Amazon.com Widgets
Currently viewing the tag: "Christianity"

Salvation Mountain USA

I don’t want to be a voice for the Newly Saved.

I don’t want to be looked at as an example of what happens when Christ enters a person’s life.

I don’t want to stand as a representative for all the Pagan converts out there, as though Pagans are so unified a group that there could be such a thing as a “Pagan convert.”

I appreciate the prayers and the support from the Christians who’ve reached out to me on Twitter, but I’m afraid that they have unrealistic expectations of me. I feel like they’re looking at me to fulfill some sort of Prodigal Son role; my story simply fitting into a narrative that they already understand.

I think that all of our stories are more nuanced and complicated than we’d like to admit publicly.

I’m unnerved that immediately after my story was exposed to the largely Christian audience of The Blaze I received my first hateful comment from a white supremacist.

Christians should take note: there is a hateful contingent among you, speaking mean-spirited things in the name of God. It should worry you. It should cause you to take a closer look at your theology, your war-language, your relationship to the “least among us,” your need to be “right” and your engagement with those who you perceive are not.

My concerns and reservations come after a long week of worrying; worrying about being misunderstood, or misrepresented, or misread. I’ve worried that Christians will see me as a champion of The Cause, and Pagans will see me as The Villain. I’ve worried that my hyper-awareness of Audience will get in the way of me listening for the movement of the Spirit in my life. I feel like the experience I had with the woman on the street — the experience which has since become a talking point on the Glenn Beck show — was a call to something. I think it may be a call to ministry of some sort, but I start to get agitated when strangers rush to tell me that they know exactly what I’m being called to.

How can they? How can they know the direction of my own life when I’m still trying to figure that out?

God works in mysterious, disruptive, seemingly illogical ways. We can pretend that God’s Will is a single thing, or a simple thing, or an easily discernible series of choices, but it’s not. We can try to tweet “God’s Will”, but unless the tweet reads “Love God, & love your neighbor as yourself,” we’ll probably be wrong.

So I don’t want to be a voice for the Newly Saved. I don’t want anyone to look to me and expect to see a cookie-cutter Christian. If you think you’ve “won one for the team,” I encourage you to reevaluate your us/them mindset.

Our call is to love.

That’s it.

Period.

Everything else is politics.

If our actions are not an extension of the directive to love, we’re missing the mark.

 

Photo by Renee Silverman

I’ve been to dozens of baptisms in my life, but this one was different.

simonella_virus - BaptismI sat in the back of All Saints in Beverly Hills, a lovely little church in an obscenely wealthy part of the world, and I watched babies have water poured over the heads. I watched parents smile as the priest anointed their children’s foreheads with oil in the sign of the cross. Godparents stood by, beaming. Those parts were no different than what would happen at any other baptism.

What was different is how I felt inside.

I felt like this was happening at a crucial moment in my own life. I needed to be here. I needed to be witness to this. And, without a doubt, I needed to stand up and renew my baptismal covenant.

So I stood with the congregation and affirmed that I belonged to God, that I would seek to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and that I would look for and seek to share the love of Christ in the world. I said I’d reject the forces of evil, too, and while I’m not really down with that language (still not a dualist) I said it anyway. I said every part of the covenant because it felt like the thing I was supposed to do in that moment.

There’s this unique push and pull going on right now between what I feel like is my will and what feels like something wholly other from my will. I’m hesitant to say that its God’s Will, but I will say that there have been moments in the past several weeks which have lined up in a way as if to say —

Yes. This is where you belong. Open your heart to this. Focus your mind on this. Be transformed by this.

All of those experiences pointed me back to God, and to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

I know that the public response to my recent transition (a word I prefer used over “conversion”) has been softened a bit because I’ve occupied this “middle way” between Christianity and Paganism. I read a number of Pagans who’ve said something to the effect of “we need more people with blended traditions represented in the world.”

Honestly, I’m a little burnt out on being a representative of anything. It was never my intention when I set up this blog to be a spokesperson for all of Pagandom (as if such a thing could even exist!), and it certainly isn’t my intention now to be a representative of Christopaganism, or for all of Christianity for that matter. I can’t shoulder that weight. And I don’t really think that Pagans or Christians need me too. If Paganism has taught me anything it’s that people need to know themselves, and they need to respond honestly and boldly to the callings they experience in their heart. That’s where Divinity is easiest to find. There, and in the hearts of those around us. That’s where we should be looking first; not in the clouds, or in the myths, or in the middle of a perfectly orchestrated ritual (although It’s there, too). We need only look into the hearts of those around us to find the spark of the Divine; to find what Christians call the Christ.

It’s right there. It’s always been just right there.

A friend and well-known Pagan told me “You know, Teo, I think people just want to know if you’re going to be a Carl McColman or a River Higginbotham.”

To that I think, I don’t know what God would have for me in any of this.

I suppose that makes me more like Carl, doesn’t it?

In my heart I know that there is more nuance to the spiritual life than can be represented in a single covenant or contained in a single religion. I know that the promises of faith and devotion we make are necessarily negotiated in each moment of each day after we make them. We have to keep making those same promises again and again. Each new time brings with it a new need to come out to ourselves and to the world. We say,

This is what I am, I think. I’m probably more than this; more than I can even realize. But this is what I am.

So if feeling compelled to reaffirm my Baptism makes me a Christian (and I think some would say that it does, unequivocally) then I guess I’m coming out as a Christian now.

A complicated Christian.

A gay Christian.

A Christian who thinks a lot like his Pagan friends, and who may have more in common with most Pagans than with most Christians.

But a Christian, nonetheless.

 

Photo by  simonella_virus

Me and Sean - Closeup

This is the kind of conversation my husband and I have over text messages:

Teo:

When was the King James Bible published?

Sean:

1600s

Teo:

And before that time, how did Christians come to know the Gospel?

Or even have a complete sense of what “The Bible” was?

Sean:

Oh, there were other, earlier versions of the Bible

King James commissioned a bible, some say, in repentance for his rather obvious homosexuality.

Teo:

Wow.

Sean:

Keep in mind, though, that even after King James, most people were illiterate and too poor to own books. So, most people knew the Gospel simply from attending church. Households did not have Bibles

Teo:

I just got to wonder how many thousands of people pre-King James knew the story of Jesus, and a vague sense of it’s place in the greater context of Jewish scripture, and how many didn’t, There was this long period of time when pre-Christian beliefs and practices (i.e. paganisms) existed side-by-side with a growing Christian faith.

And you make a good point.

Sean:

Yep. Home practice was much more pagan, I’d think. But people attended Church. In the Middle Ages, it wasn’t just monks and nuns who prayed 7 times a day, either. The Christian life was much more like Islamic practice. But prior to the Middle Ages, Christianity was a sort of magical tradition, and Jesus was sometimes seen as the greatest of the Pagan leaders, opening up a new path to wisdom and enlightenment.

The only way syncretism really works is if it looks enough like the original religion that people are convinced they don’t need to convert at all.

This is probably one of the reasons why Arthur become mythologized as a king who would return. And why his greatest quest — even though he was otherwise Pagan — was to retrieve the Holy Grail.

I’m speaking mostly from a European, early Middle Ages perspective. How people knew the Gospel in classical times — in Rome and Greece — before there was any sort of wide, paperbound dissemination of the book, I’ve no idea.

Something I do know, from my study of Classical culture and language, though, is that Hellenistic and Roman gods were not as central to those folks lives as reconstructionists like to pretend. The switch to Jesus was pretty easy, perhaps because he was seen as an active god, one who wasn’t just a story or just a metaphor. Most educated Greeks and Romans understood the Gods as metaphors.

 Me and Sean - Crazy Face

Teo:

It’s interesting to me that there are SO MANY people in the past 2000 years who have had some close, personal connection to the story of Jesus, and yet their understandings of that story could be so radically different from mine.

Sean:

Yes. One of the brilliant (from the perspective of literary analysis) aspects of the Jesus story is its timelessness. It is adaptable for people of many cultures, across centuries.

He remains popular for some of the same reasons that Shakespeare’s plays remain popular.

His messages get at the very heart of the human dilemma.

Teo:

You know, there’s a big, heart-shaped part of me that thinks of Jesus as the gateway to understanding God. I really love the idea that he is both fully human and fully divine. It makes humanity and divinity seem both completely different and yet totally compatable.

Sean:

Yep.

This changes the meaning of “God” into something only possible to understand through reflection and consideration. And something that can forever be discussed, debated, deliberated. The word “God” then becomes so slippery. Immediate, distant; intimate, foreign. For linguists, that slippage in language is a form of the erotic. And thus God becomes erotic.

Teo:

Your brain is so hot.

Sean:

Thanks.

This is why any fundamentalist perspective on your return (carefully chosen word, that) to Christian thought is immediately wrong. Because that return is exactly informed by your work within Paganism. There’s a seat at your table for both, primarily because, at the bottom of it all, there aren’t conflicts between them.

Teo:

Yes.

The sin/redemption bit does seem to be a distinction, though. I was struck by how much of that language was off-putting to me during the Morning Prayer service yesterday, and yet how at the same time I find Nadia’s theology so attractive.

