Photo by Noël Zia Lee

Yesterday I realized that I have what you might call, “Christian baggage.”

To many, this will come as no surprise. It’s been said as much on post after post, and in the occasional Pagan forum thread. In response, I always said that I didn’t think that label was fair. Most times I think I was correct. To write about or reflect on my Christian past is not, in my opinion, the same thing as having baggage.

Reflection is not baggage. Contemplation is not baggage.

But what happened yesterday was different. In a conversation with my husband about my knee-jerk reaction to a kind, innocuous comment left on my post about going to church by the very priest who gave the inspirational sermon I spoke of, I realized that when I was a Christian I believed — on some level — that my paradigm was the correct paradigm.

By that I mean that when we affirmed in the Creed that there was “one God, the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth…” we were affirming something that was true. It must be true, I thought, even if only in some mysterious, esoteric manner beyond my comprehension, in order for the whole thing (the Gospel, the Jesus, the God) to have meaning.

Also, if my paradigm was true, that meant that other paradigms, if they were different, were not true. For example, if there was only one God, there were not two. If God was the creator of all things, there were no other creators.

Plain and simple.

As I unpacked these ideas I recognized a rigidity within me that I never knew I had. Even if I hadn’t held up cardboard signs proclaiming that my truth was the one and only truth, I stood up in church every weekend and reinforced the idea that my truth was the one and only truth.

Now, there are those for whom the Creed does not serve this purpose: the words are spoken, but not necessarily law. Converts to a creedal tradition, for example, might be capable of taking a more objective stance to their newfound credal affirmations. For them, the value in speaking the Creed aloud might simply be in the strengthening of the group bond.

But as a “cradle Episcopalian,” a child who was speaking “I believe” statements before I could understand what those “I believe” statements even meant, those words have carved a deep groove in me. Even when I no longer speak them, their echo is still present.

My husband suggested that perhaps we re-write the Creed, just as an exercise. Maybe that would release some of its hold on my psyche.

It might start something like…

We believe in this one god,

A father, kind of almighty,

One of the makers of heaven and earth,

Of some things, seen and unseen….

To creedal Christians reading this blog (and I’m not sure there are many of you), I mean no disrespect by this re-write. It isn’t for you, it’s for me. Adjusting the language allowed me to laugh at my own inner rigidity. Speaking these new words out loud made it feel like the old words are in fact not law, but rather one of many ways of believing.

In that moment, there was plurality.

2…3…4?
Photo by Paul Gorbould

My friend William, an ADF Druid, reminds me often that dualism — the view that the universe is divided into opposites like good/evil, right/wrong, heaven/hell — undergirds much of our Western thinking. Even if we profess to be pluralists, we still fall back on dualism as a default. Just look back on all of the conversations we’ve had about Pagan v.s. Polytheist. That’s dualism right there. The entire firestorm about gender-exclusive ritual can be seen as a biproduct of dualistic thinking (i.e. we are either male or female — end of story).

Perhaps dualism is my Christian baggage.

If that is true (or if it is one of many truths), what do I do with that information?

How does one take apart dualism? By introducing a third way? How do you hold the tension for more than two, opposite ways of thinking, being, or doing? How, I wonder, do I work to develop an ongoing personal practice that is relevant to me without slipping into a perspective that holds up my practice as the right way?

Have you stared your own dualism in the face? What did you see? How did you respond?

Visit the post My Christian Baggage on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

I mean, really. 

I had this thought after my unexpected visit to church. I also had this thought after I returned home from Beltania, the Colorado Beltane gathering I attended and presented at over my birthday weekend. It may seem strange that I would question my Pagan identity after a Pagan gathering, but that’s what happened.

Don’t get me wrong — I had fun. I mean, I erected a giant phallus after all. The festival provided a sense of community for the Pagans who attended, and it was clear that most everybody was having a great time. Joy Burton and the Living Earth Center crew worked their butts off putting this thing together, and they deserve a huge congratulations. But on a personal level, I walked away feeling like most of what I experienced — the culture of it all — was simply not my cup of tea.

Perhaps it was the Wiccan-centric nature of the gathering that made me feel a little out of place. Or maybe I just had Lonely Druid Complex. It certainly wasn’t anyone else’s fault, though. The festival did exactly what it was supposed to do. It’s become a very important part of the Colorado (and surrounding states) Pagan community, and I’m glad I went.

