The Importance of Holding God Accountable

A Dark Night of the Soul Practice

Last time, in my riff on unified perspective, I talked about the unpredictability of natural or cosmic order, at least from the viewpoint of an ordinary, everyday human. It’s easy to feel as if life is happening to us, and that can lead to a dark night of the soul—those moments when we find ourselves on our knees, yelling up at a God we didn’t even know we believed in. Recently, I’ve been reflecting a lot on change. It’s impossible not to, with Pluto making its final pass through Capricorn before moving into Aquarius for good. Pluto won’t return to Capricorn in our lifetimes, so this feels like the closing of an era, both collectively and personally.

There’s no shortage of astrologers and readers talking about Pluto’s final foray into Capricorn, and for good reason - Pluto transits reflect massive collective turbulence. I’ve been reflecting on what has shifted for me since Pluto entered Capricorn in 2008, both personally and in terms of my role within the collective. My life has changed in ways I couldn’t have anticipated, and if you’re honest with yourself, I’m sure yours has too.

As always, astrology helps us put language to these changes. If you’re curious, you can look up where Pluto has been transiting in your chart - it may help you frame your own transformations. Personally, while I usually use Placidus for my chart, I tend to favour whole sign for Pluto transits. As a Sagittarius rising, Capricorn is my second house in whole sign, and even in Placidus, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction we all talked about in 2020 happened right on the cusp of my second house. Reflecting on this, I see that my values - what matters to me, how I measure worth, and not just materially but in every way - have completely transformed. I feel I embody those values more in my intentions, decisions, and how I move through the world. I’ll go into this more in a couple of weeks, as it relates to the tarot messages for the first week of Libra season.

In this week's reading, I asked myself the question, “How is my relationship with God abusive?” I also shared that I relate Sagittarius and Pisces to God or the divine, and see Gemini and Virgo as the signs that question God. As both a Sagittarius rising and Aquarius Sun, Pluto touches on several 12th house themes for me (ruling the 12th house of Sagittarius and transiting the 12th house of Aquarius). Let’s unpack all of this, starting with what I mean when I use the word ‘God’.

I’m using the G-word, though by any religious standard, I’m an atheist. First, it made me uncomfortable for the longest time, but now, I use ‘God’ to represent the external rhythms, systems, or structures that govern our lives. I could say fate, destiny, nature, the universe, the cosmos, the simulation, the determining physics, or the divine - and fair warning, I’ll be using some of these interchangeably with God. But calling it ‘God’ gives it a more personal feel, so that’s what I’m going with. When I talk to people in my life who describe themselves as religious or even rational atheists, I often find we’re all talking about the same thing - just using different language. If definitive proof appeared tomorrow that we live in a simulation or that physics could prove this is a deterministic universe, I still think we’re all describing the same thing, just anthropomorphising it to different degrees. So, this isn’t a debate about whether there is a God or not—I’m using the term because it evokes something personal and gives us a focus point. With that out of the way, let’s see how the mutable signs, the signs of change, help us understand our relationship with the divine, the universe, the unknown.

In astrology, two signs embody complementary ways of understanding the divine: Sagittarius and Pisces. Both are traditionally ruled by Jupiter (currently in Gemini), though Pisces is also co-ruled by Neptune in many astrological traditions. Sagittarius is the seeker, the philosopher, always searching for meaning and truth. There’s a relentless quest for divine order in Sagittarius - always questioning, always striving for a higher truth. Pisces, on the other hand, is about faith, surrender, and trust in the unseen. Pisces flows with the divine, embracing the mysteries without needing to fully understand them. Together, these signs represent different facets of God - Sagittarius as the search for divine truth and understanding, Pisces as the experience of divine connection and surrender.

