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While mulling over the endlessly protracted debates about closed or initiatory practices and why it can be so confusing for some, I came upon this idea:
All initiation is intimacy, but not all intimacy is initiation.
Consider: I may be great lifelong friends with someone and know their lives through and through, but that doesn't entitle me to legal rights to them, tax benefits with them, or inheritance from them, whether by their own will, the will of others in their life, or by the will of various legal entities that preside over us. That's what marriage is for, which is a different kind of relationship—or, rather, an officialization of relationship, a sort of explicitly witnessed recognition of our relationship that we both agree to. One can be in a long-term relationship with someone, whether as friends or as romantic partners, but without a sort of explicit license and officialization, what we might have might be good for us, but others with a stake in certain results of relationship might not deign to consider us as being friends or partners from their perspective.
I'm an orisha priest, specifically ordained to Ogún. As an orisha priest, I have privileges and access to particular rites and tools that only orisha priests are licensed to access. In that sense, by means of my initiation to him, I am deeply intimate with orisha and with Ogún. Anyone, however, initiated or not, can pray to Ogún, sing his songs, or chant his praises; one may have an intimate affection with Ogún that is not facilitated by initiation, even where Ogún may come forth in readings or in possession to say that he loves and cherishes someone not initiated—but that doesn't grant that non-initiate access to the same rites and privileges that someone who has undergone initiation has. That's a different kind of intimacy, a different kind of relationship and relationship officialization, that cannot be sidestepped or ignored.
Not all kinds of intimacy are interchangeable; not everyone has the same needs for intimacy or the same kinds of intimacy. Just as it goes with human relationships, so too does it go with religious ones—both those we have with the gods and spirits, and those with our communities. Some people never need to be initiated in this or that practice to accomplish their work and goals, while others absolutely do. And yet, what we need dictates what we do: those who don't need initiation thus don't need to do the things initiates do, and thus can't and (more importantly) shouldn't. If someone needs to be initiated, they should get initiated and then do initiate-only things that they need to do because of their need to initiate. If someone does not need to be initiated, then they don't get initiated, and do non-initiate-allowed things without getting into initiate-only things.
Another way to see initiation is as medicine: if you need it then you take it (because it's for your own well-being), but you don't take it if you don't need it, because it'll do nothing good for you (at best) or only hurt you (at worst). Initiation, in this sense, protects the practices of initiates from intrusion upon by non-initiates as much as it protects non-initiates from the effects of those practices that are improper and harmful for them.
You only get intimate with something if you're prepared to handle all of that thing, and only in the ways allowed by that kind of intimacy—and not all intimacy is the same.