But when I got home I couldn’t quite remember what it felt like to be a part of ADF, or even to be a practicing Pagan. It was like I didn’t know what path I was on any more.

Photo by Trey Ratcliff

Then, this morning, I did ritual.

I did a full fledged, bells and whistles ritual. My shrine was fresh and new after an impulse yesterday afternoon to rearrange it, so I lit a candle and some charcoal and began.

I did my Paganism.

And that’s how I know. That’s how I know I’m a Pagan.

I know by doing.

I am through the doing.

My beliefs, opinions, ideas and thoughts move fluidly from one shape to another, never solidifying into something hard or rigid. (Who wants ideas with hard edges? I don’t.) But my practice, a practice that I’ve been developing for years, is the foundation of my Paganism.

It is informed by my mystical experiences, by my meditative inquiries, and by my upbringing. This ritual of mine is about as close to an Episcopal service as you might find from any Pagan (well… short of the drumming mid-way through). My home practice informs my perspectives about festivals, and church services, and dialogues about deity, and all the other things that cross my path.

Mine is a religious practice of relationship. Ghosti is the word used in ADF to define this ancient understanding of reciprocal relationship, and the need for relationship is real. I maintain relationship with my practice in order to maintain relationship with the Kindred — the Gods of my heart and of this place, the Spirits of the world around me, and my Ancestors. These relationships inform my other relationships, which circle back to inform my ritual…

It’s a series of cascading circles of reverence and sacredness.

Photo by Claudio Alejandro Mufarrege

I’m happy to discover after a brief dry spell that I am still very much a Pagan; still very much an ADF Druid. It turns out it wasn’t really an identity crisis, but just a moment of pause.

Should I begin to question again, I will light my fire, burn my charcoal, and see how the doing of my Paganism affects my perspective.

What about you?

Have you experienced this sense of disconnect from your path? Was there an event that made you wonder if you were still a Pagan? Where did you go from there? How did you reconcile yourself to that experience, and do you still identify as a Pagan now?

Visit the post How Do I Know I’m a Pagan? on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

It was the first time I’d been to church since I left the Church.

Taking in an evening mass, done up to the 9′s with incense and vestments, was something I hadn’t planned to do while visiting Eugene, Oregon, nor was it an invitation I expected to receive from my friend, Jason Pitzl-Waters. His wife attends this congregation, and yesterday just happened to be the first time he was going to venture with her. He extended the welcome to me, and I gladly joined them both.

I’m not sure I was prepared for what I experienced.

Something pagan was present at this church service (other than the Druid in the back row). The priest spoke about the liturgical calendar, and how this Sunday — today — would be a day when the church recognized a pre-Christian, Roman agricultural holiday.

A pagan holiday.

How perfect, I thought.

(God… are you behind this?)

There was a god in that place last night. It wasn’t the only one – I think they’re wrong about that. But there was a god, nonetheless.

I stood and sat at the appropriate moments during the service, and I recognized in an intimate way the rhythm of the ritual. This was an Episcopal church, after all, and the Episcopal church was my home for so many years. I felt relevance, harmony, but a certain dissonance, too. It was neither all good nor all bad, and I’m not sure why I thought it would be either of those things. That was not the Church I knew. Being a Christian was always mixed and complicated.

I held back from full engagement with the liturgy, because full engagement felt disingenuous. I didn’t feel comfortable reciting the creed, nor did I say the Lord’s Prayer. I felt detached during the hymns, hype-aware that the messages were designed to tear down animism and build up hierarchical monotheism. The sermon was engaging and inspiring, but it was followed by kneeling and submitting to a dogma that I don’t believe in.

And yet, when I heard a small child sing along to one of the mantra-like songs after the Eucharist, I almost cried.

I was that child.

And what am I now?

That question lingered long after the service, and into this morning. I sit here in this little cafe, compelled to write again on the blog that I put on hiatus, because I was reminded last night that the inner world is complicated and worth unpacking. This blog is the venue in which I seek to answer that question again and again, and it’s time to return to that dialogue.

The short answer is this:

I am all of the things I have ever been. I continue to be them, in one way or another. Nothing is ever fully released from the heart. It’s all there, tattoo-like. Those old parts of you call out and say, We’re still here: your memories; your long, lost hopes; your visions of truth; your doubts — all of it. All here, still intact, inked into the inner flesh.

