Under the Ancient Oaks

Gut Reactions Aren’t Always Right

2012-02-01T19:26:00.000-06:00

the Land, the Sky and the Sea - all part of Nature

crossposted with No Unsacred Place

Last week fellow No Unsacred Place contributor Lupa wrote an excellent piece titled “We Do Not Return to Nature. We Are Already There.” If you haven’t already read it I encourage you to do so. The title is self-explanatory, and in the first paragraph she says:

I would bet that the majority of people who think of “nature” are thinking of open areas that have a minimum of human impact, where the signs of humanity are reduced or even almost entirely eradicated. And I feel that’s a grave shortcoming in our perceptions.

My initial, gut-level reaction was not favorable – when I read the title, I instinctively thought “no, you’re wrong.” But when I carefully read Lupa’s essay I couldn’t find anything to disagree with. Why? Why did I have this emotional disconnect on such an important concept? From reading the comments, I see I wasn’t the only one.

After thinking on this and letting it incubate for almost a week, I’ve come to the conclusion that my disconnect is the result of a no-longer-helpful evolutionary impulse.

The human brain has evolved to classify things into a few discrete categories – usually two. Forget computers and the internet – the real information overload is in the natural world. Look at a tree: how tall is it? How many branches does it have? What color and shape are the leaves? Does it have fruit? Is anything living in it? What does it smell like? What is the bark like? There are hundreds if not thousands of qualities of the tree for you to notice – and they’re all changing slowly but continuously.

While you were contemplating all the miraculous, continuous details of the tree, a lion ate you and removed you from the gene pool. Our early ancestors learned to focus their powerful but finite brains on the “critical few” instead of the “trivial many.” Nature may work continuously, but we instinctively divide Nature into good/bad, helpful/harmful, friend/foe, animals-I-can-eat/animals-that-will-eat-me and so on. On a deep time scale we aren’t very far removed from living in trees and many of us are instinctively dividing environments into “Nature” and “not-Nature.”

And if “Nature” is good, then “not-Nature” must be bad, or at least inferior.

One of the purposes of religion – any religion – is helping us overcome the limits of evolution. The traits that served our ancestors well for millions of years of living in the wild don’t always serve us well in the modern world. A biological urge to eat more than you need is a good thing when food is scarce. When food is always plentiful it’s not so helpful, as I and millions of other Americans can attest. The urge to divide everything into two diametrically opposed categories is similarly unhelpful in a world that grows more complex by the minute.

Modern Pagan and Earth-centered religions have developed in part as a response to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution: pollution, deforestation, and the mass migration from rural environments to urban ones. We are creatures of the Land, the Sky, and the Sea – remove us from that environment and our bodies and souls tell us something is wrong.

But the solution is not to go back to pre-industrial subsistence farming. For all their ills, modern industry and technology have made our lives longer, easier, and less risky. As I’ve said many times, I wouldn’t want to live in Texas without air conditioning... or at any time in history before the development of general anesthesia. Cities and suburbs have advantages over rural areas, mostly due to economies of scale: a city can support libraries, museums, hospitals, markets and businesses that support and employ their populations. Cities are inherently more energy-efficient than rural areas, primarily due to their density. We recognize this or so many of us wouldn’t live there.

The challenge of our lives as we live them here and now and are likely to live them in the future is how to live in cities and suburbs in a way that is responsible and sustainable and that maintains our spiritual connections to the Land, Sky and Sea. We can’t do that if we see these environments as “not-Nature.”

It’s easy to connect to Nature in the wilderness. It’s harder to maintain those connections in urban environments. But if we’re going to live there – and most of us are – it’s necessary. It requires intention. It requires mindfulness. It requires a commitment to regular spiritual practice.

And it requires an understanding that there truly is no unsacred place.

The Wicker Tree

2012-01-29T19:04:00.000-06:00

I remember seeing The Wicker Man as a teenager. It was an edited-for-television version, but it still grabbed me – I can clearly remember thinking “that is so cool” as the Wicker Man burned.

On his live album As Nature Intended Damh the Bard introduces a song from The Wicker Man by humorously asking “Why do we like that film? It’s not really the best publicity for the Pagan community!”

I think part of us is in love with the idea of a modern village where everyone is Pagan, where our rituals and celebrations are part of the common life, and where our beliefs and morals are seen as normal.

Another part of us likes seeing the tables turned on the dominant (and at times, domineering) religion and culture. Our better selves may not approve of Sergeant Howie going up in flames, but deep down we’re glad to see Pagans on the non-burning end of the fires for a change. We all like winning.

And that brings us to The Wicker Tree, the “spiritual sequel” by 82-year-old Robin Hardy, who directed the original Wicker Man in 1973. The premise has been known for some time: a young Evangelical couple from Texas are on a mission trip to Scotland and are brought to a rather odd village. They find the folks friendly and accept their invitation to become the May Queen and the Laddie. At that point everyone who saw The Wicker Man knows what’s going to happen – the question is “how?”

I saw The Wicker Tree today. As other reviews have said, it doesn’t end quite like you expect, but the ending is neither a total surprise nor totally unsatisfying.

When I heard the story revolved around a young Evangelical couple from Texas, I cringed. I assumed they would be stereotypical caricatures. But they mostly got it right. Brittania Nichol’s Beth and Henry Garrett’s Steve were very believable – I’ve met plenty of people like them. The only thing they got wrong was that born-again Christians don’t put much stock in angels, and they never, ever mention “the Blessed Virgin Mary”… unless it’s to accuse Catholics of worshipping her.

The Pagan and pagan references didn’t fare as well. They got Sulis right (though she’s primarily associated with Bath, far to the south of Scotland), but they conflated the whole Spring cycle into “May Day.” A character dies by a method unknown in the ancient world. Mostly, though, the sensual-yet-innocent Pagan customs that were so charming in The Wicker Man are all but gone in The Wicker Tree. Honeysuckle Weeks’ Lolly is frequently naked and constantly looking to couple, but although both the character and the performance are quite good, they aren’t enough. The Maypole, the Pagan lessons in the school, the fertility dance and the costumed procession of the original are nowhere to be found in the sequel.

Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle makes a brief appearance – much of his scene is in the trailer. Lord Summerisle asks “Can fate be altered? This is a question that every religion must try to answer. And the answer is almost certainly ‘no’.”

And there you have it. The religious philosophy underlying The Wicker Tree is neither Pagan nor Evangelical. It is Calvinist – rather appropriate for a film set in historically Presbyterian Scotland. Hardy says our fate is fixed and though we think we can change it, either through appeals to God or gods or by our own determination, in the end we will have what has been preordained – nothing more and nothing less.

The Wicker Tree is not a bad movie. See it with no expectations and you may find it entertaining and even thought-provoking. But it doesn’t come close to The Wicker Man.

Practice and Belief

2012-01-25T17:17:00.001-06:00

I’ve seen quite a bit in the Pagan blogosphere the past few days on the connection between practice and belief. That relationship is most clearly expressed in B.T. Newberg’s interview with Rev. Michael J Dangler of ADF at his Humanistic Paganism blog. Dangler says simply “practice begets belief.” He’s right, but I want to dig a little deeper into how and why he’s right.

Practice can beget belief, but more frequently practice begets experience and experience begets belief. We engage in spiritual practice: we pray, meditate, perform devotions and make offerings; we perform rituals and work magic. These practices facilitate religious experiences: we experience the presence of a deity, we feel strengthened and restored, we experience change, and we get results. These experiences are a consequence of our actions, not our beliefs. They work because they work, not because we think they work.

This is why most Pagans – and Unitarian Universalists, and followers of other liberal religions – focus on orthopraxy and not orthodoxy. We focus on doing the right thing, not on thinking or believing the right thing.

It doesn’t matter if you care for the Earth because you’re a Pagan who believes the Earth is the body of the Goddess, or because you’re a Christian who believes the Earth is God’s creation, or because you’re an atheist who believes this is the only planet we’ve got so we better take care of it. What matters is that you care for the Earth.

Belief comes as we try to interpret our experiences. What do they tell us about ourselves and our place in the grand order of things? What do they tell us about our place in the community? What do they tell us about how we should live our lives – what is of ultimate importance and what is trivial? Why did this practice generate this experience?

The meaning we take from our beliefs motivates us to practice deeper and more frequently. More and deeper practice generates more and deeper experiences. More and deeper experiences further reinforce our beliefs.

Practice, experience and belief are a virtuous circle.

Our religious traditions provide a framework for interpretation. As much as we like to think we’re unique, mostly we aren’t. Whatever we’re doing and experiencing it’s highly likely someone else has been there before. The good news is that we don’t have to figure out everything from the start. This is one of the reasons I rant against the “spiritual but not religious” movement – it forces everyone to reinvent the proverbial wheel. And that takes time and effort that could be spent more productively using an already-existing wheel to actually go somewhere.

The point that Newberg and Dangler make in their interview is echoed in this post by Druid Teo Bishop and in this one by Heathen Galina Krasskova: practice and the belief will come. The converse is also true, as Bishop has found: stop practicing and the belief will fade. I’ve done that too.

In the Protestant tradition that is still dominates the West, belief is everything. If you no longer believe, anything you do is meaningless... and you may already be damned. But in the tradition of almost every other religion, belief is of secondary importance. What’s most important is what you do. If you don’t believe, keep practicing. The techniques work – sooner or later the practice will produce religious experience and from the experience, belief.

Do the work and the results will come.

There’s one caveat to this I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere that needs to be kept in mind. What you can believe is limited by what you think is possible. You can call these “core beliefs” or “foundational assumptions” or your “worldview.” They’re usually unstated and frequently unrecognized – they’re self-evident... at least to you.

Anyone can do the practice and have the experience – experience is driven by action, not by belief. But when it comes time to form beliefs about the experience, a person with a materialist worldview will interpret that experience in a materialist fashion: he will decide he experienced only a change in brain chemistry, not the touch of a goddess.

In the interview, B.T. Newberg said “I couldn’t really accept, rationally, the idea of literal gods being outside my mind and existing out there somewhere” and went on to say “You can have different states of mind.” He did the work, he had the experiences, but he interpreted them according to a Humanist worldview.

And that’s perfectly OK. It works for him. It’s meaningful for him. What matters is doing the right things, not believing the right things.

Is a worldview something you’re born with or something you learn? I tend to think it’s a little of both. I grew up in a fundamentalist church where a “biblical worldview” was both assumed and preached. But when I got old enough to think about what I was being taught I realized it didn’t make sense to me – it went against my core beliefs. I certainly wasn’t taught universalism at home or in school – I think it’s much more likely I was born with the propensity toward rational thought and a belief in the value of every individual.

Having said that, I don’t think our worldviews are unchangeable. I completely discounted the possibility of many gods or of magic... until I met someone for whom they were very real. At that point the way I interpreted my experiences changed, and I started down the path that has led to where I am now as a Pagan and a Druid. Changing a worldview requires study and practice – you have to reprogram both the conscious and unconscious mind.

If you’re struggling with belief, keep practicing. Practice will lead to experience and experience will lead to belief.

Ground yourself in your religious tradition, which will provide a framework for interpreting your experiences. Read the myths and lore of your deities – how can you know Odin is speaking to you if you don’t know anything about him?

If you do all that (consistently, over a long period) and you still struggle with belief, it’s probably time to start looking at your worldview. What unstated beliefs rule your life? What foundational assumptions have you made, or have you been taught? Do you need to challenge those assumptions? Are they in conflict with what you’re trying to believe? Do you need to work to change your worldview, or do you need to try another spiritual path?

This is why Pagans don’t proselytize – the path that’s right for me may run counter to your core beliefs. While I will preach against fundamentalist religions of any flavor, there is value to be found in Christianity and Buddhism and Islam and atheism and virtually every religion known to humanity.

What matters most is doing the right things.

Joe Paterno 1926 – 2011

2012-01-23T18:54:00.000-06:00

With apologies to Shakespeare, I come to bury Joe Paterno, not to praise him.

For the benefit of readers who actively ignore sports in general and college football in particular I’ll offer this summary. For over 40 years Joe Paterno was head football coach at Penn State University. In a sport with tremendous pressure to win at any cost and countless examples of high-level cheating, he was known for running a clean program. He contributed millions to charity and by all accounts was a good guy.

But when presented with evidence that one of his assistant coaches was molesting children he did the minimum required by law, which was essentially nothing. When those above him covered it up he did nothing.

When the whole affair became public last fall, Paterno was fired. He died from cancer yesterday – it is speculated that when he lost his coaching job he lost his identity and his will to live.

Today, some are consigning him to hell for his negligence in protecting children. Others are screaming that one moral failing, no matter how serious, shouldn’t tarnish the legacy of someone who did so much good over his 85-year life.

I’ll leave the weighing of Paterno’s heart to others and simply state the facts as I see them: rightly or wrongly, his legacy – how he will be remembered by future generations – is tarnished.

There’s a powerful lesson for all of us in this tragic series of events: we cannot ignore evil in our midst, no matter how difficult it may be to confront.

The pull of loyalty is strong – confronting evil in “them” is easy compared to confronting evil in a friend. Our own misdeeds and shortcomings may hold us back – we wonder how we can confront him about this when we’re doing that, whether or not “that” has any moral equivalence to “this.” It gets even harder when we benefit from the evil – we don’t want to know where things came from or how they were made.

None of us are perfect and moral purity is impossible, even if your moral code is grounded in naturalism and reason and not some archaic sacred text. “Compassion fatigue” is understandable and perhaps inevitable, if still regrettable. But there is a huge difference between moral imperfection and negligence in the face of evil.

What is evil? It’s like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous line about pornography: you know it when you see it. I can’t tell you what circumstances should send you flying out of your chair and into battle.

But you can.

May we have the courage and strength to do what our hearts and our better selves tell us must be done.

Sacred Space: Architecture and Worship

2012-01-22T18:34:00.001-06:00

crossposted with Denton Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

Tom Stovall

This morning’s service at Denton UU was titled “Sacred Space: How Architecture Affects Our Worship Experience.” The guest speaker was Tom Stovall, a retired architect who specialized in church design during his career, and a member of the UU Fellowship of Tyler. I don’t normally review Sunday services, but Tom had some things to say I think are relevant to UUs (who usually have buildings) and to Pagans (who usually don’t).

Tom started by defining worship as “a series of commitments: to yourself, to your community, and to a set of principles.” Then he asked “is a church building sacred space?” A Catholic would say yes, while a Baptist would say no. And he said a church building “expresses and supports a group of people with similar principles.” I can think of no better example than Denton UU. While our founders were for the most part Humanists, they loved Nature as much as any Pagan. Their principles are reflected in the building they designed and built.

Greek temples were built as homes for gods and goddesses, not for worship. Medieval cathedrals were built to emphasize the separation of the people and the clergy. The Protestant Reformation brought the altar and pulpit forward to allow for corporate worship.

A traditional American congregational church, with its rows of pews, center aisle and raised pulpit in the center, emphasizes the spoken word – it is a passive worship experience. The semicircular seating arrangement in many modern churches emphasizes gathering around a central point. For UU churches, Tom says this central point is our chalice.

layout of Tyler UU

Tom showed a diagram of his church in Tyler. I spoke at Tyler UU in 2005 – it’s a beautiful building in beautiful setting. It has an area for gathering as people come in from the parking lot. It has a long hallway with pictures on one side and windows on the other, to allow people to prepare themselves for worship. The doors to the sanctuary serve as a threshold – it should always be a conscious decision to enter into worship.

Tom went on to make some general comments about designing a new church building, something Denton UU will have to explore in the near future. I’m going to leave that topic alone for now, except to say it’s good we’re beginning this conversation.

Any worship space is a compromise between ideals and principles, practical considerations, and finances. Most modern Pagan worship is done in circles – we frequently call our seasonal celebrations “CUUPS Circles.” Like King Arthur’s Round Table, a circle emphasizes egalitarianism – no one is more worthy than any other. It’s an important principle, but when you get more than about 25 people, the circle starts to get unmanageably large. Put 100 people in a gathering and the circle is so large it requires a huge space and people have a hard time hearing and seeing what’s going on. Denton CUUPS typically sets a small inner circle, then adds concentric semicircles around it. The ideal of the circle is compromised for the practical consideration of allowing everyone to get as close to the main altar as possible.

Denton UU has no gathering area. I don’t know why the founders didn’t build one, but I suspect it had a lot to do with available finances – with a limited budget, you put available dollars where they can best meet your needs. Religious Education space and worship space were deemed more important than gathering space. I can’t argue with that tradeoff.

