different nature.

Individually, we are controlled by the curses of addiction and deep seated and taught hatreds.  We are cursed by anxieties that were beaten into us as children, and fears that keep us from fulfilling our created purpose.  We are devoured by resentments and regrets, that magnify themselves and reinforce themselves until we find that they have become our defining feature, the core around which our whole self revolves.

Those curses can blight an entire existence.  They become our consuming madness.

As communities and cultures, our curses run equally deep.  We become consumed by the competitive desire for possessions.  We can become blind to our impact on the world around us, tearing at the very world that sustains us.  We can turn our hearts towards a fierce and angry collective selfishness, endlessly at war with neighboring cultures whose difference frightens us.

From those curses come poverty and war and the despoiling of creation, and they've rested heavy on humankind for millennia.

Removing those curses is a particularly hard thing for two reasons.

First, the casting of Remove Curse is a cast of presence.  It takes sustained and relentless casting over years before the power of a curse can be removed.  You cast it, you recast it, and you cast it again, every single time you come into encounter with it.  If cast correctly, your whole life is the casting.

That casting largely involves projecting into the individual or the culture a clear and deep vision of what life without the burden of that curse will look like.  That reality is already known to our Maker, of course, and that's where the power of the casting comes from.  "I have a Dream," as one High Priest once cast it.

But it doesn't just automatically stick.  It takes iteration and reiteration, affirmation and reaffirmation.  You have to be there, and stay there, and speak that unmanifested Deep truth over and over again.  Sometimes you have to say it with ferocity.  Sometimes with gentleness.  Sometimes with both.  You live it.

And sometimes it works.

When I first became a Cleric...formally, that is...much of my first few years of clerichood involved casting Remove Curse over and over again.

I'd rolled a pair of ones on that first gathering, and the community that I found myself cast into was tiny and fearful and angry.  Tiny was fine.  I was cool with tiny.  The fearful and angry?  Not so much.  The triple curses of Lingering Distrust and Despair and Whispering Angry Rumor, cast long ago on the fellowship by a vampiric cleric, they'd done their damage.

They had kept the gathering isolated from the world, and so...with some help from other experienced Clerics who knew the spell better than I...we hit that church with a sustained Remove Curse.  It took almost two years to cast.  Coupled with my own repeated casts of Remove Fear, the pall lifted.

It worked, for a while.  There was hope. There was promise.  They began to feel the possibility of a life lived towards a new reality.  It began to become a new reality.

The second reason Remove Curse is so hard, though, is the doozy.  It can't be cast on an individual or a group unless they want it cast.

Hear that again: you can't lift a curse from someone who doesn't want you to lift it.

That's the hardest part of being a Christian Cleric.  From your compassion, you want to take away all of the curses you see out there.  You want to lift that suffering, to break that addiction, to hearten that broken soul, to undo that injustice.

But unless they want things to be different, unless they want to be changed, you can do nothing.

That's tremendously difficult, because curses draw their deepest power from their connection to our sense of identity.  They become us.  Or, rather, we stop being able to understand ourselves as having any existence outside of those curses.

I will always be alone.  I will always yield to my addictions.  I will never come to terms with my loss.

A curse seeks to draw its victim into a dark future, blighting their present with a falsely fatalistic vision of themselves.

And as hard as that is, curses cast over communities are even harder.  They become the glue that creates common identity and a sense of belonging.  They become the very essence of what unites a group.

It can be overwhelming, honestly.  It can feel impossible.

But with our Maker, nothing is impossible.  Hard?  Sure.  But it's worth the effort.

Because removing the great curse is why our Master taught us in the first place.

Level Three Spells: Prayer

So here you are, now level five, and you're itching for some new things to try.

This one is a basic, fundamental, and essential spell, one that's absolutely necessary and yet remarkably easy to do wrong or to overlook.  It's the most vital of the level three spells, and so here I offer it to you:  Prayer.

And you say, what?  Seriously?  Again with the lame spells?  I mean, of course you know how to pray.  It's the simplest possible thing.  Just ask for something, badda boom, badda bing, in the name of the Master, Amen.

That's what we like to think, anyway.

But Prayer is one of the most significant and important spells you can learn how to cast, and it's the first level three spell any Christian Cleric should attempt to master.  In fact, this one should be a part of your repertoire even before you're particularly good at casting it.  It's something you've been trying since you were first an Acolyte.  If you haven't been practicing it, honestly, you'd never have gotten this far.  And that practice starts paying off here.

It's not that you've not been praying.  But you've not really noticed what Prayer does until this point.

Oh, there are many folks who doubt that it adds value.  Why not a third level spell that really impresses?  Sure, Prayer doesn't have the same impact on the Material Plane as Animate Dead.  Where are the shambling moaning half-living minions there to do your every bidding?  I want my zombie army!   I've known plenty of pastors who went with Animate Dead instead of Prayer, and while their churches got huge, they weren't the kind of places you'd want to spend time.  Every member seemed more interested in eating your brains than in sharing the Good News.  Stay away from those churches, my friends.

