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The Kind of Christian I Was

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gaspi_ Chapel Glass

  • I used to sing with my eyes closed. There were a few hymns at Christmas time that really did if for me. I sang harmonies a little louder than good taste would call for. Sometimes the priest would sing the Eucharist, and I knew every melody. I’d sing along quietly to myself, just under my breath.
  • I was the parishioner who showed up early to get a good seat.
  • I was the one who raised his hand in the Adult Forum class and said, “But, wait….”
  • I was the guy doing Morning Prayer alone in the chapel on a Tuesday evening.
  • I didn’t understand why certain biblical passages needed to be read. The church I belonged to, the Episcopal church, organizes its Sunday readings around a rotating three-year liturgical calendar. This insures that every church in the denomination is reading and reflecting on the same passages at roughly the same time. It forges a kind of unity that I was attempting to replicate (albeit loosely) with the formation of the Solitary Druid Fellowship.

My confusion about the passages, though, had more to do with their discontinuity. I felt like the imposition of this liturgical structure forced the priest to take great leaps when making meaning out of the ancient text. Her bias was always present. And some passages simply were impossible to reconcile.

  • I bowed when the cross passed by my pew. I didn’t know why at first, or who I was doing that for (aside from myself).

Acts of reverence like this aren’t always for the benefit of a benevolent god. They’re an extension of practice. They teach you something. They allow you to embody the experiences of respect and humility. There’s great value in that.

  • I spoke the Confession of Sin tentatively at times, and passionately at others. I was never really sold on the idea that my sin was of my birth, or that I was fatally flawed. The transactional savior concept was a little lost on me. But that didn’t mean I didn’t appreciate the opportunity to own up to all of myself, even the stuff I didn’t want to admit to. The Confession was an invitation into wholeness.
  • I loved picking apart the Gospel of Mark, becuase it rooted the story of Jesus in a specific culture. It broke apart some of the illusion that all of the Bible is essentially “one story”. That’s such a small way of thinking, and it isn’t true.
  • I thought the Historical Jesus was interesting, but I still wanted him to a be a little bit God.
  • I got angry at fundamentalism.
  • I felt angry that there was some expectation that as a gay Christian I had an even greater responsibility to show good face. My gayness was even more political than if I was churchless. That seemed profoundly unfair to me.

I wanted to have sex. I wanted to feel love. I wanted the stories about sex and love to be about me, too.

  • I had a really difficult time during Lent. I felt heavy. Sorrowful. Holy Week was the worst…

But Easter was amazing.

  • I was the kind of Christian who didn’t fit comfortably into any pre-fab molds. At least, it didn’t feel that way. I was always a little on the outside.

That is…except during the Eurcharist.

I knew I was always welcome then.

 

Coming soon: The Kind of Pagan I Am

 

Photo by gaspi *yg

The Heart Is The Only Nation

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I have met the Morrígan.

I have stood in a circle, a shape unlike any circle I’ve stood in before, and beside my human kin, a spiritual kin sharing breath and space and smell and touch, I made contact with the Warrior inside myself.

At this moment it feels as though I have never been in this body before, nor have I ever been to a ritual before this one.

I expected something great from Thorn and her tribe, but I did not know I would be shaken so profoundly.

And I feel shaken. Shaken to the core. The hot lava core. Forge fire core. The core of something that both transcends and embodies; all at once harmonious, and resonant, and ripe with the tension of anticipation and climax.

This is not what being alive is like. This is what being alive is.

Photo by Olivier Bacquet

Photo by Olivier Bacquet

My focus has been directed toward liturgy, which I continue to believe is a valuable tool. But at this moment, charged with the energy of an army calling out to a Queen, I recognize the need for something greater than just ceremony.

Ritual and ceremony are not the same thing.

The tools we use for ritual are tools, and they are not the same thing as the juicy, bloody, fleshy, powerful potential of what ritual can be. There must be magick.

There must be.

