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The Intersection of the Myth and the Meaning

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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

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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.

My Pagan Yule Sounded A Lot Like Christmas

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Pagans sang Christmas carols at the Yule ritual, and it totally caught me off guard.

The song sheets handed out to the attendees contained three classic, Christian favorites, re-written with Pagan, mostly Wiccan-themed lyrics. We Three Kings, Away in a Manger, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen were retitled and reworked as Moon of Silver, Away From The Harvest, and God Rest Ye Merry Paganfolk, respectively.

Perhaps Pagan re-adaptations of Christian hymns are not big news to my readership, but I was completely taken aback. Shocked, even. After all of this discussion about needing to keep Pagan traditions distinct from Christian traditions, and hearing Pagans emphasize the importance of defining ourselves outside of the Christian paradigm, it seemed bizarre–almost absurd–to hear Pagans sing these melodies as though there was no Christianity attached to them.

When I lived in Nashville, the Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) capital of the nation, there was nothing that made my skin crawl more than to hear a Christian band assume a style, a look, or sometimes an entire genre of music that had been originated in the secular, “non-Christian” world. The tactic was rampant in the CCM industry. It happened all the time.

If a secular rock band topped the charts with a new, unique sound, you could bet good money that there would be a Christian look-alike band performing a similar song within six months. But their song would be sprinkled with Christian theology and dogma. Instead of being in love with a lady, for example, the singer would be in love with the Lord. Or, there would be a subtle mention of salvation, or heaven, or how great it felt to be saved.

No matter how well styled the recordings were, the songs ended up sounding, to me (a liberal, Episcopalian Christian at the time), like little more than generic-brand, Christian propaganda. It bothered me to think that my fellow Christians, by and large, were not producing music that would stand up on its own, while at the same time being theologically relevant. So, Christian or not, I preferred to listen to the music of an original sinner over a saved sinner rip-off.

With all that in mind, imagine how strange it felt to stand within a circle of Pagans, candles in hand, incense burning in the cauldron, and to hear everyone sing, to the tune of We Three Kings,

Maiden, Mother, Ancient Crone

Queen of Heaven on your throne,

Praise we sing Thee, Love we bring Thee

For all that you have shown.

It was like Nashville all over again.

The CCM performers lacked a genuine, authentic, artistic identity; something which made them distinct, gave credence to their message, and was thoroughly memorable. After my experience at the Yule ritual, I question whether Pagans are experiencing a similar absence of definitive and relevant identity.

If we are not clear about what we are, on what we believe, and on how those beliefs inform our actions, we borrow. We borrow because it’s easier than doing the hard, creative, introspective work. We borrow We Three Kings instead of actually writing Maiden, Mother, Ancient Crone. We borrow instead of innovating.

But if we don’t have enough fire and passion for our religious traditions to create something new, to fashion something from nothing in order to express exactly what it is that we’ve encountered in the quietest, darkest, deepest recesses of our soul, then why are we doing this? Have we encountered something worth writing a new melody for? Or, are we just performing ritual theater? Are we just engaged in religion role-play?

I need something more than that.

Pagans can make a different choice than the CCM artists did. We can take the spiritual, ecstatic experiences and encounters with nature, with our Gods, Goddesses, Spirits and Ancestors, and channel those experiences into new, thoroughly original and relevant songs — songs that don’t sound like Medieval dirges or Protestant hymns — and breathe some much-needed life into Pagan ritual, Pagan worship, and Pagan celebration.

Religion can lead to beautiful, brilliant art. If it isn’t doing that, there’s reason to pause and take a closer look at what the religion is truly offering its adherents. The creation of art is, after all, very much connected to the experience of worship and unity with the Sacred. The two are closely related.

Are our traditions inspiring us to create? To sing out loud? To rejoice at being alive? If the answer is “no,” or if we are in any way ambivalent, what does that mean for the future of Paganism? And, what can we do to ignite a creative fire within our circles and groves?

Humbled by the Darkness of Winter

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I started out this December with a nose dive into Christmas cheer. Then, I spent some time exploring what parts of the Christian holiday were still resonant with me, and what I’d happily left behind. Now, the introspection of the Dark Days has set in.

It hit me unexpectedly. One moment I was working my craft, focussing on the task at hand, and the next I was on the verge of tears. Something someone said or some passing action spurred a memory of a younger me, and in that moment I was given insight into just how much time has passed. I didn’t feel old, but I was aware that I was no longer young in the same way that I used to be.

And this didn’t just happen once. It’s as though the entire climate and ecosystem of my personal and professional life has been infused with greater meaning, deeper symbolism, and a heavier tone. There’s been no escaping it. Nothing stills my mind but the repetitious act of knitting, and even in that there are moments where great pause and reflection interrupt the rhythm of the stitches.