My Christianity gave me my first introduction to reverence, mystery, humility and community. It encouraged me to recognize that there was nothing in the world that was not touched by the divine. It inspired me to care deeper, to give generously, and to seek out new, creative ways to serve others.

I bring all of those attributes with me to my work with the Solitary Druid Fellowship. Were it not for the Church, and for those many people who were inspired by Jesus to serve others in love, I wouldn’t be writing liturgies for Pagans.

(Chew on that one for a minute.)

I walk the path of a modern Druid, but one whose ethics were first informed by bells-and-whistles Christianity. I can never not be this person.

And I’m ok with that.

I think I’m going to go back this morning, just to see if I might talk with the priest for a moment — one religious man to another. They’re going to have bagpipes today, and they plan to process around the church in a big circle (clockwise, no doubt), and bless the seeds and livestock.

It may just be the most pagan service I will ever attend.

Visit the post A Pagan, a Druid, and an Episcopalian walk into a Church on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

Bishop In The Grove needs to go on a temporary hiatus.

These are the words that popped into my head yesterday. As soon as I heard them, I knew they were true.

Blame it on the New Moon.

I’ve had the feeling for a little while that something needed to give. I’m a decent juggler (3 oranges, no more), but the message was clear:

DO LESS.

My schedule has been quite full lately. Between my contributions to The Wild Hunt, my seasonal entries to HuffPost, my work for the Solitary Druid Fellowship, and the small pile of books that have come my way via Witches and Pagans to review (not to mention Thorn’s book that we’re tweeting about on a daily basis), I’ve been stretched pretty thin.

Then yesterday hits. I take a meeting, and during the meeting I realize that a dream project is staring me straight in the face. A quiet voice inside says,

This opportunity is yours, if you’re willing to do the work.

And I’m willing. I knew that instantly. I want to do this. I’m uniquely qualified for the work, and excited at the challenge.

So, the blog needs a break because I need to be less divided.

The Morrigan’s presence in my life continues to reveal itself.

(What will you fight for? When will you take up your sword? When will you lay it down?) 

I’m not giving up everything, though. That doesn’t feel right to do.

Here’s what I’m imagining:

• I give myself as long a break as I need from writing on BITG. During this time, when I feel the impulse to write about my thoughts on practice, Paganism, or anything that might fit naturally in the archive, I’ll write about it in a document entitled, “Book.”

• I keep writing liturgies and devotionals for the Solitary Druid Fellowship. The next will be up in a week or so. Doing service work is soul food, really.

• I continue as a contributor to The Wild Hunt and HuffPost.

• I read books when they move me, and not accept any more for review. It’s so hard to turn down a book, but I need to get better at it.

• I love on my family, celebrate my soon-to-be 18 year old kid, and spend time doing things that make us feel strong and happy.

• I make music happen.

As plans go, I think this is a good one.

While I’m away, make sure you’re following the Bishop In The Grove feed. If you choose to get your posts by email, you’ll receive my next post directly in your inbox. I highly recommend doing that.

And please know how much I appreciate you. This community of readers has helped me gain clarity in so many ways. I look forward to more conversations with you.

See you real soon.

P.S. You can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter or Google+. Sometimes I post pictures of me in kilts. You won’t want to miss that.

Photo by Markus Lütkemeyer

Visit the post Bishop In The Grove on Temporary Hiatus on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

Now, onto today’s BITG post…

The Intersection of the Myth and the Meaning

My husband and I were standing in the kitchen, preparing a meal to take to my grandmother’s house for Easter. We were talking about the difference between Easter and Christmas, and how he had always preferred Christmas.

He talked about how the Jesus of Christmas and the Jesus of Easter seemed like two different people. To him, the lead-up to Christmas was always so intense and exciting, filled with anticipation. And the payoff, the birth of Christ, spoke to something wonderful about humanity. It was the moment in the myth when the divine became humble.

I’d never thought of it that way.

I proceeded to explain to him why Easter had always been more important to me than Christmas.

Easter brought into clarity how humans like me were in relationship with God. As a Christian, it made my station clear. It made the need for Jesus clear. It brought home the reason for being a Christian: reconciliation to God, and reconciliation to ourselves about our imperfect nature.

[Side note #1: I no longer hold this belief.]