There are other folks who question whether it does anything at all, typically the fighters and rogues who sniff and make some comment about hokey religions and good blasters.

Prayer is different, and Prayer is effective...so long as you know what it actually does.

What Prayer does...beyond the requisite "plus one" to everything that you do...is cast your entire life into the context of that Prayer.  It changes the entire flavor of your existence, orienting you and directing your energies in ways that they would not be directed were you not regularly using it.  Like Chant, it modifies the way you feel, but it sticks around.

A day begun with a cast of Prayer feels different.  You notice different things.  You experience the world differently.  You make different choices.  You are aware of our Maker in ways you might not be.

That makes it a remarkably potent agent in the transformation of your life.  Subtle, yes.  But it is absolutely effective.

The great thing about a cast of Prayer is that it can be done in a wide variety and range of ways.  Prayer can be conversational or a repeated string of invocations.  It can be physically expressed through dance, or sung.  It does not have to be particularly complicated, and it does not have to be long.

In fact, it helps if it is not long.  Too many folks who aspire to be part of the Clerichood of All Believers approach prayer as if it is a long laundry list of everything they happen to want.  O Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz, as St. Janis used to sing.  But Prayer is not that.  It's not a spell about us getting what we want.  So long as we cast it that way, our casts will fail.

It's a spell that connects us with our Creator.  It's not the simple, selfish magic that brings us what we desire.  It changes our desire.

The point when we recognize this is the point when the spell starts to really have power.

The best and most productive Prayer of all, as I've found it, is the one that the Master taught all of us.  Simple, elegant, all-encompassing, it's both easy to recall and easy to cast.  I begin pretty much every day with it, before I get out of bed.  I cast it during the day as well, particularly as things grow challenging or stressful.

For example, almost every day as I walk my familiar (Dog, AC 7, 5 HP), I'll encounter a gnome.  He rests under a sustained curse that I've not yet been able to lift, one that might be the result of some pretty brutal psionics.  His mind is a ruin, and he's angry and desperately lonely.  Honestly?  He's hard to be around.  But what I've found is that on the mornings when I both begin with a cast of Prayer and cast another, reinforcing Prayer before I speak with him, I'm...better.  I'm more at ease.  I'm more willing to be present for him in his brokenness.  Prayer works to change you.

Prayer also works to lay a serious plus-one on groups and parties, but there, you have to be aware of the character of the group as you cast it.  Just blorting out any old thing, or casting it only for yourself, or mumbling something from rote?  None of those will support a group.  You have to broaden your view, using the same technique of self-emptying that Detect Evil and Know Alignment require.

When you have a sense of the group, of how it works as a system, then your cast of Prayer will be far, far more powerful.  Plus two, even.

Prayer.  Cast it every single day.

Level Four Spells: Divination

This spell is particularly and potently useful when you're finally at that point when a community seems to be gathering around you, or has invited you in.

You've learned and taught and practiced the Way, and suddenly there are people around you who seem to listen.  You've spent time in the hallowed learning halls of one branch of our Order or another, and your High Priest or Conclave or Presbytery has sent you to a distant township with an ancient and decrepit sanctuary, or to a distant land to teach and work among the elves.

This is when you're going to need Divination.  Oh, sure, it's handy for finding your way out of the mountain lair of kobolds on occasion, but mostly, you'll need it for more prosaic stuff.  I don't think I've done that more than once or twice in my ten years as a cleric.

That does not mean, though, that it is useless, one of those spells that end up gathering dust in your spell-attic.  Because once you're a cleric and you've got responsibility for those who walk the path with you, you have to know where the heck you're going.

Divination does that.  It gives you the lay of the land.  It gives you the feel for your community.  It gives you the sense of the warp and woof of where you're going to be trying to express the Deep Real into this plane.

If you cast it, and cast it well, your community will have a solid sense of itself, it's place, and the best way to to proceed.

How to cast this critter?  There are two approaches.  There's the classic and traditional casting, which requires more time, a high wisdom score, and a significant sacrifice.  Then there's a newer form of casting, one that requires the assistance of other clerics and a couple of magic users.

The classic and traditional casting is the one we'll talk about first.  Two sacrifices must be made as part of it: a sacrifice of your time and a sacrifice of calories.  This is a walking-cast, an observational meditation.  When you're finally ensconced in that new community, you cast the spell over a series of days by walking in an intentionally random pattern around your church.

You look around.  You observe.  You talk to people you meet.  If you so choose, you can stop by individual cottages and huts and engage the villagers in conversation.    In the casting, your job is to listen to what you hear, and actually see what's in front of you.

Here's where the high wisdom score comes in. What do the homes and storefronts you encounter tell you about the character of the community?  What do your conversations tell you?  If you rolled a pair of threes and a four on your wisdom scores, this might not come easy.