If you refuse to compromise, you end up with things like Wiccan covens who will meet in someone’s living room on a beautiful Spring evening, or with Druid groves who will meet outdoors during a cold February rain. As a Druid I very much prefer that worship be held outdoors, but I make no apologies for moving inside rather than putting up with 100 degree temperatures at Lughnasadh or the occasional snow at the Spring Equinox.

I have to say I’m very much taken with the concept of gathering, preparing, then crossing a threshold into worship. It’s very easy to tell arriving guests “just find a seat in the circle.” But some of our better rituals have involved gathering in one area for announcements and opening ritual, processing to the main circle, and then formally entering into the circle by smudging or anointing.

Salisbury Cathedral

Geometry isn’t the only consideration on sacred space – design and decoration also contribute (or detract) from the worship experience. The glass walls opening onto Nature help make Denton UU sacred space. I’ve been in other churches (some UU, some conservative Protestant) where I felt like I was in a theater, or worse, in a business meeting. When Cathy and I visited England in 2007, we were impressed by Westminster Abbey, but it felt like a museum. Even though Salisbury Cathedral is built on the same general plan, it still feels like a church, like sacred space. Some of our better CUUPS circles have involved spending hours turning Miller Hall into an Egyptian temple or the RE Wing into the Temple of Apollo at Delphi (and then turning it back into a UU church in time for Sunday services!).

Whether we are holding a Pagan seasonal celebration or a weekly UU Sunday Service, it serves us well to remember that we are entering into sacred space and sacred time. Anything we can do to make that space and time more special and more intentional will only improve our worship experience.

Gerry Veeder tells the story of our building to our children

Common Ritual Errors and How to Avoid Them

2012-01-19T19:51:00.000-06:00

There are rituals that leave you feeling like you’ve touched the gods and walked between the worlds. And then there are rituals where you walk away shaking your head. If you’re new to leading group rituals, how do you make sure yours fall into the first category and not the second? Knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it is a good start, but even if you follow your tradition’s liturgy or an outline like the one I presented in the last post there are still things that can go badly wrong. Fortunately, if you’re aware of the pitfalls you can take steps to avoid them.

I’ve yet to do a perfect ritual but I try not to make the same mistake over and over again. Here are the most common ritual errors I’ve encountered, in other people’s rituals and in my own.

Lack of Preparation. There’s nothing quite like standing under the full moon, bathing in its lustrous beauty, and letting your heart speak its innermost feelings. It’s a wonderful experience, but personal devotion and group ritual are two very different animals. The gods may not care if you stumble through invocations or if you’re at a loss for words in the main rite, but your fellow circle-goers will.

Very few people can extemporaneously lead a large, complex ritual and do it well. I’m not one of them. I need a script. If I don’t want to use a script then I either have to use calls, invocations and workings that I’ve done many times or I have to memorize what I want to say. It’s better to read well than to memorize poorly.

Even if you’ve got a good script you still have to practice it. The core group at Denton CUUPS has been working together and using the same basic liturgy for seven years. We still do a walk-through before every ritual, just to make sure it works in practice the way we think it works on paper. If there’s something new in a particular ritual we’ll do a full rehearsal on that section – maybe two or three times.

If a ritual is important enough to do it’s important enough to make sure it’s right.

Lack of Planning. It’s not uncommon to find a ritual script that’s all words and no directions. And without directions (and the planning that goes into them) it’s easy to do things like set up chairs from wall to wall and not leave room to walk around the circle, or expect someone to do something that would require three hands. A circle with an altar in the center is nice, but not if it means half the people can’t see what’s going on.

Beyond that there are site issues and logistical issues that need to be considered. If you’re working at night, how will you see to read: house lights? candles? flashlights? If you’re outside, can you make sure everyone can be heard? What if it rains? What if it’s 110 degrees?

If you’re planning group movements like a procession or a spiral dance, how will you accommodate people with mobility issues?

As you’re composing the ritual, mentally walk through the setup, motions and movements and then add them to the script. Make sure what you want to do can really be done.

Ignoring Sizing Issues. A private ritual for six or eight covenmates has one set of requirements. A public ritual for 20 or 30 has another. And a ritual for a public gathering with 100 or more has yet a third. What works well with one size may not work well with another.

I once attended a public ritual with about 80 people in attendance. The leader smudged everyone before they entered the circle, then later walked around the circle personally handing a charged object (stones, I think) to every participant. I’m sure this was a ritual the leader had done before in an intimate gathering, but in this setting the result was that people spent a lot of time standing around with nothing to do.

The larger the gathering the harder it is to get everyone involved and the harder it is to make sure everyone can see and hear what’s going on. On the other hand, larger gatherings mean more energy for songs, chants and dances. Size your rituals appropriately.

Lack of Reverence. I think we’ve all been to religious gatherings (not all of them Pagan) where we’ve shook our heads and said “I’m going to go stand under cover in case lightning strikes.” It’s one thing to have a lighthearted ritual, particularly at Ostara and Beltane. It’s good to be able to laugh, and to laugh at ourselves. But lightheartedness and laughter should never cross the line into parody or mockery.

Make sure you give proper respect to ancient and indigenous cultures and their relics. I’m not one to get worked up over “cultural appropriation” – we humans have been borrowing each others stories and rituals since the first tribes were formed. But credit your sources and don’t pretend to be something you’re not.

Every Summer Solstice this Druid becomes an Egyptian priest. But we make it clear we are not Egyptians and that what we do is our attempt to recreate and reimagine what the ancient Egyptians did. We’ve spent many hours pouring over the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and the Book of Going Forth By Day, trying our best to get it right.

It’s good to have joy and mirth in your circles – Paganism is not a somber religion. But it should be a respectful religion and a reverent religion.

Misunderstanding the Role of the Ritual Leader. This is probably the least obvious error and the most difficult to prevent. When you are leading a ritual you aren’t doing it for yourself – public ritual is not private devotion. At the same time, you aren’t performing for the rest of the circle, either.

The primary job of a ritual leader is to mediate between the gods and the assembly and to facilitate a religious experience by each person in attendance. That’s a big job, but remember: the ritual leader is a mediator because she or he is (or should be) familiar with a deity and with the best ways to introduce that deity to the rest of the circle, not because he or she is pure and privileged to approach a goddess or god while others are not.

When you are leading ritual, you are not a director or a lead performer. When you are leading ritual, you are a priest or priestess.

Priest and Priestess - from Mabon 2009

Doing this properly may involve performance techniques. Liturgy, props, costumes, music, motions, voice and such are not some sort of fakery. They are a means of mediation, a way to present the gods to the people so that they will be receptive to them. In an essay titled “Serving Dionysus” UU minister Rev. Victoria Weinstein compared her work as a worship leader with her performance in a community theater:

To refer to worship as a “performance” is to cheapen and defile its sanctity. And yet, of course, liturgy is a performance of sorts. And although internal preparation is important, so is external technique.

When I first began leading rituals, Summer (one of the founders of Denton CUUPS) would always ask me “what do you want people to take away from this?” Contemplating that question has helped me remember what the job of a ritual leader is supposed to be.

When Coyote Visits. No matter how much I plan and prepare, no matter how much I meditate and pray and rehearse, I have yet to do a perfect ritual. Our rituals are human endeavors and despite their divine intent they are subject to human imperfections. Since we can’t be perfect, we have to be prepared for things that don’t go exactly to plan.

If there’s a minor error, either ignore it or quietly correct it and keep going. The ritual isn’t going to fail and Lugh isn’t going to strike you dead just because you left a line out of an invocation. If you realize you forgot to light the incense, quietly light it before the next invocation – it will look like it was supposed to be that way. Never, ever apologize or call attention to a minor error.

For the hardcore magicians in the audience – yes, I know there are some rituals that must be done exactly according to script or Bad Things will happen. You shouldn’t be doing those rituals in public. If you need me to tell you that you shouldn’t be doing them at all.

If something happens that can’t be ignored – if you knock over the chalice and spill the wine, or if you catch your sleeve on fire – stop and calmly take care of what needs to be done. If the atmosphere hasn’t changed and the energy is still good, simply pick up where you left off. If it was a serious disruption, take a moment to reground and recenter. It may help to go back to the beginning of section where the disruption occurred, particularly if the interruption occurred during the main working.

If something serious happens – if a fire breaks out in the next room, if tornado sirens start going off – you may have to stop the ritual. Every situation is different – do what you need to do and what feels like the right thing to do. In nine years of leading open circles I’ve never had this happen.

Leading ritual isn’t complicated and anyone who feels called to do it should be able to do it. It just takes planning, preparation, and a lot of forethought to do it well.

May all your rituals be powerful and magical and blessed!

A Pagan Ritual Outline

2012-01-16T19:02:00.000-06:00

This past weekend I made a trip to Houston to visit with the Northwest Community UU Church. On Sunday I helped Cynthia present her service on UU and Islam and on Saturday we had a dinner meeting with some folks who are interested in starting a CUUPS chapter. During our conversation someone said “we don’t know much about doing rituals, we just find stuff we like that seems to work.”

Unless you join a teaching coven or other highly structured group, I think that’s how about 95% of Pagans get started. That’s what I did the first time I coordinated a CUUPS circle: I pulled out a couple books and found about a dozen rituals on-line, then borrowed and blended and mixed and matched till it looked about right. It worked. When I look back on that ritual now, though, I see some things that didn’t mix and match as well as I thought at the time, and I see that I didn’t completely understand why I was doing what I was doing.

Fortunately, there are resources available that can make life easier for the beginning ritualist. I have two books on ritual on my Pagan Reading List: Neopagan Rites: A Guide to Creating Public Rituals that Work by Isaac Bonewits and The Elements of Ritual by Deborah Lipp. Isaac’s book is simply the best guide to group ritual yet written – every Pagan ritualist should have a copy. Deborah’s book is very Wicca-oriented and gets into the minutia of ritual, but if you want to really understand the symbolism behind the liturgy, read it.

Over the past nine years I’ve developed my own ritual outline. It has its roots in these two books, in various on-line rituals I’ve found, in the rituals of OBOD, in public rituals I’ve attended and in years of trial and error in practice with Denton CUUPS. Very little is my original work. Yes, it is “Wiccanish” and yes, ethnic reconstructionists will probably prefer other liturgies. But it’s worked well for us.

This liturgy works well in circles of 15 up to about 60 or 70. Much less and you won’t have enough people for all the parts, many more and staging issues become a problem. More about that later.

A Pagan Ritual Outline

Introduction. Begin by informally introducing yourself and your group. Take care of any housekeeping activities: turn phones off, point out where the restrooms are, let people know when it is and isn’t OK to leave the circle. Assume there will be at least one person in the assembly who’s never been to a Pagan circle before – tell them enough to put them at ease. If there are any responses, chants or songs, teach them now.

Religious and Cultural Education. This is your opportunity to pass on history, lore, and myths – a bit about the holiday you’re celebrating, how it was observed in ancient times, and its survivals in modern culture. This can be very helpful, but make sure you keep it brief. You’re doing a ritual, not a lecture.

There are some rituals that need to let mystery speak for itself. Our Samhain ritual last year had zero educational readings. When in doubt, talk less and do more.

Cleansing and Purifying. Smudging, aspersing, anointing or other acts of purification are designed to help everyone check their baggage and not bring it into the circle. The best explanation I’ve heard is that if you’ve just finished chopping garlic, you probably want to wash your hands and utensils before you start baking a cake. Garlic isn’t dirty or evil, but I don’t want it in my cake.

Opening Bell. This is the signal that we’re shifting from ordinary time into magical time. It tells people to get serious – we’re about to start. Bells, chimes, singing bowls and gongs all work well. So does simply saying “let us now begin.” The important thing is to let people know that we’re crossing a boundary into something special.

Grounding, Centering, and Merging. This step is designed to further shift peoples’ consciousness from the ordinary world into the magical world, and to merge the individuals into a “group mind.” The ritual will be far more powerful if everyone is on the same page and moving in the same direction. This is usually done with a guided meditation, though singing, drumming, and chanting can accomplish the same thing.

Declared Opening and Stated Purpose. This is a line or two or three that formally says why we’re here and what we’re going to do. “We are here to celebrate Yule, the Winter Solstice. We welcome all who come in love and friendship to join our gathering and celebrate with us.”

Casting the Circle. This step creates sacred space in which we can work. The circle acts as a barrier to keep out unwanted energies and (more importantly) to keep our own energies in until we’re ready to release them. It’s true that circle casting is not an ancient pagan (lowercase intentional) activity – it has its roots in medieval ceremonial magic. But it has become commonplace (OBOD Druids do it, though ADF Druids don’t) and it helps reinforce the idea that you’re working in sacred space.

You can’t always cast a circle. Some times there are too many movements to stay within fixed boundaries, or you have to process from one place to another. If so, consider other methods for creating or declaring sacred space.

Calling the Quarters. Here we call the essence of the four directions and the four elements to be present at our circle.

Invoking the Ancestors. Here we call our ancestors of blood (our parents and grandparents going back to the dawn of time) and our ancestors of spirit (the founders of our traditions and the ancients who inspired them and us). We do this to acknowledge our connections to them, to honor them for the foundations they laid for us, and ask for their help with our workings.

Invoking the Gods. Here we invite the deities to join us and bless our circle. Depending on the ritual or on your thoughts on hard vs. soft polytheism, this may be the Goddess and God, or it may be a particular deity or deities. As with the ancestors, we want to acknowledge them, honor them, and ask for their assistance.

Giving Offerings to the Ancestors and Gods. If we ask divine beings to come to us, bless us, and assist with our workings, it is proper to offer gifts to them. Offerings can include food or drink, burning herbs or incense, prayers or poems or songs, drumming or dance – anything that is done in praise and honor of the deities we have called. This is neither bribery nor groveling – it’s simply the polite way to treat our most honored guests.

Interludes. If you have a long ritual or if the emphasis makes a sudden change, break it up with one or two or three interludes. This can be live music, recorded music, or readings of poetry or stories. Interludes can serve as “palate cleansers” and they can also help weave a story into the ritual.

Main Event. Everything done so far has been preparation – now we’re ready for the main event. This can be a magical working, a seasonal rite, a rite of passage, a re-creation of an ancient ritual or the telling of an ancient story. It can be very formal or very informal.

There can be more than one “main” event, although that runs the risk of diluting the overall impact, and the risk of going too long. If there is more than one main event, they should support each other in a common theme or goal. Make sure the main event really is the main event – it is anticlimactic to work through 15 minutes of readings, castings and callings for a 3 minute working.

The Simple Feast. A good, energetic working can be draining. Eating and drinking helps ground you and begin the return to the ordinary world. Sharing a meal is also an act of unity for the circle.

While the similarities to the Christian communion can be troubling for some, this actually has its roots in the much older Egyptian reversion of offerings. Food offerings were presented to the gods, who did not physically consume them. After some time, the food was eaten by the priests, and in some cases the worshippers.

Beyond that, if the leader and the circle as a whole have done a good job of raising and directing energy, and if the gods are pleased, then the food and drink will be charged with divine energy. When that happens, we are not just eating and drinking, we are consuming the blessings of the Divine.

I strongly suggest music or readings while the Simple Feast is being served. Otherwise people tend to talk among themselves, which breaks the atmosphere.

Reversing the Ground, Center, and Merge Meditation. This is a very brief meditation that reverses what was done at the beginning. It helps move everyone back towards the ordinary world.

Thanking the Gods and Ancestors. Anyone or anything that is called into a circle needs to be thanked and released, and this should be done “inside out” (last in, first out – preferably by the same person who called them). Please remember to be polite. Maybe you want to “dismiss” Morrigan – I prefer to keep my skin on my body.

Releasing the Quarters. Again, thank and release who and what you called.

Uncasting the Circle. This is opening sacred space – taking down the boundaries we have put up. It doesn’t need to be anywhere nearly as elaborate as the casting – it can be as simple as declaring “the circle is open.”

Closing Bell. Whatever you used to say “now we’re beginning” should be used again to say “now we’re done.” The leader can add a final blessing such as “go in peace” or something similar.

Final Words. This is the informal ending. Thank people for coming, plug your next event and make any other announcements. Ideally there will be a social time afterwards.

We don’t do all these elements in every ritual. Denton CUUPS rarely does cleansings, we don’t always cast a circle, and the closing ritual tends to be very compressed. But this basic outline has served us well for the past nine years – if you’re looking for a ritual template, give this one a try.

In an upcoming post I’ll talk about sizing, staging and other logistical concerns.

