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Serving Solitary Pagans: An Experiment in Liturgy

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In September of this year, I submitted an application to start my own ADF protogrove for solitary Pagans. I planned on calling it, Sojourner’s Protogrove.

Protogroves are the precursor to fully-chartered groves within the ADF organization, and their main responsibility (as with groves) is to provide public rituals for each of the eight High Days of the year. These open rituals are a hallmark of ADF’s approach to Neopagan religion. Allowing the rituals to be open and available to all was a central tenet of Isaac Bonewits’s vision for the Pagan church.

Sojourner’s Protogrove was to be, in many ways, just like any other ADF protogrove. In ADF’s system, the Protogrove Organizer has the freedom to organize their group around whichever of the Indo-European hearth cultures associated with ADF. Some groups are Celtic, some Norse, some Hellenic, and there are even some which mix and match their cultural influences (i.e., the eclectics in our midst). Sojourner’s Protogrove — or SojoPro, which I was fond of calling it — was to use the pantheon and mythology of the Pan-Celtic cultures, as those are the deities and stories that most speak to me.

But there was one way that SojoPro would not be like the other ADF protogroves:

SojoPro’s free, open rituals would not require solitary Pagans and Druids to meet in a shared, physical location. Instead, SojoPro would create congregation in solitude by providing to all of Pagandom (via the protogrove’s website) a common liturgical form.

In short, we would become united through a shared liturgical practice.

The ADF leadership had mixed reactions to my application, but they were unanimous that this couldn’t be a protogrove. The physical component was too important, too fundamental, it seemed. They gave the project a tentative approval, but with conditions. I’d need to have more clergy oversight, and I’d need to call it something different. So I came up with this:

The Solitary Druid Fellowship.

I wrote about my vision for the Fellowship in the most recent edition of Oak Leaves, ADF’s quarterly magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Liturgy is an underutilized tool in the service to solitaries. Liturgy, when organized around and synchronized with the Wheel of the Year, is a way of uniting solitaries in a shared practice that does not simply mirror the experience that one can have in a Protogrove or Grove; it does something altogether different. Solitaries joining other solitaries in a shared liturgical practice makes possible a transcendental experience of congregation.

The one becomes the many.

This is where the Solitary Druid Fellowship enters in. The Fellowship, as an extension of ADF, is organized to provide solitary Druids, as well as any solitary practitioner in the general public, with an opportunity to engage more deeply with their ritual practice by adopting a shared liturgical form. This form is unique to the Fellowship, just as the rituals designed within Protogroves and Groves are unique to them. But, the form follows the COoR (Core Order of Ritual), and is in keeping with the traditional ADF rite.

From High Day to High Day, SDF will help transition ADF solitary members and non-member participants through the changing seasons. There is a blog on the Fellowship’s website, SolitaryDruid.org, and on this blog there are weekly posts which reflect on the seasons, on the meaning of solitude in the lives of solitary Druids, and on various aspects of Pan-Celtic culture, mythology, and religious practice. These posts are not instructive so much as they are reflective, and they will help create a contemplative environment in which solitaires can prepare for the coming High Day. Additionally, these posts will be written by other ADF solitaries, as well as solitary Druids and Pagans of other traditions who have insights to offer on the experience of solitude.

On the week of the High Day, SDF distributes our shared liturgy through the Fellowship’s website, and solitaries celebrate the High Day in solitude. On the following week, participants will be called upon to reflect on their experiences of shared, solitary worship, and the cycle begins again as we move toward the next High Day.

By taking part in this communal, albeit private practice, we join in a kind of long distance fellowship; in a shared celebration of our gods, our ancestors, and the spirits of the land on which we live, using many of the same words, invocations, and prayers.

All of this through liturgy.

There’s a lot of work to do in preparation for the launch of the Solitary Druid Fellowship, and even a few hoops yet to jump through. I’m considering how to write liturgy that is not exclusive to the Pan-Celtic hearth, but that opens up ADF’s liturgical form to any and all of the Indo-European hearth cultures of the tradition. In theory, ADF provides the tools for this already. I just need to craft something relevant for solitary use, and meaningful within a solitary context.

