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.