CUUPS Imbolc Circle

2012-01-14T09:06:00.000-06:00

If you're going to be in the North Texas area, please join Denton CUUPS for our Imbolc Circle two weeks from tonight, on January 28.

Click on the image for a larger version of the flyer.

The Death of Trees

2012-01-12T18:35:00.000-06:00

crossposted with No Unsacred Place

It is no exaggeration to say that Pagans love trees. Our ancestors had tree alphabets and World Trees. We admire trees, photograph them and hug them. We hold sacred gatherings under them and among them. At times we commune with them. They are beautiful, strong, resilient and supportive of other life.

some trees live, some died

So it was saddening to hear news reports that last year’s drought killed as many as 500 million trees, up to 10% of all the trees in Texas. Some may only be dormant, but as the drought is expected to continue at least through the Spring there is little reason for optimism.

That’s the high end of a Texas Forest Service estimate. An exact count will take much longer, so it’s possible the actual number of trees killed by drought will be lower. But even here in North Texas where the drought isn’t quite as severe the effects are clear and unpleasant.

There isn’t a lot we humans can do. I made sure the live oaks in my front yard got enough water (watering restrictions wisely give trees a higher priority than lawns), but those are two trees out of billions. If the drought breaks later this year further damage will be avoided, but if the long-term climate really is becoming hotter and drier then millions more trees and perhaps whole species will disappear from the region.

If we can’t stop the trees from dying is there at least something we can learn from all this? For me there is.

Some trees are persistent – they’re green all year. Others are resilient – they’re stripped bare in Winter and then full of green in Spring. But an extended drought can kill either. Nothing lasts forever. Whatever good is in your life, love it, honor it, and enjoy it while you have it. Experience it and commune with it as deeply as you can. But don’t cling to it, because some day it will be gone.

For every living thing – from the simplest single-celled organism to dolphins and humans and giant redwoods – there are environments that are favorable and environments that are unfavorable. And since environments constantly change, so must we. If our surroundings become unbearable we must either change our environment (by modifying it or by moving) or change ourselves. We are more adaptable and far more mobile than the greatest tree, but in the end all species and all creatures face the same harsh but unavoidable choice: adapt or die.

Will this be a short-term drought and things will soon return to normal? I don’t know. Will this be a long-term “dust bowl” drought that will kill millions more trees and change the landscape for years to come? I don’t know. Is this the beginning of a climate change that will make North Texas unsuitable for large trees for centuries? I don’t know.

But I do know this. If it gets too dry for oaks, mesquite trees will grow. If it gets too dry for mesquite, cactus will grow. Go to the driest desert, the deepest ocean, the darkest cave, or the coldest mountain, and you will find life. A forest burns and a whole cycle of life begins. One species dies off and another moves in. An old tree falls and a dozen acorns sprout.

Life persists.

So should we.

Fifty

2012-01-10T18:57:00.000-06:00

I turned 50 today. There’s a solidity to that number, a reality that’s impossible to deny. Maybe that’s because fifty is half a hundred. Maybe that’s because five uses up all the fingers on one hand. Maybe that’s because five is a troublesome number in the Tarot. Maybe something else.

When I turned 40 I wrote in my journal “I still don't think of myself in a significantly different way than I did when I was 22.” At 50, injuries and weight gain have stopped my running, I take daily medication for acid reflux, I need glasses to read, my beard is mostly white and the hairline that started receding in my late 20s is now racing backward.

I can’t kid myself any more – I’m getting old. Oh, I can still do almost anything I want, but not as fast or for as long, and recovering takes longer. Sometimes a lot longer. There are a few things on my “bucket list” I need to do soon, before age diminishes my capabilities too much further. The youthful illusion of immortality is pretty much gone.

But when I move beyond physical aging there is much to like about 50. Ten years ago I was still trying to find a path – today I’m well down that path with a firm direction for the future. Ten years ago I had figured out that more stuff wouldn’t make me happy but I didn’t know what would – today I do. Ten years ago Cathy was pretty much my only friend in Texas – today I’m part of a growing community that shares my values.

Part of me wishes I had gotten here sooner. But one of the benefits of being 50 is the wisdom to realize that I had to go through what I went through to get from where I was to where I am. And I firmly expect that experience will serve me well as I move on towards 60, 70, and beyond. I know my path – I don’t know where it will lead or what I will encounter on the way.

To my family of blood: you gave me my start and you instilled in me the resilience that keeps me going through difficult times. Thank you.

To my family of choice: you make the bad times bearable and the good times worth it all. Thank you.

To my family of spirit: you have shown the little boy who couldn’t believe what he was told he had to believe that there are many paths and on this one there is learning and integrity and depth and love. Thank you.

To Cathy: you hold me close but you never hold me back. I love you and I thank you.

It hasn’t been easy and it certainly hasn’t been perfect, but it’s been a good fifty years.

Here’s to the next fifty.

Tim Tebow Is Not A Hypocrite

2012-01-08T15:57:00.000-06:00

I’ve mostly ignored Tebowmania. He was a Florida Gator, I’m a Tennessee Vols fan. He plays for Denver, I live in Dallas. He’s an Evangelical Christian, I’m a Druid and a UU Pagan. Whatever side he’s on I’m usually on the other side. But recently I’ve seen a lot of folks on my side of the religious spectrum taking shots at him, shots I don’t think are fair to Tebow or helpful to us.

Most start with a picture of Tebow’s signature one-knee prayer with Matthew 6:5-6 superimposed. In that passage, Jesus says:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

The logic is simple – Jesus told his followers not to pray like the hypocrites, who loved to pray in public. Tebow prays in public, therefore he’s a hypocrite.

If our logic is that simplistic we are no better than the fundamentalists who cite Leviticus 20:13 or Deuteronomy 23:17 to bash gay people.

A hypocrite is a person who says one thing and then does another, a person who pretends to be something he’s not. A politician who campaigns for smaller government and then earmarks pork for her district. A preacher who condemns homosexuality from the pulpit and then picks up gay men. A Baptist who dutifully votes against alcohol sales and then buys liquor in the next county. A Pagan who talks about loving the Earth Mother and then can’t be inconvenienced with sustainable living.

According to various internet sources, Tim Tebow’s parents were Baptist missionaries and he’s a member of the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida. I grew up in a Baptist church, was at least a nominal member of a Baptist church till well after I became an adult, and I live in Baptist-dominated Texas – I’m very familiar with Tebow’s religion. Its highest emphasis is on salvation, which it defines as a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Its greatest practice is “witnessing” – telling others about Jesus so they’ll “get saved” too.

Tim Tebow is doing exactly what his religion tells him he should do.

Is that what Jesus taught? I don’t think so. I think Jesus taught his followers to love God and love their neighbors, to care for the sick and the poor and to build the Kingdom of God here and now. I think the doctrine on which the Baptist / Calvinist / Evangelical ideas of sin and salvation are based is an intellectual house of cards that textual criticism and modern science knocked down over a hundred years ago. In short, I think Tim Tebow’s religion is outdated and ultimately unhelpful, even though it is clearly meaningful for him and many others.

That makes him mistaken. It doesn’t make him a hypocrite.

Tim Tebow is polite and respectful. I’ve seen him share his faith numerous times, but I’ve never seen him be aggressive, much less obnoxious like so many hellfire preachers and pandering politicians. He works hard to promote his religion and he works hard to improve his craft… even though most people (including me) don’t think he has what it takes to be a successful NFL quarterback.

Ordinary people see this. When we take shots at Tebow for living out his faith as he understands it we look ignorant, petty and intolerant.

We do not have to share his faith to respect his dedication. I wish more Pagans and UUs were willing to live their faith as openly as Tim Tebow lives his. I wish more of us had Tebow’s passion for winning. I wish more of us had his work ethic. I wish more of us had his confidence in our faith and in ourselves.

Tim Tebow is many things – good and bad – but a hypocrite is not one of them.

A Steve Jobs of Religion?

2012-01-05T11:55:00.000-06:00

Early last month the New York Times published an essay by Eric Weiner on the rise of the religious Nones – as in None of the Above. I’ve been critical of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd, but Weiner appears to be a None who is sincerely searching and not just being spiritually lazy.

The Dallas Morning News’ Texas Faith panel addressed Weiner’s essay this week, in particular his claim that “we need a Steve Jobs of religion.” Their responses ranged from thoughtful to dismissive to wishful thinking that what Weiner describes already exists in their own religions. Here’s Weiner’s last paragraph, which Texas Faith used as their jumping off point:

We need a Steve Jobs of religion. Someone (or ones) who can invent not a new religion but, rather, a new way of being religious. Like Mr. Jobs’s creations, this new way would be straightforward and unencumbered and absolutely intuitive. Most important, it would be highly interactive. I imagine a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment. A religious operating system for the Nones among us. And for all of us.

EarthRhythms’ Amy Martin had two excellent points in her response. The first was “whatever the future of religion is, it will be done bottom-up Wikipedia style, generated from shared concepts rather than the revealed word of a transcendent personality.” And second “what is emerging must be articulated, but not defined.”

Amy’s right. New religions – or new ways of being religious – are a response to the needs of a particular group of people living in a particular place and time. No one or two or five persons have the breadth of experience and depth of intuition to coalesce those needs and responses into a set of beliefs and practices. A new religion will not be created, it will evolve.

While Weiner’s call for a Steve Jobs of religion is off base, his call for an Apple-ish religion is right on target.

First, a new religion for the 21st century will be like Apple because it will be intuitive. More importantly, it won’t be counterintuitive. It will not ask people to believe what their experiences tell them is false. It won’t claim that good people are damned because they can’t accept someone else’s special revelation. It won’t claim that who you love is more important than that you love.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, it will be a religion that makes your dog and cat – and your neighbor – better for it.

It won’t make claims we wish were true but intuitively know are false: that humans are really perfect but just don’t recognize it. Our experiences of violence, cruelty, and addiction, of guilt and shame tell us we are far from perfect. As William James said over a hundred years ago: “Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help! No prophet can claim to bring a final message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality in the ears of victims such as these.”

Instead, it will teach spiritual practices that help us find wholeness and live in integrity according to our highest values.

A new religion will be like Apple because it will be interactive. It will be participative and it will appeal to the body as well as the mind. There is a time to sit and listen but religion isn’t entertainment – it’s something you do. Sing, drum, dance, and feast! A new religion will also be experiential – it will encourage religious experiences by everyone, not just a special few. While it is true that mystical unity with God / Goddess / The Universe comes when it will and cannot be controlled, it can be facilitated with proper training and techniques. The leaders of a new religion must master these techniques so they can be demonstrated to all.

A new religion will be like Apple because it will be expensive. Cheap and easy religion is weak religion. If it is to be any good a new religion will require a significant investment of time: daily meditation, prayer, reading and contemplation. Regular meetings for group study and practice, and periodic intensive retreats. Work to put beliefs into action and make the world a better place. And money to support all of those activities.

Like Apple, there will be those who find it too expensive for their tastes. So be it.

Unlike Apple, though, a new religion for the 21st century will be humble. It will recognize that its religious experiences are unverified personal gnosis – meaningful for those who share them but not binding on those who don’t. It will freely acknowledge that doubts and uncertainty accompany any exploration of the limits of human understanding.

At the same time, it will not be paralyzed by those doubts. In the absence of certainty it will confidently proclaim “this I believe” and move forward boldly. And when some of those beliefs and practices are found to be incorrect or unhelpful, it will change them and try something else.

This religion is evolving even as we speak, but it is unlikely to become a wholly new religion. Instead, these new ways of being religious are being incorporated into existing religions both large and small. People are reinterpreting their sacred stories in new ways to fit our needs here and now.

This new way of being religious doesn’t need an inventor. It needs evangelists.

Lots of them.

Ritual and Culture

2012-01-04T19:25:00.002-06:00

We Pagans like to call what we do “the old ways” and while the question of the direct lineage of our beliefs and practices is a matter of debate (a debate I find interesting but not particularly useful), there is no question we are inspired by our pre-Christian, mostly-European ancestors. But if you want to study the origins of religion you must go back farther than the Greeks, Norse and Celts. You must go back to tribal religions.

Fortunately, there are still some tribal religions in practice. Ritual: Power, Healing and Community by Malidoma Patrice Somè is about the practices of the Dagara tribe, who live in Burkina Faso in West Africa. It’s not a new book (first published in 1997) and it’s not even new to me. Cynthia loaned it to me early last year and I finally read it this week (it’s amazing what you can do when you minimize distractions).

The book is nominally about ritual, but really it’s about the structure of an indigenous society and the ceremonies that bind it together. Malidoma constantly contrasts indigenous culture with the “Machine culture” of the West, a culture that has made us slaves to time and to our possessions. What goes unstated are the core values behind those contrasting cultures.

In the West, the freedom and autonomy of the individual is the greatest good. Traditional Western religion reflects this, with its emphasis on an afterlife and personal salvation. Much of alternative Western religion is even more individually focused, with an emphasis on empowerment or enlightenment or prosperity.

In an indigenous society, the harmonious continuation of the tribe is the greatest good. Rituals insure the ancestors and spirits are pleased and that things are done the way they’re supposed to be done. Roles are narrowly defined for men and women; for children, adults and elders. To do something else, to “follow your bliss” is simply unthinkable. Your “bliss” is found only within the community.

Malidoma Somè

And the pressure to conform is great. Malidoma says:

For a person to break the rule is not a sign of weakness or a momentary failure of the will. It is plain and irrevocable abdication or resignation from the group. A ritual must be done at this time to save the group from disintegrating as a result of this violent disconnection. To save an outcast … one must lose one’s power [and] you never will have it back. Therefore to try to save the outcast is to become an outcast yourself.

Some rituals – such as initiation – are so secretive Malidoma would not say anything about them. But he describes funeral rituals (which are public affairs) in great detail. You can deconstruct these rituals from a psychological or a magical point of view and there is much we can learn from them. But while they are clearly powerful, they are just as clearly intended for a different culture. Participating in them is like listening to singers singing beautifully, but in a different language. You can appreciate them and you can be moved by them, but you can’t completely understand them.

If we are to save ourselves from the curse of Machine culture, we should look to indigenous societies for help. But we should not expect to be able to perform their rituals and get the same results the tribes get. Indigenous rituals are powerful – Malidoma describes a mourning ritual done for Vietnam veterans that generated an amazing response – but even the most sensitive and enlightened of Westerners has a different worldview and lives in a different culture. Our rituals must be tailored to who we are and where we live here and now.

This is what we are doing as Pagans. We are attempting to adapt ancient concepts to our current predicament. Modern Paganism is our own indigenous religion.

Ritual: Power, Healing and Community is a fascinating look at an indigenous society and its religion. It’a fast read (112 pages) and well worth your time.

A Contemplative Season

2012-01-02T15:28:00.000-06:00

On several occasions I’ve mentioned the need for a contemplative season in modern Pagan religion. By the solar calendar this should be the season between Samhain and Yule. But our mainstream culture makes this period so overwhelmingly busy that it’s virtually impossible to maintain a quiet introspective outlook for more than a few days.

But now “the holidays” are over. For me, today is the last of eleven days off from work – tomorrow 2012 begins in earnest. The magical “vacation time” is ended and “ordinary time” begins again. But in my industry (as with many), January and February are slow months – work is typically not too hectic. Away from work, the sun has been reborn, but the days are still short and the weather is entering its coldest phase – those of us in the Northern Hemisphere will be spending most of our time indoors.

In this world, the time between the secular New Year and Imbolc is the ideal time for a contemplative season.

If this is a season of contemplation, what should we contemplate? Start with your gods and goddesses, your ancestors, and the spirits of Nature. Talk to them. Make offerings to them. Most importantly, listen to them. Contemplate your families and communities – how can you better serve them this year? Contemplate your life and your calling – are you fulfilling your True Will?

How should we go about this contemplation?

First, emphasize your daily spiritual practice. Whatever you try to do every day, do it every day. For this season – not forever, not all year, but for these few weeks – let nothing short of a certifiable emergency keep you from daily meditation, prayer, reading, visualization and other spiritual practices. Don’t try to start something new and special, just give a heightened importance to the things you’re already doing.

Second, emphasize depth over breadth. If you usually spend ten minutes in meditation, spend fifteen. If you pray once a day, pray three times. If you do devotional reading, read and then meditate on what you’ve read and then write about how it applies to you and your practice. This isn’t the time to sample from the spiritual smorgasbord – it’s the time to go deeper into the path to which you’ve been called.

