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Blogging is very much a form of community engagement for me. I look at the last few posts, and there is so much to learn from one another about spirituality, religion, semantics, and how to engage in effective dialogue on the internet. It’s a relief to read thoughtful, mindful comments, and witness the kaleidoscope of human thought and perspective casting colors all over my computer screen.

The backdrop of my blog is colorful now, too. As with my post on salvation, I’ve taken inspiration from Star Foster, who recently gave the Patheos Pagan Portal a facelift. If you’re not already following that blog, you aught’a. There’s some good dialogue going on there, too.

I take inspiration from people I know. It’s something I’ve always done. As a kid, my mom was very mindful of when I was behaving less like me and more like my friends. She would tell people that she knew who I was hanging out with by the way my talking changed. All it would take was one long, holiday break with my relatives in Texas or Tennessee for me to acquire a drawl. I was pliable like that.

Mimicry, for me, was a way of understanding other people. To talk like my friends or relatives was to become a bit like them; to approach an aspect of their personality with more intimacy than was allowed for in normal conversation. It was a way of gaining insight into their lives, and into my own as well. I learned what I was and what I was not by speaking in a voice that didn’t originate in me. It was experiential, interpersonal learning, and I continue to practice it to this day.

Sharing an accent, though, is quite different than assuming another person’s belief system. I might be able to talk like my Texan relatives, but I would have a very hard time believing what they believe about God, the Bible, and my very gay relationship to my very male husband. Sometimes imitation isn’t necessary to know a person; hearing their words is plenty enough.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and family politics are on the brain. We’ll pay a brief, mid-day visit to my grandparents house, hopefully avoiding most of the anticipated drama, before heading to dinner with a predominately queer, eclectically spiritual group of friends, where we will likely spend the rest of the evening waxing philosophic about religion, tradition, and the curious experience of being human. Basically, the stuff we talk about here.

It occurs to me that I share thoughts and ideas on Bishop In The Grove that I’ve never brought up at my larger family gatherings. In a way, as a blogger, I’m shielded by the medium, protected by the space between me and whomever is reading these words. I write, I post, and then I’m free to walk away and go on with my life. I can come back to the conversation whenever I please, and if it ever goes sour I can just shut my computer and wait to deal with it until later.

But at a dining room table, sitting next to the cousins I haven’t spoken to in years, or across from the aunt who is likely to snap at any minute, there is no shielding to be had. There’s no space between my words and their responses, no easy way to shut off the conversation, and no time to wait. The dialogue can not be drafted and re-drafted before it is shared. Real-world relationships are immediate; they happen in real-time.

We experience a unique brand of vulnerability in the presence of our family. These people, who knew us before our ideas took form, before our personalities became more fixed, before we concluded that we were a Witch, or a Druid, or a Christian, or any such other thing that we’ve become, they have the ability to hurt us in ways that no one else can. The wounds afflicted by family can be some of the deepest, and some of the hardest to heal.

But, perhaps the opposite is true, too. Maybe vulnerability is not simply an opening for us to be hurt, but also an opportunity for us to become fully known, and to be deeply loved. Making ourselves vulnerable seems like a necessary risk we take in order to be in true communion with one another, and in the case of our family, where this vulnerability exists by default, perhaps we are presented with an even greater opportunity to experience real, meaningful, human connection.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling these apprehensions about family gatherings, and I’d love to get some of your insights about how you navigate the sometimes treacherous topography of Thanksgiving dinner. Do you see it as a disaster in the making, or a chance for reconnection. What is it about the bonds of family that can inspire so much dread, and also so much comfort?

I look forward to reading of your experiences and insights. Once you’ve written them in the comment field, feel free to share this post on your social network of choice.

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.)