Low rollers...and you'll know if you're one...have this unfortunate tendency to talk when they should be listening.  They show up at a door, and the conversation is all about them and what they want to say.  They come with an assumption about what it is they're going to see, and with an assumption about how they're going to respond.

You learn nothing that way.  The Creator of the Universe could be trying to whup you over the head with precisely the knowledge you need to further the goal of our Order, spoken through the mouth of that half-orc mother.  But if you're sticking to your scripted pitch or rote casts of Chant, you won't hear it.

You can also fail to see what's around you.  If you try to cast this spell trotting along on horseback or comfortably ensconced in a carriage, you're going to blunder right on by what the Real has to tell you.  An undercooked Divination spell is like half-cooked chicken.  You don't want to bother with it.  If it ain't slow, the spell won't go, as the cheesy old mnemonic went.

So take your time.  Move slowly.  Absorb and perceive.  You'll learn and encounter things that others will have missed, even those who've lived in the very same village for years.   Funny thing about humanoids: we so often end up living like giant ants, just bumbling along a scent trail for years, utterly oblivious to the reality on the other side of that field.

That's the old school cast, but there's a new option now, one that involves casting your consciousness into the virtual plane.  This cast is increasingly the approach of choice among younger clerics.  Sure, it's scroll-driven, which can feel a bit like a quick and dirty way to approach it.   But what matters is the awareness, and this will get you there.

The MissionInsite Fellowship scrolls and the Elven Percept scrolls are two that are particularly good at quickly and easily casting this one out there.   The clerics who've worked hard to create them know their business, and while they tend to be multi-classed cleric/magic user half-elves, they're particularly good at crafting these very practical tools.

They'll tell you everything you need to know, or rather, they'll give you all of the stats and roll counts.   What you need to know still rests in your ability to actually take in what you're encountering.

Which comes back again to wisdom, which if you ain't got it, well, what can I tell you?  Even the most perfectly crafted scroll won't convince some clerics that maybe they shouldn't try to build a gathering in bugbear country.

Ultimately, I'm of the school that favors using both the older cast and the newer one.  The two are deeply complementary, and give you a layered Divination that will prove profoundly helpful as you negotiate the challenges of the material plane.

Divination.  Because it helps to have a clue what you're doing.

Level Two Spells: Know Alignment

If you're going to engage a community and gather fellow disciples to share the effort, you'll need to hone your empathic and discernment skills.  As those numbers grow, few spells are quite as useful as Know Alignment.

Why?  Because not everyone you encounter will be you.  We already know, from an earlier chapter, that to be a Christian Cleric who is actually and materially empowered by the Deity, you have to be good.  Neutral, Chaotic, or Lawful really doesn't matter.  What matters is that you are good.

Here's the thing.  In your congregation, there are going to be people...good people, kind people, folks doing their darndest to do the right thing...whose approach to being good is different than your own.  If you're not careful, you can mistake that difference for evil.  And when you treat good folks as if they are evil, you have a hand in creating the evil.

As a strongly neutral good cleric, for example, I'll often find myself getting frustrated by fellow walkers of the way or fellow clerics who seem to be an endless font of chaos.  They're scattered and fluttery, all over the place, as they leap from one concept to another without seeming to consider the implications.  They're passionate about something, full throttle all in and full of dreams, and then the next thing you know they've moved on to something else, leaving the business of maintaining the thing they've started to others.

I'll also find myself frustrated by those who focus on structure to the seeming exclusion of all else, the ones who think about every new initiative in terms of liability exposure and accountability protocols.  Energy and creativity, joyfulness and playfulness, these things feel stifled.  Growth and the transformative change that is at the heart of our Way starts feeling like a secondary concern, and the winds of the Spirit feel becalmed.  This is a particular problem for Presbyterians, The Maker help us.

But just because these folks think differently and act differently does not mean they are evil.  Chaotic Good and Lawful Good, sure.  But not evil.  As a cleric whose primary focus is the furtherance of the good, being aware of the joyful and necessary balance between the two is essential.   As a walker of the  Way, you know that the narrow path is filled with individuals who have all kinds of different gifts, abilities and skillsets.  Again, encouraging that balance is key for we Neutrals, but for both lawful folk and the chaotic creatives, being able to support the different soul who seeks the good is a central part of our Way.

That encouragement comes both for you personally in your clerical journey, but also as you encounter Lawful and Chaotic Good types chafing against their difference within your community.  They'll get frustrated with one another, and resentful of one another, and resistant to one another, as they feel order or freedom threatened.  Or annoyed at you, if you're a Neutral, as you stand wishy-washily in the balance.

Where you encounter such conflict, a cast of Know Alignment is best followed by a cast of Bless.  Casting Know Alignment in such a situation is best done so that everyone sees what you're doing, and so that the subsequent Bless spell hits everyone with equal beneficence.  The effect of that is to letting all partners in that tension to focus on the good in one another, and to realize that their common purpose to serve the good has primacy.