Third, minimize distractions. Mojo of “The Wigglian Way” podcast recently talked about selling his PlayStation to devote more time to guitar practice. Maybe you don’t need to go to that extent – but maybe you do. I have to limit my internet time. It’s too easy for me to read the news and check Facebook and read an article someone posted and follow a link or three and all of a sudden it’s time for bed. Whatever it is that sucks up your time and distracts you from spiritual practice, minimize it. Set firm limits and stick to them – not forever, but for this season.

Should we fast or give up something, like the Muslim Ramadan or the Christian Lent? There is historical precedent for a restricted diet in this season. Winter is just beginning and you have no way of knowing if Spring will be early or late… and even when Spring comes, it will still be many weeks before food crops can begin to be harvested. For our agrarian ancestors, this was a time to conserve food. For me (and, I imagine, for many people) changes in eating habits are their own very large challenge, a challenge that could turn into a distraction. If this strikes you as something you should do, then do it. I’m just going to focus on simplicity and avoiding extravagance.

How long should this season run? I’m starting tomorrow and ending with our celebration of Imbolc on January 28. If some of the in-depth practices become habits and carry over into the next season, great. If not, then I’ll pick them up again next year. That’s one of the benefits of observing the Wheel of the Year – different seasons have different emphases and different activities, so you don’t get bored or burned out on any of them.

In our ordinary world there is no better time than now for a season of contemplation. Will you join me?

Looking Back on a Year

2011-12-31T11:25:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow is the first day of the secular New Year and with it comes the inevitable New Year’s Resolutions. While new resolutions have value despite their clichéd weakness, before you make any new resolutions, set any goals or make any plans, let me encourage you to take an in-depth look at the year that is passing.

Since my first year out of college, I have taken a few hours around every new year to sit down and review the previous year. It started because I missed the feedback from school: from kindergarten through graduation – 17 of my then-22 years – I had received quarterly report cards. I always knew how I was doing. I was a good student and most of my grade reports were positive feedback, but there were occasional quarters where the report reinforced what I knew but didn’t want to accept – I needed to make some changes.

More than just missing the feedback, I also had trouble recognizing my successes. I’m an engineer – my natural tendency is to find problems and then try to solve them. But once something is done (usually to “improve” rather than to “fix”) it’s easy to forget about it and become engrossed in the next “problem.”

You don’t need a PhD in Magic to understand what happens when you constantly dwell on the negatives in your life and minimize the positives.

So tomorrow I will continue this practice of looking back at the previous year and I encourage you to do the same. Some years it takes me 30 minutes to do. Those are the years where I’ve kept good journals and have kept my goals in front of me throughout the year. Other years take three or four hours. Those are the years when I got “too busy” to write. They aren’t necessarily the bad years, just the years when I didn’t write. I tend to journal more in bad years.

There are many ways you can do an annual reflection. Over the years my reviews have become less like a report card and more like an annotated diary. This is the format that works best for me.

What did you do last year? Go through your journal, your date book, your on-line calendars, your smartphone calendars, check registers and any other chronological records you have. List everything you did during the year: religious and spiritual events, key dates at work, trips, physical achievements and difficulties, family matters, and milestones of every description. If it brought you pleasure or gave you pain, list it.

What I found when I first started doing these was that I had actually done a lot more than I recognized. In my first year I tended to dwell on the fact that I was unhappy living alone and ignored the major accomplishments of graduating from college, finding a professional job and moving to a new city. In 2010 I tended to dwell on the fact that my job had gotten very stressful and ignored the spiritual work I was doing and the milestone of completing the OBOD Druid Grade. In both cases, the calendar review showed me that in spite of some very real difficulties, I had major accomplishments I needed to recognize.

How did your goals and resolutions go? What did you say you wanted to do at the beginning of last year? How did you do? If you succeeded – in whole or in part – that’s something to celebrate. What did you do well? What did you learn? What techniques or approaches can you apply to other areas of your life?

If you didn’t do as well as you had hoped, ask yourself why? Was it an unrealistic goal to begin with? Was it something you didn’t really want to do but felt like you “should” do? Did something unexpected interfere?

The purpose isn’t to beat yourself up over “failure.” The purpose is to help you do a better job of aligning your goals and plans for the coming year – as the old saying goes, wise people learn from their mistakes.

If the goal was a good one and you didn’t achieve it, what can you do differently next time? “Try harder” isn’t likely to product better results. What new approaches can you try? What new support can you arrange? What new feedback can you get? How can you prepare for the next unplanned interference?

Arrange your goals and activities into major categories. I have six major categories:

Financial – income and expenses, savings and investments. Did I live on a balanced budget? Did I save for contingencies and retirement? How am I doing toward my long-term goals?
Physical – how’s my weight, cholesterol and other measurables? How much did I exercise? Did I do anything noteworthy or have any issues that need to be monitored or addressed?
Professional – how’s my job going? Am I getting the results that make me valuable? Am I maintaining and growing my skill set? Do I need to be looking for something else?
Social – what did I do to form and strengthen my social relationships? I’m a natural introvert and if I don’t make this a priority I’ll spend too much time at home in front of the computer.
Spiritual – how was my daily spiritual practice? What did I learn? Who did I serve? How is my relationship with my gods and goddesses and with others in my spiritual community?
Family – how’s my relationship with my spouse? With my family of blood? With my family of choice?

You may have other categories – these are mine. Over the years I’ve added some and deleted others.

The category review has two purposes. First, it forces you to think about what general areas of life are important to you. What’s not a category is just as important as what is. Second, it lets you see where you’re actually spending your time, money, and energy. If you say your family is the most important thing to you but have a page on Financial, a half page on Professional and two lines on Family, maybe you need to reconsider your priorities – or at least be honest with yourself about what your priorities really are.

What progress did you make toward your long-term goals? What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to be five years from now? What are your dreams? What is your True Will? The more clearly you can define these goals the better, but a even if all you have is a vague idea you can still take steps in that general direction.

What did you do toward making those dreams a reality? What progress did you make? Did you learn something that helped you more precisely define what you really want, to more clearly understand why you’re here in this world?

Summary. I find it helpful to summarize the year in a couple sentences, to find the theme that ran through the year, to extract what wisdom I can from it. I know others who think that’s oversimplifying a complex matter, but it helps me close out the old year and get ready for the new year.

Now that you’ve taken a good, hard, in-depth look at the last year, you’re ready to set goals and make resolutions for next year.

The End Is Nigh

2011-12-24T14:37:00.001-06:00

The Pyramid of the Magician - Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico

A lot of people used December 21, 2011 to look forward 366 days (leap year next year) to the Winter Solstice of 2012, which some believe the Mayans predicted would be the end of the world. Or the end of an era. Or the beginning of a new cycle. Or something else big and important.

Almost all the articles I came across were debunking the prophecy in one fashion or another. Jason Boyett of the Washington Post’s On Faith blog says:

Maybe you’ve heard that the Mayan calendar is coming to an end. That’s no more accurate than saying your car will come to an end when it passes 99,999.9 on the odometer. Just like our calendars, when the Long Count completes an interval it rolls over and starts counting again. The “end” doesn’t matter.

An ABC News report quotes Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia:

The Maya are viewed by many westerners as exotic folks that were supposed to have had some special, secret knowledge … What happens is that our expectations and fears get projected on the Maya calendar.

John Michael Greer addressed this in his most recent Archdruid Report:

One year from now is December 21, 2012, a date onto which quite a few people have piled extravagant labels and grand expectations, but which will get a different moniker after the fact; the one I have in mind is Nothing Happened Day.

Greer has a new book titled Apocalypse Not: Everything You Know About 2012, Nostradamus, And The Rapture Is Wrong, which is now on my to-be-read list. He says:

The research for [it] was among other things a first-class education in the pointlessness of apocalyptic prophecy. There’s nothing in today’s advance press for December 21, 2012 that doesn’t have precise equivalents in a thousand similar prophecies for a thousand similar dates when nothing happened.

Why do we keep making and believing these doomsday prophecies, despite the fact that they fail over and over again? Greer says:

In the face of a cosmos that generally fails to cater to our sense of entitlement, they all offer narratives that make believers feel special, promise them some variation on pie in the sky, and offer them a good hearty helping of excuses for not taking action at a time in which action desperately needs to be taken.

The purpose of prophecy is not to make either the prophet or the believer feel special. The purpose of prophecy is to enable the hearer to take action, to utilize her or his free will to change the outcome of events.

The world as we in the United States know it faces many challenges: climate change, dwindling fossil fuels, increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a government that grows more dysfunctional by the day. You need not be a master of divination to see that significant change is already underway. If we buy into apocalyptic fantasies we will be no better prepared to deal with these changes than if we buy into the myth of inevitable progress and expect that science and technology will solve all our problems for us.

What if the Mayans were right and this is the end of an era?

What if we made them right?

What if we started a new era here and now?

What if in this new era people began with the idea that the Earth is sacred and should be treated as such? What if they realized that happiness comes from having enough and not from having more? What if they accepted that our fate as a species and as a people is inexorably intertwined with the fate of every other species and people on this planet?

What if we all – Pagan, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, atheist, and everyone else – decided to live according to the highest values we claim to profess?

The world will still be here on December 22, 2012. Will that world be a better place for us, our children, and the generations to come?

That’s up to us.

Solstice Meditation

2011-12-21T10:56:00.000-06:00

Tonight is the longest night. As we wait in anticipation for the rebirth of the Sun at dawn, it’s helpful to contemplate where we have been and where we are going in the coming year.

It’s important to recognize and celebrate your successes. You have accomplished much, perhaps more than you realize. Name your triumphs and mark your progress. They aren’t isolated to this year – they’re an investment in your future. Build on them as you continue on your chosen path.

But make sure you haven’t forgotten something important – is there something you’ve left behind you will need?

What have you learned about balance and moderation? Does your spiritual practice make you feel good? Does it also equip and inspire you to make the world a better place? Take care that your achievements don’t cause you to withdraw from the Great Work.

Our dreams can inspire us and show us possibilities we didn’t recognize. But at some point we must make a choice and begin the work of turning one vision into reality. There will be forks in your path. Do your homework, make a decision and then move forward boldly. Remember, you’re striving for real growth and true prosperity. Even if you’re sure you’re right, make sure the prize is worth the fight.

The path may be rocky and the way uncertain, but you know where you need to go. The load will be heavy, but you are strong enough. You have wisdom to gain and wisdom to share.

When the time for contemplation ends, the time to act begins.

May the blessings of the reborn Sun be with you and in you in the coming year. Happy Solstice.

With You Always?

2011-12-19T18:56:00.000-06:00

Those of us who grew up in Christianity were taught that God is always watching you. Part of that was to deter you from doing what you weren’t supposed to do, but part was the comfort of knowing you’re never completely alone: “God is with you always.” Of course that only applied to Christians: Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith caused a commotion in 1980 when he dogmatically proclaimed “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew.”

The thought that “God is only a prayer away” is a pleasant one, and many people carry this thought with them when they become Pagans... to such an extent that their concept of “The Goddess” is little more than Yahweh’s slightly more pleasant sister. But when you study the beliefs and practices of our pre-Christian ancestors you find many goddesses and gods: polytheism, not duotheism and not female-oriented monotheism. One of the key attributes of polytheistic gods and goddesses is that they are not omniscient and omnipresent.

Isis is not with you always. She has many areas of responsibility and many followers around the world. She may or may not be able to be in many places at once but she is not in all places at once. That has some serious implications for our relations with our goddesses and gods.

Do you really need Thoth’s help on that math test? Can you get over a headache without Brighid? Do you need divine assistance right now? Whatever the gods and goddesses are they are not our servants and they have better things to do than to tend to our whims. Sometimes they share their plans (or parts of them) and sometimes they don’t, but whatever their goals this much is clear – your happiness is not at the top of their lists. If they lift you up it is not so you can have a nice life but so you can help with the work of the greater good.

Yes, they occasionally bail us out of trouble... and sometimes they don’t. Yes, they occasionally give us a hand up... and sometimes they give us a kick in the ass and tell us to get our act together.

They may not hang around forever. Some people have life-long relationships with gods or goddesses, but read the accounts of contemporary polytheists and you’ll find numerous cases of deities coming and going. Sometimes they lose patience with a lack of commitment or a forgotten commitment. Sometimes they only enter your life to teach you one thing or to get you to do one thing for them and then they move on. Sometimes they leave for reasons they don’t explain.

Think you’d be better off with Jesus? Read the writings of Mother Teresa that were made public after her death. She referred to Jesus as “the Absent One.” She felt him call her to work with the poor, then shortly after she began he left. She never experienced him in her life again. There are plenty of Christians with similar stories – just because they like to say “God is with you always” doesn’t mean that’s what they’ve experienced.

Want your favorite goddess or god to stick around? Put some work into the relationship – same as with any other relationship. Spend time in mediation and prayer. Make appropriate offerings. Learn their stories. Live your life according to the examples they set.

Any ethical relationship should be mutually beneficial. If you’re going to ask for favors or teaching or opportunities you should expect to give something in return.

What does a god or goddess want from you, or with you? Why don’t you ask him or her? And then listen for the answer.

If you find yourself in a dire situation, ask for help. You may have ancestors who will hear you. Some deities are merciful. Others are opportunistic. And you may find you have skills and resources you didn’t know you had.

But if you assume a god or goddess is always there you may be very disappointed.

A Foot in Both Worlds

2011-12-15T19:46:00.000-06:00

I live with one foot in the world of science and the other in the world of magic. I am an engineer and a Druid, a corporate manager and a priest. It is not the easiest path to walk... though I think most of us who are Pagans in the 21st century West walk this path to one degree or another.

Sometimes the tension between these two worlds produces conflicts that are difficult to resolve. If we are to live both fully and with integrity we must learn to deal with this tension. I’ve been in one of those conflicts the past couple of days.

I. It started with this blog by Juniper who tells the story of a young woman who had been harassed by a “nasty spirit” and the trouble the woman had in finding someone to help her get rid of it. It’s very good and worth your time to read, but stay with me here for now.

The woman asked Juniper why no one in a rather large Pagan community would help her. Juniper offered several possibilities, first among them that some Pagans simply don’t believe in “the woo stuff.” She’s right – some don’t... and it’s pretty hard to banish a nasty spirit when you don’t believe nasty spirits really exist.

Could I have helped this woman? I’ve done some cleansing and shielding but I’ve never tackled anything quite like this. It may very well be beyond my skill level. I could make a couple phone calls and bring in some people I’d trust to take on pretty much anything, but until the occasion arises I’ll never know for sure.

And Juniper’s question remains – do I really believe? If I have doubts, could they keep me from working magic – or from even trying? Is this something that requires both feet in the same world?

II. Then I had a comment on my No Unsacred Place essay “Meeting the Spirits of the Land” that challenged the reality of my experiences. The commenter asked “You have any actual evidence these creatures exist?”

I think I gave a pretty good answer, basically telling him this is unverified personal gnosis. My experiences of “the woo stuff” are meaningful and helpful so I order my life as though they are real, even though I can never be sure. And since I can’t be sure I don’t go around insisting that others take my experiences at face value. If you want to interpret them metaphorically or psychologically I won’t argue with you. You might be right.

That’s an answer both the Druid and the engineer in me can speak with integrity.

III. Yesterday I came across this essay by Southern Baptist theologian Rev. Al Mohler where he insists all Christians must believe in the virgin birth of Jesus. I’m not going to get into why Mohler is wrong from a Christian viewpoint – if you’re interested, here’s a link to an excellent article on the subject by ReligiousTolerance.org.

When I read this the tension between science and magic popped up again. How can I accept Juniper’s story of nasty spirits at face value but dismiss Mohler’s story of a virgin birth?

Both stories make supernatural claims and neither story can be objectively verified. But when you look at them more closely you see they’re very different stories told for very different purposes and making very different claims to truth.

The Pagan story relates a personal experience to tell us we should be respectful of other people’s beliefs – this woman believed she was being harassed by a spirit and she didn’t get relief until she found someone who took her seriously. This story understands that unverified personal gnosis can be very meaningful but it cannot be used as a basis for universal Truth. While some people may have similar experiences, some do not and others have contradictory experiences, none of which can be objectively confirmed or rejected.

The Calvinist (I refuse to lump conscientious followers of Jesus in with fundamentalist Bible-worshippers) story relates a mythical experience and tells us we must believe it happened literally, not because the evidence for it is so strong but because if it did not happen literally then the whole doctrine on which Calvinist Christianity is based will come crashing down. It claims a literal certainty it cannot support and threatens its hearers with eternal damnation if they don’t believe it anyway.