There must be a movement of that stuff in the belly of bellies, in the gut of all guts. The words you speak are only useful if they mean something. They have to mean something. If you are going to speak — if you are going to stand before an altar and recite words to your Gods — you better say something that matters.

Liturgy is empty without heart, and as we sang at the tops of our lungs tonight —

The heart is the only nation.

A Goddess cut me deep tonight.

Cut a hole and filled it up with…

reverence…

awe…

wonder…

power…

unexpected gratitude for the force which drives me to fight, to have sex, to use this body for all it’s worth, to stand up and speak…

These are the things which flow through me right now.

There may be no one right way to have a spiritual life, but fuck if this wasn’t a right way tonight.

If I had wings, they would be those of the raven.

Liturgy And A Cocktail

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Let me try to explain how I’m feeling right now.

When I exhale, my breath shakes a little. Not the crying kind of shake, but almost the laughing kind of shake.

My fingers are cold, which is partly on account of the freezingness of Colorado (and I’m using that word, regardless of what the auto-spell says), but they’re not so cold that I can’t type. A candle is burning on my desk, lit from the candle on my shrine, and I’m smiling.

I’m happy.

The first Solitary Druid Fellowship liturgy is now available. I just published it.

I suppose this feeling is related to nervousness, but it isn’t exactly that. It’s more like a nervous/pride/relief cocktail.

Photo by StrangeTikiGod

Photo by StrangeTikiGod

I didn’t know if this day would come. I didn’t know if this out-of-the-box approach, this new form –which even for me is an experiment– would live. For a while there, mostly through the months of September and October, I was a wreck about it. It was like I was living in suspended animation, unable to really move forward in any of my projects.

But once the approval from ADF leadership came, everything opened up. And now, just a few days out from the Winter Solstice, there are the beginnings of a shared practice.

I am chugging this cocktail.

All of what SDF is doing is necessarily incomplete. It is not a finished product, because it isn’t a product. It isn’t a thing that’s being sold. It’s a service that’s being shared, and it will necessarily evolve as we move forward and get a better sense of what kind of service truly needs to be provided.

So far I’ve been fortunate enough to get the support of two ADF members to post to the SDF blog, Kristin McFarland and Rev. Michael J Dangler. There are other writers on board whose upcoming posts will include reflections on the solitary practice for an ADF noobie, what resources a solitary Druid might seek out in order to deepen her practice, and [CALLING ALL ADF SOLITAIRES] how people from different hearth cultures incorporate their cultural idiosyncrasies into a solitary practice.

There has also been discussion about creating some kind of daily practice. I love this idea, and I haven’t really wrapped my mind around it yet. I almost think we’d need to develop several different kinds of daily practices to suit the needs of different solitaries. There could be a more formal liturgy for daily practice, which might be slightly  longer (say, 10 to 20 minutes). We could also have a brief, 3-5 minute liturgy, or even a series of brief prayers. There are already wonderful resources for prayers, like A Book of Pagan Prayer and A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book [Fields Bookstore links], but even the author of those books encourages us to write new words that resonate with us.

The long and the short? There’s a lot more to come.

About a dozen people have received the liturgy as of writing this post, and more keep coming. It’s surreal. I hope that they like it. And I don’t say that because I hope that they like me. I just hope that it resonates for them, and that it’s useful.

One last bit:

I’ve made the choice to keep SDF a mostly comment-free site. There will be posts where dialogue is invited, but there is also a desire to keep some of the pages and posts streamlined and clear of conversation. I think this allows for certain information to remain true to its published form, at least on the site itself, so that newcomers to SDF will not feel so much like they are walking into a conversation that is already taking place.

That being said, I’m a big believer in dialogue. If you’ve read my blog for any period of time you know that.

So, if there is anything that you’d like to voice about SDF that you haven’t been able to on SolitaryDruid.org, please feel free to open up that dialogue in this post. I’d love to hear from you.

Then, pop over and get your copy of the first Solitary Druid Fellowship liturgy!