What I’m feeling has nothing to with Jesus being or not being the “Reason for the Season” — all of that talk seems like trivial bickering right now. Nor does this state seem to stem from anything related to a recently assumed Pagan tradition that I’ve picked up over the past few years. This feeling doesn’t seem to originate from within me at all. It’s like the entire world is working a stillness into me, and I have little control in the matter.

Perhaps the reason that some of us bicker with each other around this time of year, be that over family dramas or to debate the legitimacy or illegitimacy of one another’s traditions, is that in doing so we experience a kind of spark; an artificial fire that allows us to deny the darkness that is actually setting in all around us, and inside of us. We remain in our heads, formulated better arguments, forging more effective defenses, and all the while the darkness grows deeper. The darkness grows in spite of our best efforts to hold on to the light.

We don’t need to pay attention in order for winter to happen. We don’t create the darkness. The darkness of winter simply arrives, and it transforms us, and we are left to decide whether we will surrender to it, or resist. In the darkness of winter, we are given the opportunity to see our lives from a still position, reflecting on who we’ve become and from where we’ve traveled. We can take that opportunity, or we can argue with one another. To choose the latter is to miss what the Holy Cycle of the World is offering to us.

It may seem that I have no choice in the matter; my emotions are a full cup, with the water just about to crest. But there must be some choice to be made, and I think I made it long ago when I committed myself to a deeper level of engagement with my life, with my beliefs and with the world around me. That’s what Druidry is for me; that is my Paganism. This commitment to my life has led me to — among other things — to a more acute sensitivity to the changes of the earth.

With just a few days left before Yule, before the calling back of the light, I experience a still darkness inside my soul, and through this darkness passes the images of a younger me, a me who was filled with many hopes and aspirations, naive to the challenges I would inevitably face, and unaware of little else besides my own desires and dreams. The darkness shows me who I was, and then without judgement, shows me who I am now.

A Conscientious Objection to the War on Christmas

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While this Pagan was in the middle of the most Christian part of our country, singing “Silent Night” to rooms full of cheery Jesus-folk, a small group of vocal and well represented Christians took up arms in a supposed “war on Christmas,” and now my Pagan brothers and sisters across the internet are all in a tizzy.

Facebook is littered with defensive posts about Saturnalia and Winter Solstice, and as I write these words a boldly entitled essay, Christ is NOT the Reason for the Season, is the most popular post on all of Patheos.com. Many Pagans are spreading the good news that Jesus is simply a stand in for an older and thereby (as their logic would suggest) more relevant deity, and their antagonism is serving well as ammunition for the angry, Fox News sponsored, Christian artillery.

But everybody’s missing the point. And, as with many historical battles, both sides are much more alike than they’d be willing to admit.

Too many Christians and Pagans are making an idol out of historicity.

Our religious and cultural narratives are relevant because they speak to something true about the human experience, not because they are historically accurate. Fundamentalists, be they Christian or Pagan, willfully ignore this point.

The story of Christmas is metaphor. For that matter, the very word “God” is metaphor. As Matthew Fox writes in his book, The Hidden Spirituality Of Men:

Metaphor is the proper language for the Sacred, for that which is bigger than our controlled world of words. It is also deeper and more grounding, more primeval, more child-like, and more bodily than the literal.

The function of mythological stories is not to mandate the way we live our lives. That’s where fundamentalists and literalists get it wrong. And, ironically, that is the mindset which motivated so many of the most vocal, and sometimes historicity-obsessed Pagans to leave their Christian congregations in the first place.

Rather, these stories are meant to help us approach the mystery of the Divine. If they aren’t doing that, then either they aren’t worth telling or we aren’t making ourselves open to their deeper meaning.

The literalist Christians who insists that the Bible is a divine instruction manual which provides the faithful with a five to six-thousand year “historical” record of the life of this planet are misguided. They’re trying to fashion science out of poetry, and they’re botching the beauty and power of the language in the process.

With that said, the literalist Pagans who will hear nothing of the symbolism and metaphor found in the stories of the Bible, or who insists on pointing out every last historical inaccuracy found in the Christian tradition, are also misguided. They are allowing themselves to be blinded by the same, insistent rationalism that their Christian fundamentalist counterparts tout as proper piety.

The problem is not in the story. The problem is in the way we tell the story.

The Christmas narrative need not be about an actual birth of an actual person. Christmas is just a starting point for people to explore the idea of the coming together — the bodily cohabitation — of the Divine and the human. And, it doesn’t have to be about some singular, historical moment when this divine cocktail first was mixed and shaken in the little baby body of Jesus; Christmas can be about this union taking place in every, single human being, at every moment, across all traditions and all religions.

Incarnation is a universally applicable metaphor. The Christmas myth is archetypal. It belongs to all of us, because it speaks to something human, not simply something Christian.