It is not the story of the virgin birth of Jesus I reject or even its possibility. It is the certainty of a literal virgin birth I cannot accept.

IV. These incidents illustrate a major challenge for Pagans living in the 21st century West. We understand the difference between literal truth and mythical truth. We understand unverified personal gnosis – its meanings and its limitations. We walk easily with one foot in the world of science and the other in the world of magic.

But when we step into the circle or when we invoke our gods and goddesses or when we are called on to banish a troublesome spirit we must have both feet in the same world. For that time outside of time in that place not a place we must have the confidence that everything we see and hear and do and say is absolutely real.

During an invocation is not the time to debate whether our deities are individuals or aspects or archetypes – at that time they simply ARE. During a working is not the time to debate whether a spell is directed energy or divine intercession or psychological programming or all of the above – at that time it simply IS.

Don’t try to banish your doubts and don’t try to pretend you don’t have them. Go down that route and you’ll end up believing that if a virgin didn’t give birth your whole religion is worthless. Simply set your doubts aside while you’re in the circle. For that time take a hint from the Buddhists: just be, just do, just experience. Don’t judge and don’t evaluate. Commune with your gods and ancestors. Journey to other worlds. Work magic.

After the circle, pick up your doubts and put one foot back in the world of science. You had the experiences – that makes them real. Contemplate them and decide what interpretation is most meaningful and helpful for you.

V. Some people can’t set foot in the world of magic. If there’s no objective, verifiable evidence then they can’t believe it. That’s fine – not everyone is called to this path. We don’t judge people by their beliefs but by how they live their lives.

Some people can’t step out of the world of magic. If everything they believe isn’t literally true then they lose their faith. Again, if that’s their calling so be it. We don’t judge people by their beliefs but by how they live their lives.

As for me, I’m called to walk in both worlds.

And so I do.

Altars

2011-12-14T22:22:00.000-06:00

I’m working on something fairly deep and it’s not going to get finished tonight. Until then, let me point you toward author and teacher Thorn Coyle’s new blog post on altars. It’s quite good – go read it for yourself.

The important point is that altars aren’t decorations. They’re representations of what you hold sacred, and as such they should be tended.

This is my home altar.

A framed copy of the picture below hangs on my office wall. It is invaluable for keeping me connected to my core values and keeping me grounded during stressful times.

What does your altar look like?

A Religious Community in Motion

2011-12-11T19:17:00.000-06:00

Though I frequently write about “community” and its importance in our spiritual lives I don’t write much about my religious communities. But today I want to write about a huge milestone for my spiritual home, the Denton Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.

In our Winter Congregational Meeting today we approved the largest budget in the 62 year history of the Fellowship, which for the first time will include a full time minister. This budget is 86% larger than last year’s budget and it is balanced. This budget increase is possible because pledges are almost double what they were last year.

The numbers tell the dramatic story, but what’s important is what this means for Unitarian Universalism in Denton.

It means our congregation is growing. Sunday attendance used to be in the 50-60 range, now it’s more like 90-100, with some Sundays going over 120. This means more people are participating in free religion, more people are learning their religious options are wider than Baptist or Catholic, more people can come to church and sit next to a Buddhist or a Humanist or a Pagan or a Christian and learn from them as well as learning from the minister.

It means a Youth Religious Education program that used to have 6 or 8 kids per week now is pushing 30. That means more kids growing up learning to respect all religions. These kids will be able to explore their religious paths at ages 6 and 8 and 10 and not have to wait till they get to college. These kids will never have to worry they might burn in hell forever because they might not be “saved.” These kids will learn they’re OK whether they’re gay or straight or somewhere in between.

It means all the programs we’ve started in the past year can continue to grow and continue to offer the inclusive, welcoming message of Unitarian Universalism for those who need to hear it.

It means that our members have increased their commitment to the Fellowship and to Unitarian Universalism. A lot of people have moved from being casual givers to being committed givers. And a small but significant number have moved from being committed givers to being sacrificial givers.

When I was elected Congregational President in 2005 I thought we’d see this within a year or two. It didn’t work out that way. We had a “transitional” minister who was a poor fit with the congregation and all our energy was focused on him and not on our mission. There were times I thought about leaving, thought it wasn’t worth the trouble. I stayed, in part because of my spiritual practice with CUUPS, but mainly because I thought the goal was worth the work. There was a lot we had to go through as a congregation, a lot we had to learn, before we could become what we are today.

I hesitate to name names because I know I’ll overlook some people who should be thanked, but I’m going to do it anyway.

To the Presidents who held things together in tough times and led us to where we are now: Dennis Wood, Cindy Breeding, Dolores Nabors, Mark Davis, and our current President, Jim Progar – thank you!

To Linda Tucker, Jake Jacobson, Cindy Jacobson, and all the volunteers who have made our Youth RE program a wonderful, educational, spiritual experience for the kids (and a magnet for their parents) – thank you!

To Genevieve Scott (whose generous bequest paid for much of our building renovations), Barney Cosimo (who did most of the work) and everyone who contributed their time and treasure toward enlarging our sanctuary and making our building more welcoming – thank you!

To Mark Davis, Mary Curtis, Bob Snyder, Theresa Page, Herb Newton, Abby Bonard, Kati Trice and all the other folks who have raised funds and managed our money – thank you!

To Gerry Veeder, Barb Rodman, Judy Smith, Kelly Taylor, Linda Brown, Dolores Nabors, Bruce Jarstfer, Cathy Sassen, Jackie Gibbons and all the others who served with me on our Worship Committee and who have kept our pulpit filled with meaningful worship services, whether by our minister, a guest minister, an outside speaker or a lay leader – thank you!

And finally, to our soon-to-be-full-time minister Rev. Pam Wat, who is an inspiring presence in our pulpit, a voice for inclusiveness and a beacon for justice in our community, and a calming presence in our lives – thank you! It is popular in some circles to claim that ministers don’t matter. If anyone at DUUF still thought that when you got here, they don’t any more.

A budget is a plan and a commitment. We still have to follow through and do the things we voted to do today. But we couldn’t have gotten to this point without a lot of good work by a lot of people. And it stands to reason that work and the commitment behind it will continue and we will be the religious community we all want to be.

Good things are happening at Denton UU. I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

How Doctors Die

2011-12-10T14:57:00.000-06:00

Nothing I have written in the 3½ years I’ve been keeping this blog is as important to you personally as this article by Ken Murray, a medical doctor and an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC. It’s titled “How Doctors Die.” Here’s one paragraph, then go read the whole thing.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Most of us don’t like to think about death – particularly our own deaths. But they are coming. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but we will all die. We know that, but we don’t like to think about it.

Beyond that, most of us have an unrealistic view of modern medicine and what it can do for us. Yes, many diseases that were almost always fatal even a hundred years ago can now be cured. Yes, you can survive a heart attack. My father survived three – but not the fourth. Yes, some forms of cancer can be controlled.

But some diseases and conditions simply can’t be cured. And the older and sicker you are, the less chance you have of recovery. In these cases, “treatment” – which is usually painful and extremely expensive – doesn’t mean you’ll get well. It means you’ll live a few weeks or a few months longer, in (or at least, in and out) of a hospital, in discomfort.

Do you really want to do that? Do you really want to subject someone you love to what Dr. Murray says is “misery we would not inflict on a terrorist”?

Think about this NOW. Fill out an advance directive. Discuss it with the people who will make decisions for you if you’re incapacitated. I did this in 2005. There are copies in my fire safe and a friend who I trust to do the right thing has another copy.

Now, here’s the even harder part. Think about what you would do if you’re called to make a medical decision for a parent, spouse, or, gods forbid, child. Because if you are suddenly thrown into a situation where such a decision is necessary, the odds are pretty good you aren’t going to be thinking clearly. If you haven’t been over this – and discussed it with those involved – you’re much more likely to tell the doctors “do whatever it takes” whether that will do any good or not.

Live life to its fullest. Let modern medicine help you live it well. But when your time comes – or your parent’s or spouse’s or anyone elses – let go.

Live a good life, then die a good death.

Yule Circle!

2011-12-08T19:00:00.000-06:00

If you’re in the North Texas area come out and join Denton CUUPS for our Yule Celebration next Saturday, December 17 at 7:00 PM. We’ll celebrate the Solstice and the rebirth of the Sun.

We’ll be in our usual location, the Denton Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 1111 Cordell Street, Denton, Texas 76201.

Click the image for a larger version of the flyer. Feel free to contact me with any questions.

See you there!

Messy Religion

2011-12-05T22:26:00.000-06:00

Fellow No Unsacred Place columnist Juniper has a new essay titled “This Gift, This Sacrifice” about the offerings she made during a recent Hecate’s Night ritual. I’ve written about sacrifice a few times recently and don’t have anything more to add to that. What grabs me about Juniper’s essay is the messiness of her rituals and her sacrifices.

As a UU I’m heir to a tradition of reason and learning. As a Druid I’m heir to a tradition of culture. My faith is a reasoned faith. I may be a Pagan, but I’m a civilized Pagan... as are most of the Pagans I know.

That’s a good thing. We need civilization. We need the Intellect and the Will to guide our lives and to balance the evolutionary instincts which served our pre-human ancestors well but which are not helpful to our lives here and now. But if we listen only to reason, if our religion touches our heads and not our bodies then we’re missing something – something important.

When was the last time you got your hands dirty doing religious work? I don’t mean metaphorically – I mean literally, grease-under-the-fingernails dirty? When was the last time a religious service got you hot and sweaty? When was the last time a religious observance got you cold and wet? If you can’t remember then it’s been too long.

I don’t mean that our religious practices should be unpleasant (though sometimes they may be). There is sensual pleasure in running your fingers through moist soil, standing under the Midsummer Sun, or walking through the snow. “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals” means all acts, including but not limited to sexual acts.

We grew out of the Earth. We are part of the Earth. The Earth is not neat and clean and comfortable and safe. The Earth has teeth. If our religion – our beliefs and our practices – doesn’t acknowledge and honor those physical connections then our religion is incomplete. If our religion isn’t one of touch and taste and smell as well as one of sight and sound then our religion is incomplete. If our religion speaks to our God-soul and our Human-soul but not to our Animal-soul then our religion is incomplete.

We are the heirs of the drummers and dancers. We are the heirs of the Lupercalia. We are the heirs of the Great Rite. Our religion may be cultured and reasoned, but at least occasionally, it should also be messy.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go outside and get my hands dirty.

Climate Change: Talk, Action and Myths

2011-12-03T13:14:00.001-06:00

Crossposted with No Unsacred Place. Check it out and read some of the other writers too!

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is meeting this week and next week in Durban, South Africa. The theme is “Working Together – Saving Tomorrow Today.” That theme is far more optimistic than most observers of the conference.

The purpose of the conference is to begin negotiating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in 1997 and expires in 2012. Here’s a link to a 2007 article by the CBC that does a better job of explaining Kyoto than I can – if you’re not familiar with it, go read the CBC article and then come back. In short, the Kyoto Protocol was intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% from their 1990 level and thereby avoid significant worldwide climate changes later this century.

Kyoto was on shaky political ground from the beginning. It exempted developing countries – most notably China and India – on the grounds that they couldn’t afford pollution control measures and because they had contributed very little to the current situation. The United States refused to ratify it on grounds that it would put our economy at a disadvantage to our global competitors. Canada agreed but has done virtually nothing and is now talking about pulling out. Only Europe has taken any real action and they’re refusing to go further unless everyone else does.

Are we going to do nothing of consequence? It certainly looks that way… but it doesn’t have to be.

How We Accept or Reject Science

According to various sources, somewhere between 40% and 60% of the people in the United States reject the theory of evolution, despite the fact that the evidence for it is overwhelming. There are two main reasons why.

First, it doesn’t match our subjective experience. We see dogs giving birth to dogs and tomato seeds producing tomatoes. We see the results of selective breeding, but in our predilection for simplistic classifications, we look at a Great Dane and a Pekingese and in both cases we see “dog.” What we’re missing is “deep time” – the fact that the Earth isn’t 6,000 years old but 4.3 billion years old.

Secondly, evolution doesn’t match the myths – the orienting stories we live by – of most of the people in this country. The mythology of the dominant Abrahamic religions speak of God creating the world as it is now. Our pagan creation myths don’t speak of evolution either, though some of them do hint at deep time. Our ancient ancestors – whether they were Celtic or Yoruba or Hebrew – simply had no way of knowing what we’ve learned in the past two centuries. That’s one of the reasons we need a new mythology that reflects our understanding of the Universe.

We intuitively accept data and theories that are in alignment with our subjective experience and with our myths. We intuitively reject data and theories that contradict them. Some of us will reject them outright, but even those of us who will examine contrary arguments will look at them more skeptically than we would if they confirmed our experience and myths.

The Uncertainty of Science

Lower the temperature of a beaker of water and the water will freeze at 32°F. Apply heat to the beaker and the water will boil at 212°F. You can stick a thermometer in the beaker and watch it happen every time.

These simple experiments help us understand the cause and effect relationships that are at the heart of science and the scientific method. But they are not proof. They are evidence that support a theory – a set of propositions about the way Nature works. For simple experiments the difference between evidence and proof is so miniscule as to be irrelevant.

The more complex the phenomena the harder it is to establish the cause and effect relationships and to separate correlation (X happens with Y) from causation (X happens because of Y).

In the case of climate change we have many variables: atmospheric composition, surface temperatures, ocean temperatures, ocean salinity, rainfall patterns, severe storm patterns, solar activity, human activity and many more. Analyzing the data and predicting future climate patterns is extremely complex. It is not intuitive, and it is not certain. The data supports the theory, but it does not prove the theory.

This is simply how science works. For decades the evidence has supported the theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Now we’re seeing experiments indicating that some particles do in fact travel faster than light. It’s still very early – perhaps the experiments will be shown to be in error. But if not, then the theory will be modified. This is science: hypotheses, experiments, analysis, theories, more experiments, and the refinement of theories. If you want certainty study mathematics.

The Climate Change Problem

The theory behind climate change is relatively simple: burning fossil fuels has increased the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. More greenhouse gasses mean more of the Sun’s energy is retained in the Earth’s surface and atmosphere. More retained solar energy means the planet gets warmer. A warmer planet means icecaps melt, seas rise, low-lying land is flooded, temperatures and rainfall patterns become more irregular.

Understanding weather – day to day observations – is hard enough. Understanding climate – long term patterns – is far more difficult. Like our ancestors who saw dogs giving birth to dogs and couldn’t imagine they were the product of millions of years of evolution, we see that it’s hot in the Summer and cold in the Winter, that some years are warmer and other years are cooler. The idea that the climate might be changing goes against our subjective observations.

Is the Earth’s climate changing, beyond normal variation? The data and the theory – the set of propositions about the way Nature works – says it’s almost certain. Is human activity causing this change, or at least, making it worse? It’s extremely likely.

Will this change cause the calamitous events predicted by some? That’s less certain, but it seems likely.

Will the burden of these events be borne primarily by the poor and by non-human species? They always are.

Uncertainty Is No Excuse For Inaction

We can’t say for certain if Micronesia will be flooded, much less Florida. We can’t say for certain if rain patterns will shift and turn the U.S. farm belt into a wasteland.

But we can say this: pumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year isn’t a good thing. Burning fossil fuels that took hundreds of millions of years to form at a rate that will deplete them in a couple hundred years (and maybe a lot sooner) isn’t a good thing.

And we can say that the mindless pursuit of more more more doesn’t make us happier or healthier.

Uncertainty around the severity of climate change is no excuse to do nothing.

Our Evolutionary Instincts – Live For Today

Unfortunately, we have several million years of evolutionary instincts telling us to eat all we can and reproduce as much as we can because tomorrow we may die. We’re like the rabbits in elementary school presentations on ecology: when most of our natural predators are removed, we consume more and more until we exceed the carrying capacity of our environment – at which point starvation ensues.

We have more intelligence than rabbits –we can see where our actions are likely to take us. But frequently, we don’t – Easter Island stands as a clear example.

Even if we could prove that climate change is real, with severe consequences, and avoidable, most of us would still choose to continue living the way we’ve always lived. Our instincts tell us to live for today.

To Change People’s Decisions, Change Their Myths

If you accept the science around climate change, if you understand that uncertainty is no excuse for inaction, and if you understand that actions to mitigate climate change will be beneficial in and of themselves, then you understand that people – especially us here in the “first world” – need to change the way they live.

