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I’m Not An Expert On Paganism, But I Play One On The Internet

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I’m not an expert on Paganism.

Photo by Matt Grimm, Flickr

If you’ve spent any time here on Bishop In The Grove you’ll know that being an expert on Paganism wasn’t why I got into blogging.

I blog in order to be a better student.

I ask a lot of questions. I point out the things that are curious to me or that strike me as interesting, and I invite my readers to become my teachers. I call things into question because I believe that doing so allows me to be more present in my religious and spiritual life. I think it’s a healthy thing for a religious community, as well.

When I was in my early 20’s I was a member of an Episcopal church in Tennessee. Episcopalianism was the tradition I was raised in, and this church was one I came to after a long period of spiritual drought. It wasn’t long before I was an active member of the community, attending Sunday “adult forums,” and weekday prayer services (which I often led and attended alone).

A few years into my involvement with the community I was asked to help teach the Sunday school classes for the upper-grade high school kids. Their teacher had up and left, and they needed a replacement quickly.

I was a little hesitant at first. I hadn’t been raised in a house where the kids memorize bible verses, or that emphasized a strict adherence to some religious code of conduct. My parents were musicians, and my stepdad didn’t care much for God at all. But the dean of the Cathedral thought I’d be a good fit, that the kids would relate to me, and that I could communicate to them, as he might have said, the love of Christ.

On my first day of teaching I came into class, tattoos showing, and began a dialogue with them that would go on every Sunday for weeks, months; a dialogue that was not really concerned with the syllabus, or even with the Bible. I invited them into a dialogue that encouraged them to make inquiries of the most basic tenets of the faith. I asked them to think for themselves, to seek out their own connection with the divine, and to do so in the way that made the most sense to them.

I acknowledged their own authority in matters of the heart, the mind, and the spirit.

This is my ethic here on Bishop In The Grove as well. I have my opinions, my perspectives, and my preferences, as well as a whole host of experiences which inform my writing, but I don’t pretend to be an expert on all-things-Pagan any more than I pretended to be an expert on Christianity. I trust that you have insights, too, and that your insights are valuable.

I bring this story up today because I’ve been invited to be a part of a roundtable discussion about Paganism on HuffPost Live, which is described on their website as,

“A live-streaming network that uses the HuffPost universe — the stories, editors, reporters, bloggers, and community — as its real-time script.”

I’ll be joining Patrick McCollum, Amy Blackthorn and others today, Wednesday the 31st at 6PM EST (UPDATE: LINK TO SHOW ARCHIVE) to share our perspectives on and experiences with being Pagan for the general public. I’m honored to be invited, and — as I was before first stepping in front of that Sunday school class — a little hesitant to be seen as an authority.

I’m but one voice in a crowd of many.

Since this appearance will likely direct a lot of new readers to my blog, I thought it might be valuable to present them with a more rich, diverse explanation of Paganism than what one Pagan (me) might be able to do. I’d like, in classic BITG style, to open up the comment section of this post to you. I’d like for you to share a bit about what Paganism looks like from where you stand.

This is my way of extending the floor to a much larger group of Pagans, and this is your chance to provide someone who knows very little about Paganism with your own, personal testimony about what your religious or spiritual path means to you.

So…

Do you identify as a Pagan? If so, how do you live that out in your life? What do you believe? What do you practice?

If you don’t identify as a Pagan, perhaps choosing to be understood as a polytheist or to be known by your specific tradition, what does your tradition look like? What are the central principles which you live by?

The floor is yours, friends. Tell us a little about yourself.

Where Does Belief Belong?

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I’m having a difficult time identifying the right place for belief.

I was brought up a Christian. Episcopalian, to be specific. Belief, for me, was connected to creeds. If you’ve never recited a creed, it goes like this:

I believe X, and X is this. X did this, was this, is going to be this.

I also believe in Y. Y is this relationship to X, and Y is this.

I believe in Z, too…

It’s a little math-like, when you remove all the personal pronouns.

Creeds are useful in the way that they unify a group, but they do little to inform the individual about beliefs. I didn’t really come to the believe in “One God” through any mystical experience. There just always was One. It was the first line of the creed, after all.

This morning I had a somewhat spirited conversation about the commonly held belief in certain Christian sects that the world is somewhere in the vicinity of 6-8000 years old. The notion raises my hackles a bit. An Earth timeline is nowhere to be found in the creeds of my youth, and it wasn’t something that ever came up in a sermon, either. We didn’t use the Bible to determine the age of rocks.

But, my resistance to this Christian belief was called into question. How could I, someone who has encountered a god that I believe to be Arawn, the Welsh god of the Underworld — which is quite specific an assessment for something so illusive as Deity — take issue with anything that someone else believes? Where exactly do I draw the line between empirical thinking and magickal thinking?