*sips cocktail*

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?

Liturgy is Sexy to *this* Druid

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Here’s why ADF is awesome: The Core Order of Ritual.

There are other reasons, too, but the Core Order of Ritual (or COoR) tops my list at the moment.

The COoR is the key liturgical framework for ritual that unites the Druids of Ár nDraíocht Féin, regardless of what Hearth Tradition they’ve adopted for themselves or for their groves. Each group can make subtle variations to the language of the ritual, paying homage to the Gods with whom they are in relationship (Celtic, Vedic, Norse, etc.), but the basic form is always the same.

The COoR is to ADF Druids what the rites of the Book of Common Prayer are to Episcopalians. Both are blueprints, which, if followed, can create for the practitioner a deep, enriched spiritual and religious experience.

As I’ve written before, liturgy is important to me. I find comfort in its structure, consistency, and rhythm. As I return to my altar this week, I need not have resolved all of my questions of belief in order to enact my ritual, for my ritual has a form which is independent of my state of belief or faith. The form allows the rite to function, and through fully engaging with the form I become open once again to something divine.

It’s amazing, really. It works.

Full disclosure: I was hesitant about ADF at first. I found Druidry through OBOD, the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, which is based out of England. The British Druids, led by the eloquent and satiny-voiced, Phillip Carr-Gomm, were attractive to me for their emphasis on inner work and psychology. Theirs is not a strictly liturgical, religious Druidism, but rather a philosophical model which can be applied (in their experience and perspective) to a wide variety of religious traditions. Plus, OBOD emphasizes the re-enchantment of the world, and I believe that’s a concept with which all Pagans should concern themselves.

ADF, on the other hand, felt very much like the religion that I was leaving. ADF is public about being non-dogmatic, but at the same time they affirm a very particular viewpoint on the nature of the Gods (hard-polytheist, by and large), the paramount importance of historicity, and a religious identity that sets itself very much apart from the Abrahamic traditions. If you read any of my November and December writing (which can be found in the Post Archive page), you’ll know that I go back and forth on Christianity, and on setting up your identity in opposition to another religious tradition.

I didn’t think I needed another religion after Episcopalianism. That wasn’t what Paganism was going to be for me. Religion, with all of its rules and guidelines, felt counter-intuitive; counter-Pagan, if you will.

I’ve bounced back and forth between OBOD and ADF for a couple of years now, undecided as to which kind of Druid I should be. I listen religiously to Dahm the Bard’s excellent podcast, Druidcast (which I highly recommend for its production value, creative contributions, and the glimpse it offers into what British Druidry looks like today). I also continued to revisit the audio lessons from OBOD’s Bardic Grade correspondence course. The information contained in them may conflict with the perspective of the more reconstructionist-minded Druids of ADF, but I liked it just the same.

But, as I wrote about in my last post, there is a special place in my heart (and on my altar) for the founder of ADF, Isaac Bonewits. He may have spoken against some of the very practices and beliefs held by OBOD that resonate in my heart, but he’s still an important figure in my spiritual formation.

And now I am rediscovering the value of the COoR, and in the process reconciling myself to the fact that I am, indeed, a religious person. I need the form. I flourish in the form. Religion, as I’m experiencing it as a Solitary Druid, can be a fresh fire, rekindled every morning I return to my altar. Religion need not be the enemy. Religion is just a tool; a system. In truth, I needn’t even spend too much time thinking about this practice asreligion. It’s my ritual. My personal practice to honor the Cosmos and all of its divine creatures.

There’s reason, I think, to be at peace with the back-and-forth-ness. I’m rarely just one thing. I float, I drift, and then I plant my feet on something firm. I engage in ritual, and remember something about myself. The process is a sacred one, even in the more difficult moments.

What a pleasant discovery.

So what of it, my friends and loyal readers — how do you experience ritual? Do you share with me this love of liturgy, or are you more freeform? Does your personal practice resemble something religious, structured and blueprinted, or is it mystical and abstract?