Sean:

For me, it’s always important to recognize that sin/redemption are not dependent on Jesus. He showed us a transactional metaphor. In every small way, we must die and be reborn whenever we repent, whenever we modify our behavior, apologize, change our thought patterns. There are very likely similar metaphors (actually, I can think of some from the Mabinogian right now) within Pagan traditions.

Jesus showed us we are already whole. We just need to go through some shit to recognize it.

Teo:

Again and again, often.

Sean:

Yep.

And the avoidance of that cycle, that effort… that’s sin. The only real one. To live in a deficit of existence (not my words… from Giorgio Agamben).

Jesus said: Crucifixion is a bitch, but look what it leads to!

Teo:

Jesus just became a drag queen.

Sean Morris:

“Oh, so now you’re Jesus.”

Teo Bishop:

HA!

Teo:

Would you mind if I published this little bit of conversation on my blog?

Sean:

Not at all.

Me and Sean - Hands up

Dear Sara,

Thank you for your response. It’s delightful to read about your personal experiences with all of this. You offer a soothing, yet invigorating perspective.

ashleyrosex_ Close Cross

You asked,

“What is contradictory for you personally between Christianity and Paganism…theologically, emotionally?  Does opening the door to Christianity automatically mean shutting the door to Paganism, and if so, why?

Discussing Christian theology feels, at this point, a kind of misplacement of focus. What seems to be happening to me is an emotional and perhaps even metaphysical pull towards Jesus, God and the Gospel. It’s confusing, because I’m so used to parsing out Christianity intellectually. That’s what I did the first time around. I dug in with my head, first, and then listened to my heart.

But this feels so different. It feels as though the heart is leading, and that the heart is also being led.

I can say that I feel the immediacy of God in a new way now, and I’m using language to describe that feeling of immediacy which feels rather foreign to me. I’m saying things like, “I guess God wasn’t done with me,” or “I’m feeling called back to the Church,” or “But I was already claimed by God.” These are not the kinds of things I ever said before as a Christian. These are, in fact, the kinds of statements that would make me a little squeamish when I heard other people say them. But when I say these things now I feel like I’m speaking about something that is actually happening in my life, rather than some abstract concept or idea. It feels as real and ordinary as if I were to say, “I haven’t showered yet this morning,” or “I need to put some socks on because my feet are cold.”

This doesn’t feel like zealotry, either. I feel no compulsion to start “saving” people. Not. at. all. This immediacy feels incredibly personal, and reminds me in some ways of how I’ve heard hard polytheists speak about their Gods. And they used to wig me out a little, too, when they did that. But I don’t have any beef with them now. I actually feel like I understand them in a better way, because I’m having the sense that God is working in my life somehow just as they understand their Gods to be working in theirs.

And see, this is where it gets challenging to parse things out intellectually. I’m feeling a pull to God, a comfort in the Gospel, a challenge from the example of Jesus (all of this in a very short period of time, mind you), while at the same time feeling a deep understanding and appreciation for my polytheist friends in their experience of deity. Certain Christian doctrine and thought would seem to make that impossible or completely incompatible, but not for me.

When I’ve been in church, wrapped up in the movement of the liturgy, or when I’m considering the conciseness of the Nicene Creed and Christian cosmology (at least, the one that’s painted for me in the Episcopal service), I at once recognize that this is complete and incomplete; it is all of what is necessary to inform and enrich my own human experience, and yet it is not anywhere near complete enough to incapsulate all of what is about humanity, or life on Earth, or the Universe, or God.

To try to illustrate what I mean, I’d like to refer to a post I read on Nadia Bolz-Webber’s blog a couple days ago. The post consists of her a sermon from this last Sunday on the Gospel story in Luke about the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14). She illustrates the way in which Jesus flips the whole notion of righteousness on it’s head (which I’m down with). But then at the end of it she concludes the sermon by presenting a somewhat traditional understanding of Jesus as God made flesh/Redeemer/Savior to the sinners. Read it. You’ll see where it happens.

At that point I think: but if Jesus fucks with the paradigm of righteousness, saying that your virtue doesn’t earn you anything in the eyes of God (nor does your humility), isn’t asserting with certainty who Jesus is, or what his role is in relationship to the Human Condition yet another exercise in the righteousness that Jesus was defusing in the parable? Doesn’t defining the mystery destroy it? In the moment that Jesus is presented as the champion of Christianity rather than the One Who Comes to Mindfuck, through Love, the Christian paradigm seems smaller than Jesus, himself. Do you see what I mean?

A part of me would like for all of this to be simple: believe that Jesus is the son of God (or don’t), and believe that that means a very specific thing with very specific consequences and very specific edicts attached to it, and you’ll know how to live your life. But that part of me is minuscule when compared to the sense of God’s immediacy in my life at this moment. And the divine seems to care nothing about what I believe! My ability (or inability) to parse all of this out doesn’t make a difference. I still feel an awareness of God working in my life somehow.

And maybe that’s Grace. Maybe the message isn’t that “It doesn’t matter what you do, Jesus has washed your sin away,” but rather “It doesn’t matter what you do, you are swept up in the current of the Spirit… It is always already working in your life… You do not have to deserve it, or earn it, or justify yourself in the eyes of the divine… you are always already in a state of being loved.”

So I don’t know how to answer your question just yet. I don’t feel like I’m closing the door to Paganism, although I’m sure most Pagans would have a hard time believing that having read what I just wrote. But I feel like my Paganism is informing my reawakening to Christ, just as my time spent in the Church in my early 20’s informed my constant desire to subject all of my experiences in the Pagan community to a close exegesis of their function, meaning and relevance. I was always somewhat of a Christian when I was exploring Paganism, just as I am still somewhat of a Pagan as I respond to what feels like a call to return to the Church.

Sent with love from the inbetween,

Teo

The Truth of What Was

I was never completely committed to ADF. I didn’t finish the Dedicant Path because I was unwilling to speak out loud the final Oath. I wasn’t willing to make that kind of commitment to Paganism, or — more specifically — that significant a renouncement of my Christianity.

There were plenty of people in ADF who could see this. The leadership in the ADF Mother Grove was divided on whether or not I should be allowed to create the Solitary Druid Fellowship, not so much because they didn’t think it was a good idea but because they did not think that I was necessarily the right person to execute it. It hadn’t proved myself to the community.

At the time when I learned of their hesitation I was resentful. I thought they weren’t being progressive enough. I thought they were slow-moving, unimaginative. I thought a whole host of things that placed judgement on them. I still think that ADF moves unnecessarily slowly about certain things, but that isn’t the point. They were right. They saw something in me that I was unable to see. I was not the right man for this, and not because I couldn’t create it but because I wasn’t in it for the long haul.

You know, I almost left ADF just before the launch of the Fellowship. There was a moment when the Mother Grove questioned my investment in ADF, and I almost left. I almost took the Fellowship with me, too. I’d registered the domain, I’d reserved the Twitter handle, I’d done all of the legwork in building a website and conceiving of how the liturgical model would function. I had this moment when I realized that I didn’t really need ADF to do this.

But leaving would have created yet another splinter Pagan group, this one in my own image, and I didn’t want to do that.

tim_ellis - Splintering Brach

The Truth of What Is

I had a moment a few days ago — during church, actually — when I said to myself,

“But I was already claimed by a God. I am already His.”

It was an unusual thing for me to think. It’s not a way I ever talked about God when I was a practicing Christian, and it was also the kind of language I heard from hard polytheists that made me a little uncomfortable. That idea of being claimed always felt a little dangerous to me.

But I thought it. It made sense. It felt true.

I have been changed by my time with ADF. I can’t deny that. I have different ideas about divinity now. I’ve come to recognize, even more so than I already believed, that there are many, many ways for people to live out a meaningful spiritual life. I trust that there are some people in ADF, and in Paganism in general, who came to some Pagan tradition and thought, “This! This makes sense in my soul! This is where I belong!”

The truth of the matter is that I had that very feeling when I was in church this past weekend.

This makes sense to my soul. This is the system in which I feel most comfortable, in which I find the most richness, wherein I think there is the most room for me to grow. There is a place here for a reverence of nature. There is a place here for compassion. There is a place here to acknowledge the fullness of life, and the nuances and complexities of morality, and the gale force power of Grace. I am willing to accept that I don’t understand all there is to know about divinity, and that the Gods that other people worship — some of whom have touched my life in an immediate way — are real in ways that are mysterious to me. But when it comes down to it I’m experiencing a simple call to return to the place from which I came.

And you have to go where you feel called.

vainsang _ End of the Road

The Truth of What Is to Come

I read these words last night. They come from what The Contemplative Life website said was the most famous of Thomas Merton’s prayers:

 

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.”

 

This is how I feel right now.

The prayer goes on to say:

 

“Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that

I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am

actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You

does in fact please you. …

Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost

and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for You are ever with me,

and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.

 

This last bit is all I can really hold onto right now. I can’t quite wrap my mind around whether or not I think that my desires to please the divine really earn me any good favor. That logic, like the idea of being claimed, feels strangely transactional and human-shaped.

But trusting in some kind of Unfolding — that is about all I can hold onto right now.

The words from Imbolc, “I keep vigil to the fire in my heart,” have always represented to me that some part of the divine was with me always, an inextricable part of me. I’ve always held that belief.

So I shall seek to continue to tend that fire, trusting that I am not alone.

Dear Sara,

I didn’t plan on going to church last weekend. It sort of just happened.