So...how to cast this one?  Like the related but simpler Detect Evil, Know Alignment requires that you open yourself to the fullness of a system or network of relationships.  It is a spell that requires indirect seeing, a setting aside of yourself so that your own place within the system does not cloud your vision.

This stepping outside of oneself is best done through a combination of contemplative practice, self-stilling, prayer, and reason.  Also helpful in the casting are two forms of scroll, from both the Meyers Briggs and the Enneagram Schools of Alignment Assessment.  These don't approach alignment in the traditional way, and require the participation of the spell targets to cast, but both have proven useful over the years.  I prefer the former scroll, but the latter has some significant proponents among clerics I respect.

Finally, another reason to cast this spell regularly on your leadership team is to watch for twitches and variances towards evil.   It can happen to the best of us, if we are stressed and in a place of challenge.  The yearning for power over others and obsession with selfish ends that define the dynamics of evil will often overcome communities or suddenly begin to consume individuals.

It even overcomes clerics.  There are, as all can plainly observe, evil clerics.  Being able to tell one from another is central.  Particularly if the cleric who may be bending towards evil is you.

That's the greatest challenge in casting this one, because a good group cast will naturally include you in it.  And when the message is returned from the Deep Real that you're not quite as pure as the driven snow, you need to be ready to hear it.

As an Order that cares deeply for the furtherance of the Good, there are few spells more important than know alignment.  Add it to your spell book, and remember to include yourself in the casting.

Level Two Spells: Augury

As you're seeking a community with which to engage, trying to discern the direction for that community, or helping your followers and hirelings determine a particular course of action, there are few spells more important than Augury.

This moderately complex spell allows you to determine the likely success or failure of any particular course of action, particularly in the short term.

This one was the first of the second level spells I learned how to cast when I became a cleric, because I knew how very vital it is to the health of a community.  Yeah, Resist Fire might impress folks as you walk across those coals, but really, kids.  How often do you need that?

Discerning the path of greatest grace and promise for any gathering is a central function of any cleric of level eight or above.  If you're in that position of giving guidance to a fellowship, and you can't Augur, you're all in for a world of hurt.

And frankly, many clerics who find themselves looked upon for leadership choose to skip this spell.  Instead, they assume...from the foundation of their own ego...to assume that whatever path they've decided is right must be the right one.

Because Augury is not a spell that's about power.  It's about listening to what God has said and will say.

Casting this one is demanding, because it requires a strong subset of skills.  Low or moderate wisdom scores mean you're pretty much out of luck with this casting, as does any intelligence under thirteen.  Yeah, they don't say that in the handbook, but I've watched folks flail horribly at this.  If you can't integrate new knowledge easily and you're the sort of person who makes the same mistakes over and over again, Augury will probably fall flat for you.

I've also found an inverse relationship between the success of this spell and the charisma of the caster.  This is probably just correlation rather than causation, because I think when you're used to charming others into doing what you want, you tend to get overly reliant on that skillset.

Augury, with its intense demands on wisdom and intelligence, tends to be an ability set that favors those who've spent their lives watching and observing and growing.  The broader your set of experiences, and more intentionally you've developed yourself as a person and a walker of the Way, the more accurate you'll be as you attempt to cast this spell.

So how do you cast it?   It's a spell that demands self-opening practices.  That means contemplation and stillness, but it also engages you as a person.  You listen.  You pay attention.  You open your mind, and engage the entirety of your experience and learnings against the problem that is facing you.

You pay particular attention to those whose wisdom is written in the Manual, those prophets and sages whose guidance is part of our Sacred Book.  You also pay particular attention to those whose wisdom is proven and that you respect.  You look for everything that meaningfully provides input into the likelihood of a particular outcome.

Thomas Bayes, the Presbyterian cleric who founded the Bayesian School of Augury (now the dominant form of practice in this field) called this attention to those things you can observe "determining the priors."  Because in Augury, what has been spoken into being by our Maker holds the key to determining the probability of what might be.   Most of the possibility of success and the likelihood of failure are already etched into the real.

Sounding the problem against all of these things, you still yourself and prepare to receive your answer.

If you are listening, it will come.

And that's the rub, and the reason why so many clerics overlook this one.  The answer may not be what you want.  It may challenge your sense of self.  It may require you to back down from a strongly set course.  Casting this spell is not kind to your ego.

Take, for example, an unfortunate incident in my local Cleric's Conclave from a few years back.  The decision was made to move one of our training and meditation fortifications from one location to a new location.  Everyone was eager and excited, so much so that only one Cleric would regularly bother to stand up in the Conclave and report the results of his Augur cast.  He'd done that sort of thing before, so his grasp of the Bayesian priors were strong, and his Augury spell was potent.

