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Blood Sacrifices Are So Messy

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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?

How Do We Stock Our Metaphoric Pantry?

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Last year on Lughnasad I was all worked up over food.

Riffling through some old files yesterday I discovered this entry:

I’m not sure there’s a way to talk about the “First Harvest” without paying mind to the fact that there is a severe drought across the land, or that in other parts of the country there is great flooding….

Is it possible that Neopagans (using the Bonewits definition of the term) are enacting the rituals of an earth tradition without being fully engaged as an Earth Tradition? Is it nostalgia we’re living in when we talk about “The First Harvest”?

I don’t harvest my own food. Do you know where your food comes from?

Perhaps this should be a theme of our harvest festivals. We celebrate the food we eat, and we take pause to consider how this food arrived to our table. Was it grown, picked, washed and served, or was it grown, assembled, packaged, and frozen?

The food part was a big hang up, and I had a difficult time seeing anything but the conflict between the “Old Ways,” and my total immersion in Western culture.

A few nights ago I was interviewed on The Psychic and the Witch, and toward the end of the interview I stumbled upon a different way of thinking about the holiday. It was as thought I managed to dust of the old metaphor machine in my brain, and for an instant I saw a different meaning of Lughnasad.

First, let’s acknowledge that — yes — it is good to know where your food comes from. And growing one’s own food, to whatever degree you can, provides you with a perspective on nourishment, as well a more intimate understanding of the power of the Earth Mother, which does not come from eating packaged food alone.

With all of that said, the realization that came was that I need to allow myself to look at this holiday, and perhaps the other 7 High Days, too, for its symbolic value. Metaphor is a gift religious people give ourselves, and we should use it when it serves us.

So…

Castlecraig Wheat Field, by Jrimas

The First Harvest is a time to take stock of our fields; to survey all that has grown throughout this year. Some seeds planted took root, and others did not. Some soil was better prepared, and better tended to. But, it’s undeniable that there has been change, and that change came through our hard labor, our perseverance, and on occasion, an unexpected storm.

Standing on my field, I can see a great, dynamic, living community around me. We share our voices, and we work to support one another as best we can. Since this time last year Bishop In The Grove has grown into quite a healthy garden. When each of you visit and share your stories, your insights, and your inquiries, you care for our common ground.

This blog produces a healthy crop.

But Lughnasad is a time to be proud of the work you’ve done, and also to prepare — both psychologically and physically, if necessary — for a slowing down of things. The days will get shorter and colder before long, and we must prepare ourselves by setting some things aside, yes?

But here’s where the metaphor gets complicated for me. I’d like to get some feedback from you.

“Taking stock of the fruits of our labor” is not difficult for me to wrap my mind around. I understand how that agricultural language can speak to matters of my personal productivity, innovation, creativity, and dedication to my path.

But preparing for winter? How do we, metaphorically, set things aside? Is there a pantry in our heart or mind where we can store jars of canned goodies, and if so, what do we keep in those jars?

How do we prepare, metaphorically, for the slower, colder days of Winter?

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.