I hadn’t been in a very long time, and during my most recent visit I was only barely present. Participation in the service felt a bit like an act of treason. I’d read Pagan writers who said as much. And they must have made an impression on me, because I didn’t engage at all. I just sat and watched the Christians give themselves over to the liturgy, to the songs, and to God as though all of it was foreign to me; as though it wasn’t foundational to my spiritual identity.

But it is. And when I went to church last weekend I didn’t try to pretend otherwise. I was all in. No reservations. It didn’t matter if I didn’t believe every aspect of church doctrine. It didn’t matter to me if I took issue with the gender language. It didn’t matter if I was the only Pagan in the pews. I chose not to focus on any of that. I surrendered myself to the moment…

…and it was beautiful.

Trinity-2

I’m not sure what changed in me that made me open to this experience. I just woke up and wanted to go. I wanted to see what it felt like, and whether it would mean anything to me. Would I — a man who’s been a very vocal Pagan in recent years, who’s tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to adopt a polytheist theology, who’s worked to build community for other Pagans, to create a space for dialogue about Pagan issues — feel like a foreigner in church? Was there any part of me that would still feel at home in that environment?

I stopped going to church because the politics were ugly, and I was bothered by how small everyone made God out to be. If God was worth his salt, then she was beyond what anyone could imagine. God was a mystery. God was even greater than he was written about in Scripture. She was beyond all comprehension, which, itself, is an idea beyond comprehension. The Church made God small and petty, when it is really people who are small and petty.

You wrote,

“I believe spiritual journeys are wildly complex creatures.  They are not linear, they do not make logical sense – they loop back on themselves and contradict themselves.  So if this is a moment that passes away for you and you find yourself 100% (or as much as anyone can say that) Pagan, that is legit, and if you find yourself returning to the church and identifying as 100% (again, as much as anyone can) Christian, that is legit, and if you remain in a strange fluctuating inbetween world where you are both and sometimes more and sometimes less, etc, that is legit too.  Our cultural worldview doesn’t tends to affirm this.”

I think you’re right. But I find myself stuck on this idea that by having a meaningful experience in church, or by opening myself up to discussions about Jesus or his teachings (something that’s been more or less off limits in my household over the past few years) that I might no longer be Pagan. I feel like I am, and yet I cannot deny how resonant it was to me to be in that service, to sing those songs, to take the Eucharist.

A part of me wants my religious identity or my spiritual inklings to make logical sense. Binary thought is popular for a reason: it takes away a lot of the guess work. You simply are something or you’re not. There are plenty of Christians who see the world that way, and a good handful of Pagans, too.

But when it comes down to it, I don’t think I’m like that. I keep finding myself in the “inbetween world”; never either/or, but always somehow both/and.

It’s an act of faith to think that’s legit.

So I’m going to church tomorrow again.  And afterward I’ll start making plans for my Samhain ritual.

Do you ever wonder how it is that you can worship nature, or be an animist, and also be a follower of Christ? How do you hold the tension between the parts of yourself that are seemingly at odds with one another? Are they at odds, or are you just chasing the Spirit wherever it leads you?

I eagerly await your reply.

In peace,

Teo

Get it?

A pair a’Docs

  • I’m the kind of Pagan who hasn’t gotten rid of his Bibles.
  • I don’t think there is a single Truth any more than I think there’s only one god, but I do think there’s something which unites everything in the universe. And I’d like to imagine that this connecting force is sentient, but I don’t know that for certain.
  • I’ve built connections on the internet with other Pagans, and some of those connections have felt like “community.” But I’ve never really sustained an on-ground community with other Pagans. I think this may contribute to why it feels difficult to clearly identify at times just how I’m a Pagan. I don’t have a community of people who mirror that for me.
  • I find it difficult to have discussion about practice without having some kind of acknowledgement of belief. It feels false to me to think of the two as separate. I think they’re inherently woven together. For some belief comes first. For other practice.

I don’t know which of those people I am.

  • I feel like the best way for me to learn something new is to be a teacher, and the best way for me to teach is to be a student. This has been how I’ve approached the development of my Paganism.
  • I want to be having more conversations about morals and ethics than do many of my fellow Pagans, it seems. Discussions of morality don’t scare me, because I don’t think that morality needs to be connected to Divine Judgement. I think discussions of morality are incredibly useful for the development of a healthy society.
  • I don’t think that everything is subjective. Sometimes I want to draw a line in the proverbial sand and say — “no, that’s wrong.”

And yet I also think that drawing that is wrong.

  • Someone told me once that Goddess spirituality was born from this deep yearning for the Sacred Feminine; a principle which was absent in Western Christianity. She said,

“We just wanted a Mother.”

Her words made me remember that as a Christian I delighted in the phrase “Mother Jesus.” The idea really fucked with my perspective, and I loved that feeling of being shaken into a new way of seeing the divine.

But I’ve never really felt the kind of pull to the Goddess that I hear other Pagans talk about. I took God for granted, and I never really thought of God as a father, even if I did refer to God as “he” (which I stopped doing in my 20’s).

  • I’ve tried to make my Paganism into a religion, but I don’t think it actually functions well as a religion. It’s not defined enough. It’s not clear enough about what it is. It’s a framework — a loose framework — and maybe even a way of being, but I don’t think it’s a religion.
  • I think that polytheist reconstructionists are doing religion.
  • I have a religious nature, but the way in which I engage with religion is to get inside of it and take it apart. And I want for it to push back against me and challenge me.

I don’t know if Paganism is inherently challenging. At least, not the kind of Paganism that defaults to “whatever works for you.”

That said, I often default to that perspective because I don’t want to be judgmental. I think that you can benefit from the strengths of pluralism and still push yourself to think deeper about your assumptions, but I don’t know how many others in the Pagan community want to be challenged in that way.

  • I’m a Pagan who’s in the middle of rediscovering the impact that Jesus has had on his life. I’m also a Pagan who’s still exploring what Druidry means to him.

I’m a Pagan of paradoxes, and for now I think I’m ok with that.

 

Photo by Camera Eye Photography

gaspi_ Chapel Glass

  • I used to sing with my eyes closed. There were a few hymns at Christmas time that really did if for me. I sang harmonies a little louder than good taste would call for. Sometimes the priest would sing the Eucharist, and I knew every melody. I’d sing along quietly to myself, just under my breath.
  • I was the parishioner who showed up early to get a good seat.
  • I was the one who raised his hand in the Adult Forum class and said, “But, wait….”
  • I was the guy doing Morning Prayer alone in the chapel on a Tuesday evening.
  • I didn’t understand why certain biblical passages needed to be read. The church I belonged to, the Episcopal church, organizes its Sunday readings around a rotating three-year liturgical calendar. This insures that every church in the denomination is reading and reflecting on the same passages at roughly the same time. It forges a kind of unity that I was attempting to replicate (albeit loosely) with the formation of the Solitary Druid Fellowship.

My confusion about the passages, though, had more to do with their discontinuity. I felt like the imposition of this liturgical structure forced the priest to take great leaps when making meaning out of the ancient text. Her bias was always present. And some passages simply were impossible to reconcile.

  • I bowed when the cross passed by my pew. I didn’t know why at first, or who I was doing that for (aside from myself).

Acts of reverence like this aren’t always for the benefit of a benevolent god. They’re an extension of practice. They teach you something. They allow you to embody the experiences of respect and humility. There’s great value in that.

  • I spoke the Confession of Sin tentatively at times, and passionately at others. I was never really sold on the idea that my sin was of my birth, or that I was fatally flawed. The transactional savior concept was a little lost on me. But that didn’t mean I didn’t appreciate the opportunity to own up to all of myself, even the stuff I didn’t want to admit to. The Confession was an invitation into wholeness.
  • I loved picking apart the Gospel of Mark, becuase it rooted the story of Jesus in a specific culture. It broke apart some of the illusion that all of the Bible is essentially “one story”. That’s such a small way of thinking, and it isn’t true.
  • I thought the Historical Jesus was interesting, but I still wanted him to a be a little bit God.
  • I got angry at fundamentalism.
  • I felt angry that there was some expectation that as a gay Christian I had an even greater responsibility to show good face. My gayness was even more political than if I was churchless. That seemed profoundly unfair to me.

I wanted to have sex. I wanted to feel love. I wanted the stories about sex and love to be about me, too.

  • I had a really difficult time during Lent. I felt heavy. Sorrowful. Holy Week was the worst…

But Easter was amazing.

  • I was the kind of Christian who didn’t fit comfortably into any pre-fab molds. At least, it didn’t feel that way. I was always a little on the outside.

That is…except during the Eurcharist.

I knew I was always welcome then.

 

Coming soon: The Kind of Pagan I Am

 

Photo by gaspi *yg

I’m overwhelmed with thoughts of Jesus.

Jesus and God and Christianity and the Lord’s Prayer and compassion and forgiveness and hope and judgement and freedom from judgement and all of the things which made (and make) me feel connected to the Sacred.

I don’t know what to do with all of this.

andormix _ Jesus

It started when I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk next to her shopping cart. She was filthy and small, and she looked deeply tired. Bringing her food I asked,

“How are you?”

She looked up at me, a bit surprised at having been spoken to or asked after. She thought for a moment.

“I’m recovering,” she said somberly.