Perhaps most importantly, Easter made the Christian myth relevant in the world. It provided me a way of applying the myth in my life. It said, “This thing happened, and because this thing happened you can better understand yourself. You can now go into the world and better understand the nature of the world.” Lent, the season preceding Easter, was equally important for me because it rooted the myth into my personal life, and encouraged in me a deep reflection on the parts of myself I often avoid acknowledging.

Christmas, on the other hand, was less visceral for me. Funny, right? Christmas is all about incarnation; about the divine being made human through birth — the most visceral act. Yet it did not feel as immediate or as potent as the Easter myth. Easter was about the complexity of humanity. Holy Week, even, provided all of these opportunities to reflect on the ways in which, in spite of all of our virtues, human beings do ghastly things to one another. It forced me to looks at my own potential for complicity in hatred and cruelty. It was humbling.

[Side note #2: It would be incorrect to dismiss this exploration of what Easter or Christmas meant to me in my early Christian life as "Christian baggage." Having conversation about our past, or engaging with the stories which have been relevant to us at different times is not "baggage." The term is reductive. I think we can be bigger than that.]

When I think about my proclivity toward inquiry about different ethical, and perhaps even moral convictions within the Pagan community, it is not because I believe in replicating a Christian-like, sin-based, transactional model of interaction with the divine; rather, it is because I have always believed that the stories you tell about the gods you worship need to be relevant in the world you live in. They must be more than just stories. They must have application.

I was never an advocate of literalism in the Church. I thought that was missing the point. The stories of Easter didn’t need to actually happen in order for them to be important or applicable. They could be symbolic while still being relevant.

And the point is that they were. Relevant.

So when I write about Pagan bubbles, or the effects of casting circle, or the function of love within a Pagan paradigm, I’m doing so because I am a person whose initial religious identity was heavily influenced by the idea that one’s religion must inform how they understand themselves in the world. I’m sure there are plenty of Pagans who can explain how their religious practices and mythologies directly influence their engagement with the world, and I’d like to hear from you here.

While the m-word (morality) may reek of wine and wafers and be stained with a duality that makes many of us cringe (myself included), the intersection of the myth and the meaning is where morality is born.

Is that correct? Can you find a way to phrase that last part more accurately?

But that’s beside the point of the original realization. Easter meant more to me because it made my myth into something I could apply in my life while informing me of my relationship to God. I may now see divinity as something different than I did then (and I do), but I still long to find, uncover, or create stories which make a similar connection. I’m not interested in finding the exact right one (I don’t think such a thing exists), but I am on a quest for meaning.

It all has to mean something, or it means nothing.

Visit the post The Intersection of the Myth and the Meaning on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

Photo by YAT OP

Sometimes I find myself out of balance.

Today, for example, I came into my room — the place where I light my incense, still my mind, perform acts of reverence and celebration — and I found myself uncertain about how to begin.

My mind was a repository for too many things. There was clutter everywhere.

Thoughts about music…

Thoughts about leadership…

Thoughts about love and relationship…

Thoughts about the responsibilities I’ve taken on…

These things clouded my mind, and made it very difficult to listen.

Listening, I’ve come to learn, has to happen first before any meaningful creation can occur. (This is why I prefer a silent space in which to write.)

I find that I don’t often know what to do when I’m in these moments of crowded-headedness. My first impulse is to try to organize the mess. (Not eliminate it, mind you, but organize it.) This rarely leads to resolution; instead, I feel little more than a mild sense of productiveness. I feel like:

Well, at least I’m doing something.

Other times I open up a browser window and find something to read. I scan Facebook, or I look at the comments on a post or a status update. I engage with others and allow the dozens of freeze-frame conversations to be my focus. I chat about someone else’s writing, someone else’s ideas, something mildly stimulating or (at times) completely engaging. Doing this feels like:

Well, at least I have something to say.

There are other ways I distract and occupy myself, but none of them seem to address what’s really going on.

And just what is really going on?

I think — and it’s a hunch more than anything — that in these foggy-brain moments I have forgotten, however briefly, what it is that brings me into alignment with my deepest, greatest sense of happiness and purpose.

(a.k.a. My True Will.)

I don’t know how to take that first step into the labyrinth because I have forgotten why taking that step is meaningful.

This morning I wrote the following update on Facebook; writing it was an attempt to kick-start my creativity after the first draft of this post petered into self-pity:

Each day we begin again. Each day we must make decisions about how to live, how to connect, how to release, how to create. Living is an art, even if at times it feels like little more than a struggle.

