How do you break up with a deity?
Yesterday I was reading an interesting article about the value of having a single deity relationship, in that author's case with Hekate, that fulfills all your religious needs. It prompted me to think about my own deity relationships and how... scattered they are.
Maybe I just read too many stories as a child with ragingly angry gods in them (the Book of Job probably had a bigger effect on my fear of what's outside of my control than I like to admit; at least in the Greek myths, people tended to deserve it) but I have a very hard time with the idea of stopping work with a deity. Not for any rational reason, but because I've read stories of people whose attention the gods want, or who call on their HGA, and their lives get ruined. It was just recently that I pegged this as related to religious scrupulously and, therefore, to OCD.
There are plenty of deities I have, in fact, stepped back from over the years... or maybe I should say they stepped back from me. But it's as if I can't remember how that happened, how it escaped their notice that I hadn't yet been smote from on high. (Or down below, in Ereshkigal's case.)
Then I started on the opposite obsessive thought, that they wanted me gone and I was annoying them by not having figured it out yet. Because thank you, Lizard Brain, I needed that.
I don't mind having an eclectic practice, but I want to have an intentional one, not one where altars and statues just hang around because I'm afraid of offending someone I no longer really have a relationship with.
I think I'm going to spend some time sitting with each of the deities and spirits I have altar space set aside for and ask them what they want, and do divination because I don't trust myself to interpret their answers. Even for deities I want to continue working with, it's probably not a bad idea to check in and see how things are going, if I'm overlooking things that are important, and so on.