Now, consider their opposite signs, Gemini and Virgo, both ruled by Mercury. I’ve increasingly seen Chiron’s connection with both Virgo and Sagittarius, but I’ll get to that later. Mercury, as the psychopomp, is the guide between worlds. Its ability to traverse realms makes it the perfect ruler for signs that challenge God. Mercury is the messenger, the one who brings divine knowledge down to earth and questions it in the process. As the ruler of Gemini and Virgo, Mercury governs the mind, communication, and the movement between the seen and unseen realms. In mythology, Mercury (or Hermes) often played the trickster, challenging the gods and upending the status quo. This energy aligns with Gemini and Virgo, which refuse to take divine proclamations at face value, instead seeking to understand, analyse, and sometimes subvert them.

Gemini, the sign of communication, curiosity, and duality, represents the mind’s ability to hold multiple perspectives and question everything. Gemini challenges God by refusing to accept any single truth as absolute. Instead, it plays with ideas, explores contradictions, and constantly asks, “Why?” Gemini’s role as a challenger of the divine comes from its need to understand through questioning, its refusal to accept dogma, and its belief that truth is multifaceted and ever-evolving. If Sagittarius seeks to understand God through a singular, overarching truth, Gemini asks, “But what if there’s another way to see this?” To me, Jupiter in Gemini feels like God having an existential or identity crisis, and of course, I say that because it resonates deeply with my own experience.

Virgo, on the other hand, challenges God through its attention to detail, analysis, and focus on practicality. Virgo is the sign that looks at the small, often overlooked aspects of existence and asks, “Is this right? Does this make sense?” Virgo challenges the divine by holding it to a standard of perfection and integrity, scrutinising the fine print of the cosmic contract. While Pisces is about surrender and faith, Virgo is about discernment and refinement. Virgo’s challenge to God lies in its demand for accountability and its insistence that everything - down to the smallest detail - must align with a higher standard of order and justice. Not a standard dictated by Virgo, but God’s own.

Therefore, understanding and challenging God or the universe is not a binary experience - though it’s often viewed that way. Our relationship with God is dynamic and multifaceted, and for a fuller, more whole experience, it cannot simply be about blind faith or rebellious doubt. It’s about finding balance between the two. There can be no sacred cows if we truly want to work with the mutable energies within ourselves, or as archetypal themes reflected in the outer world.

One of the unhealthiest things we do, even as believers, is to hold God in too high a regard - ironically, this isn’t high enough. Yes, you read that right. We cannot see God, Source, Spirit, or the Universe as only the light, only the good. That’s selling both ourselves and God short. If we divide reality into a binary system of good and bad - and God gets all the good - who gets all the bad? Many faiths introduce a figure like the Devil to play the role of evil or darkness, but what does that do to us? Every thought, act, feeling, relationship, and experience in our lives gets boxed into either the light or the dark.

I call this unhealthy because we see the same dynamic play out in ourselves and others. One example of this is what I call the ‘toxic-healing dynamic.’ We’ve ‘worked’ on ourselves like crazy. We’ve faced childhood trauma and behavioural patterns that we’ve discovered are the source of so much of the messed-up stuff in our lives. We’ve learned different healing and self-enquiry techniques - reiki, tarot, astrology, etc. We follow the signs and synchronicities faithfully, trusting that they are signposts on our journey. We have healthy relationships, we express gratitude, we understand the world is a reflection of us. We diet, we exercise, we meditate, we live by values we strive to embody. We can honestly say we’ve done all that’s possible to do, and we’ve found deep spiritual meaning in our practices.

Yet, sometimes slowly, sometimes in a Tower-moment, we realise: nothing has really changed. Our relationships feel the same, our work is just as dissatisfying, our bank balance looks the same. What has actually shifted? This is when we can either double down - projecting on others and trying even harder to ‘fix’ ourselves - or recognise another option. Most of us need to go around on the merry-go-round a few more times before we realise there is another path. Either way, if we’re lucky, this is when many of us experience a dark night of the soul.

A dark night of the soul is a spiritual crisis. We experience inner turmoil, feeling disconnected from meaning, purpose, or a higher power. We see ourselves as broken, beyond repair. We see only the bad - we are the bad, still bad. Yet, it’s in these moments of isolation, confusion, and despair that the potential for transformation exists. Ultimately, a dark night of the soul serves as a catalyst for deeper self-awareness and spiritual growth. This is when we must realise that despite all of our work, our attempts to be good and loving, there is a wound at our core we have not been able to heal. Hence the doubling down. But I ask you to consider: what if that wound is not meant for us to heal?