Being present with our own creative nature — the place where our humanity comes to look very much like something divine — helps us to be artful in our living.

How do you begin each day?

I wrote these words and realized that by reaching out to others, I care for myself. There is a connection between outreach and inreach (that should be a word), between service to others and service to myself, between the compassion I show for my community and the compassion I offer to myself.

These things are connected.

My mother used to tell me that when I felt sorry for myself I should do something for someone else. For the longest time I thought that her advice would have the negative side affect of fostering denial about what was really troubling me, but I think I was wrong. Turning my focus to the well being of others reminds me of what “well being” feels like. That act of turning outward has a profound and amazing affect on my own inner reality.

This isn’t to say that I shouldn’t sort some things out in my own head, away from the view of others. I certainly have my own work to do. But it’s a reminder that in moments of frustration or confusion, or when there is a lack of space in one’s mind, there is a great benefit in becoming a servant to others.

Turning outward in service is — I promise you — a service to yourself.

Each day we begin again. I begin with a mind and heart of service, and by showing love and compassion for others I receive the benefits of love and compassion in my own heart. I encourage creativity, and in the process I experience creativity. I remind others of the artful nature of living, and I am graced with a glimpse of the art in my own life.

This is how I began today.

How will you begin?

Visit the post How Do We Begin? on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

By Markos Zouridakis

Faitheist serves as an example to Pagans, polytheists, Witches, Druids and Heathens (I think it’s time we get our own LGBTQAI abbreve, no?) of the impact and power that storytelling can have on furthering our ideals.

Browse the bookshelf at a local metaphysical bookstore, and you will find book after book which explains the hows of our different systems. You may find a title or two that dives deeper into the why, but you will be hard pressed to find many books which unpack the personal stories of the author. We don’t do memoir very often, and I’m not sure why.

As I was reading to the end of the first chapter of Make Magic of Your Life by T. Thorn Coyle, the March BITG Book Club title (which I am enjoying very much, and which I encourage you all to start reading), I was struck with a sense of longing to know more about Thorn’s life. I was curious about what had transpired that led to these deep and expansive awarenesses.

Last week, in response to a blog comment that asked something to the effect of, “How does love permeate a hostile universe?,” Thorn quoted an old blog post of hers to illustrate her point about love’s presence:

“This week, while cleaning the old sixteen burner stove at the house of hospitality, pressing the rough green scrubber against the tough metal “I love you” rose unbidden to my thoughts. This was not some practice of connecting to the stove, this was connection to the stove. The divine presence was there.”

This.

This is what I mean. This is what I was longing for.

To be fair, I’m only in the introductory portion of Make Magic of Your Life, and I’m not criticizing Thorn or the book. I just found myself, having moved from Chris’s memoir to what I suppose you might call an empowerment guidebook, wanting to be reading Thorn’s memoir so that I could better understand her (and, in turn, so that I might better understand myself).

Stories do that for me. I think they do that for all of us.

Stories provide context that instruction does not. Parables get at meaning in ways that user manuals do not. Our stories are what make us who we are, and the telling of our stories is what affirms our interconnectedness, our sameness, our differences, and the sacredness that weaves it all together.

A good memoir (which I believe Faitheist to be) weaves the messages and teachings that are important to the author directly into the narrative. My copy of Chris’s book has a couple dozen dog-eared pages, and the statements I underlined were (I think) the meat of Chris’s message:

“[Our world needs] people of all different stripes and convictions coming together to deal with things that matter, announcing our differences without fear, enthusiastically embracing our commonalities, and intentionally seeking out points of mutuality and understanding in the face of vastly different metaphysical commitments.”

Or,

“A bit of intellectual humility and self-awareness goes a long way; a quick perusal of human history shows that when one person’s idea of “rationality” trumps basic human decency for others, we all suffer.”

Or,

“To build a strong society, my Humanistic ethics encourage me to engage. This is much more than mere atheism, which is only a statment about what I don’t believe in. After years of witnessing the ugliness that arises when rejection-based beliefs lead to the rejection of people, I now seek out ties that will bind us together.”

These are messages that our community — that every community – needs desperately to hear.