Liturgy works for me. What works for you?

How I Arrived At Pagan

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Over the past few days I’ve taken great pleasure in reading and re-reading the posts of the Rogue Priest, Mr. Drew Jacob, who describes himself as,

Priest of many gods. Freelance author, nonprofit professional, and full-time adventurer.

I like Drew. He’s intellectually rigorous, but not snobby. He’s thoughtful and respectful of his readership, and he challenges us to think broader and deeper.

I think I’d end up a regular at his Temple if it weren’t 900 miles away.

Drew doesn’t identify as a Pagan, although I took him for one. I asked him how exactly he wasn’t Pagan, and he did a mighty fine job explaining that in this post, “Why I’m Not Pagan“. Give it a read.

In response, I’m writing to explain my relationship with the identifier, Pagan, and how it sometimes fits and often does not fit my sense of religious identity.

An Acolyte’s Primer

There’s no better preparation for becoming a liturgist, Pagan or otherwise, than to train directly with a priest in the Episcopal Church. They do liturgy well. I discovered a love of ritual at a very young age. Eight, maybe? The smells of incense, the white robes and rope belts, the ringing of bells and the chanting… it was heavenly.

I loved church. I loved being a part of a community. My priest taught me, directly and by example, that my actions, be they ceremonial or mundane, helped to created something vibrant and meaningful for myself and for others. Liturgy can be truly transformative magic, and the magic took root in my soul. But more importantly, the magic had context within the community. It served a greater purpose than my own personal fulfillment.

Did I love Jesus? Was a Bible thumper? No, not exactly. I didn’t not love Jesus. It just wasn’t really about him, blasphemous as that may have seemed. It was more about all the stuff that surrounded Jesus; the myth made manifest through our actions. That’s what made me feel good about being Christian. That, and the community of people who cared about me.

The Beauty of Ruin

I had my hard times with the church, don’t get me wrong. But I always returned because I believed in the magic that happened during the services, and between the people who showed up. I believed in an incarnate Spirit, and that She wasn’t just some idea for theologians to parse out. The Spirit was real, and moved through a place. God was a mystery, but the Spirit was the the source of the most amazing, moving, meaningful magic.

For a brief while, I was a youth leader for the Juniors and Seniors at my Cathedral. I was tattooed, queer, and unwilling to allow them to rest on dogmatic laurels. I challenged my kids’ assumptions about God, about faith and about the strange and often uncomfortable intersection of the two. I opened them up to the idea that there was more than one way to connect with the Divine. I told them that I didn’t really care what they believed. I just cared that they sought out something deeper. I wanted them to experience the magic I’d felt in my heart.

In time, I came to realize that the Church was not concerned so much with magic. The Church is a business, a bureaucracy. Ultimately, it all boils down to belief, and due process. Jesus is God, and God is Love, and saying that Love is the Law is legalism, eventually.

So, in spite of all the joy it brought me, I left.

by Hee K. Chun

From That To This

Being Pagan is much more than simply not being Christian. You don’t walk away from the Church and just – poof! – you’re a Pagan. At least, this has not been my experience.

Two years ago I found OBOD, The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids, and I thought that their expression of Druidry might be a good fit for me. They hold up creativity as sacred, and their understanding of Awen (a Welsh word meaning, literally, inspiration) felt very much like my understanding of the Spirit. I sent off for their correspondence course.

OBOD isn’t a religion, per se. They are a Druid Order, and they approach Druidry more as a philosophy. You don’t have to be Pagan to be a Druid, they posit, and their stance was important to me at the onset of my new quest, because I didn’t know if I was Pagan. I just knew I was seeking something mystical, magical and communal. I was seeking an immediate connection to the Source — the Awen.

OBOD’s study course was interesting for a while, but I slowly lost interest. I had no community support, and the absence of religious structure left me feeling aimless in my studies.

