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We Don’t Have Faith: We Make Agreements.

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Photo By Svadilfari

A couple weeks ago I wrote about creating the Solitary Druid Fellowship, an extension of ADF designed to serve the broader community of solitary Pagans and Druids by providing them with a shared liturgical practice. I’m currently in discussion with the Clergy Council of ADF to work out the final details of the site launch (sign up here to be notified), and I’m spending a lot of time mulling over what it means to practice in solitude.

At the same time I’m also preparing to take part in an ADF grove ritual here in Denver. I’ve been asked to be the Bard, so I’m learning new songs, rearranging old chants, and trying to envision how to best use my musicality in the context of a group ritual.

The truth is, I find comfort in solitary work. When you do ritual alone, you are working with the agreements you have made in your own heart; agreements that you’ve made with yourself, perhaps with your gods, spirits or ancestors. These agreements cover what you believe about who you are, about who or what the gods are, and about your role in the cosmos. You make these agreements to believe, to suspend belief, or to practice your devotion. The agreements made by the solitary practitioner need never be put up for a vote, judged by a governing body, or scrutinized by committee.

With group work, though, agreements are a different beast.

Consensus must be reached in group, and there are politics to contend with. The needs of the many must be considered, as should be the overall welfare of the group. The agreements one makes in her heart are still her own, but they cannot be treated as law, doctrine, or as “the way it must be.” They have to be held up against the agreements everyone else has made.

Discerning how to do that can be difficult, especially when the agreements other people have made seem to be so different from your own.

You think,

But they’re talking about the gods like the gods are their best friends…

Or,

They’re talking about the gods like the gods are complete strangers…

Or,

They’re talking about the gods like the gods are judges, overseers, politicians, warriors, or any other purely human thing.

Or even,

When are they going to talk about something that’s relevant to me?

No matter what agreement you’ve made, what decision you’ve reached about what religion means to you, when you participate in a ritual led by others you will have to to examine those agreements, perhaps even question their validity. Questioning your agreements can be a good thing, though. If you’ve made the agreement that your truth is The Truth, for example, or that your way is The Way, it might be time to do a little questioning.

Photo by Alexander Henning Drachmann

When I wrote the first Solitary Druid Fellowship liturgy (which should be made public on the week of the Solstice), I made a point of keeping certain aspects of the ritual neutral. I indicated places in the ritual where one could substitute the names of their gods, or the language specific to their hearth culture. I wrote in sections that encourage people to use their creativity in order to create a meaningful solitary rite.

But one person’s neutrality is another’s loaded gun.

We do the best we can, I guess. We write the rituals or prepare the songs in accordance with the agreements we’ve made in our heart, and we try to remember the shared agreements we’ve made with one another.

Shared agreements! Yes — that’s key, I think. What are the shared agreements we’ve made with one another? One has to ask that of herself before participating in a group ritual, or even a non-religious group gathering. What are things we’ve decided to collectively hold up as true, relevant, meaningful, appropriate, necessary? These agreements we make should be — no, they are — at the core of what we do. The question is, are we having open dialogue about what those agreements look like?

Please take a moment to think about the work you’ve done in groups — whether that be in a grove, a coven, a church or a community group. Think about your shared agreements. How did you reach them? Were they a point of contention, or did they bring the group together?

How much of our shared agreements are assumed, passed down, unexamined? When do our shared agreements need to be mended, or amended? When do they need to be re-written altogether? How often are we, in group, holding up these agreements to the light? Are we looking for cracks, beauty marks, frayed edges, or are we seeing only a projection of the agreements made in our own heart?

What are some of your shared agreements?

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?

Doing It Alone on the Equinox

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I find that the best way to get my house clean is to throw a party.

My desk may be covered with books and papers, my laundry bin filled, and my various interests — knitting and sewing being those that come with the most accessories — all sprawled out across the dining room table, but as soon as I decide to invite people over? POOF!! I’m a bearded Mary Poppins, snapping my fingers at the furniture. Before the song is over, my house looks marvelous.

All it took was a spoon full of sugar and an Evite.

This happens in extreme cases, too. When my husband and I sold our house last year and moved across town to a slightly smaller, more manageable rental, we scheduled a gathering with friends exactly one week after our move in date. It wasn’t a “help us unpack our boxes” party, or a “let’s hang art” soiree. Nnnnope. It was the end of October, and we threw a Halloween party. Boxes be damned!!