Schooled On Belief

I’m taking a class right now through Cherry Hill Seminary, a Pagan Seminary in North Carolina, called, “Why Magickal Thinking Isn’t Crazy.” The class is being taught by a Harvard schooled physicist, who is also a Wiccan. It’s a four week course that’s open to anyone, regardless of your level of education or experience.

We’ve been engaging a lot with the principles of scientific thinking in the first two weeks, looking at how information is gathered, calculated and researched. Magickal thought and practice, as we’re examining is, can be understood to encompass phenomenon that exist inside and outside of Pagan culture, including Meditation, Prayer, Remote Viewing, Psychokinesis, and Channeling.

The purpose of looking at things scientifically is to show that these phenomenon are real. They are measurable — at least, most of them — and they should be given legitimacy.

I’m mostly having an easy time with this class, but I’m running into some issues with reconciling imperial thought with magickal though. It turns out I’m more inclined to be a binary thinker than I would have guessed.

I want to say, without reservation, that the world is older than 8000 years. I also want to accept, whole-heartedly, that people can communicate with gods. I resist thinking that the world is 8000 years old because there is empirical evidence that speaks to the contrary. Yet, there is little to no empirical evidence that speaks to the existence of Deity in any form — singular or plural — and yet I have no problem with accepting my own personal experience.

Belief as a Catylst

Belief informs action. We believe something about the world, and then we relate to the world based on what we believe. If we believe that the world is constantly being held together by super-strong, invisible, winged and sparkly creatures, then we might live our lives giving thanks to those creatures. We might be on the lookout for them. Our actions, in many situations, would be informed by this belief.

I’m ok with that, even though I don’t hold that belief. I don’t see the potential for immediate harm done to me by another person holding that belief either.

But then I start thinking about the belief that some have the Deity bestows power, and that that power is being directed to a certain end. I’ve seen this in Christian circles (as has anyone been paying attention to the media these days), and I’ve seen it in Pagan circles, too. I was at a Full Moon ritual where the group raised energy and directed it to the universe in order to “bring to justice” a person who had inflicted harm on another person who was said to be “one of our own.” The working wasn’t explicitly malicious, but it had some ugly undertones.

People who do magick, who direct energy in a certain way, are operating on a set of beliefs about how that energy works in the world, and how it should work in the world. So, belief and action are connected there, too.

But should they be? What are we to do with belief, especially considering that belief has proven to be much more a divider than a uniter among peoples?

Should we throw belief to the wind, or can we imagine engaging with belief in a way that still allows for us to live in the world with people who believe something completely different than us?

I want to know what you think about belief. Do you see your belief influencing the way you interact with others? Did you come to your belief through a religious upbringing, or did you construct your beliefs outside of religion? Do you experience personal conflict when you encounter someone whose beliefs are radically different than you own?

Leave your thoughts and beliefs in the comment section. And, if you’d like to expand the conversation even further, share this post on Facebook and Twitter!

The Meaning of Prayer: A response

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This post is a response to The Meaning of Prayer on Grey Wren’s Flight.

Kristin, I appreciate what your fiancé said – “Prayer is an offering of time and spirit” – and I’d like to add something my husband told me. He said that of all the offerings we make to the Kindred, our sincerity may be the greatest one we have to give.

When we were Catholic, or in my case, Episcopalian, and we prayed in thanks for something we had received, or to request something from God (good health, protection, blessings upon those who we loved, etc.), we were making a sacrifice, of a sort. True, we also had a theological construct to inform our understanding of sacrifice (i.e. Jesus’s transaction on the cross), but we approached our God with a sincere heart and made our requests anyway. How different was that from what we are doing now? We may offer grain or spirits, incense or fire, but fundamentally are we not simply offering a part of ourselves?

We give back because we have already received, not simply because we wish to receive more. Our offerings can have built in to them a recognition of all that has already been given to us.

In a way, your “spontaneous prayer” can do the same thing.

Rev. Skip Ellison writes these suggestions for integrating your spirituality into your daily life in his book, Solitary Druid:

  • When you see something in nature that strikes you, thank the Spirits of Nature.
  • When you remember one of your Ancestors, thank them for giving you their wisdom
  • When you feel the presence of one of the deities, thank them for being with you, and ask if there is a special lesson you should be learning from this moment.
  • Last, by opening yourself up to what is really happening around you, you will find it easier every day to understand this communion with the Mighty Kindreds.

Make the first steps to bringing prayer back into your life. It belongs to you still. It is a natural extension of your innate connection to the Mighty Kindreds.

(To Kristin, and to all those who long for the immediacy of prayer that they knew before starting their journey on the Druid Path, I encourage you to purchase a copy of A Book of Pagan Prayer by Ceisiwr Serith.)