There are two ways to change people’s actions. One is by force of law. Although leaders are supposed to lead, in a democracy (more or less) leaders who lead in a direction where a majority of people don’t want to go will be quickly replaced. Further, unpopular laws tend to be ignored – see our own laws on recreational drugs.

The other way to change people’s actions is to change their myths.

If our myths tell us the Earth is sacred, we are much more likely to live in ways that respect and sustain her. If our myths tell us all people are our brothers and sisters we are more likely to live in ways that do not harm them. If our myths tell us all living things came from a common ancestor we are more likely to live in ways that do not drive other species into extinction.

If our myths tell us we should strive to have “enough” instead of “more” we are likely to live in ways that have less impact on the Earth, its climate, and its creatures.

I’m glad the nations of the world are talking about climate change and I’m glad they’re proposing real actions to deal with it. I support those plans. But I have little confidence they will be implemented on a significant scale.

Our leaders will not solve this problem. Therefore it falls to us to solve the problem of climate change.

Can I tell you a story about our Mother the Earth?

Happy Birthday Mama

2011-12-01T19:22:00.000-06:00

Pearl West, circa 1930

Today would have been my grandmother’s 104th birthday. Pearl Hale West was born on this day in 1907 in Crossville, Tennessee.

She was the only grandparent I really got to know. My father’s father died before I was born and his mother died when I was seven. My mother’s father died when I was nine. Shortly after that, Mama (which is what we all called her – my mother was and is “Mother”) came to live with us. She lived in a mobile home behind our house until she died in 1990 – long enough to see me graduate from high school and college, get married, and build a house a couple stones throws from her.

She was everything a grandmother is supposed to be: warm, loving, generous, patient and kind.

She was a good Christian and she joined the Baptist church where my parents went, although she didn’t care for the bombastic preaching and often reminisced about her Methodist church “where they worship God and don’t whoop and holler.” In her later years she would occasionally turn her hearing aid off when the preaching got too loud or when the sermon didn’t strike her as suitably reverent.

Mama did most of the cooking for us. She liked cooking, it made her feel like she was contributing to the family, and she was good at it. She was a good ol’ Southern cook who fried everything – her food may not have been particularly healthy but it was good. I can still remember her fried okra, cornbread, and peach cobbler. Her Thanksgiving dressing was the best I’ve ever had. Everyone else said she put too much sage in it – I don’t think there’s such a thing as too much sage!

She was healthy and energetic at age 80 but then developed cancer. Her last two years were difficult and painful for her and for the rest of the family. She died at home on October 20, 1990. She was “ready to go home” and we were glad her suffering ended.

I sometimes wonder what she would have thought of my spiritual journey and where it’s taken me in the years since she left this world. I don’t think she would have understood. Unitarian Universalism – much less my more esoteric and mystical practices – is too different from her Methodism, and she wasn’t one for questioning authority or challenging traditions.

But I am sure – as sure as I am about anything – that she would have loved me just the same.

Happy Birthday, Mama.

The Season of Contemplation

2011-11-28T19:02:00.000-06:00

The season between Samhain and Yule is traditionally one of contemplation and of rest. Crops have been harvested and preserved, hay is in the barn, herds have been culled and moved to Winter pastures. The hard work of farm life is mostly done for the year and the worst of Winter is still several weeks away. We quietly look forward to the rebirth of the Light at the Solstice.

Or at least that’s what happened in a pre-industrial, pre-consumerist agrarian society.

Over the past few days I’ve read or heard several prominent Pagans calling for quiet contemplation in the season leading up to Yule. They’re not wrong. But the last six weeks of the year is anything but restful and contemplative in contemporary American society.

The days before and after Thanksgiving are the busiest travel days of the year, as many of us go over the river and through the wood to celebrate with family. The feast has to be cooked and the groceries have to be bought and somebody has to wash all those dishes. Even if you don’t participate in the absurdity of excess that is Black Friday, most of us still have people we have to buy presents for.

Then in December there are special religious services, semester exams, office parties, football bowls and basketball tournaments, more travel to family, more feasts, more shopping, cooking and cleaning. There’s take-stuff-back day (aka December 26), mid-winter vacation, New Year’s Eve parties and more football to cram in before starting the long, cold grind that is January and February.

How much of this can you avoid even if you try? How do you experience the dark when the whole world is strung with lights? How much quiet contemplation can you do with carols and jingle bells in the background?

I’m all for reclaiming the Winter holidays and for refusing to participate in the insanity of commercial Christmas. There is great value in participating in a Solstice ritual that celebrates the restfulness of the Dark and the rebirth of the Light. And since long before I became Pagan I have set aside several hours on or around New Year’s Day to review the past year in detail and set goals for the coming year.

But is this really the best time for a season of reflection, contemplation, and silence? How much swimming upstream are you ready to do?

In our contemporary Western world, Imbolc is the season best suited to quiet contemplation. The busyness of Christmas and New Year’s is past. The party is over and it’s time to go back to work, back to school, back to the gym. We’ve celebrated and done what we wanted to do, now it’s time to go back to doing what we have to do. The weather is bad and even in Texas we’ll be spending most of our time indoors. January and February are to us what November and December were to our agrarian ancestors.

So enjoy the Winter holidays, Pagan and Christian and secular. Enjoy them in moderation and in reason – participate in what’s meaningful or just plain fun for you and don’t be afraid to say “no” to the things that aren’t (I haven’t attended an office Christmas party in 10 years). Take some time at the Solstice to honor the dying Sun and to celebrate the reborn Sun.

But plan on a time of extended contemplation and introspection from Back to Work Day (that’s January 3 for me) until the celebration of Imbolc (January 28 for Denton CUUPS). Your dates and your duration may be different, but most of us will have a least a few suitable days early in the new calendar year.

We don’t live in an agrarian society any more. Let’s set our spiritual calendars to our lives as we live them here and now.

A Special Christmas

2011-11-25T08:42:00.000-06:00

I am not so old and cynical I can’t remember the joy that Christmas – a traditional American Christmas – can bring to a child. Nor am I so naïve I can’t recognize that my disdain for its materialistic aspects comes from a position of privilege. I remember being six or eight or ten years old and enjoying putting up the tree, shaking presents, shopping for gifts for the rest of the family… Those were wonderful times and I would not deny them to anyone of any age.

The problem is one of proportion and of desensitization. I remember my grandmother (who was born in 1907) telling me about getting an orange for Christmas and being happy with it. She was not an old grouch who enjoyed misery, nor was she some kind of transcendent saint – she was telling the truth. Her family were poor farmers and that was all they could afford. A hundred years ago, bringing oranges from Florida to Tennessee by train and then to market by horse-drawn wagon was costly – oranges were luxuries.

When I was a child fifty years or so later, oranges were no longer luxuries. They were commonplace even in our semi-rural working class home, and orange juice was always in our refrigerator. The bar had been raised.

Holidays are meaningful because they are special. There are special decorations, music, food, clothing, gatherings, and activities – things you don’t see and do and eat every day. They are a time outside of time, when normal rules (which are necessary for day to day order) don’t apply. Giving gifts is part of what has always made Christmas special – we don’t do it every day.

Today, all but the poorest Americans live in what would have been luxury a hundred years ago. When you have every thing you need and virtually every thing you want, how can another thing be special? The attempt to keep it special leads to present-counts among children (“I got nine and you got eight – I win!”) and an arms race of extravagant one-upsmanship among adults.

Certainly we appreciate the thoughts behind the gifts… though we know from first-hand experience the thought behind many gifts was “just grab something at Wal-Mart so I can check him off my list.” Can anyone truly understand The Gift of the Magi anymore?

The Winter Solstice is perhaps humanity’s oldest and most universal holiday. It represents the rebirth of the Light and the promise of Spring and it is the birthday of countless gods and heroes. It is a special time and we should observe it in ways that are special to us.

Several years ago, Cathy and I stopped buying Christmas presents for each other. Instead, we take a trip around the holidays – this year we’re going to spend a few days on the Texas Gulf Coast. Though it is not rare, travel is still special for us. We buy presents for our mothers and a few others who wouldn’t understand if we didn’t. If we stress over anything, it’s over the many religious gatherings we attend: Winter SolstiCelebration, Yule, her choir’s Christmas music program, Christmas Eve services at my church or hers or her mother’s. It makes for a busy season, but it works for us.

What would make Christmas / Hanukkah / Yule work better for you?

And what about the children? I have no children and I’m hesitant to advise others as to how to raise theirs. But I still remember being a child. Surely there is a way to make the holidays special for them without feeding the materialistic beast that Christmas in America has become. Perhaps that starts by setting a good example???

The annual Halloween to New Year’s orgy of excess will not be defeated by pious exhortations to remember “the reason for the season” – or that “the season is the reason.” Our children – and the children who still live in each of us – will never permit it. Rather, it will be defeated as one by one we decline to play by the old rules and instead find what makes the holiday – the holy day – special for us.

I hope each of you has a happy and special Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule or whichever of the many incarnations of the Winter Solstice you celebrate.

Gratitude Is Not Enough

2011-11-24T09:38:00.000-06:00

If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “thank you,” that would suffice – Meister Eckhart

With apologies to Meister Eckhart, whose life was exemplary and whose quote I have used on many occasions, gratitude is not enough.

Don’t misunderstand – gratitude is important. The practice of gratitude reminds us to focus our attention on what’s right in our lives rather than on what’s wrong. What we dwell on we manifest, so it behooves us to dwell on the good in our lives.

Gratitude keeps us humble. When we give thanks we acknowledge that much of what we enjoy did not come solely by our own efforts. We are where we are because of the family that gave us a start, the ancestors who gave us a foundation, and the community that gave us a structure in which to live and work. We are where we are because of the grace of the gods. Things could be very different and for many people they are.

Gratitude reminds us that since we receive much from others we have an obligation to give. Sometimes this means paying back and sometimes it means paying forward. In doing so, we build a virtuous circle of giving and gratitude, each of us doing a kindness that isn’t in our immediate self-interest but over the long term provides us all with far more benefits than we could ever generate on our own.

Gratitude is important and necessary and helpful. A big part of my daily spiritual practice is giving thanks. But gratitude by itself is not enough.

Gratitude in isolation can lead us to believe that because we have a good life we don’t need to make any changes. It’s good to have enough and to have the wisdom to recognize it. But that’s not an end in and of itself. Having enough, doing what you have to do, frees you to do what you’re called to do and to do it the best you can. What is your art? What is your ministry? What is your service? What is your priesthood? What Great Work is making you uncomfortable by its absence or incompletion?

How much of that is enough? All you are called to do – no more and no less. Gratitude must be balanced by a commitment to excellence.

Gratitude in isolation can focus too much of our attention on ourselves and we can forget that not everyone has it so good. Our thankfulness that we have enough is no substitute for making sure everyone has enough. We accomplish this through giving and teaching, but also through working to change systems that oppress and exploit the poor and the vulnerable. Gratitude must be balanced by a commitment to justice.

It is good we have a holiday – a holy day – dedicated to gratitude. Give thanks to your gods and goddesses, to your ancestors, to your family and to your community. Give thanks for all you enjoy, and remember that things could be very different.

But then recommit yourself to excellence in your calling and to building a just world here and now.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Solstice Gifts

2011-11-21T19:04:00.000-06:00

Cara Schulz, the excellent reporter for the Minnesota bureau of the Pagan Newswire Collective, asked me for three suggestions for Nature-inspired or eco-friendly Solstice gifts for a feature they’re running later this week. I’m not sure I’m the best person to contribute to this article – while I try to live responsibly and sustainably, I don’t obsess over green. I have nothing unique or exotic to offer. But it didn’t take long for me to think of three gifts that would be welcomed by most any lover of the Earth, Pagan or otherwise.

Dark Green Religion by Bron Taylor. What, you’re shocked I’m recommending a book? This is a study of the relatively new religious trend toward viewing the Earth as sacred and acting accordingly. It describes the roots of the movement in such figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Muir, how the belief that the Earth is sacred is manifesting itself in our wider culture, and what we’re likely to see in the near future. It’s suitable for theists and non-theists alike. My full review is here, and it’s available as an e-book as well as in hard copy.

A good camera. Not necessarily an expensive camera – just one with enough flexibility to shoot at a variety of distances and light levels. Nature photography is a virtuous circle: you enjoy experiencing Nature so you want to remember it with a picture; then you enjoy the picture so you want to go back out into the natural world and experience it again.

A visit to a beautiful place. Several years ago my wife and I decided to stop buying holiday presents for each other and go some place instead. Some years we spend more than if we bought presents and other years (like this year) we spend a lot less, but it’s made my Solstice and her Christmas a lot less stressful and a lot more fun. This doesn’t have to be a week’s vacation – a picnic in a park, a hike in the mountains, or a trip to a museum can work just as well. Giving doesn’t have to mean giving things – giving experiences can be just as rewarding.

Remember – you don’t have to participate in Black Friday to have a Happy Solstice!

Know Your Limitations

2011-11-18T18:13:00.000-06:00

James Arthur Ray, the New Age guru who orchestrated high-dollar “spiritual warrior” retreats, was sentenced to two years in prison for the criminally negligent homicide of three people who died in one of his sweat lodges. Liz Neuman, Kirby Brown and James Shore died from a combination of dehydration and other heat-related complications.

Ray had consulted with Native American sweat lodge practitioners but then modified the standard lodge to make his even hotter.

This should stand as a warning to those of us who consider ourselves spiritual leaders or who are considered spiritual leaders by others. When I wrote after Ray’s conviction in June I talked about the need to know the limitations of those who put their trust in us. But we also need to know our own limitations.

When we take people on journeys are we sure we know how to get them back? When we read Tarot or practice other forms of divination are we sure we know how to deliver the messages we’re given? Can we recognize the difference between spiritual difficulties and mental illness? Do we know when someone’s situation is beyond our skill to deal with? Do we have the courage to say “you need to see a professional”?

It makes us feel good to help our friends and others who come to us. But we do them no favors when we dispense advice and teaching beyond our expertise.

James Arthur Ray is going to prison and will likely be bankrupted by the civil suits that will be filed. Liz Neuman, Kirby Brown and James Shore are dead. All because one arrogant man didn’t know – or didn’t want to acknowledge – his limitations.

May we never forget.

Hoofprints in the Wildwood

2011-11-16T19:15:00.000-06:00

Cernunnos. Herne. Bucca. Gwynn Ap Nudd. Pan. Maybe these are different names for the same god. Maybe they’re different gods who do similar things in different places. Maybe they’re both. In any case, the Horned God is a very old, very primal deity. He is a god of instincts, not a god of the intellect. He is the Lord of the Animals, the Hunter and the Hunted, the Lord of Death and the Lord of Life.

And he is calling followers here and now. They are men and women; gay, straight, and bisexual; from America and Europe and Australia.

Hoofprints in the Wildwood, edited by Richard Derks, is a collection of devotions made by those followers. It’s a small book: 188 pages featuring 55 offerings by 30 contributors. The offerings include poetry, essays, rituals, personal narratives and artwork. It’s available as an ebook for $5.99 or as a printed book for $14.50 through Lulu’s print on demand service.

As you might expect from such a wide assortment of contributors, the entries are a mixed bag. Some are excellent, most are good and a few left me scratching my head. But even the most derivative of the offerings have something important – passion.

I’ve come across some of these writers on the internet, but as far as I know none of them are “professional Pagans.” These aren’t people who make their living studying religion or even teaching religion. They’re people who do religion. Reading their work makes me want to do religion too.

My favorite entry is “My God” by Juniper. It’s the very intimate story of how she came to be called by Cernunnos and the impact he’s had on her life. Her experience with Cernunnos is very different from mine, but I can easily see the same deity working in both cases, personalizing his approach to two rather different people. Juniper has a longer piece on the history of the Horned God on No Unsacred Place – it’s the first of a multipart series and is very much worth your time to read.

Hoofprints in the Wildwood is what its subtitle says it is: “A Devotional for The Horned Lord.” Although you could read it in one sitting, it’s best read in a devotional setting: read 10-15 minutes, meditate on what you’ve read, then make your own offerings. Maybe you read one of the poems out loud. Maybe you perform one of the rituals. Maybe you sing or dance. Maybe you simply close your eyes or gaze into the trees and speak what’s on your heart.

But be warned – the Horned God is not someone to approach with trivialities. Your ego and your comfort aren’t too high on the priority list of a god who is both Hunter and Hunted. He has more urgent, more important matters to deal with. He is not cruel, though he can be harsh. Several of the writers’ experiences match my own – the Horned God can be loving and patient and nurturing. But he wants what he wants and he needs what he needs – passionately.