To quote Matthew Fox again,

The archetype of Christmas also speaks to just what a child is. Who is a human child? Not only the son of a king, the son of a president, the daughter of a rock star—not only the identity of a well-known or well placed child, but the “every child,” including the poorest of children born to the poorest of parents in the poorest of circumstances—in a stable, a barn, a ghetto, or a peasant village. What about that child? What is his or her worth?

This can be the meaning of Christmas, and this is a message that is approachable by all people.

Myth — Christian and Pagan alike — is a gift available to all of us, and can be a starting point for a deeper level of engagement with our own humanity. Christmas need not be a time of anger at fundamentalists, or of becoming, ourselves, fundamentalist. Christmas — even for the non-Christian — can become a metaphor for our own expanding compassion. It can come to represent our decision to hold up the worth of every person, of every child, of every moment of this precious life.

It can be that if we are willing to let go of our anger, to release this need for historical accuracy, and to open up to the fragility and strength of our own human hearts.

A Pagan Reclaiming Forgiveness

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In the midst of this Christian extravaganza, standing beneath the red and green blinking lights, and surrounded by the sound of Jesus followers singing hymns and secular Christmas classics, I’m rediscovering the act of forgiveness.

I didn’t expect forgiveness to be a theme of this brief caroling experience. I thought my time singing Christmas songs might offer me more chances to make theological comparisons; a kind of anthropological experiment, if you will.  I, the Pagan and Druid-in-training, would stand before the Christians and make a beautiful noise, using their myths and traditions as source material, and in doing so I might walk away with a keener understanding into how we are different.

Instead, I’m discovering that forgiveness, a word that many of us associate with the Christian doctrine of “the forgiveness of sin” (a concept most all of my readers reject), is being offered to me as an early Christmas gift.

Forgiveness, it turns out, is mine to experience because it is mine to offer to others.

See, I’m a person who gets burned rather easily. When someone hurts me, I retreat (sometimes geographically) and I rarely look back. When we’re done, we’re done. That’s been my approach to relationships for most of my adult life.

This has been true in personal and professional relationships, with family, and even with religion. I left the Church, and that was it. No more Jesus talk. No more redemption, salvation, forgiveness — any of that. I lumped all of those words and ideas into one big, Christian box and stored it away in the dusty-attic recesses of my mind. I had no intention of exploring how these themes were still present in my life. They were Christian, so I didn’t want to think about them.

We’ve touched on salvation as a concept that can exist outside of the Christian paradigm, and I believe there’s still more to be explored in that conversation. But for now, it appears that forgiveness is the theme of the moment. Set aside the belief that humanity must seek forgiveness from God, and there can still be a way for us to approach this utterly human, utterly necessary act.

We don’t forgive, or seek forgiveness because to not do so would result in our eternal damnation. Forgiveness isn’t a Divine mandate.

We seek to forgive others and be forgiven because it allows for us to continue to write the story of our life. Forgiveness restores a sense of continuity between the past and the present; a continuity which is broken by our own resentfulness and heartache.

Forgiveness belongs to all of us, and is not wrapped up in any one, religious tradition. The Christians talk a lot about forgiveness because it plays a large role in their understanding of Jesus, of God, and of their beliefs regarding humanity’s role in a “Divine plan.” I’m not taking issue with that here. There’s no need to. If a Christian processes forgiveness through that lens, it does me no direct harm. They’ll learn the lessons they need to learn.

But for me, I’m seeing forgiveness more like an essential component of our human life which transcends the myths we hold up as sacred, and even the identities we work so diligently to construct and defend.

By embracing Christmas as I described in my last post, I am discovering that I’ve become resentful and defensive about other people finding joy in the Christmas holiday. I’ve felt spurned by the sleigh bells, put off by the tinsel and the incessant jolliness. There was something false in it, I was certain. Christmas was, after all, just a Pagan holiday in disguise. How dare people enjoy something that wasn’t, in fact, what they were claiming it to be.

But what did I gain from that experience?

Not much, really. The feeling of being spurned, perhaps?

Fun.

I never passed the “true Christian” test that some Christians subject other Christians to, because I was never willing to accept wholeheartedly the belief that there was only one way to the Divine. Some might suggest that I don’t pass the “true Pagan” test because I still believe that Christianity, and the other monotheistic faiths, can be very effective at providing people with a rich spiritual life and deep connection to the Great Mystery.

Tests are silly. I didn’t care for them in grade school, and I still don’t know. You can test a kid from 7AM to 3PM every day of the week, and still not get a real sense of what she knows. Marking the right boxes is very different than having a deep knowledge of the world you live in.

I’m more of an in-the-world learner.