We'd borrowed gold from several goblin tribes and the local thieves guild to finance the building of it, and we'd built it far away from our supply lines.  That bold Cleric called it out, but pretty much no-one seemed to be paying attention.  We were too fixated on the future we were sure would happen.

When the goblin armies arrived on masse to take back their gold with interest, well, we weren't ready.  It was a rout.  They sacked the new fort, sacked the old fort, and then demanded and received tribute that nearly destroyed our Conclave.

We'd allowed ourselves to be convinced that there was just one possible future.  This is a mistaken assumption about the Material Plane, and a mistaken assumption about God.  Neither is as rigid or linear as we might like to think.

God will let us screw up.  Our Maker will give us all of the signs, and give us the ability to read them, and will allow us to Augur the best future and choose to act on that knowledge.

But if we choose not to do so, then we're going down, as surely as if we'd been hit with Spiritual Hammer.

Augury.  Use it.  Or not.  But really, use it.

Level Two Spells: Chant

I know what you're thinking.  Here we are, finally getting into the level two spells, and I'm offering you...Chant?  Chant?  C'mon.  Why the lame spells?

"Why not Spiritual Hammer," you say.  "That's an awesome level two.  I want to knock people down with the Holy Ghost!  Bam!  Boom!  Whomp!"

But remember, I'm a Presbyterian Cleric.  I can only teach you the spells I know, and we Presbyterians are hard core into the support class focus.

You want to knock people over with the Holy Ghost?  Let me suggest that you consider paying a visit to the Pentecostals.  Televangelist Benny Hinn does it all the time.  Spiritual Hammer seems to be his favorite spell.  Lord knows what it has to do with the message of our Master and the purpose of our Order, but it is amusing in a slapstick sort of way.

Chant, on the other hand, is a very, very different sort of spell.  It's not showy, but it's immensely powerful.  It's the spell Presbyterian Clerics should find themselves casting every single Sunday in worship.  When you get up there into the pulpit, or you pace the floor proclaiming, or you crank your way through your message, what you're doing is casting Chant.

Or rather, that's what you should be doing when you're up there preaching.

For far too many of my clerical brothers and sisters, this spell gets badly muddled with two other second level spells.  Instead of focusing on the rhythm and pattern and flow of the mystic syllables that strengthen and empower, the time of Chanting becomes instead an aimless, humorless, arrhythmic drone That Just. Will not.  Stop.

Quotes from obscure authors, abstract theological terms,  and derivative jokes pulled from pastor-helper books are peppered throughout, but even those only reinforce the relentnessness of it.  What does this look like?  If you're presenting a theological explication of proto-preterism as it's manifested in the writings of your favorite Westminster Divine, you're making that mistake.  If you're exploring the semiotics of Womanist ecclesiology, you're also making that mistake.

The minds of those exposed to that drone are driven from the material plane and into distant and ethereal realms.  The room becomes quiet, except for the sound of the drone.

What's being simultaneously cast is not Chant, but a level two mystic mashup of Hold Person and Silence, 15' Radius.

I mean, seriously.  Look at the quiet room, at the glazed eyes and the frozen bodies and the drooling.  Spiritual Hammer couldn't stun 'em as effectively.  Presbyterians in particular seem to make this mistake with some frequency, although at least we usually keep ourselves to under 20 minutes.

Chant is different.  It uses the sustained expression of the sacred to stir the movement of the Spirit in those who have gathered to worship.  It uses rhythm and rhyme, tone and cadence, story and song, and is akin to sacred poetry.

Isn't that music, you ask?

In point of fact, yes.  The music that your bard guild works so very hard on every week is certainly a Chant casting.  It stirs, empowers, strengthens, and encourages. Remember, church bards are often dual-class, particularly the elves and half-elves who inhabit monastic communities.  They share some of your clerical spellbook.  That's why attending to and respecting the music in your church is so very, very important.  That music becomes the Chant that folks in your community will sing to themselves as they encounter times when a plus one is what they need to get through.

But you need to be sure that the cadences and patterns of chant sustain throughout your own vocalizations during worship.  You are, through this spell, summoning the Spirit to dwell in and encourage those around you.  Sure, it can be thoughtful and thought provoking.  You can write it down if you want, or free-range, or use a presentation.

All of those things work.  Attend to cadence and the mystical terms that evokes the best spirit of your community.  Work on the rhythms and musicality of your proclamation.  Learn how to spin a narrative that delights and carries your listeners along.  It will both soothe and be stirring.  Your preaching will cast a sweet spell over those around you, and that will be a strength to your community.

There are limits to this one, though.  Three stand out.

First, Chant loses power almost the moment you stop doing it.  Oh, the echoes of it might sustain long enough for folks to compliment you on the sermon on their way out.  But Chant works with the sympathetic nervous system...and those effects fade away pretty quickly.  Chant can augment substantive preaching, but it can't replace it, because it's just too ephemeral.  Music gets around this by being recastable by the listener, and the cadences or phrasing of a particularly fine Chant cast may be repeatable by those who have heard it.  But still.  It's limited.