Rumi said, "The wound is where the light enters." I believe this applies to our Chiron wound, and I don’t think it’s ever meant to be healed. Rather, it’s a source of healing. I know, right? How can it be both?

Chiron, the Centaur who taught the greatest heroes of Greek mythology, was himself rejected at birth. Because of this, I believe Chiron’s placement in our charts speaks not only to how we feel abandoned or rejected, but also to the behaviours we develop to avoid abandonment. To explore this further, let’s take a brief look at Chiron in the 12 signs and houses:

• Chiron in Aries & 1st House: The wound of feeling rejected in personal identity or existence. The challenge is asserting oneself without fear of being unwanted or seen as too much, learning to claim space in the world.

• Chiron in Taurus & 2nd House: The wound of feeling unwanted in terms of material security or personal value. The challenge is believing in one's worth and learning to trust in stability after experiencing neglect or deprivation, often around basic needs or self-worth.

• Chiron in Gemini & 3rd House: The wound of feeling rejected or unheard when attempting to communicate or express oneself. The challenge is overcoming fears of being misunderstood or disregarded, finding confidence in one's voice and ideas.

• Chiron in Cancer & 4th House: The wound of emotional abandonment, especially in familial or nurturing contexts. The challenge is creating a sense of inner security and learning to nurture oneself after feeling emotionally unsupported or unlovable.

• Chiron in Leo & 5th House: The wound of feeling rejected for creative self-expression or authenticity. The challenge is to shine despite past experiences of being overlooked or unappreciated, learning to express oneself fully without needing validation from others.

• Chiron in Virgo & 6th House: The wound of feeling rejected for imperfections or perceived inadequacies. The challenge is learning to accept and love oneself without needing to meet an impossible standard of perfection, healing self-criticism and obsessive improvement.

• Chiron in Libra & 7th House: The wound of rejection within relationships, often feeling unworthy of love or equality. The challenge is finding balance in partnerships, overcoming fears of abandonment or being judged for not meeting relational expectations.

• Chiron in Scorpio & 8th House: The wound of betrayal or violation of trust, often linked to themes of rejection around power or intimacy. The challenge is learning to trust again, transforming pain into empowerment without fearing further rejection.

• Chiron in Sagittarius & 9th House: The wound of being rejected for one’s beliefs or worldview, feeling lost in the search for meaning. The challenge is to trust in one's personal truth, overcoming disillusionment or existential rejection, and finding purpose after spiritual or philosophical abandonment.

• Chiron in Capricorn & 10th House: The wound of rejection related to authority or achievement, often feeling like one’s efforts are never enough. The challenge is to heal feelings of inadequacy around success and societal roles, learning to redefine worth beyond external validation.

• Chiron in Aquarius & 11th House: The wound of feeling unwanted in one's uniqueness or struggle to belong. The challenge is to reconcile the desire to be authentically different with the need for community, overcoming isolation or rejection by the collective.

• Chiron in Pisces & 12th House: The wound of feeling unwanted on a spiritual or existential level, often feeling abandoned by the divine or overwhelmed by others' emotions. The challenge is learning to set boundaries and trust in one’s inherent connection to the universe, healing the wound of spiritual rejection or being overwhelmed by empathy.

I believe much of the healing journey involves discovering and understanding our Chiron wound and how it has manifested in our lives. The first part of this is recognising all the harmful ways it has shown up. For many, this is where the healing begins - when we start exploring our motivations and intentions, and make changes in our boundaries, relationships, and choices. But the second, often more distressing, part is realising that this wound is still present even in the areas where we think we are healed and shining our light in the world.

What do I mean by this? We might come to see that we've always had abandonment issues, showing up in our lives through neglecting our own needs, people-pleasing, and sacrificing ourselves for others. Surely, if people need us, they won’t leave us, right? After this realisation, we may assert boundaries, remove unhealthy relationships, focus on our needs, and practice self-love and self-acceptance. Or so we think. Eventually, we realise we’ve only removed others' ability to abandon us - we still carry the abandonment issues, and we may be pandering to them more than ever. This is what I call becoming aware of our background programming.