So, in the same way, I don’t need to pass anyone’s religious test to determine what I am. I am complicated, and textured. In my voice you’ll hear remnants of my old Christianity; out of practice, but not completely forgotten. You’ll also hear me rediscovering the enchanted world, which is a direct result of my opening up to Druidry, and to the Pagan community. It’s all here; all a part of the whole.

I embrace forgiveness and, in the process of doing so, calling back to myself each of my disparate parts, each of my forgotten persons. Those things which seemed disharmonious are each forgiven, each accepted as holy mixtures of the beautiful and the ugly.

I forgive both, and in the moment of my forgiveness I encounter the most unexpected sensation of love, and of being loved.

A Pagan’s Christmas Message

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I’m in Nashville, home of the Christian Contemporary Music Industry, home of LifeWay Christian Stores, and home of the Southern Baptist Convention. This week, in a kind of radical re-immersion into Christian culture, I’m going to spread the message about Jesus to Jesus-people, and I’m doing so in the most subversively effective way imaginable: through catchy melodies and rhyming lyrics.

Caroling. This Pagan is going to sing Christmas carols to Christians.

I’m going to sing songs about the Virgin Birth, the upbringing of a Messiah, and the ascension of their Lord and Savior into the cloudy realms of Heaven (which is really a theme more suitable for Easter, but which often shows up in the more Jesus-y Christmas songs). I’m also going to sing about snow, which wasn’t a part of the original Jesus birth-narrative, but which is pretty, and white, and threatening to fall at any given moment from the cloudy, Tennessee skies.

Why am I doing this?

Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that question a few times.

I feel like this is my karma; I am called to engage with what feels uncomfortable or unreconcilable, both in the world and within myself, so that I might find ways to bring those disparate parts into a state of peaceful balance.

It’s kinda my thing.

I’m hoping to create harmony even while experiencing internal dissonance. This is a radical approach to reconciling my personal conflicts, I know.

It would be easier for me to dismiss Christianity altogether, as some of my fellow Pagans have done, and in the process negate all it teaches about compassion, forgiveness, and kindness, focussing on instead on the faults of its adherents and the limitations of its theology.

It would be easier to proclaim that my current expression of Paganism is superior to my former experience of being Christian. Anyone can claim superiority, and many do. I could say–quoting some new, scholarly, archeological tome–that mine is a more historically accurate, perhaps even culturally relevant religion. Mine is older, rooted deeper in the sacred dirt of human history, and therefore I have greater insight into the inner workings of the spiritual world.

But, I’m not taking the easy route. Instead, I’m going to have a hand at being a Pagan who helps Christians be Christian.

I’m kind of obsessed with interfaith dialogue, and the thing I’m discovering is that the real challenge in it is not what happens when you are in conversation with others; it’s what happens when you are in conversation with yourself.

Can you hold up your current beliefs and practices against seemingly contrary ideas without feeling threatened, or broken, or like you made some mistake in becoming who you’ve become? Can you sing about Jesus to people who believe something different about him than you do and still remember who you are?

These are the question I’m asking myself as I’m rehearsing songs about Little Baby Jesus in a manger.

Before we can have any kind of meaningful dialogue with another person, we must first spend time reflecting on our own ideas and beliefs. For me, a convert of sorts, this act of reflection can feel quite conflicted. The term I used to describe the process in my post, On Converting a Christian to Paganism, was inner-interfaith, and I think there may be no better two words to explain what’s going on with me right now.

But rather than letting this dialogue only take place in my head (or on this blog), I’m bringing it out into the open. I’m allowing my inner conflicts to become incarnate in the world, and I’m doing so in a way that forces me to be a little kinder to them. Perhaps, too, I’m working through a new understanding of the Christian narrative and what it offers Christians and Pagans alike.

We forget about the Divine, about our sense of wonder, mystery and magic, and through that act of forgetting we experience an absence of the Sacred. It was always there: immanent, ever-present, ever-willing to be known and experienced. But we forget, and when we do we feel alone.

Transcendence, then, means less that the God of these Christmas carols is distant from His creation, and more that the very idea of “distance from the Divine” is illusory. With that in mind, Christmas, and my singing of Jesus songs to small crowds of Christians, becomes an affirmation of a value that Pagans can and do affirm; that in the moments when we’ve forgotten that the world is holy, that our lives are sacred, and that the Great Mystery is woven into the fabric of all things, it still is.

It is, it always was, and it always will blessedly be.

So I say, “Ho, Ho, Ho! Merry Christmas, Jesus folk. The Sacred is as close to you as it is to me. Call on it, and welcome it into your hearts. Let it come to you through the melody of your favorite Christmas song, and inspire you to be a kinder, gentler, more compassionate human being.”

Then, when the singing is done, I’ll return to my little hotel room, light my candle, close my eyes and experience the sanctity of my own breath. I will worship in the Temple of the Gods, which is this body: this house of Spirit.