My heart broke a little. It wasn’t the response I expected. It was so vulnerable, and honest. Her statement felt unfathomably large, as though she was recovering from all of the things that had ever been done to her.

She seemed grateful for the attention, and for the food.

“God bless you,” she said, sincerely.

My heart broke some more.

I headed off, feeling heavier in my boots.

Further down the path, I heard the call of a crow. I looked up and saw it sitting on top of a telephone pole. I thought of the Morrigan.

Remember me.

I felt a bit jarred. The crow seemed to take notice, and then began to fly.

I walked in the direction of the crow, uncertain. Walking in the other direction on the opposite side of the street was a man holding a book under his arm. There was a yarmulka on his head. He looked at me, probing. Are you a part of my tribe? I looked similar to many of the Orthodox men walking through the neighborhood, but not an exact match. Close, but not close enough.

The words sink a little deeper.

Am I a part of his tribe?

There is this dialogue running in me that keeps returning to the religion of my youth and young adulthood; to the man who was the subject of so many of my conversations. There is also my Paganism, built and cultivated over the past four or five years. It is young and lacking the same kind of deep root system I developed in my Christianity, but it is still a part of me now.

My Druidic studies are calling me to look at the world as an enchanted, alive, vibrant and magical place. There’s a shortage of that perspective these days. Meditating on these ideas brings me peace. But then I see someone who is broken, or damaged, or simply doing their best to not fall apart, and I think back to the lessons of compassion and kindness I learned in the Church. I feel compelled to love other people without reservation. I feel compelled to offer them respite. I feel compelled to feed them, to care for them, to treat them with dignity and respect.

These are the desires that rise up out of my memories of the Lord’s Prayer, or the stories of Jesus. These are the principles that I valued about my Christianity.

And I don’t know what to do with all of this reflection, or how to talk about it. I don’t think I’m becoming a hard-core or born again Christian, or even a Christo-Pagan. But there is a softening inside of me that feels directly connected to Jesus and to the language of mystical and contemplative Christianity.

Just the other day, after a similar encounter with an old woman on the street in Portland, I had the thought —

“I’m going to go ahead and believe in God.”

The thought came into my head before I could censor it.

A few days later I polished a Celtic cross that I’d picked up a few years back. It’s a replica of one I saw on pilgrimage in Ireland, the place where I first found Brighid. I hung the cross around my neck beside my Awen and acorn pendants. It’s still hanging there at this moment.

So there’s this softening to Jesus, and a confusion about what that means, and — in no small way — a concern about how this occurrence will be perceived by others.

Will Pagans see this as proof that I was never really one of them? Will Christians see this as proof that God is calling me back to the Church?

 

Photo by  Isaac Torrontera

Pagan Jesus

I started reading a book yesterday called Contemplative Practices in Action: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health. It’s an academic volume which seeks to demonstrate that contemplative practices have positive affects on the lives of those who engage in them. It’s of personal interest to me for a number of reasons.

First, I would like to see an emergence of a contemplative stream of Pagan practice. I would like to see Pagans, through the lenses of their traditions, build and develop contemplative practices that are both true to their community identity, but also examples of how the Pagan ethea is relevant in the modern world. To some whose tradition already incorporates contemplative-style activities in their group work this shouldn’t seem like much of a stretch. But I’m not sure if they’re identifying what they’re doing as “contemplative practice.”

But aside from my conviction that the modern Pagan movement needs more contemplatives, I was drawn to this book because I feel a need to enrich my own contemplative practice. My writing in recent days has been centered around my own inquiries and doubts, but the current running underneath all of it is a desire to have a deeper and more fulfilling contemplative life.

For an academic text rich with footnotes and references, I was surprised at how quickly I started in on this book. The second chapter, Similarity in Diversity? Four Shared Functions of Integrative Contemplative Practice Systems spelled out a few ideas that immediately made me think about ADF and my Dedicant Path studies (which, truth be told, have all but been ignored over the past long while). The author, Doug Oman, looks at a variety of systems, including The Eight-Point Program of Passage Meditation, Centering Prayer, and Mantra Repetition and outlines four elements or themes present in most of them. A practice system, he asserts, could be considered an integrated contemplative practice if it contains these four common elements:

1. Set-aside time–time that is set aside regularly, usually daily, for a disciplined activity or exercise that has a comparatively powerful effect on training attention.

2. Virtues and character strengths–qualities of character and behavior, such as compassion, forgiveness or fearlessness. … Typically, the recommended qualities involve subsets of six cross-culturally prevalent classes of virtues recently identified by positive psychologists–wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

3. Practices for centering/stabilizing that are usable through the day–such as during occasions of stress, anxiety, or unstructured time.

4. Spiritual models–attending to the individuals whose behavior reflects desired spiritual qualities–provide a unique resource for spiritual growth. … Attending to spiritual models’ words and actions can motivate sustained practice, and guide or inspire implementation of other spiritual practices. (Oman 8)

(emphasis mine)

This last one, spiritual models, caught my attention.

We don’t have those, I though. Or, at least, I’m not sure there is one particular spiritual model set forth by my tradition to look to for inspiration or guidance. In fact, I’m sure that there isn’t.

I posed these questions on Facebook:

Are Pagan traditions offering the kind of “spiritual modeling” that you might find in, say, Buddhism or Christianity? Do we have spiritual figures — either from history or from myth (or in the fuzzy place in the middle) — that we regularly look to for examples of how to act in the world? If so, who are these folk?

Who do *you* look to for “spiritual modeling”?

The responses were interesting.

Some look to figures like Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Hypatia. Others see Crowley and Doreen Valiente as figures to look to (both in a historical and in a magickal sense). MLK was mentioned as was Malcolm X, the current Archdruid of ADF, and the heroes of Celtic legend.

Michael York asked, taking us to an archetypally pagan place, “Is not our ultimate spiritual model nature herself?”

All of these things were relevant to the people who offered them, but as I sit with these ideas now I realize that — for me — I need my #4 to be connected more closely to my #2: I need a spiritual model that demonstrates the virtues and character strengths that are meaningful to me.

In my time as Pagan, I’m not sure I’ve found that model.

As a Christian, Jesus was that model for me. While I was always a little uncomfortable by some of the language that accompanied the act of “following Jesus,” especially anything that ascribed to the person of Jesus attributes that seemed little more than projections of the follower, himself, I was still influenced by the example of this man. He was something concrete to look to, even if his life was represented in an incomplete and biased fashion. It was a point of reference, and that was valuable. He wasn’t important because of the “saved soul” factor; he was important because he made it easier for me, personally, to connect my actions to a system of values.

Some people who responded to my questions don’t look to anyone other than themselves. They are their own example; their own spiritual model.

While I respect everyone’s right to develop their religious and spiritual life as they see fit, I don’t think I can serve as my own best example. I need something to look to that is outside of myself, even if in the form of a character in a story or myth, in order to help me better understand the nuances of my own humanity.

The question is, who’s going to by my Pagan Jesus?

 

Photo by Noël Zia Lee

Photo by Noël Zia Lee

Yesterday I realized that I have what you might call, “Christian baggage.”

To many, this will come as no surprise. It’s been said as much on post after post, and in the occasional Pagan forum thread. In response, I always said that I didn’t think that label was fair. Most times I think I was correct. To write about or reflect on my Christian past is not, in my opinion, the same thing as having baggage.

Reflection is not baggage. Contemplation is not baggage.

But what happened yesterday was different. In a conversation with my husband about my knee-jerk reaction to a kind, innocuous comment left on my post about going to church by the very priest who gave the inspirational sermon I spoke of, I realized that when I was a Christian I believed — on some level — that my paradigm was the correct paradigm.

By that I mean that when we affirmed in the Creed that there was “one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth…” we were affirming something that was true. It must be true, I thought, even if only in some mysterious, esoteric manner beyond my comprehension, in order for the whole thing (the Gospel, the Jesus, the God) to have meaning.

Also, if my paradigm was true, that meant that other paradigms, if they were different, were not true. For example, if there was only one God, there were not two. If God was the creator of all things, there were no other creators.

Plain and simple.

As I unpacked these ideas I recognized a rigidity within me that I never knew I had. Even if I hadn’t held up cardboard signs proclaiming that my truth was the one and only truth, I stood up in church every weekend and reinforced the idea that my truth was the one and only truth.

Now, there are those for whom the Creed does not serve this purpose: the words are spoken, but not necessarily law. Converts to a creedal tradition, for example, might be capable of taking a more objective stance to their newfound credal affirmations. For them, the value in speaking the Creed aloud might simply be in the strengthening of the group bond.

But as a “cradle Episcopalian,” a child who was speaking “I believe” statements before I could understand what those “I believe” statements even meant, those words have carved a deep groove in me. Even when I no longer speak them, their echo is still present.

My husband suggested that perhaps we re-write the Creed, just as an exercise. Maybe that would release some of its hold on my psyche.

It might start something like…

We believe in this one god,

A father, kind of almighty,

One of the makers of heaven and earth,

Of some things, seen and unseen….

To creedal Christians reading this blog (and I’m not sure there are many of you), I mean no disrespect by this re-write. It isn’t for you, it’s for me. Adjusting the language allowed me to laugh at my own inner rigidity. Speaking these new words out loud made it feel like the old words are in fact not law, but rather one of many ways of believing.