Chris could have written a book that explained how to be a Humanist, but he didn’t. And I’m glad that he didn’t. I don’t think it would have made the profound impact that it is making on our culture. His messages would have read as platitudes, and we would be missing the valuable context.

Context is key.

I would like to see a Pagan Memoir section at Isis Books or online, and I’d like to read the stories of our teachers, leaders, magick workers, priests and priestesses. I would like to know what all of this spiritual and religious work has meant in their lives. I’d like to know when they felt doubt, or when they encountered something transformative. I’d like to read their lives and not just their instructions. I think it would be revelatory, really. (I’m putting In the Center of the Fire on my reading list.)

Chris told stories, and then stepped back to allow the conversation to begin.

And that’s what I’d like to happen here.

What story in Faitheist resonated most with you? Was there any one piece of Chris’s narrative that led you to a new awareness about interfaith work? About religious pluralism?

How did Chris’s storytelling affect you, personally?

Visit the post Faitheist: A Lesson for Pagans in Storytelling on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

Photo by Chris

I am not a Christian, but I have no problem with placing love at the center of my religious ideology.

(That I should feel the need to qualify the centrality of love with an “I am not” statement is notable.)

When I check in with my desire, my deepest yearning, I discover love. It’s there, simple and quiet; steady and ready to be known.

The word, as many wiser people than I have observed, is overused in the English language. When I say “love” you might think of love as romance, adoration, longing, friendship or lust.

Do you love your car? Do you love your husband? Do you love your new phone? Do you love the land? The Gods? Yourself?

In each of these cases, the word is used quite differently. Isn’t it?

Photo by Chris

So what does it mean that my deepest yearning, my True Desire, is love?

I don’t know how to answer that question.

While I’m perfectly comfortable with writing that “love is at the center of my religious ideology,” I don’t know exactly what that means.

I was raised a Christian. I’ve written about that in many places. I also came into my own as a young adult within a Christian community. One could easily ascertain that my emphasis on love is a holdover from my earlier tradition. The Christians planted the love seed, and the tree continues to grow — even if it is decorated with Pagan symbols now.

Perhaps that is true. For certain, it is reductive.

I don’t think that Christians have the patent on love. It wasn’t born two thousand years ago, and it isn’t contained exclusively in the pages of the Good Book. It is bigger than any one tradition.

Photo by Franny Lane

But how do we talk about love in a Pagan context? Can we place it at the center of our religious ideologies — or our spiritual practices, if that feels more comfortable to you — while retaining a sense of identity in our tradition.

For that matter, is it reasonable to expect that we do such a thing?

I’ve met people who seem to care little about love in a broad or theological sense, but a lot about love for their tribe. The boundaries are clear to them. You have it for some, but you don’t necessarily have it for others. There is an inside (where love is given), and there is an outside (from which you protect yourself).

And it’s not just Pagans or polytheists who do this. There are Christians who think of love in this way. There are Muslims who think of love in this way. There are people in every religious tradition who think of love as something that is given to only a few select people.

Tribalism is tribalism, no matter how you dress it up.

So, again, what does it mean that love is at the center of my religious ideology?

I still don’t know.

There are a few things that I am clear about:

• I care for people. I care about their well being. This care sometimes is experienced as love, and this love is given to people I know very well and people I don’t know well at all. I consider myself a servant of my community, and I have great love for those who I serve.

• I am in love with my husband. Madly. Over the past several weeks a new fire has ignited between us. Seven years we have been together, and somehow — amazingly — we are discovering each other in completely new ways. In him, I know love.

• I feel a profound sense of love when I do ritual. This love feels like it’s coming from something on the edges of myself, pouring inward. I felt this at the PantheaCon Morrígan ritual (which continues to work its way into my skin). I have felt it every time I performed a Solitary Druid Fellowship High Day ritual. Love — some primal, essential kind of love — is present with me in those moments.

So it’s interesting to me that I start off this post with a need to clarify how this centrality of love is not Christian. My disclaimer makes me aware that I haven’t had much cause (or opportunity) to talk much about love since I became a Pagan.

And why is that?

How is it that something that can be so intrinsic to me (and I presume to others) can be a subject that doesn’t come up much in my religious community? Is it that we don’t have a context for talking about love? Are we convinced that love wasn’t that important in the Old Ways, and — more importantly — are we satisfied with that conclusion?

Or, are we afraid that if we talk about love in connection with our religious lives that we might start sounding too Christian?