Second, Chant may stir and embolden and give a fleeting sense of passion, but it's ethically neutral.  It can be badly misused, particularly if it is cast from a heart of egotism or desire for power.  The charm that comes from a Chant-underlaid sermon can just as easily mislead as lift up, so be careful in it's use.  Watch the state of your soul as you cast it.

Three, Chant may become a surrogate for the real transformation that defines our Way.  People come to get that "hit" of your carefully crafted conjuration, and will meander from week to week, waiting for that plus one they get on Sunday.  They won't change.  They won't improve.  And if that happens, you're not doing your job as a cleric.

Finally, there's a specific use of Chant that I've found powerful and efficacious outside of either public worship or when questing through a dark backcountry infested with orcs.  That comes at the bedside of those who are suffering or dying.  Let me give an example.

A few years back, I was in the hospital visiting an older man whose body was in the cascading final stages of death.  Everything was shutting down.  He could barely move.  He was intubated, and could not speak.  He'd lost the physical control over his hands, and couldn't focus enough to write.  He was in pain, and he was alone, with no family or friends.

All he could do was mouth the words, "I'm in Hell."  Over and over again, as he tensed and writhed.  It was not an easy moment, one of the many times I've wished that the power of healing was not limited to magic users in this branch of the material plane.

While I could not heal him (nor could the Magic Users who'd filled his body with tubes and tinctures), I could for a moment take him away.  And so I Chanted.

I told a story, softly, of the Fall day that was outside, invoking the blue sky crispness of the air and the yellow brightness of the windblown leaves.  I told it with a lilting cadence in a soft voice, conjuring up for him the beauty of the world beyond.

For a minute, for two, for three, for five, I drew him out of himself.  His body relaxed.  He calmed.

But then a nurse came in, and the spell was broken.

Still, it was worth the casting, in those moments.

Chant.  Know its value.  Know its limitations. Know how to cast it.

Level One Spells: Remove Fear

Clerics help make things happen.  It's what we do as a support class.  We're proud of it, dagflabbit, and it's why you want us as a member of your party.

But as a cleric committed to the Nazarene, what you want to happen is something pretty huge.  Oh, sure, we help facilitate the orc-slaying and the goblin-bashing and the kobold-punting now and again, but that's not our primary purpose.  We've got bigger fish to fry.  We're looking to change lives so that compassion and mercy and grace and justice are made real.  We're in the business of bending this whole blessed world in a new direction.

It's an immense task that has been placed before us.

Fear gets in the way of all of that.  Fear turns human beings against one another.  Fear turns us against ourselves, from moving towards being the person that God made us to be.   Those anxieties and terrors and gnawings prevent those around us from making this branch of the material plane into what it should be.

So one of your key tasks, as a Christian Cleric, will be to master the ability to make those around you unafraid.  That's where "Remove Fear" comes in.

Unlike Bless and Detect Evil, Remove Fear is a contact spell.  It's a spell of presence.  It's your hand on the shoulder of someone who's suffering.  It's your voice, speaking words of wisdom.  It's you, there, unafraid, with them.

That means that Remove Fear can only be cast if you remove fear from yourself.  This is not the same thing as being blindly self-confident or willfully oblivious of the implications of what you're doing.  There are plenty of clerics who confuse their egos with this first step of Remove Fear, but these are mostly the folks who rolled a flat nine for their wisdom score, and who probably would be better off as a fighter or a thief.

Fighting and stealing tends to be what overconfident egotists do when they lead churches anyway, but that pet peeve is another thing for another time.

The power for a Remove Fear spell comes from your own sense of God's presence and purpose in your life.  As with other similar spells, this sense of God...the source of everything we do...is developed through careful spiritual discipline and practice.  That means regular prayer, but it goes past that.  Mystic disciplines are particularly good for this, because they ground you and center you in the Creator.

That grounding and centering creates two things.  First, it replaces all of the small-ball weakness and paralyzing anxiety of our day to day existence with the Fear of God.  Our God is an Awesome God, as that praise song goes.  But when Jesus folk sing that and smile and hold their hands in the air and wave 'em like they just don't care, they really have no idea what they're talking about.  When you, in prayer, get a sense of the divine presence, it's knee-buckling immensity.  Scares the bejabbers out of you.  Or overwhelms you so completely that you kinda sorta cease to be for a little bit.

This is not because God is a monster.  It's because God is so much vaster than we can imagine, so much more all-pervading and radiantly, inescapably real.  When we get a glimpse of that, even a tiny peek, it's a shattering thing.  It changes us.  And that's really terrifying, to the point where all the other things we encounter seem like mist and shadows.  Oh, they'll make us quake a little bit.  They can threaten us physically.  But they are so much less than God that it becomes hard to let them rule us.