In that moment, there was plurality.

2...3...4? Photo by Paul Gorbould

2…3…4?
Photo by Paul Gorbould

My friend William, an ADF Druid, reminds me often that dualism — the view that the universe is divided into opposites like good/evil, right/wrong, heaven/hell — undergirds much of our Western thinking. Even if we profess to be pluralists, we still fall back on dualism as a default. Just look back on all of the conversations we’ve had about Pagan v.s. Polytheist. That’s dualism right there. The entire firestorm about gender-exclusive ritual can be seen as a biproduct of dualistic thinking (i.e. we are either male or female — end of story).

Perhaps dualism is my Christian baggage.

If that is true (or if it is one of many truths), what do I do with that information?

How does one take apart dualism? By introducing a third way? How do you hold the tension for more than two, opposite ways of thinking, being, or doing? How, I wonder, do I work to develop an ongoing personal practice that is relevant to me without slipping into a perspective that holds up my practice as the right way?

Have you stared your own dualism in the face? What did you see? How did you respond?

20130505-092328.jpgI went to church last night.

It was the first time I’d been to church since I left the Church.

Taking in an evening mass, done up to the 9’s with incense and vestments, was something I hadn’t planned to do while visiting Eugene, Oregon, nor was it an invitation I expected to receive from my friend, Jason Pitzl-Waters. His wife attends this congregation, and yesterday just happened to be the first time he was going to venture with her. He extended the welcome to me, and I gladly joined them both.

I’m not sure I was prepared for what I experienced.

Something pagan was present at this church service (other than the Druid in the back row). The priest spoke about the liturgical calendar, and how this Sunday — today — would be a day when the church recognized a pre-Christian, Roman agricultural holiday.

A pagan holiday.

How perfect, I thought.

(God… are you behind this?)

There was a god in that place last night. It wasn’t the only one – I think they’re wrong about that. But there was a god, nonetheless.

I stood and sat at the appropriate moments during the service, and I recognized in an intimate way the rhythm of the ritual. This was an Episcopal church, after all, and the Episcopal church was my home for so many years. I felt relevance, harmony, but a certain dissonance, too. It was neither all good nor all bad, and I’m not sure why I thought it would be either of those things. That was not the Church I knew. Being a Christian was always mixed and complicated.

I held back from full engagement with the liturgy, because full engagement felt disingenuous. I didn’t feel comfortable reciting the creed, nor did I say the Lord’s Prayer. I felt detached during the hymns, hype-aware that the messages were designed to tear down animism and build up hierarchical monotheism. The sermon was engaging and inspiring, but it was followed by kneeling and submitting to a dogma that I don’t believe in.

And yet, when I heard a small child sing along to one of the mantra-like songs after the Eucharist, I almost cried.

I was that child.

And what am I now?

That question lingered long after the service, and into this morning. I sit here in this little cafe, compelled to write again on the blog that I put on hiatus, because I was reminded last night that the inner world is complicated and worth unpacking. This blog is the venue in which I seek to answer that question again and again, and it’s time to return to that dialogue.

The short answer is this:

I am all of the things I have ever been. I continue to be them, in one way or another. Nothing is ever fully released from the heart. It’s all there, tattoo-like. Those old parts of you call out and say, We’re still here: your memories; your long, lost hopes; your visions of truth; your doubts — all of it. All here, still intact, inked into the inner flesh.

My Christianity gave me my first introduction to reverence, mystery, humility and community. It encouraged me to recognize that there was nothing in the world that was not touched by the divine. It inspired me to care deeper, to give generously, and to seek out new, creative ways to serve others.

I bring all of those attributes with me to my work with the Solitary Druid Fellowship. Were it not for the Church, and for those many people who were inspired by Jesus to serve others in love, I wouldn’t be writing liturgies for Pagans.

(Chew on that one for a minute.)

I walk the path of a modern Druid, but one whose ethics were first informed by bells-and-whistles Christianity. I can never not be this person.

And I’m ok with that.

I think I’m going to go back this morning, just to see if I might talk with the priest for a moment — one religious man to another. They’re going to have bagpipes today, and they plan to process around the church in a big circle (clockwise, no doubt), and bless the seeds and livestock.

It may just be the most pagan service I will ever attend.

To those participating in the Bishop In The Grove’s Bookclub reading of T. Thorn Coyle’s Make Magic of Your Life, join me on Twitter throughout the month of April and engage in a Twitter dialogue about the questions raised in this book. Be sure to @reply with the hashtag, #MakeMagic and Thorn’s handle, @ThornCoyle.

Now, onto today’s BITG post…

The Intersection of the Myth and the Meaning

Hot Cross Buns

My husband and I were standing in the kitchen, preparing a meal to take to my grandmother’s house for Easter. We were talking about the difference between Easter and Christmas, and how he had always preferred Christmas.

He talked about how the Jesus of Christmas and the Jesus of Easter seemed like two different people. To him, the lead-up to Christmas was always so intense and exciting, filled with anticipation. And the payoff, the birth of Christ, spoke to something wonderful about humanity. It was the moment in the myth when the divine became humble.

I’d never thought of it that way.

I proceeded to explain to him why Easter had always been more important to me than Christmas.

Easter brought into clarity how humans like me were in relationship with God. As a Christian, it made my station clear. It made the need for Jesus clear. It brought home the reason for being a Christian: reconciliation to God, and reconciliation to ourselves about our imperfect nature.

[Side note #1: I no longer hold this belief.]

Perhaps most importantly, Easter made the Christian myth relevant in the world. It provided me a way of applying the myth in my life. It said, “This thing happened, and because this thing happened you can better understand yourself. You can now go into the world and better understand the nature of the world.” Lent, the season preceding Easter, was equally important for me because it rooted the myth into my personal life, and encouraged in me a deep reflection on the parts of myself I often avoid acknowledging.

Christmas, on the other hand, was less visceral for me. Funny, right? Christmas is all about incarnation; about the divine being made human through birth — the most visceral act. Yet it did not feel as immediate or as potent as the Easter myth. Easter was about the complexity of humanity. Holy Week, even, provided all of these opportunities to reflect on the ways in which, in spite of all of our virtues, human beings do ghastly things to one another. It forced me to looks at my own potential for complicity in hatred and cruelty. It was humbling.

[Side note #2: It would be incorrect to dismiss this exploration of what Easter or Christmas meant to me in my early Christian life as “Christian baggage.” Having conversation about our past, or engaging with the stories which have been relevant to us at different times is not “baggage.” The term is reductive. I think we can be bigger than that.]

When I think about my proclivity toward inquiry about different ethical, and perhaps even moral convictions within the Pagan community, it is not because I believe in replicating a Christian-like, sin-based, transactional model of interaction with the divine; rather, it is because I have always believed that the stories you tell about the gods you worship need to be relevant in the world you live in. They must be more than just stories. They must have application.

I was never an advocate of literalism in the Church. I thought that was missing the point. The stories of Easter didn’t need to actually happen in order for them to be important or applicable. They could be symbolic while still being relevant.

And the point is that they were. Relevant.

So when I write about Pagan bubbles, or the effects of casting circle, or the function of love within a Pagan paradigm, I’m doing so because I am a person whose initial religious identity was heavily influenced by the idea that one’s religion must inform how they understand themselves in the world. I’m sure there are plenty of Pagans who can explain how their religious practices and mythologies directly influence their engagement with the world, and I’d like to hear from you here.

While the m-word (morality) may reek of wine and wafers and be stained with a duality that makes many of us cringe (myself included), the intersection of the myth and the meaning is where morality is born.

Is that correct? Can you find a way to phrase that last part more accurately?

But that’s beside the point of the original realization. Easter meant more to me because it made my myth into something I could apply in my life while informing me of my relationship to God. I may now see divinity as something different than I did then (and I do), but I still long to find, uncover, or create stories which make a similar connection. I’m not interested in finding the exact right one (I don’t think such a thing exists), but I am on a quest for meaning.

It all has to mean something, or it means nothing.

Photo by Chris

Photo by Chris

I am not a Christian, but I have no problem with placing love at the center of my religious ideology.

(That I should feel the need to qualify the centrality of love with an “I am not” statement is notable.)

When I check in with my desire, my deepest yearning, I discover love. It’s there, simple and quiet; steady and ready to be known.

The word, as many wiser people than I have observed, is overused in the English language. When I say “love” you might think of love as romance, adoration, longing, friendship or lust.

Do you love your car? Do you love your husband? Do you love your new phone? Do you love the land? The Gods? Yourself?

In each of these cases, the word is used quite differently. Isn’t it?

Photo by Chris

Photo by Chris

So what does it mean that my deepest yearning, my True Desire, is love?

I don’t know how to answer that question.

While I’m perfectly comfortable with writing that “love is at the center of my religious ideology,” I don’t know exactly what that means.

I was raised a Christian. I’ve written about that in many places. I also came into my own as a young adult within a Christian community. One could easily ascertain that my emphasis on love is a holdover from my earlier tradition. The Christians planted the love seed, and the tree continues to grow — even if it is decorated with Pagan symbols now.

Perhaps that is true. For certain, it is reductive.

I don’t think that Christians have the patent on love. It wasn’t born two thousand years ago, and it isn’t contained exclusively in the pages of the Good Book. It is bigger than any one tradition.