If you are a priest, priestess, devotee or follower of any of the Horned Gods, or if you just want to see what Pagan religious devotion looks like, I recommend Hoofprints in the Wildwood.

Meeting the Spirits of the Land

2011-11-15T05:05:00.001-06:00

crossposted with No Unsacred Place

If you grew up watching Looney Toons (and if you didn’t you had a very deprived childhood!) you saw many stories about the collision of Nature and the modern world. Water abruptly stops flowing when a huge dam is constructed overnight. Chipmunks (or was it gophers?) get scooped up by a harvesting machine and have to escape from an automated cannery. And in 1954’s “No Parking Hare” a construction worker tries to evict a certain wabbit so a superhighway can be built on top of his home.

The formula is simple: peaceful forest creatures are assaulted by “progress,” the creatures fight back and outsmart the humans, we laugh at the cartoon violence, and in the end some kind of accommodation is reached. The superhighway is built, but it goes around the rabbit hole. Whether that arrangement was sustainable for the rabbit wasn’t discussed… like a lot of assumptions, both then and now.

Many of us like to speak of the “spirits of Nature.” Sometimes that’s an expression of animism, the belief that all things have a spirit similar to our own spirits. Other times it’s a reference to creatures who are closer to the land than us but who are still individual beings. Some of us have had experiences with these creatures that give credence to our beliefs – at least for ourselves.

What happened to those creatures, those spirits of Nature, when we built our cities and suburbs on top of their homes?

I don’t know. It’s reasonable to assume that some couldn’t deal with the loss of their homes and died. Some moved – either to more remote regions or back to the Otherworld. But as anyone who has seen a tree growing through a sidewalk can tell you, some are still here.

Who’s still living in your back yard? Who’s living in the park down the street? Who’s living in the tree in your office parking lot?

For a long time I avoided approaching the Nature spirits who live near me. Aside from general skepticism (I am an engineer, after all) I was concerned about how I’d be received. Just because you’re a Nature-loving, tree-hugging, Goddess-worshipping Pagan doesn’t mean Nature spirits are going to see you as anything other than another greedy land-despoiling human. Stereotyping sucks, especially when you’re on the receiving end.

But when you’re around someone for a long time, you get to know them. And when you live in one place for a while, the Nature spirits get to know you. Over time, either your actions line up with your words or they don’t.

When my daily prayers began to include acknowledgement of the Nature spirits, something changed. I went from feeling like I was being watched with suspicion to feeling like I was being watched with curiosity. I wasn’t just addressing “Nature” any more – I was speaking directly to the spirits who live near me. Eventually, they spoke back.

They’ve been here a long time and they don’t want to leave. Right now their biggest concern isn’t people, it’s the drought – all living creatures need water. Mainly they wanted to be left alone.

It was a short, polite conversation. No pronouncements of wisdom, no offers of treasure or teaching, no dire warnings or threats. Just neighbors, thrown together by the winds of life and change, being neighborly.

If you’re thinking this was all in my head, well, maybe you’re right. I like what J.K. Rowling wrote in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in the chapter “King’s Cross”:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

There is value in honoring the spirits of the land, no matter who they are or how you see them.

The Road to Real Reform

2011-11-12T21:29:00.000-06:00

I’ve always felt negative criticism needed to be balanced with positive suggestions. Don’t just complain about what’s wrong – explain how to make it better. All institutions and systems are human institutions and systems, meaning they’re far from perfect. Sometimes, even though a particular arrangement is flawed it’s still the best that’s possible under the circumstances.

In comparison with all the current and historical systems of finance, economics and politics the current American system is pretty good. But it’s far from the best that’s possible. People are suffering and the trends are headed in the wrong direction. Changes need to be made.

But changes need to be well-considered with an eye toward results, not toward someone’s political doctrine. A solution has to offer specific measures to achieve specific results. Any effective solution will strike a balance between egalitarianism and individualism – it will allow people to pursue their own self-interests while insuring everyone has enough.

Systems Changes – What Occupy Wall Street Should Demand

A financial transactions tax. As I discussed on Thursday, our financial markets are too fixated on short term increases in stock prices and not on long-term profits and profitability. Computerized trading means that a brokerage can buy and then sell a stock within minutes or even seconds. This does nothing to help efficiently allocate capital, it simply adds to volatility. A transactions tax on every purchase and sale of stocks, bonds and commodities would provide a disincentive to speculate.

I don’t know what the rate should be – high enough to cut down on churn but not high enough to be a disincentive to sell a stock you felt was going to lose value. Whatever the rate, it should be higher on commodities and extremely high on oil. You can’t repeal the law of supply and demand, but if the demand doesn’t include speculation prices will be lower and more stable.

With less short term trading and speculation stock prices would be more stable. This would encourage the executives of publically traded companies to manage less for short term income and more for long term profitability.

Campaign finance reform. I’m not talking about partial measures. I’m talking about radically restricting the amount of money available for political campaigns. No institutional contributions. No soft money (money given to political parties and interest groups). Extreme limits on the use of personal funds.

The problem isn’t that the rich “buy” candidates. The problem is that there’s so much money in the process that every politician employs huge staffs of professional campaigners that don’t go away after the election is over. Nobody wants to govern any more – every decision is about scoring points to win the next election.

Without the money to pay professional campaigners politicians would have to rely on input from a handful of staffers and from their constituents. Without the funds to pay professional pollsters politicians would have to vote based on what they thought was right – which is what’s supposed to happen in a representative democracy.

Would it be perfect? No. Would money still get into the system? Yes. Would the rich still have more influence than the rest of us? Yes. But the system would be much cleaner without the full time professional campaigners.

Those two items would do more to reduce inequality and the abuse of power than anything else that can be done politically. There’s more I’d like to see: increased transparency in the financial industry, the restoration of a highly progressive tax code, universal health insurance, the elimination of the cap on social security taxes, and massive investments in infrastructure repairs and expansions. But no movement could achieve all that at once. A financial transactions tax and campaign finance reform would offer the most impact.

Personal Changes – What We Should Do

If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.

If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.

If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.

If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.

If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.

– Lao Tzu

The theme running through all this week’s posts is that we are where we are because a lot of people made decisions they thought were in their own best interests, but failed to consider that those decisions had impacts on other people and that they had unfavorable long term consequences. This is what people will do over and over again unless constrained by intense social pressure or by the force of law.

There is another way – changing human hearts and minds.

Most all of our moral and social conflicts are due to millions of years of evolutionary instincts telling us to do things that are no longer helpful in the modern world. But we don’t have to wait for mutations and adaptations to change us, we can change ourselves.

This requires mindfulness – considering what we do before we do it. It requires understanding that once we have enough, more doesn’t bring more happiness. It requires learning that the person speaking a different language or worshipping a different god is our relative just as much as the person next door.

We can learn and grow. We can mature – we can break out of the cycle of “mine!” and “not fair!”

Lao Tzu taught this. Buddha taught it. Jesus taught it. Muhammad taught it. So have prophets and sages and philosophers around the world for the last 2500 years. Each put his own mark on it, each adapted it for his own time and place, each wrapped it in his own sacred stories.

Those sacred stories are still valid. If you’re a follower of one of the “major” religions, find a denomination or a congregation that teaches compassion and unity and help build a thriving community.

Maybe you don’t like the old stories. Maybe you prefer the story that says there’s nothing beyond this world so we’d better take care of it and live the best we can while we’re here. That can be a good story too.

Or maybe, like me, you prefer the really old (or is it really new?) story that says the Earth is sacred and that we have a obligation to both past and future generations to take care of her and to take care of each other.

Whatever version of the great story of mindfulness and compassion you prefer, learn it and live it.

It isn’t easy – millions of years of instincts don’t fade away overnight. The “us vs. them” and “survival of the fittest” stories are very prevalent – and very popular – in our mainstream society. It takes commitment and practice.

But really, what choice do we have? What we’re doing now isn’t working. I don’t know about you, but I’m hurting enough to try something different.

If there is to be peace in the world, there must be peace in the heart.

Why Occupy Wall Street Will Fail

2011-11-11T18:32:00.000-06:00

A year or two or five from now it will be difficult to declare OWS either a success or a failure. Its goals are wide, vague and implied rather than clearly expressed. With no clear targets its enemies can proclaim its failure and its supporters can proclaim its success and neither will be able to prove the other wrong. For the purposes of this analysis I’m going to assume success for OWS would mean significant, lasting changes in our financial, economic and political systems which reduce income inequality and political inequality. That’s still pretty high-level, but it’s something to work with.

OWS will not be a total failure – it will have some successes. You can argue the presence of OWS is responsible for the big banks’ decision to cancel debt card fees. If it lasts through next year’s Presidential elections it will shape some of the debate. But I don’t see it having a significant, lasting impact.

Before we look at what we can do to successfully address the problems OWS is protesting we need to look at why their approach isn’t going to work.

Protests Haven’t Worked Since the 1960s

The results of the Arab Spring demonstrations were amazing. Long-seated dictators were removed by massive social-media -facilitated protests. While building an honest government is far more difficult than toppling a corrupt one, this was still a significant achievement. If protests can change regimes in the Middle East why can’t they reform regimes in the United States?

The last demonstrations that were effective in this country were the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s. But they only managed to change laws – although we’ve come far, 50 years later racism is still very much alive. Protests couldn’t end the Vietnam War, protests couldn’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment, protests haven’t eliminated nuclear weapons, ended the death penalty, or brought either the immigration reform wanted by the left or the mass deportations wanted by the right.

Protests work by growing and marshalling numbers to apply pressure. Gandhi basically shamed the British into granting independence to India. King did the same thing here in the Civil Rights movement. The Arab Spring worked by the implied threat of violence – which in the case of Libya turned into actual violence.

Those in power in this country have learned that the best way to counter protests is to ignore them and to focus attention on their less-attractive elements. The early Occupy Wall Street protests got very little coverage from the mainstream media and what was there was usually offset by comments about “privileged rich kids too lazy to work.” In most places the authorities have taken a very low-key approach so as not to generate sympathy for the Occupiers – Oakland being a notable exception.

No matter how valid their complaints, the status of the OWS protestors simply isn’t dire enough to generate sympathy or shame, and no one thinks there’s the slightest chance that real violence will erupt. Protests and demonstrations have generated publicity, but they aren’t going to create real change.

Fuzzy Targets Yield Fuzzy Results

There’s a word for how demonstrations and protests are supposed to work – magic. For the benefit of those who are new to this blog that doesn’t mean imaginary hocus pocus. It means the classical definition of magic: a change in consciousness in accordance with the will. Magic is particularly helpful in political situations because politics is all about consciousness – how people think and feel about issues and candidates.

People have been practicing magic – though many call it something else – for a very long time. It’s fairly well-known what works and what doesn’t. And one of the most basic, most powerful principles of magic is that the more specific and finite you make your goal the better your chances of success. Or conversely, as the late Isaac Bonewits liked to remind us “fuzzy targets yield fuzzy results.”

Gandhi wanted independence for India. King wanted equal rights for all. The Egyptian protestors wanted Mubarak gone.

Occupy Wall Street wants what? Better regulation of the financial industry? Campaign finance reform? Loan modification and forgiveness? A financial transactions tax? The end of capitalism as we know it? Ask ten Occupiers and you’ll get twelve goals. All the energy generated by and around OWS is being dissipated in a thousand different directions. Unless OWS can agree on a few specific goals they aren’t likely to achieve significant results.

Old Habits Die Hard

We humans are creatures of habit. We do things the way we’ve always done them without thinking about them. We get comfortable with the way things have always been.

Change is unknown. Change is scary. Change might make things worse. Mainly, though, change requires conscious effort – that’s the “will” part of the definition of magic.

Most people will not change unless they’re suffering enough or (occasionally) curious enough or (very rarely) bored enough to risk the unknown and make a change. Mainly they have to be hurting. And as bad as things are right now, most people aren’t hurting badly enough take what they perceive as a big risk.

Unemployment may be 9%, but that means 91% are working. 49 million Americans have no health insurance, but 263 million do. If you’ve got a job and you’re paying your mortgage or rent and you’re not behind on your bills you may not see the need for drastic change. We have a strong evolutionary instinct to take care of our own needs right now and not worry about people we don’t know or a future we can’t see.

Occupy Wall Street simply isn’t generating enough momentum to uproot a critical mass of the general public from a system that works, even though it only works sort of, for some, for now.

In the final blog post on Occupy Wall Street I’ll discuss what we can and should do both collectively and individually to address the problems raised by OWS.

What Went Wrong

2011-11-10T18:12:00.000-06:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement has done a good job of listing what’s wrong with our economic, financial, and political systems. They’ve been criticized for a lack of “demands” – for failing to propose solutions. I’ve heard some say that’s not their job, that it’s the job of our elected officials to change the rules and structures. If, as those on both the left and right contend, our government is beholden to “special interests” it is foolish to expect them to fix the problems on their own. Any change they propose will favor their benefactors every bit as much as the current system.

But before we propose solutions it will be helpful to look beyond the symptoms of growing inequality and persistent unemployment / underemployment and try to get at some of the underlying issues. The better job you can do of defining the problem the better job you can do at crafting a solution.

Remember what we talked about yesterday – people have evolutionary instincts to preserve and promote themselves. All but the most mindful of us will make choices based on what’s best for us now. Some of us will consider what’s in our long term interests. Very few of us will consider the impact on others – particularly if those others are people we don’t know.

The cumulative impact of those seemingly minor, seemingly logical decisions can be larger than we imagine.

There are many reasons why we are where we are – I want to look at two of them.

Wall Street – From Efficient Allocator of Capital to Casino

The financial markets have a legitimate, necessary and valuable mission – to efficiently and effectively match investors with entrepreneurs. Businesses – from the smallest sole proprietorships to the largest multinational corporations – need capital. They need to buy facilities, tools and equipment and they need working capital – cash to finance purchases of materials and supplies.

Investors – from the guy flipping burgers who saves a few dollars each week to heiresses with billions – need a way to put their money to use. An efficient financial market matches businesses with investors. That helps businesses owners grow their businesses and it helps investors grow their savings. Providing loans and lines of credit and selling stocks and bonds is a valuable service for which financial institutions can honestly charge fees to both buyer and seller.

That’s what they teach you in high school economics and that’s the original mission of the financial industry. But as buying and selling financial instruments got easier and easier, more and more people stopped investing and started speculating. They weren’t buying stocks for the dividends, they were buying stocks hoping that the price would go up and they’d sell them at a profit. With the advent of computerized trading, the “hold period” got shorter and shorter. This has led to what I was complaining about on Monday – executives who make decisions based solely on what will make the price of the stock go up.

It gets worse when you get into more complicated financial instruments like the mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps we’ve heard so much about since the housing market crashed in 2008. Too much of the financial industry has moved from investment (loaning money to someone in anticipation they’ll make profits in which you can share) to speculation (buying something with the intention of selling it as soon as it rises in value). But when you pay brokers and fund managers huge bonuses based on this quarter’s results or even this year’s results, they aren’t motivated to concentrate on long-term investments – they’re motivated to do whatever it takes to make the numbers go up now.

The laissez faire fundamentalists say these are big boys who know what they’re doing and if you can’t stand the risk you should stick to buying CDs. That might be OK if it was only their own money they were wagering. But when the market crashes we all suffer. Beyond that, we’ve seen the bailouts of institutions deemed “too big to fail.” In a perfectly free market they would have failed and those involved would have suffered the consequences – but the consequences for everyone would have been too high. The federal money either has been or will be paid back, but the risky behavior wasn’t punished and is likely to be repeated.

When money is invested and used to produce products and services the profits represent a real increase in wealth. When money is used for speculation the profits represent an increase in paper value only. Paper increases, as the housing market has shown us, can disappear in an instant.

The World Economy – Jobs Moved Because We Demanded It

Why is Wal-Mart the largest retailer in the world? Because you can get it there cheap. We see “low prices” and we make the perfectly rational decision to pay less at Wal-Mart instead of paying more somewhere else.

But that decision has repercussions: not just to the independent retailer who can’t compete with Wal-Mart’s economies of scale but also to the Wal-Mart buyer who has to keep finding cheaper and cheaper sources. I remember when Wal-Mart put “Made in USA” stickers on everything they could. They stopped doing that because their customers – that’s us – would pass up the Made in USA products for the Made in Korea and Made in China products that were a few dollars less. That affected me personally – the factory where I worked closed because we couldn’t get our costs low enough to beat the Koreans’ prices.