I found religion and structure in ADF, or Ár nDraíocht Féin (Our Druidry in Irish). ADF also offers a study course, but it leans more towards the anthropological and less to the philosophical. ADF is much more like a Reconstructionist tradition, placing high emphasis on building a religious practice the approaches the traditions of the Indo-European people. Accuracy is paramount. ADF is also explicitly Pagan.

Pagan as Pre-requisite

I joined ADF and decided that I might be able to find the magic by participating in the religion. Rather than chase the Spirit, I would build the Temple. creating a home in which the Spirit could dwell.

And I’ve done that, at least on a small scale. I have an altar, and I worship daily. I’ve taken to reading books on polytheism, Indo-European tradition and Celtic deities. I have a personal religion now, albeit one I still don’t completely understand, and it satisfies my need for fragrant, candle-lit, ceremonial liturgy. What it doesn’t do, however, is provide any real sense of community.

A Context of Communion

It comes to down to is this: I believe that a solitary, Pagan/Druid practice is not a viable substitute for communal worship. Not for me, at least. The work I do alone should prepare me for work I do in community. Magic requires context in order for it to be valuable to anyone other than just myself, and community creates the context.

I think Pagans – and for now, I include myself in that category – would do good to sit with the idea of Communion, as it relates to community. Set aside the Christian connotation for a moment. I’m not talking about the consumption of body & blood. I’m talking about the something more universal.

See, communion is more than just a Christian sacrament. Communion is a human birthright. We commune with one another so that we might catch a glimpse, experience a moment of kinship with the spiritual forces that create our world, and with whom we work to create the magic in our lives.

Communion, as an extension of community, creates the context through which our personal magic is imbued with purpose.

So, for now, I’m a Pagan in search of Communion. This is my new starting point.

If this was post was interesting to you, please be a good friend and tweet or Facebook share it.

A Beautiful Noise

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I experienced a kind of breakthrough this morning during my devotional. For the first time since I began this path of Our Druidry, I sang my liturgy.

It was a magnificent feeling.

I think the experience was so fresh, so powerful, because the sung liturgy the part of the Episcopal church service I cherished the most. As I mentioned before, I was an acolyte, and I loved the liturgy. Wholeheartedly. I knew the rises and falls of the melody, and was moved by them. I relished in them. I sang along beneath my breath. It never occurred to me before today that I could facilitate that sort of worship on my own.

I had just finished intoning the AWEN, and I was centered and still. I was listening, deeply. From the silence, I heard in my mind, “Sing to Arawn.”

(I’ve learned to follow these voices during worship, and not spend time inspecting them too closely. When you receive this sort of quiet direction, you take it.)

So I did, and the experience was, in so many ways, more natural for me than speaking the invocation has ever been.

The melodies were simple, and reminiscent of those sung back at church. To Arawn, my melody was deeper, fuller; something felt right in singing with a manly tone when calling him. To the Kindreds, I lifted the melody a few steps, and, being that I speak close to the same words for each of my three offerings, I did my best to use the same melody for each of the Three. To Brighid I sang with the most passionate tone, which was still simple in its form (the Priest is never to interject too much, as it is the simplicity and beauty of the voice paired with the meaning behind the words that creates the proper worship experience).

After making my offerings, I thrice intoned the AWEN, recalling “Amen” from church. However, while singing the word I remained conscious that the AWEN is a force, living and moving through me and the world – not simply a statement of closing (as one might use, “So Mote It Be”).

This integration of yet another tradition from the Christian experience of worship feels right to me. There are so many effective aspects to the Episcopal liturgy, and I see no reason why I shouldn’t integrate them into my Pagan experience. This mashup of religious expression is coming from a sincere place, and I believe sincerity to be the most important ingredient in one’s religious life.

So, as I am moved, I shall sing to the Kindreds. I shall lift up my voice in praise to the Gods and Goddesses, the Ancestors who have paved the way for me, and the Spirits that surround me in this great land. I shall make a beautiful noise in their honor, and they shall hear me.