Photo by Franny Lane

Photo by Franny Lane

But how do we talk about love in a Pagan context? Can we place it at the center of our religious ideologies — or our spiritual practices, if that feels more comfortable to you — while retaining a sense of identity in our tradition.

For that matter, is it reasonable to expect that we do such a thing?

I’ve met people who seem to care little about love in a broad or theological sense, but a lot about love for their tribe. The boundaries are clear to them. You have it for some, but you don’t necessarily have it for others. There is an inside (where love is given), and there is an outside (from which you protect yourself).

And it’s not just Pagans or polytheists who do this. There are Christians who think of love in this way. There are Muslims who think of love in this way. There are people in every religious tradition who think of love as something that is given to only a few select people.

Tribalism is tribalism, no matter how you dress it up.

So, again, what does it mean that love is at the center of my religious ideology?

I still don’t know.

There are a few things that I am clear about:

  • I care for people. I care about their well being. This care sometimes is experienced as love, and this love is given to people I know very well and people I don’t know well at all. I consider myself a servant of my community, and I have great love for those who I serve.
  • I am in love with my husband. Madly. Over the past several weeks a new fire has ignited between us. Seven years we have been together, and somehow — amazingly — we are discovering each other in completely new ways. In him, I know love.
  • I feel a profound sense of love when I do ritual. This love feels like it’s coming from something on the edges of myself, pouring inward. I felt this at the PantheaCon Morrígan ritual (which continues to work its way into my skin). I have felt it every time I performed a Solitary Druid Fellowship High Day ritual. Love — some primal, essential kind of love — is present with me in those moments.

So it’s interesting to me that I start off this post with a need to clarify how this centrality of love is not Christian. My disclaimer makes me aware that I haven’t had much cause (or opportunity) to talk much about love since I became a Pagan.

And why is that?

How is it that something that can be so intrinsic to me (and I presume to others) can be a subject that doesn’t come up much in my religious community? Is it that we don’t have a context for talking about love? Are we convinced that love wasn’t that important in the Old Ways, and — more importantly — are we satisfied with that conclusion?

Or, are we afraid that if we talk about love in connection with our religious lives that we might start sounding too Christian?

Where does love fit into Pagan and polytheist traditions?

Welcome to the first Bishop In The Grove book club discussion about our February book, Faitheist, by Chris Stedman!

Let’s get something out on the table: I have never done a book club before. As such, I’m kind of winging it. My hope is that it can be informal, conversational, and ongoing; I envision there being multiple BITG book club posts about Faitheist. This one is simply designed to get the ball rolling.

Let’s get started!

FaitheistFirst, reading this book made me wish I could give Chris Stedman a huge hug. I kinda love this guy. His willingness to tell his personal story, a very vulnerable act, is nothing short of inspiring. Think what you will about atheism, Christianity, or interfaith dialogue, but you cannot deny the courage it takes for a person to tell their story to the world. And more than that, Chris frames his story as an introduction into a deeper conversation about the identity of others. He’s looking for dialogue — real dialogue — and offering himself up in an attempt to initiate that dialogue.

Chris may not be a Christian anymore, but there is a selfless, sacrificial-like quality to his approach that reminds me very much of the Jesus I admired as a young man. When speaking to atheists, Chris asks the potent and controversial question: “Do we simply want to eradicate religion, or do we want to improve the world?” One should not underestimate the gravity of that question in the circles that he moves through.

There’s also something bardic in the telling of his story. There is a message, a meaning, that transcends the book-jacket subtitle: “How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious.” Chris, I believe, in his quest to form connections with the religious, is trying to inspire us all to recognize our common humanity, and to acknowledge that that is enough to justify our striving toward peaceful interaction. Our shared humanity is the universal base from which we can construct all kinds of meaningful and sustainable communities.

About mid-way through the book, I came across a passage in Chapter 5 (Unholier Than Thou: Saying Goodbye to God) that caused me to put the book down for a few days; it affected me quite deeply. Chris tells the story of making his way to El Salvador on a pilgrimage of sorts to the site of Monsignor Óscar Romero’s assassination. Chris documents a series of connected events that occurred; events the include a discussion he had with a fellow student about a tattooed Bible verse on his leg, the emotional impact of being in the church where Romero was killed, and the revelation that the verse which he’d discussed earlier — a verse which he regretted having made permanent on his skin — was the very verse that Romero had preached about on the morning of his assassination.

It was Chris’ evaluation of the events that gave me pause.

Chris writes:

“I don’t know why I felt I needed that episode to be intentionally orchestrated in order to cull significance from it — it was significant on its own merit. I imagine that a desire for purpose is innate for many of us. We presuppose that learning occurs within larger, cosmic narrative structures. Things matter because there is an implicit reason behind their occurrence, and it is our job to discern the organic meaning within. Constellating and creating our own sense of meaning from such moments can feel insufficient; discovering some preordained answer seems more compelling. In that moment I wanted to be handed a fate, not fashion my own.”(93)

The conclusion that Chris reaches here is, itself, insufficient for me for several reasons.

First, this rationality still feels like an extension of Christo-centric thought. I read this and think, Who said anything about intentional orchestration? That concept is born straight out of a Christian paradigm. One needn’t believe in a god that is authoring your life in order for you to see the meaning inherent in a series of events…. or even to recognize that there is some kind of authorship taking place.

When Chris says that “things matter because there is an implicit reason behind their occurrence, and it is our job to discern the organic meaning within,” I shout YES! But I also recognize that this story — a story that he, himself, told by unpacking events that were strangely, clearly connected — was, in a way, a story being told to him.

It might not have been God doing the telling, but it was certainly not a story that he wrote all on his own. I wanted for Chris to see was that the people on the bus, the tour guide, and even the memory of his fallen idol were themselves the ones telling and authoring this story to Chris, about Chris.

(That’s the making of a mystery in my book.)

For some, this might be the moment when they say, “It’s God,” or “It’s the Goddess,” or “It’s _______ who made this happen,” and I — like Chris — think that’s missing the point. It is awe inspiring because it is happening, not because it was orchestrated. And I’m a believer that awe, wonder, and reverence even, are natural and fitting responses to events like the one he had in El Salvador… even if you don’t ascribe them to a deity.

You see – I’m trying to get at a kind of transpersonal awareness that felt missing from Chris’s re-telling of this one story. His evaluation was, to me, lacking because it did not acknowledge now, from his present vantage point, that this series of events was somewhat awe-inspiring in its unfolding. He included the story, but then missed the opportunity to experience any kind of wonder at the coincidence. It didn’t have to be a wonder born from a Christian context — or even any context which ascribes all meaning to the supernatural — in order for there to be wonder.

And as a religious person, I value wonder. I value uncertainty. I value and honor the mystery of human life and its intersection with non-human life. Chris demonstrates throughout the book a deep love of justice, equity, and humanity. His love is commendable; inspiring, really. I wonder if there’s any way for Chris — or other non-theists and Humanists — to cultivate some degree of love for and wonder at the mysteries surrounding the experience of being human.

Is it possible for an atheist to make a space for the kind of wonder that feels integrated into the lives of many religious people, without adopting a set of beliefs that is in contradiction with hir ethics and principles?

Perhaps that answer will come in the memoir Chris writes about his life from ages 25 to 50. Or, I might be able to shoot him a message on Twitter and see about interviewing him for the blog!

Chis Stedman Bedroom Eyes

Even the straight boys are crushing on this picture. Don’t lie.

Now, onto the discussion!

Did you have a similar reaction to this section of the book? How did (or do) you read it?

If this ties into another section of the book that resonated with or affected you, feel free to share that as well. This is the first of several book club posts inspired by Faitheist, and I will likely bring elements of this first conversation into my subsequent posts.

[And for our March BITG Book Club Book, check out the icon at the top of the right sidebar or the BITG Book Club page!!]

Photo by the Catholic Church England and Wales

Photo by the Catholic Church England and Wales

The first thing that sprung to mind when I learned that Pope Benedict was resigning from his station of service was a series of quips and puns.

 

WWBD? He’d quit.

Two living popes in Rome? It’s like Buffy and Faith all over again.

Well this is a good way of dodging the child abuse scandal, no?

My Catholic grandmother is in her 80’s too, but I think if she was called to be the voice of Christ she would do it to the death. Just sayin’.

 

They kept going for several minutes. It wasn’t my most sensitive, kind-hearted moment, but it was funny.

Once the fairy dust settled a bit, my husband and I began to consider the real conflict this would (or, perhaps should) create in the hearts and minds of Catholics. This situation, the leader of the Catholic church resigning his position — a position which make him the mouthpiece of the Godhead, the voice of Christ in the world — calls so many things into question for the faithful, doesn’t it?

As the title of this post says, I’m not Catholic. But what about my grandmother and my aunt? A great deal of my family is Catholic, and there will likely be readers of this blog who know and love Catholics. While it is easy to make fun of this situation, especially for those who found the current pontiff’s politics to be unsavory, I wonder if that response is really appropriate or helpful.

This is not my crisis of faith, admittedly, but it is a crisis of faith for others. As I consider what it means to be a servant to my community, and a believer in interfaith dialogue to boot, what is the best response to a situation such as this?

Humanism, perhaps? Is the best interfaith response to a religious crisis one that does not acknowledge at all the religious implications, but rather seeks to focus on the struggle of the individual?

