Some Say We Should Look at the Fire Inside

As apocalyptic wildfires course through Southern California, people need soothing. Many will head for traditional places of worship and hear the familiar explanations and exhortations.

Then there’s the group that will attend services Sunday morning at a home in Irvine, where Ava Park, the Keeper of the Goddess Temple of Orange County, will make sense of it all.

And even as she graciously and meticulously explains to me why it all does make sense, I don’t fully grasp it. But that doesn’t matter, because men aren’t allowed at Goddess Temple services, anyway.

That doesn’t mean we can’t connect spiritually; it just means we can’t get in the front door.

“Women’s spirituality is ancient,” Park, 48, says. “It’s pre-Christian, so it’s many thousands of years old. We believe that each woman is a priestess of her own life, a priestess for her family and community. We’re acting as priestesses with the good intention to help heal our community.”

Goddess Temple philosophy is rooted in the belief that a person’s intentions, thoughts and prayers can affect the reality around them. Imagine, then, what a large number of people’s thoughts could do.

If it sounds like a prayer chain, it is -- sort of. “We don’t believe in begging,” Park says, noting that’s the derivation of prayer. “We believe in affirming. We believe as we focus our intentions, we cause the possibility we’re focusing on to manifest in this reality.”

This week, that means stemming the fire. Accordingly, Park is bumping Sunday’s scheduled speaker, a dream therapist.

Women in attendance (services start at 11 a.m.) will be asked to concentrate on “cooling and containing” whatever may be raging in their own lives, Park says. “If there are fires raging in the hills, we believe the world is a mirror of what is going on inside us as human beings,” she says.

All the “anger” on the local scene, including the recent recall and the grocery strike, resemble a raging fire, she says. “We’re not saying that’s causing this fire, but it’s somehow related. So we believe we need to put a call out to look in our own hearts and see if a fire is raging and do what we need to do to quench it, to cool it.”

Another task is concentrating on “balance” in the environment -- now top-heavy with fire. Doing that, however, means to respect fire as a natural part of our world.

A third element, Park says, will be to “release any resistance” to the fires. That doesn’t mean, she quickly adds, that firefighting efforts should end or that the fire is welcome; it means that the fires are the reality and that resistance to reality is what “truly causes us the most pain.”

The goal of the service, she stresses, will be to change the reality. Those are heavy concepts, requiring much faith. Many Temple members, Park says, joined after rejecting traditional religion.

“We would differ from traditional Christianity in that we’d be very clear that our idea of the divine is that it would never visit harm upon us. We believe our own energetic thoughts create these events.... They always work out as they should, energetically. Not necessarily always in a happy ending, but everything that happens is based on the kind of energy you allow to channel through your body. So if you’re channeling negativity and anger and fury to go through your heart and you’re putting it out there, that which you sow is what you will reap.”

Knowing I have inner negativity that could be purged, I ask Park why men can’t come to Goddess Temple services.

“It would probably take longer to answer that than you’d care to hear,” she says, cheerfully. “But there is a good answer for it.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.