If you’re interested in joining us, visit SolitaryDruid.org and sign up for notification of the site launch. I’m hoping to have it up in time to offer a liturgy for the Winter Solstice.

What are your first thoughts in learning about the Solitary Druid Fellowship?

If you’re a solitary Pagan or Druid, do you think it would be useful to you to have a common practice with others, one that you could customize around your own relationships to the Kindred?

Solitaries are the Glue which Hold Paganism Together

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I’ve spent nearly the entire week working on new ways to make ADF Druidism an accessible tradition to solitary Pagans. The work is still in its early stages, and I’m piecing together ideas which I hope to share once the leaves have fallen. My backyard maple is only hinting at new color, so it will be a few months yet.

Crafting religious practice gets me really excited, though. As perplexed as I was last week about the Gods (and I’ve been on the fence about capitalizing “god,” by the way — please share your thoughts about that grammatical choice in the comments), I’m having no problem with putting together new models for sharing my religion that might better serve people.

Religion, as I’m learning to practice it, allows each of us to be our own priestess or priest, our own empowered solitary practitioner. When we do religion in this way we become better equipped to serve our community, and we cultivate an intimate relationship with the Kindred.

Isaac Bonewits wrote in The Vision of ADF:

“Everyone is expected to communicate with Goddesses and Gods in her or his own way — spiritual growth is not a monopoly of the clergy. Every human being needs to learn how to contact the divine fire within, how to talk with trees, and how to unleash the power of magic to save the Earth. If there is such a thing as ‘spiritual excellence,’ we need to be striving to express that as well.”

Isaac placed great emphasis on terrestrial religious gathering (i.e. Grove rituals being held in physical locations), but I think the underlying message of the above quote speaks quite clearly to the path of the Solitary Druid. It is what a Druid does on her own — her devotionals, her studies, the development of her personal piety — that informs how she participates in community.

And I believe it is important to note that the work of the Solitary is the work of the community, because the Solitary who never participates in a terrestrial gathering is nonetheless a part of the greater religious body.

Perhaps this idea of a unified religious body is easy for me to conceive of, having been brought up in a tradition which understood the Church — capital C — to be the “Body of Christ.” All salvation doctrine aside, this concept of a unified body of believers was empowering, and created a sense of deep, spiritual belonging.

I think there is a Pagan analog, perhaps conceiving of ourselves as the “Body of the Mother,” or the “Children of Earth” (feel free to offer up any phrases in the comments that you think might be clearer, or more appropriate to Pagans).

We are less a “body of believers” than we are a “body of practitioners,” and in the case of ADF — a Pagan tradition which already emphasizes unity through practice — we have good cause to embrace this idea of a unified religious body.

See — I think Solitaries are the glue which holds a religion together. They (we) are not the cast-offs who simply can’t make it to the party. We are our own party.

We are, through the nature of our solitary circumstance, sometimes better equipped to engage in deep contemplation about the ambiguities, the paradoxes, and subtext which often goes unnoticed in group settings. In silence and solitude we hone our skills at cultivating the “divine fire within,” we uncover the language of the trees, and we connect in an intimate, personal way to the Earth Mother.

We have that available to us, that is.

I asked on Facebook, “Do you consider yourself a ‘Solitary Practitioner’ of a Pagan tradition?”:

Click photo to share your answer

There are a good number of people who are practicing their religious traditions alone, or mostly alone, and I think those of us who find ourselves in that position might do well to start exploring ways in which we can become united with one another in our solitude. That’s the work I’m busy crafting right now, and I’m at a point in the process where I could use some feedback from you.

Do you consider yourself a Solitary? If so, have you ever felt a sense of unity with other Solitaries? If you are an ADF member, what has been your experience of our community’s service to solitaries? Where have we succeeded, and were could our perspective use a little adjustment?