Where does love fit into Pagan and polytheist traditions?

Visit the post Where Does Love Fit into Pagan and Polytheist Traditions? on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

Let’s get something out on the table: I have never done a book club before. As such, I’m kind of winging it. My hope is that it can be informal, conversational, and ongoing; I envision there being multiple BITG book club posts about Faitheist. This one is simply designed to get the ball rolling.

Let’s get started!

First, reading this book made me wish I could give Chris Stedman a huge hug. I kinda love this guy. His willingness to tell his personal story, a very vulnerable act, is nothing short of inspiring. Think what you will about atheism, Christianity, or interfaith dialogue, but you cannot deny the courage it takes for a person to tell their story to the world. And more than that, Chris frames his story as an introduction into a deeper conversation about the identity of others. He’s looking for dialogue — real dialogue — and offering himself up in an attempt to initiate that dialogue.

Chris may not be a Christian anymore, but there is a selfless, sacrificial-like quality to his approach that reminds me very much of the Jesus I admired as a young man. When speaking to atheists, Chris asks the potent and controversial question: “Do we simply want to eradicate religion, or do we want to improve the world?” One should not underestimate the gravity of that question in the circles that he moves through.

There’s also something bardic in the telling of his story. There is a message, a meaning, that transcends the book-jacket subtitle: “How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious.” Chris, I believe, in his quest to form connections with the religious, is trying to inspire us all to recognize our common humanity, and to acknowledge that that is enough to justify our striving toward peaceful interaction. Our shared humanity is the universal base from which we can construct all kinds of meaningful and sustainable communities.

About mid-way through the book, I came across a passage in Chapter 5 (Unholier Than Thou: Saying Goodbye to God) that caused me to put the book down for a few days; it affected me quite deeply. Chris tells the story of making his way to El Salvador on a pilgrimage of sorts to the site of Monsignor Óscar Romero’s assassination. Chris documents a series of connected events that occurred; events the include a discussion he had with a fellow student about a tattooed Bible verse on his leg, the emotional impact of being in the church where Romero was killed, and the revelation that the verse which he’d discussed earlier — a verse which he regretted having made permanent on his skin — was the very verse that Romero had preached about on the morning of his assassination.

It was Chris’ evaluation of the events that gave me pause.

Chris writes:

“I don’t know why I felt I needed that episode to be intentionally orchestrated in order to cull significance from it — it was significant on its own merit. I imagine that a desire for purpose is innate for many of us. We presuppose that learning occurs within larger, cosmic narrative structures. Things matter because there is an implicit reason behind their occurrence, and it is our job to discern the organic meaning within. Constellating and creating our own sense of meaning from such moments can feel insufficient; discovering some preordained answer seems more compelling. In that moment I wanted to be handed a fate, not fashion my own.”(93)

The conclusion that Chris reaches here is, itself, insufficient for me for several reasons.

First, this rationality still feels like an extension of Christo-centric thought. I read this and think, Who said anything about intentional orchestration? That concept is born straight out of a Christian paradigm. One needn’t believe in a god that is authoring your life in order for you to see the meaning inherent in a series of events…. or even to recognize that there is some kind of authorship taking place.

When Chris says that “things matter because there is an implicit reason behind their occurrence, and it is our job to discern the organic meaning within,” I shout YES! But I also recognize that this story — a story that he, himself, told by unpacking events that were strangely, clearly connected — was, in a way, a story being told to him.

It might not have been God doing the telling, but it was certainly not a story that he wrote all on his own. I wanted for Chris to see was that the people on the bus, the tour guide, and even the memory of his fallen idol were themselves the ones telling and authoring this story to Chris, about Chris.

(That’s the making of a mystery in my book.)

For some, this might be the moment when they say, “It’s God,” or “It’s the Goddess,” or “It’s _______ who made this happen,” and I — like Chris — think that’s missing the point. It is awe inspiring because it is happening, not because it was orchestrated. And I’m a believer that awe, wonder, and reverence even, are natural and fitting responses to events like the one he had in El Salvador… even if you don’t ascribe them to a deity.

You see – I’m trying to get at a kind of transpersonal awareness that felt missing from Chris’s re-telling of this one story. His evaluation was, to me, lacking because it did not acknowledge now, from his present vantage point, that this series of events was somewhat awe-inspiring in its unfolding. He included the story, but then missed the opportunity to experience any kind of wonder at the coincidence. It didn’t have to be a wonder born from a Christian context — or even any context which ascribes all meaning to the supernatural — in order for there to be wonder.