In seven days, we unpacked all of our bags, hung all of our art, filled every drawer and shelf, and made the crucial decisions about where to sit, where to eat, and where to place the plants so that they’d have the best chance of survival. It was a whirlwind of a week, but we got it done. And, were it not for us becoming impromptu party planners, the process may have dragged on for weeks — months, even.

I bring this up because The Spring Equinox (Alban Eilir/Eostre/Ostara) is exactly two weeks from today, and I have no idea what I’m going to do to celebrate. I’ll be away from home, cloistered in a hotel room in Los Angeles, far from my altar, my ritual garb, and the big, budding Maple Tree in my backyard. I imagined myself doing ritual under that tree once the snow melted, inviting a few friends to take part with me. But, that isn’t going to happen this month.

I could just prepare a personal ritual, making it a full-fledged, ADF style, bells and whistles affair, and perform it alone on the morning of the Equinox. There is an ADF grove in Southern California, Raven’s Cry Grove, and they celebrate (as many of our groups do) on the Saturday following the actual Equinox, but I’ll be traveling on that day as well.

See, part of my study requirement with ADF (Ár nDraíocht Féin) is to honor and celebrate each of the eight High Days throughout a single year, and to record my experiences. Ideally, I would celebrate the High Days with a group of ADF Druids, but this isn’t a strict requirement. Only four of the eight rituals need to be ADF style.

It’s just that I want to have an ADF ritual on the Equinox, and I want to share it with others. The quality of my religious experience changes greatly when I take part in ritual and fellowship with like-minded folk. I felt this most profoundly during PantheaCon when I was asked to participate in the ADF ritual alongside the Senior Clergy.

I wasn’t expecting to be involved in any way. It was a last-minute decision made by the clergy — literally, the night before the ritual. And, just like with our moving-in Halloween party, I made it work. I purchased a long, green robe in the PantheaCon vendor room, I processed into the room beside the priests like a pro, and when it was my time, I stepped into the center, lifted my voice, invoked the spirit of Inspiration, and felt a real sense of purpose and belonging.

For the rest of the ritual, I was fully present, fully engaged, and swept up in reverent worship.

And that’s the thing — I love being with people. It doesn’t matter if it’s a themed party or a sacred ritual, I love the energy of a group. When I clean house, I’m readying the space so that all those who enter will feel welcome, relaxed, and happy. My guests are my motivators, and my reward. But now, as I look toward the coming Equinox, I have no guests for which to prepare, or even a fixed space to make ready.

So, I’m reaching out to you, my friends and loyal readers. Maybe you could brainstorm with me.

If you’ve been a solitary — either by choice or by circumstance — how did you celebrate the High Days? If you have experience at leading groups, what do you do to prepare for your gatherings? If you have insights into how I might approach my situation, I would love hear them! Please post them in the comments.

Turning Over The Earth

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The Spring comes, and my life transforms. It seems to be almost as reliable as the coming of the Cottonwood snow. It happens every year, this pull towards the world; this letting go of Winter’s introspection.

In the past week, I’ve experienced a great upheaval and shifting in my professional and personal life. Relationships are changing, and I’m doing my best to remain calm and steady, respectful of the balance between what I can do to move things forward and what the currents are naturally doing on their own. It’s been hard, and I’m a little exhausted.

I think this pulling back from intense spiritual work, including a break from blogging and a relaxing of pressure around my DP work, has allowed me to prepare for this shift. My daily practice is still strong — stronger than ever, in fact. My devotionals have become so deeply a part of my life that I almost cannot remember what it was like without them. This sacred time feels less like a requisite of the DP course, and more a natural extension of my being.

In light of the hefty transitions and the attention they require, I’ve decided not to attend Wellspring. This saddens me a bit, as I was really looking forward to meeting my fellow sojourners in the flesh. But, I just turned over a huge plot of land, and I’m planting a season’s worth of new seed. You don’t just up and leave during the first few days and weeks after planting. You stick around. You water the earth. I have to make sense of what is coming, and I need to be here in order to do that.

I pray that all of my friends and readers have been well since last I wrote here, and I hope that you’ll reach out to say hello. To all of those attending Wellspring, I hope you have a brilliant weekend. I’ll send my spirit to be with you around the sacred fire.

Bright blessings,

Teo