That fear...the deep, personal, and existential knowledge of God...changes how you act.  It is, as the Manual says, the root of all wisdom.

Second, that grounding relieves that fear.  God did not create us to be afraid, as level thirty seven High Priest  Paul once said.  Once you've got a deep sense of connection with the Divine, and that Spirit moves in you, fear evaporates.  Why?  Because you're so infused with your sense of God's gracious purpose that neither shattering chaos or crushing oppression seem worthy of your anxiety.  They lose power over you.  In their place, faith pours in hope.  And hope, coupled with faith, overcomes all fear.

You even lose your fear of God.  How can you fear that thing that is both your ground and your purpose?

So you've driven out fear in yourself, enough so that you are emboldened to resist broken and oppressive things.

The next step in the spell-casting is to project that confidence into the hearts of those around you.  You do that by being there, and sharing it.  Share it with your voice, speaking gently and boldly and simply.  Remind people of their created purpose.  Share it with your actions.  Stand by them, working by their side and refusing to step away.

An example of this spell, cast over a sustained period, came as I entered my first congregation.  It was a mess, a complete gnawing pit of lemures, wraiths, and the ghosts of what had been.  Everything was whispering fear, fear of the denomination, fear of one another, fear of an unknown but seemingly hopeless future.

It was a dark chaos, but I made it clear: so long as you want me here, I will be with you.  I poured out presence and the real possibility of change for the better.  And in those first three years, it made a difference.  The spirit changed.  People had hope, and a sense of purpose, because I was there, continually and relentless casting Remove Fear.  There were other spells, too, but we'll get to those later.

I will admit that it did not end as I had hoped, as the Enemy sent in reinforcements from one of the darker circles of Malboge.  That ultimately forced my retreat and my evacuation of those who'd gathered around me to safer spiritual redoubts.  But for a while, it was worthy.  It worked.

A few caveats on this spell, ones that can cause you to fall from the path.  First, don't be the only one who knows how to cast it.  Teach everyone in your congregation how to cast it, just as they should know and be confident casting all first level spells.  You do this because as a Jesus-cleric, you need to avoid becoming the only spell caster.  Clerichood of all believers, as they say.  Your friends have to be able to defend themselves, and embolden themselves.  Don't fall into the trap of becoming the only one who knows how to use it.

Second, though this spell can be reversed, never ever ever do that.  Cause Fear, like Curse, is a tool of the Enemy.  It is a common implement in the hands of Churches that have fallen into the thrall of Evil.  Those blighted communities use fear to maintain control of their members, terrifying them with threats of hell and social exclusion.  They also create fear of others and fear of the world, forcing their terrified members to hide within the carefully constructed prison those fallen clerics create with every new cast of Cause Fear.

Causing Fear also has another effect.  It makes people flee...not just from the churches tight in the clutches of Asmodeus and Beelzebub, but also from those that remain in God's hands.  It is part of the Enemy's strategy.  Teach them that faith is about fear and manipulation and pain, and they will learn to be cynical about faith.

Cunning and monstrous, but it's very hard to overcome.

But overcome it we shall, and Remove Fear is a potent tool in our spellbook.

Level One Spells: Detect Evil

Here's another one that's pretty darned important to know as you're starting down the Christian Cleric path.  It's a Level One, so it's not too complicated, but it's harder than Bless.

Why is it so important?  Because Honey Child, you are going to need this.  You’ll need it like you need to breathe.

You'll need it in church.  You’ll need it in meetings.  You’ll need it as you counsel.  You'll need it in worship.  You’ll need it every time you consider a change.  You'll need it as you sift through your inbox, and as you read through the blogs you feed and the endless chatter on the interwebs.

Evil is out there, it is, and if you miss it and let it slip by you, it'll destroy everything you're working towards as you walk the Way we've chosen.   It tears the heart out of communities.  It shatters relationships.  It creates hostile and oppressive environments.  It destroys the souls of those you love.  It’ll destroy you, too.

If you can’t detect the predators and the bullies, the toxic whisperers and the confidence men, your work will fall apart.  

Evil just plain bites.  It's the Enemy.  You have to be able to read it.

So how to cast it?   A cast of Detect Evil can involve all kinds of sympathetic elements.  But as you’ll find with most Christian spell-casting, none of them are really necessary, and some can be actively counterproductive.  Throwing powdered sulfur on that elder who keeps challenging your leadership at meetings tends not to get the result you’re looking for.

This one requires both a well developed empathic sense, and a carefully practiced ability to not look at the thing you're looking at.  What does that mean?

First, the empathic sense.  You develop your empathic sense by maintaining continual connection with other living beings.  While good and evil are a fundamental part of the Deep Real, they have to do with the dynamics of relationship between creatures that have awareness.  That’s real, but its a different way of being real, different than the way air and water are real.  One cannot do “evil” to an inanimate object, for example, unless that object is somehow connected to a living being.  