And as a religious person, I value wonder. I value uncertainty. I value and honor the mystery of human life and its intersection with non-human life. Chris demonstrates throughout the book a deep love of justice, equity, and humanity. His love is commendable; inspiring, really. I wonder if there’s any way for Chris — or other non-theists and Humanists — to cultivate some degree of love for and wonder at the mysteries surrounding the experience of being human.

Is it possible for an atheist to make a space for the kind of wonder that feels integrated into the lives of many religious people, without adopting a set of beliefs that is in contradiction with hir ethics and principles?

Perhaps that answer will come in the memoir Chris writes about his life from ages 25 to 50. Or, I might be able to shoot him a message on Twitter and see about interviewing him for the blog!

Even the straight boys are crushing on this picture. Don’t lie.

Now, onto the discussion!

Did you have a similar reaction to this section of the book? How did (or do) you read it?

If this ties into another section of the book that resonated with or affected you, feel free to share that as well. This is the first of several book club posts inspired by Faitheist, and I will likely bring elements of this first conversation into my subsequent posts.

[And for our March BITG Book Club Book, check out the icon at the top of the right sidebar or the BITG Book Club page!!]

Visit the post Faitheist: A Quest for Meaning Within Reason on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.

This week I’ve been in the middle of intense songwriting work, all of it very rewarding. But as I wrote on my music blog, #allofthesongs, there are times when it is valuable not to speak about what we do:

“…Being in the middle of the artistic process reminds me that there is cause to be silent sometimes. There is a real value in not revealing who you’re working with. Tell the world what the process is like, and you change the process. Reveal how you feel about it, and that feeling is no longer contained in the same way.

Containment is important. Holding onto that feeling of creative anticipation and tension, and being willing to delay the gratification that comes when you let the world know what you’re doing — a world of people who in that one instant of reading your status update or tweet cannot begin to understand the gravity of your life, the complexities of your situation, who cannot savor in the pleasures of what it is to be a living, breathing, creative person in the exact body that you inhabit — makes possible some really transformative writing.”

What is true in the creative process is also true in the transformative work done to me/through me by the Morrígan.

I recognize that this kind of language — me being affected by the work of a divine being — may come across as a kind of certainty about the gods; a clear knowing about their nature, or a tangible recognition on what or who they are.

Don’t mistake me. I am not that bold, or that foolish.

I do not know what the Morrígan is. I do know, however, that the devotional ritual at PantheaCon, the one I wrote about last week, initiated a chain of events that have led me into a greater state of embodiment, a deeper connection with my own Will, and a “no bullshit” approach to my daily encounters.

I feel more willing now to speak with conviction about my perspectives, my doubts, my desires — oh, my desires! — and all of the things that I might otherwise tuck away inside of me for fear of what power they might hold over me or over my life.

And what is happening does not feel like the introduction of recklessness into my life. It isn’t that I am out of control, or that I’m becoming completely overtaken by the parts of me that have been ignored. It is rather that the parts of me that have been hidden (either out of fear or because of ignorance) are thrusting their way forward, jutting out of me with precision and sharpness. The inside of me projects outward and shouts –

“I AM HERE! DO NOT IGNORE WHAT IS HAPPENING INSIDE OF YOU!”

This I can speak about. This is how I talk about the workings of a Goddess. I do not presume to describe Her, but rather the way that She has initiated a transformation in me.

Photo by Sarah Gould

This theism, this religiosity, is motivated by the visceral feeling of this skin, this flesh, these parts that are filled with the blood we all share. In this blood is iron – iron!! 

Do you hear me?

In our blood is iron. Within us is flowing something so firm, so strong, something so raw and ready for the forge.

“I have a warrior heart,” I wrote in a song a few weeks before Pantheacon. I had no idea at the time how much a great, Goddess Warrior would wield influence over my body and my mind.

And yet here I am. Taken by Her. Inspired into a fuller life, a more honest life. In every moment.

How do we talk about the workings of a Goddess?

With a fierceness. That’s how.

Visit the post How Do We Talk About the Workings of a Goddess? on Bishop In The Grove and join in the dialogue. Your contributions to the conversation make this blog a community effort.