I’m reminded of Chris Stedman, the author of this month’s Bishop In The Grove Book Club book, Faitheist. He is not a religious man, but he has dialogue with the religious. In my personal conversations with him I’ve found him to be incredibly compassionate and caring. As a humanist Chaplain, I wonder what it would be like for him to be approached by someone in a religious crisis. What would Chris Stedman do? (#WWCSD)

This puts into context why reading this book is valuable at this time. I’ve often wondered if the religious (i.e. theists of all sorts) can learn something from their non-religious counterparts. Could we take a lesson from them on how to reach out to one another on a purely human level? Does the humanist movement provide the religious with a reminder that our religiosity doesn’t always encourage us to be better humans to one another? And if we find that it doesn’t, does that mean that we should re-evaluate our religion?

I don’t know the answers to these questions.

There are many atheists in the Pagan world. Some of them write brilliantly about their perspectives. At times these voices sound most reasonable and compassionate, such as in the case of John Halstead or B.T. Newberg. Halstead is always rooting things back into his ordinary life, filled as it is with ordinary, sometimes very difficult challenges, and Newberg’s writing inspires me to think more deeply about how I’m rooted in the world (and how the world is rooted in me). This current crisis in the Catholic Church doesn’t belong to either of them, but I wonder how they might respond to it as humanists.

And I wonder how you might respond.

Do you find yourself responding with humor to this situation? With compassion?

Is your perspective about this transition — a historic one, for certain — colored by your own religious beliefs and practices? Is there any way for you to hold space for those who value the institution of the Catholic Church, or is that an unacceptable proposition for you?

What’s your take?

My inbox over Thanksgiving weekend was flooded with talk of — you guessed it — blood sacrifices.

The debate raged over whether making blood sacrifices, a practice strongly rejected by my tradition, ADF, is worth consideration. After all (the argument goes), the ancients did it. Plus, there’s a case being made for the awareness of a meat-eater’s own bloody relationship with food. If we can eat it, should we not be able to kill it? And if we kill it, should there not be some acknowledgment of the Kindred in the form of a ritual blessing and offering?

Some might, I imagine, like to see some sort of Druidic Kosher or Pagan Halal put into place. Others, understandably, are concerned that any time a Pagan gets blood on their hands — literally — the crazies come out with their pitch forks chanting “Satanist!! Satanist!!”

Even just talking about blood sacrifices is messy.

(This man was not harmed in the taking of this sardonic photo.)

The timing of this sanguine debate lines up with a different conversation, one that was concerned not with literal blood and tissue but rather with the metaphorical heart and all of its messiness. This was what I planned to write about today. I was even going to call it, Sacrificing the Heart: A New Pagan Tradition. 

My idea was that we need to examine our own hearts, and perhaps allow them to be offered up — to one another, to whatever we think the Gods are — in order to know better what our raw materials for religious practice are made of. We produce those raw materials, after all. Shouldn’t we take a closer look at what we’re working with? Shouldn’t we seek to know our own heart?

This leads to more interesting questions. What is the heart, anyway? Is it the seat of the soul? The center of our energetic body? The location of our inner-knowing? Is the heart the author of our UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis), or is it the translator?

All this and more came from the idea of offering one’s own heart as a sacrifice. The richness of the discussion that (I think) could be born out of a talk of sacrificing one’s own heart is made possible by the fact that we aren’t talking about literally cutting out one’s heart and laying it on an altar. We’re talking in metaphor, and using metaphor as a way of becoming aware of a deeper meaning.

“Offering” by Katherine Harper (CC)

I’m reminded of conversations that took place years ago in the adult forum of my former Christian church. It was asked whether the Bible was laying out for parishioners an instruction manual for living (a “How-To” book, basically), or if it was intended to be used as a tool for unlocking the inner mysteries.

Some believed, as many Christians do, that the Bible was instructive and prescriptive. These were the folks that favored the legalistic books, the ones that spelled out clearly what was allowed and what was not.

Others favored the mystic writings of John or the poetic book of the Psalms, because these works were steeped in metaphor and clearly intended to evoke something in the heart.

The legalists believed that their actions would, in some way, bring either God’s favor or his wrath. The mystics, on the other hand, relished in the idea that God was the greatest mystery of all, and that seeking to appease him with “right action” did more to make a deity into a human than anything else.

I wonder if something similar is happening here.

Is the talk about literal blood sacrifice too one-dimensional? Is it without the rich, layered meaning of a metaphorical sacrifice of the heart? Or, is there something to the argument that Pagans need to make our religions more visceral?

Do we believe that the Gods want blood in order to be in relationship with us? Do we think they want the full engagement of our heart? Perhaps they want from nothing from us at all, and we are simply projecting our idea of “wanting” onto our idea of deity.

How do you sort through the messiness of sacrifice?

I’m coming to terms with the truth about why I left the Church.

Just Before Leaving, by brokenview

It wasn’t that I had an experience of deity that fell outside of the Church’s teaching. That would come later.

My experience of God was always mysterious, never concrete. I was taught that one could, if centered and open, feel a presence that you might identify as God or as the Holy Spirit, but I didn’t trouble myself too much with whether what I was feeling was the Grand Daddy of Them All, or something else. I was content with seeking out a feeling of reverence.

I didn’t leave the Church because I suddenly stopped believing in a literal interpretation of the Gospels or the Bible. I never believed in literal interpretation. Contrary to popular belief, not all Christians are literalists, or even dogmatists. I knew a great many mystic-minded people in the Episcopal church, many of whom used the scriptures as a launching point for deep, inner-dialogue. It was all metaphor for me: the Gospel, the Eucharist, all the aspects of church life and ritual. It was all meant to be symbolic of an inner reality of harmony and oneness with the divine. Or at least, a striving toward that state.

I didn’t even part ways with the Church because I felt like Christianity was insufficient in providing one with the means to build a meaningful spiritual life, a more present engagement with the world. People take Christianity to town on account of its patriarchal nature, but I was a part of a tradition that was led by a woman who referred to Jesus as “Mother Christ.” Christ was beginning to be understood, by some, as the Goddess might be understood to some Pagans; a universal force which is both masculine and feminine, whole unto Itself and also capable of keeping each of us within the reach of Her divine love.

This was the Christianity I walked away from.

Admittedly, I did have problems with certain aspects of the Church before I left. I was uncomfortable with saying the creeds, for one. “We believe” is rarely a true statement, and I didn’t believe a lot of what was being said. I didn’t believe that Christianity was the One True Faith, nor did I believe in original sin. I didn’t believe in proselytizing, but neither did most of my fellow church-goers (another misconception is that all Christians are fired up to convert — this wasn’t my experience).

But these problems weren’t what ultimately drove me away from the Church.

I left the Church because of the bureaucracy.

Red Tape, by Julia Manzerova

I left the Church because I was tired of having the legitimacy and acceptability of my sexuality put to a vote. I could not tolerate any longer a conversation about how inclusive the Church should be, because the answer seemed ridiculously clear to me: radically inclusive. Even having that conversation allowed people to entertain the notion that there was an acceptable amount of exclusivity, and that never sat right with me.

I watched leaders within my own tradition manage their churches like businesses, like corporations, and I watched leaders in other traditions swindle and lie.

The people. The ignorance, the narrow-mindedness, the rigidity — that is what led me to leave the Church and consider other possibilities.

I wonder if a Pagan who is part of an established, well-organized tradition could find herself at a similar point of crisis.

Bureaucracy is bureaucracy. There are a number of Pagan churches — I’m a member of one — and many of these traditions have hierarchical leadership structures. Leaders are people, and people are fallible, and politics are a part of institutions. I’m not sure there’s any way around that.

But do our Pagan organizations, with their structured forms of leadership, their real and legitimate financial needs, their need to keep the institution alive/functional/growing/ordered, run the risk of becoming like what the Church became for me?

I ask these questions not to hold up the evils of Christianity against the virtues of Paganism — that is not the discussion I’m hoping to have here. What I’m wondering about is the nuts and bolts of religious community, of Pagan religious communities.

Can they exists without becoming centered around power-dynamics? Do not the matriarchal traditions also deal with struggle for power?

Can Pagan churches fail in the same way that Christian churches do, in that they become so focussed on keeping order, upholding what is safe, resisting the transgressive even when the transgressive element may embody some central teaching or central truth about the tradition?

How does Paganism reconcile Pagan bureaucracy?

Since I began working through the Dedicant Path this second time, I’ve run across a number of people who are also starting their studies with ADF. They’re showing up in the comment section on Bishop In The Grove, on Facebook, and I’m wondering if there’s some deeper meaning behind it.

A friend of mine suggested that we should distrust the Volkswagen Bug syndrome. You know — the one where you buy a VW bug, and then all you see around you are VW bugs. They start popping up everywhere — in parking lots, next to you while driving on the freeway, trailing you home from your knitting class…

…that last one isn’t part of the lore. It just came to me.

You know what I’m talking about, though. You make some change to your life, and then you see that change reflected in the world around you.

If I was an adherent to a popular New Age theory like The Secret (which my husband calls “The Trick”), I might say that this is the Universe providing me what I asked for. Although, it would seem a bit more like the Universe on overdrive, wouldn’t it? How many VW bugs does one guy need?