If I throw a rock through a window of a long abandoned house, I do nothing.    It is a neutral act.  If I throw a rock through your window, well, that’s a different story. 

So being carefully and intentionally aware of all living things around you is absolutely essential.  If you are isolated and disconnected, this spell becomes impossible to cast.  You lose your ability to tell the difference between the Good and the Evil.

Maintaining that broad and global awareness of the relationship you have with those around you and the relationships they have with one another is the first component of this spell.  Regular and sustained prayer, both spoken and contemplative, are absolutely key to this.  

Clerics who fail to do this and allow themselves to be isolated have a whole bunch of trouble casting this spell.  And though our class is a public one, this is a surprisingly easy place to find yourself.   Clerics are often under a whole bunch of stress.  The organizational demands and role-expectations are really high.  A majority of clerics are also introverted, which makes it easy to fold in on yourself, fleeing that which is difficult and interpersonally painful.

But if you’re isolated, either personally or by closing yourself off from others in an echo chamber of like-minded souls, you lose your ability to tell the difference between the Good and the Evil.  Lay that groundwork.  Keep connected, and do so prayerfully.

The second necessary component in a Detect Evil cast is being able to not look at the thing you’re looking at.  What does that even mean?  Well, let me elucidate.

When you encounter an individual or specific situation that seems to require a Detect Evil casting, do not look directly at it.  Evil people can be charming and smart and confident and beautiful.  Evil choices can be deeply alluring, as they offer power and easy success and personal glory.

If you focus on them, you won’t be able to see them for what they are.  They will be shiny.  They will taste sweet, deliciously, intoxicatingly so.  Instead, open your vision.  Look not at the person or the choice itself, but at how that person or that choice exerts influence.  Use indirect viewing.

It’s a bit like choosing not to turn your mind towards the object that your eyes are focused on, and instead choosing to focus your thoughts on the fullness of your vision.  In looking indirectly at a tree in front of you, for example, you don’t look at just one point.  Instead, see the whole thing, the way the leaves ripple and move in the wind.

Casting a Detect Evil is like that, only you’re looking indirectly at a network of influences and relationships.

What does a Detect Evil cast look like?  Here are some examples.

Years ago, I came across an elderly gentleman, a fading bard and raconteur.  He was a longstanding member of a community, smart and utterly charming and gregarious, with a playful mind and demeanor.  His charisma was at least seventeen.  His mind was like that of a far younger person, like a bright, sharp adolescent.  Talking with him one on one was a delight, and he immediately created an easy rapport.  Everyone loved him, or so it would have seemed.

But because I was attending to being connected with the whole, I began to notice that his charm had a  focus.  He showed a particular interest in developing relationships with preadolescent boys.    He hovered around them.    He was often in physical contact with them, in ways that crossed...very subtly...a boundary line. I could perceive it in the boys, in their awkwardness around him.

I felt the play of it across others, and there was a sourness to it.  So I looked indirectly and intently, and in attending to it, realized that all was not well.   Other clerics had cast protection spells and glyphs of warding around him, which I found in the dusty cybernetic archives of the church, but those had lost their power.  He patiently outlasted them all.  There was predation there, carefully and intelligently hidden by a smart and charming human being.  

It was evil, and being able to detect it required the careful effort of this spell.  That, I was able to stop, with the help of other Presbyterian clerics and those I'd trained within the community.  It was hard, but it was important.

Another cast came one early afternoon when I happened upon a fellow cleric disciplining one of her young charges, just inside the doorway of a room.  Kids get out of line regularly, so this wasn’t unusual.  She didn’t notice me.  I paused for a second, and suddenly what I saw was not the conversation, but the room.  It was filled with other girls, the rest of the acolyte class.   They were all looking down, embarrassed and upset.  The room was tense with a feeling of discomfort and shame.  Something was wrong.   I found myself involuntarily prepping for a spell cast.

Listening in more closely, still unnoticed, Detect Evil did its work.  The “discipline” was a bullying harangue, one that threatened that teenage girl with exclusion.  It was a public shaming in front of her friends, delivered not because she'd acted hatefully or been disrespectful.  It was because she’d chosen to be with friends the night before instead of going to an outing she had planned for the girls.  “You're showing me you're not committed to the Way.  You don’t care about the Master or your faith,” said the teacher.  “You may as well not even be here.  In fact, you're welcome to leave.  If you don't care, go ahead and leave.”  There was no love in it at all.  It was, like all evil, only about power and control.

And then, to my shame, I did not intervene then and there.  The cleric in question was influential in the community, a potent practitioner of Christ-masked dark magic who already had a chip on her shoulder where I was concerned, and I stumbled in my reaction.  When that young woman had a chance to leave, she never graced the door of the monastery again.  And neither, eventually, did any of those other girls.  When they grew up, they fled to places where they would not be bullied or manipulated.

Detect Evil is vital, but it is only the first step.  When you detect it, you need to do something about it.