We may be tempted to jump back on the merry-go-round to ‘fix’ the problem again, but let me save you another trip - you’ll never fully remove that background programming. It will be with you for your entire life. However, you can change your relationship with it. By embracing this darkest wound, it can become a source of light. Chiron, the wounded healer, reminds us that our Chiron wound is one we can never fully heal within ourselves. Yet, through acknowledging and understanding this wound, we find the power to help others heal. This dynamic creates a paradox: the wound remains a part of us, but we transform it into wisdom, compassion, and healing for the world. The pain doesn’t disappear, but by using it to guide and support others, we turn it into something meaningful and constructive.

We each know the deep pain of our own wound, and we are learning to love ourselves with it - learning to see it as part of us, rather than a flaw to be fixed. As we practice this, why wouldn’t we interact with others knowing that everyone carries such a wound? Wouldn’t our hearts ache for the whole of humanity?

So, let’s return to God. In my worldview, I take a very Piscean view of the divine - it is the animating force of the universe. The divine is both the darkness of the wound and the light that shines through it. Spirit is the unconscious projection of our wounds and shadow, as well as the compassionate grace we offer ourselves and others. The first thing we need to do is stop trying to read the mind of God and making up rules about what we need to do to be worthy, loved, rewarded, good, or light. These rules are based on judgment, non-acceptance, and a lack of love - both for ourselves and others. When we understand that God, Source, Spirit, the Universe, Cosmic Energy, is literally everything, then God can’t just be perfect light; it must also be the shadow. For a deeper exploration of God’s shadow, I highly recommend Jung’s ‘Answer to Job’.

So, what do we do? Suck it up? Accept we’re powerless and adopt a nihilistic view where nothing has any meaning? I’ll tell you what I did when I reached that point: I got really fucking angry. I’m not someone who gets angry often, and maybe I should, because whenever I do, I have profound breakthroughs. Anger fascinates me, because with Chiron in Aries in my 4th house, I never allowed myself to express it. I even denied feeling it, so for much of my life, it consumed me from within. Now I see it as a massive neon arrow pointing to what I feel is obstructing me from my goal, and my ultimate goal is to be more me.

People often ask me how they can figure out what’s blocking them or how they’re self-sabotaging. The simple answer? Whatever makes you angry holds the key. So you see how suppressing anger robs us of profound insights? Anger is the ultimate, liberating Tower-moment. The question I always ask in my anger is, “What is obstructing me? What’s blocking my path?” Throughout my spiritual journey, I’ve always turned that question inward, taking ownership and finding something within myself to heal. But this last time, something different happened. I wasn’t angry at myself - I was angry at God.

I could honestly say I’d done everything within my power. In every area of my life, I wasn’t just satisfied, I was proud of how I’d moved, how I showed up. I could swear on everything I hold dear that I live my present life in service to the future I envision - not just for myself, but for humanity as a whole. Yet, when it came to outer support in all areas of my life, there was none.

We’ve all been here before, and I had too. But this time felt different. Before, I would’ve gone within, worked on being more grateful, or examined where I was attaching my happiness to external rewards. I’d have done some other practice that ultimately said, “No, God is perfect. If you don’t recognise that, there’s something wrong with you - fix it!”

But something important had happened six months before this. I had an insight about my relationship with God that came through as I considered having a covenant with the divine. I realised my faith had been one-sided, even selfish. I noticed that in many of my human relationships, what I wanted or how I wanted to be loved didn’t matter. People came in, did whatever they wanted, and expected me to be grateful. To me, that wasn’t a relationship or connection, let alone any kind of partnership. We were all just using each other as mood adjusters. And me being me, I immediately saw how I did this with God too, and called it faith.

It was a saga, but the bottom line was that from that moment until now, I’ve come to understand deeply what it means to live from a place of “Thy will be done.” We don’t just have relationships - we have covenants with each other and everything else, including the divine. It’s a binding oath of our duty to ourselves and to one another. In Pisces season, I said karma is not just about what we do, but also what we are due. Now, six months later, I’m talking about the full comprehension that you are due. We all are.