Photo by Marty Desilets

This search for the source of the repeating VW — or the new wave of ADF Dedicants — may be fruitless. If it’s the Universe, there’s no good way to trace that. Same goes for the gods.

Right?

In the comment section of my last post people went to town explaining their relationship to Pagan and metaphysical stuff. It was eye-opening.

I’m reminded of one comment now.

“On the one hand, I fully agree with the idea that Pagans collect too much stuff….On the other hand, what if it’s what the gods demand of us?”

How do we know (he asks with no clear answer) if the gods are encouraging us to buy that fancy wand or that new “mysterious” crystal skull? How do we discern the meaning behind the multiplying VW’s and Druids?

Perhaps that word — discernment — is a key to unlocking some of this.

Photo by Jef Safi

A quick search for the meaning of discernment reveals this (the secondary definition):

(in Christian contexts) Perception in the absence of judgment with a view to obtaining spiritual direction and understanding

  • – without providing for a time of healing and discernment, there will be no hope of living through this present moment without a shattering of our common life

Why, I wonder, is this labeled as “in Christian contexts”?

The Christian context for discernment assumes that you’re listing to the One True God, but if he isn’t your Mr. Right you’re going to be listening for something, or someone else.

Many a Pagan turns to divination for answers, and perhaps for them divination is the Pagan version of discernment. But, for those who divine as a way of listening to the gods (or the dead, or the spirits of place), isn’t there a teensy-weensy bit of discernment involved in that process? Don’t you have to suspend your judgement — or, at least your immediate, knee-jerk, influenced-by-your-cultural-conditioning-and-prejudices judgement in order to tap into the knowledge of something other than yourself — something non-human?

In my ADF studies, I’m doing a lot of book work. I’m also being called to do a lot of personal reflection. In reflection, an act of seeing inward, there is an auditory component. There is inner-listening.

I think “inner-listening” might be another way to think of discernment.

The question is, listening for what?

Your personal truth? The voice of Demeter? The advice of your dead great-grandmother?

Discernment is nuanced in the Christian world. It points to a personal relationship with deity, and when I’ve heard it used it was done so with seriousness and sensitivity. You don’t just hear God without freaking out a little, or without having to go through a process of trying to figure out — did I just hear God?

So what about discernment outside of the Christian context? I have this strong feeling (perhaps I’m discerning something) that there is a place for discernment in the religious lives of polytheists and Pagans.

So, what is that place?

What is the use of discernment in your life?

Sometimes I think there’s a good reason for blind faith, religious ignorance, unwavering piety. Sometimes those seem like a much easier choices than being inquisitive, being contemplative, being patient with your own uncertainty.

The dialogue around the last post extended deep into the theoretical as well as the practical, even spawning an interesting offshoot post on ecological polytheism, and a resurgence of questions about an American goddess named Columbia.

The explosion of ideas did a number on me. I didn’t realize that it had until I tried to approach my shrine this morning and perform my daily ritual. I couldn’t turn my brain off, and I kept wondering — But who am I making these offerings to, exactly? What is the point of this thing that I’m doing?

This quick-shift back to a state of doubt and questioning might come off to some as a sign of an adolescent faith. But if that’s true, what’s the alternative? A religious practice or paradigm that is no longer close-examined? A fixed piety? If that’s the case, then perhaps the people who are unwilling to engage in a discussion about the nature of the gods (or God, if that be their god), the origin of divinity, or any other such complicated subject simply have it easier. Their religious tradition can grow without the tampering of every little question, every “wait but....”

Clearly, though, I cannot be comfortable with such a religious tradition.

I question. I always have. If there’s anything about me that’s fixed, perhaps it’s that.

Some people suggested that my difficulty in conceiving of how a god might have a human origin is a holdover from some part of my Christianity, and that it may be the lingering perception of God’s infallibility that is making it difficult for me to imagine myself (or anyone I’ve ever known) as being one day thought of as a god. Fallibility or infallibility didn’t even enter into my mind when I wrote that post, though. The question wasn’t whether or not gods are, by nature, infallible, omnipotent, omnipresent, or any of the other descriptives of the Christian god, and the fact that those concepts were thrown into the mix only confused things for me.

If there was any holdover from the Christian tradition of my past, it may have been that they conceived of God as being responsible for, or an undercurrent to all of what exists. Let me repeat that: all of what exists. I’m well aware that this is not how Pagans conceive of gods, but consider for a moment the (perceived) difference in magnitude between a deity which is understood to be the origin of all creation, and a deity that, in the future, will once have been me.

You see what I’m saying? Different scale, right?

On one level this is all theoretical, but on another it is not. This information, these questions, they had an impact on how I approached my shrine today. They affect how I proceed in participating in my religion, and how I prepare myself to be in dialogue with people from other traditions. None of this seems trivial to me.

P. Sufenas Virius Lupus asked in the comments:

“Is it that you worry that you’ll be “mistaken” for a god, with the implication that you’re not and likely never could be; or, that you’ll be recognized as a god, and what that could mean about your own potentials now and the responsibilities you might have in the future that you’re not comfortable with? In other words, not that it’s a mistake to recognize you as a god in the future, but instead that it’s a mistake to not recognize your own divinity?

(emphasis added)

These words are messy. The food won’t stay in its own little compartment, and all of a sudden the divine peas are mixing with the divine meatloaf, and I’m not sure what divinity is even supposed to taste like anymore.

Semantics, people say dismissively when I get worked up in one of these states. But these semantics are rearranging my furniture, and I’m not sure where to sit or stand at the moment.

Help?

When you find yourself uncertain about the definitions, the functions, the meanings or the purpose, what do you do? If religious ritual is the thing that centers you, but it is also the thing which is informed by the very stuff you’re questioning, what do you do?

Should I make offerings to the future me-god for some guidance?

I’ve been a stay-at-home Pagan, a bookish Pagan, a CUUPS ritual-attending Pagan, and a blogging Pagan. But as of yet, I have not been a festival-going Pagan.

That all changes this week.

On Wednesday I shall make my way to the Prosser Ranch group campground, located just outside the town of Truckee, California, and celebrate Druidism, ADF style, at the annual Eight Winds festival.

20120625-135933.jpg

The timing of this religious retreat is rather interesting. Over the last month, swamped as I’ve been with work-related travel and the upkeep and promotion of my Indiegogo Campaign (which, by the way, wraps up in a little over a week…nudge, nudge), I’ve neglected my daily practice. Some days I approach my shrine with an open heart and a still mind, but most mornings I dive straight into work without much attention at all to the gods or to my spirit. There’s been no consistency, only a cursory amount of reverence or piety, and a whole heaping load of worry and stress.

On top of all that, I just finished reading a book about Jesus, and it’s thrown my mind into a bit of a tailspin.

[STAY CALM — This is not a conversion post.]

The book, Jesus through Pagan Eyes: Bridging Neopagan Perspectives with a Progressive Vision of Christ, has done quite a number on me. I’ve written a review for HuffPost called, “Every Conceivable Jesus: A Review of ‘Jesus Through Pagan Eyes,'” and it should be published sometime this week (UPDATE: Post published on 6/26). The long and the short of it is this:

Reading Rev. Mark Townsend describe his complicated, rich, and heartfelt understanding of the many persons of Jesus reminded me of what I loved about being a Christian, and reading the book’s essays and interviews from Pagans about their perspectives on Jesus left me feeling a little underwhelmed. Perhaps reading a book about a central figure from a Pagan tradition — say, Pan or Lugh — in which two dozen Christians reflect on that particular god’s relevance (or irrelevance) in their religious lives would affect me similarly. In any case, it was the lone Christian in the bunch whose voice resonated with me most, and I’m not exactly sure what that means.

I remember writing about a similar quandary last Winter, and one of my readers responded with something like, “If you want to be a Christian, be a Christian. If you want to be a Pagan, be a Pagan. But pick one already!” I found the comment to be rather rude, and terribly reductive. We are never just one thing. We are always the sum of our parts, a work in progress, a collage. Many of our parts remain hidden from us until we are ready to understand them, but they’re all there. We are mysteries, even unto ourselves, and part of the wonder of living is unpacking the mystery.

Know thyself is a process, not a single action.

To be reminded in such a visceral way of my former expression of religiosity on the eve of a celebration of my newer expression of religiosity is confusing, to say the least. It makes me wonder whether or not I will be able to surrender completely to the experience of fellowship and ritual at Eight Winds, or if I will be consumed by my own questioning. My hope is that there will be opportunities for dialogue with other ADF members, and through that dialogue we might come to know one another (and ourselves) a little better. Perhaps Jesus will hitch a ride to the Druid camp, and I’ll be forced again to examine who he is in relationship to this new, thoroughly Pagan environment. Or, maybe when we’re all naked and dancing around a fire (which, in my imagination, is key to any successful Pagan gathering), Jesus will calmly retreat into the background, and await rediscovery at some future point.

I wonder – do you find that religious retreats or Pagan festivals provided you with opportunities to explore and express the more complicated sides of your religious path? Do they serve the purpose of simply affirming what we know about ourselves and our traditions, or do they challenge our assumptions? Have you ever gone to a festival expecting one thing, but you ended up experiencing something altogether different?

Feel free to share your festival experiences, or reflections on anything in this post. Then, click here for a clip of some wicked, unreleased Pagan music.