But what I understand now - what was still an open question back in Pisces season - is how we are due. We aren’t due because of entitlement, or because we did something to deserve it. We aren’t due because we’re good or have faith or because we must be rewarded for our struggles. We are due because that is the natural order of things. After winter, spring must follow. After a long dark night, there must be dawn. This is natural law, and nothing we do can prevent or speed up this process. It’s a deep kind of hubris to think our actions and efforts could bribe that change. Just like the tree that stands bare all winter, we too must wait for spring’s arrival to begin our next cycle of growth.

Our work so far has been to understand what this process is for us individually, and to respond to a spring that we might not even recognise as such because of our limited understanding of what spring truly means.

There’s so much more to this process, and I’d be happy to share more insights if you have questions, but I’ll leave you with a few key reflections from my experience. That moment of holding God accountable, of demanding, “Where is spring?” was a massive confirmation of my faith. It was the realisation that I am not doing any of this alone, and indeed, I can’t do it all alone - especially if I want to be in healthy, interdependent relationships. I could feel (not just intellectually know) that all relationships - from the divine, to society, to friends, family, and ourselves - must involve reciprocity. Most importantly, as my anger began to dissipate, I realised that God, or divine timing, wasn’t keeping me waiting. I was the one who had kept picking at that Chiron wound.

In some ways, I had been sitting in a restaurant, staring at the menu, wondering why no food was being delivered. I kept going over my choices, thinking maybe I’d picked the wrong thing. When in reality, all I had to do was put the menu down to signal I was done choosing. Even more than that, I realised life isn’t a restaurant - it’s a banquet. I don’t have to wait to be served; I can go up and serve myself.

Now, I know, trust me, I do - it may sound like I’m just coming back around to blaming myself. But I’m not. In holding God accountable, I connected with that part of myself that is divine. Yes, Virgo will hold God accountable, but Pisces will remind us that we are all one. Virgo shows us that we can’t do it alone, while Pisces laughs and tells us we were never alone and that we were always perfect. We just needed to stop scrutinising ourselves and trying to live up to unrealistic standards of perfection.

Before we get lost in the mystical waters of Pisces, let’s not forget that we’re in Virgo season. It’s the perfect time to ask: do the structures and systems of my life reflect my relationship with the divine? My body - whatever state it’s in - does its duty and allows me to be in this world as the person I am. How do I reciprocate that service? Do I feed it good food, give it enough rest, keep it strong and healthy? What if the winter trees aren’t us, but the relationships we create with each other? Do we bring our warmth and light to let those relationships grow, or do we keep picking at our Chiron wounds? Do we show up, knowing we can’t do it all alone, and ask for exactly what we want from our partners in these relationships - even knowing they may not be able to provide it? The only way to know is by asking. This is the ultimate acknowledgment of a relationship. It’s not about getting anything from each other, but about realising we’re building and growing a connection together, and that relationship will go through all seasons. Thankfully, we don’t have to weather any of them alone.

I often say Pisces and Virgo are Heaven and Earth. They both always exist, and sometimes we find ourselves yo-yoing between the two. Other times, we feel lost, as if we belong to neither. But they are always within us, and their union becomes harmonious and balanced when there is reciprocity between them. Our actions reflect the kind of cosmic force we believe in. If we keep slavishly pandering to a God we hope will deem us good enough for crumbs, promising we’ll do better to avoid the lashes of fate and destiny, we keep the chains firmly on our wrists and feet, fruitlessly toiling away. Our relationships will reflect this dynamic too.

So, stop for a moment, look at yourself, look how far you have come, see yourself in the natural rhythms of this beautiful, complex, often difficult world we live in. What is the God or cosmic force you have determined in your life by your relationship to it? How does your relationship with your God show in your life? Are you ready for your greatest act of faith and divine partnership? Are you ready to hold that God accountable, in a greater way than you ever have before, knowing that doing so will have a ripple effect throughout your life?