The emergence of Asian countries as the world’s factory is nothing short of phenomenal. In total this is a good thing – it’s raised their standard of living tremendously. It’s kept prices low in this country. But it’s transferred millions jobs out of this country – not just the low-skilled and semi-skilled assembly jobs, but also the high-skilled jobs (tool and die makers, electricians, machinists) and the white collar jobs (plant managers, parts buyers, manufacturing engineers) that support them.

The world economy has made most of us slightly wealthier – you can buy more stuff from Malaysia than you can buy from Michigan. But if you’re one of those Michigan factory workers who’s out of a job the world economy has made you a lot poorer.

This is one of the most important causes of wealth inequality in our country. “Low cost country” sourcing is Robin Hood in reverse. It takes a lot from a few people in the middle class and spreads it around to everyone else.

All because everyone involved made the seemingly rational decision to buy from the cheapest source.

Individual Reflections

We aren’t in this mess because of some grand conspiracy. Truly criminal behavior (i.e. – Bernie Madoff) is notable because of its rarity. We’re here because a lot of people at a lot of levels over a long period of time made decisions they thought were in their best interests but turned out to have disastrous consequences for us all. Like I discussed on Tuesday, in the absence of intense social pressure or the force of law, people will grab as much as they can for themselves whenever they can.

If you’re old enough to read this you’re old enough to have experienced this for yourself. Maybe not on this scale, but you’ve done it – you’ve made a decision that seemed right at the time but that turned out very badly. Maybe you only hurt yourself. Maybe you hurt someone close to you. Maybe you hurt someone you didn’t know and couldn’t see.

Give this some thought – we’ll come back to it in the final OWS post this weekend.

But next I want to look at some of the reasons Occupy Wall Street is going to fail.

Individualism vs. Collectivism – A False Choice

2011-11-08T20:03:00.000-06:00

We are born selfish. Among the first words a child learns are “no!” and “mine!” Our evolutionary instincts for self-preservation and self-advancement are very old and very strong. That’s not a bad thing. If we didn’t have those instincts (or more precisely, if our ancestors hadn’t had them) our species wouldn’t have survived and we wouldn’t be here at all.

The thing is, nobody likes being on the other end of those 3-year-old rants. So we teach our children to share, to be generous, to learn that giving can be as rewarding as getting. We teach them reciprocity – that if we share with others they will share with us.

But how much should we share? What should we share? Who should we share with and under what conditions? These are basic but incredibly difficult questions humans have been trying to answer since before we were human. They are at the core of all our social, economic and religious traditions.

Hunter-gatherer societies are (or were – there aren’t many left) collective and egalitarian. These societies have narrowly defined roles based on gender and age, but there is no inequality of wealth among the members of the tribe – resources are shared equally. Primitive societies have little material wealth to begin with – if one or two people hoard even a small amount the survival of the tribe may be jeopardized. And if that hoarding is discovered, the cohesion of the tribe will be jeopardized. Another of those very ancient 3-year-old-isms is “not fair!” – which usually means “somebody else got something I didn’t get.” Social pressures to share and to conform are immense.

The problem with this – as any free market conservative will be happy to tell you – is that enforced egalitarianism stifles creativity and productivity, and it’s creativity and productivity that have moved us out of caves and into iPhones.

Remove the social pressure to share equally and the selfish instinct motivates people to work harder and to try new ways of doing things so they can get more for themselves – you get industriousness and innovation. You also get inequality – some have more, others have less. As long as there’s enough for everyone that’s only a minor problem (there would be no OWS if the economy was booming like it was in the Clinton years). But let it go on for very long and inequality turns into hierarchy and hierarchy produces chiefs, warlords, kings and CEOs. The strong rule and take the best, the weak serve and take what’s left. On an evolutionary scale this is a step backward to the alpha male dominated societies of chimps and gorillas.

Ethical religions and the rule of law arose in response to the excesses and abuses of these hierarchies. Their civilizing and humanizing forces have been only partially successful.

The excesses of large corporations and the financial industry are nothing new. This is what happens when selfish instincts are left unchecked by intense social pressure or by the force of law. People see a way to make big money for themselves, the culture celebrates taking risks, and if other people get hurt in the process so be it. The alpha males (and a few females) get the money and power and everyone else cleans up the mess.

I’m sure some of those early warlords were great guys who did amazing things for their tribes. But whatever good they did didn’t warrant the development of feudalism and the divine right of kings. Likewise, there are some people in every industry who make tons of money and earn every penny. But that doesn’t justify a system where a few profit at the expense of the many.

This is not a call for collectivism. Remember the hunter-gatherer societies – pure egalitarianism brings conformity and stagnation. Individualism vs. collectivism is a false choice promoted by those who want to keep the status quo and by those who think the status quo is unfair to the warlords of Wall Street.

This is a call for an adult economic system, a grown up financial industry and a mature government. It does us no good for one side to scream “mine!” while the other side screams “not fair!”

In the next post I’ll talk more specifically about the structural and systemic issues that got us into this mess.

Tired of Being Grateful for Leftovers

2011-11-07T17:24:00.000-06:00

I haven’t said much about the Occupy Wall Street movement so far. I’m in general sympathy with them but I have doubts as to their ultimate effectiveness, so I’ve been reluctant say anything that would either 1) discourage people who are taking risks to confront real problems, or 2) create false hopes that change will be anything other than difficult, imperfect, and slow. But now I think it’s time to say something.

I’m going to start with my own personal situation: I’m tired of being grateful for leftovers.

I have a pretty good life. I’m not rich and I’ll never be rich, but I have enough. Part of that is due to my own efforts but much of it isn’t. My family gave me a good start. I’ve worked hard and I haven’t made many costly mistakes. I live in a place and time with many opportunities and I’ve done my best to take advantage of them. I recognize that things could be very different. That makes me reluctant to complain when the breaks don’t go my way – I know I still have it better than most.

But I’m tired of being thankful I didn’t get laid off today.

I work for a large corporation that will remain nameless. As corporations go it’s not bad – we always fulfill the letter of the law if not always its spirit. We make good products and sell them at competitive prices. My job is stressful at times but usually manageable and it pays for all the things I need to do and want to do. Things could be much worse. But...

Earlier this year the corporation implemented a 6% across the board pay cut (executive cuts were larger). That’s not pleasant but it isn’t going to kill me – I don’t live that tightly. My first thought was “I’m thankful I still have a job, even at 6% less.” What bothers me is why this pay cut was done.

Pay cuts are a legitimate and necessary tool for companies that are losing money and companies that need to conserve cash. The company I work for has been hit by the recession, but we’ve remained profitable the whole time. The money saved by cutting everyone’s pay isn’t going to pay other expenses, to pay down debt, or even to maintain dividends to shareholders. The money is going to repurchase company stock. Stock repurchases have one goal – to make the short-term price of the stock go up.

From a macroeconomic standpoint this is a horrible decision. It has taken money out of employees’ pockets – where it can be spent, which stimulates the economy – and stuck it in the company treasury, where it sits, doing nothing.

I find it hard to be grateful I still have a job when I’ve taken a pay cut for no better reason than to support the stock price.

Last week a significant number of people were laid off. I’ve worked in the corporate world for 27 years – I know very well that the workforce has to be “right-sized” for the level of business. If we sell less, we need fewer people making the products, fewer people selling them, and fewer people moving them. If revenues are down, that’s less money available to invest in new products and systems. But there’s a difference in right-sizing the business and making random cuts to hit an arbitrary target. With few exceptions, the people who were laid off were doing work that needed to be done – letting them go hampers the long-term business plans of the company, to say nothing of the impact on them as people.

I find it hard to be grateful I still have a job when others have been laid off for no better reason than to make this quarter’s income statement look a little better to the Wall Street analysts.

We’re in the annual enrollment period for health insurance. I’m used to the realities of health insurance – costs are going up and no one wants to make the structural changes necessary to control them. Last year my premiums actually went down a bit – but my deductible went up 9x. This year the premiums stayed the same, but the deductible went up 50%. What this means is that beyond a limited amount of “preventive care” I pay for everything out of my pocket – I’ll never reach the deductible in a normal year. The good news is that if I get cancer or have a heart attack I won’t lose my house. I’ll just lose all my savings. Our health care payment system needs to be overhauled but all this does is shift cost and risk from the company to the employees.

I find it hard to be grateful I still have health insurance when costs and risks keep getting shifted to me to improve the company’s bottom line.

I’ve always been a big believer in accepting reality – in seeing how things really are whether you like it or not. But these changes didn’t have to happen. Some people have lost their livelihood, others have had their incomes cut and expenses and risks increased, all to make the price of the company stock go up this year. And the macroeconomic effect (small but real) is to reduce overall economic activity, meaning this contributes to extending the recession.

All these changes were command decisions – the CEO decided and they were implemented. My choices were to accept them or find some place else to work. I don’t expect democracy in the workplace but I do expect the needs of all the stakeholders to be considered and I expect the long term success of the company to be put ahead of short term desires for a higher stock price.

I’ve got a pretty good life. I’ve worked hard, I’ve made careful decisions, and I’ve been lucky. I’ve built on the structures that those who came before me put in place. I’m thankful for all that. I’m uncomfortable complaining about “first world problems” when so many have so little.

But when I hear the Occupy Wall Street movement ranting against “greed” I know exactly what they’re talking about.

And they’re right.

Tomorrow: Individualism vs. Collectivism

Druid Reading Recommendations

2011-11-05T13:25:00.000-05:00

I’m frequently asked for reading recommendations. Usually this comes from people who are new to Paganism, so I put together a Pagan Reading List to get people started. Recently I had a couple requests for recommended reading on the subject of Druidry. These people had read and practiced enough basic material to know – or at least suspect – Druidry is their path and they were looking for something deeper.

Here are my recommendations for an introduction to Druidry.

Introduction and Practice of Druidry

Druid Mysteries – Philip Carr-Gomm. This book by the Chosen Chief of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids is a good place to start. It’s short (186 pages) and easy to read. It provides a brief introduction to the historical Druids, the revival Druids, and contemporary Druids. It includes some exercises to help you begin a Druid spiritual practice. And it includes a recommended reading list far longer than this one. If you read Druid Mysteries and do the work it recommends you’ll be in good shape to figure out where you need to go next.

The Druidry Handbook – John Michael Greer. Archdruid John Michael Greer wrote this as a textbook for the Ancient Order of Druids in America. It follows the same general outline as Druid Mysteries – historical Druids, revival Druids, contemporary Druids – but it covers them in considerably more detail. It includes a section on the Ogham (the Druid tree alphabet), rituals for each of the eight major Pagan holidays, and the First Degree curriculum of the AODA. It really is intended to be a textbook – read it in short sections, do the work recommended, review the section, learn it well, then move on to the next section.

Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism – Isaac Bonewits. Isaac Bonewits, who died last year at the too-young age of 60, was one of the most important figures in Druidry and Paganism of the past thirty years or so. He founded Ár nDraíocht Féin (A Druid Fellowship) in 1983, and like ADF, this book takes a slightly different approach than most others. While it also covers historical and revival Druids, its contemporary section takes a reconstructive approach – it attempts to break with Western Mystery Tradition influences and return as closely as possible to the beliefs and practices of the ancient Celts. This book includes a very extensive recommended reading list, and just as helpful, a short list of books that are not recommended (because they contain material that is clearly inaccurate and/or fabricated but presented as ancient).

In Philip Carr-Gomm, John Michael Greer and Isaac Bonewits you have the three most influential Druids of our era and the leaders of three of the largest Druid organizations in the world. They have all written other books and the ones I’ve read have been good – these three are the best place to start if you’re interested in learning more about Druidry. Where they agree, you can be certain the information is correct. Where they disagree (in fact, or more frequently, in emphasis) you can see the points of contention, check their sources, look for other opinions, and draw your own conclusions. And, as Isaac recommends, “when in doubt, consult your nearest tree.”

The Historical Druids

The important thing to remember about the historical Druid is that we know very little about them, and much of what we do know comes from questionable sources. That hasn’t stopped professional historians – much less writers of fiction – from making guesses about who they were and what they did. Some of those guesses are more likely than others.

A Brief History of the Druids – Peter Berresford Ellis. This was one of the first books I read on the ancient Druids, and it remains on of the best. Ellis covers the general structure of the Celtic world in which the Druids lived and worked, the historical sources we have for them, and what we know or can reasonably guess about their beliefs, teachings, rituals and work in their societies. Some of this involves speculation, but it’s reasonable speculation supported by evidence and logic. If you want a good guess at what the ancient Druids were really like, this is your best bet.

The Druids – Ronald Hutton. This is another fairly short (240 pages, including 22 pages of source materials) easy to read book. Its premise is that while we can know very little about the ancient Druids with certainty, we can know how the Druids have been imagined over the last 500 years or so. They have been seen as patriots standing against the Roman invaders. They have been seen as priests of a bloodthirsty human-sacrificing religion – and thus convenient proxies in the Protestant-Catholic conflicts. They have been seen as peaceful elders with great knowledge of the natural world. Druids are portrayed in many different ways in the media and popular culture – this book explains how and why.

Blood and Mistletoe: the History of the Druids in Britain – Ronald Hutton. Unlike the book discussed above, Blood and Mistletoe is long (491 pages, including 69 pages of notes and indices) and dense. Hutton is a professional historian and this book is intended to be a serious work of academic history. If you want the facts unglossed by speculation, this is the book for you. Fair warning – there were many times when I found myself mentally screaming “I know we don’t know but what do you think happened?!” The bulk of the book concerns the Druid Revival that began in the 1700s and continues to this day. I did a full review of it here. If you’re serious about following a Druidic path you should read this book at some point, but I don’t recommend it to beginners.

Other Resources

DruidCast – Damh the Bard. DruidCast is the official podcast of OBOD. It’s a once-a-month, hour-long look at Druidry as it’s actually practiced. It features music, interviews with notable Bards, Ovates and Druids, interviews with ordinary Druid practitioners, and news and commentary on important issues. It’s hosted by Damh the Bard, whose music is some of the best contemporary Pagan folk music around. It’s available for streaming or download; you can also subscribe to it on iTunes.

Druid Orders. Druidry isn’t something you believe, it’s something you do, something you practice. And it’s easier to practice as part of a group. Unfortunately, there’s not a Druid grove on every corner, or even in every major city – that’s why my primary practice is with Denton CUUPS. All three of the orders mentioned in the first section (OBOD, AODA, ADF) operate distance learning programs. I’m a Druid in OBOD and I highly recommend the OBOD program. Check them all out, look into some of the other orders I didn’t list, talk to some people who are in them, and see which one is best for you. Even if you’re part of a local group, the formal training programs are very helpful.

The Purpose of Religion

2011-11-02T19:28:00.000-05:00

What is the primary purpose of your religion? Religion in general has many purposes, most of them dealing with forming and maintaining relationships: with God or Goddess, with gods and goddesses, with our ancestors, with the spirits of Nature, with our families and communities.

But right or wrong, religion in the contemporary Western world is generally thought of as an individual thing. Bring up religion to the guy in the next cubicle and he’s likely to ask “what do you believe?” Explain that religion is more about doing than believing and he’ll ask “what do you do?”

Why do you believe what you believe and why do you do what you do? What is the purpose of your religion? I see three kinds of religion, each with a very different purpose. But before I get to that, I’d like to share two stories.

The first is this essay from the Huffington Post titled “Can Evangelicals Ever Tolerate Gay Marriage?” What grabbed me was the observation that “Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson gained great fame not by demanding that Christians live their lives differently, but by sanctifying the lives they were already inclined to live.” The writer says that Evangelical arguments against marriage equality simply proof-text the Bible to justify inherent homophobia, and when homophobia wanes in Evangelical circles as it has in mainstream circles, the objection to gay people marrying will fade away.

The second thing I’d like to share is a personal confession: I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh. In the Bush Sr. – Clinton years I’d go out to lunch and listen to Limbaugh’s opening monologue on the way back. My politics are mostly center-left – some of his points made good sense and he was always entertaining. I stopped listening to him around the 2004 election. Common sense conservatism gave way to far right dogma and well-intended satire gave way to mean-spirited mockery. I bring this up because on several occasions Limbaugh said “I’m successful because I say what other people think to themselves but are afraid to say out loud.” Conservative talk radio has been successful because it validates the opinions and prejudices of its listeners.

With those stories in mind, let’s look at three kinds of religion with three very different purposes.

Bad religion says you’re OK but other people are screwing things up and screwing you over. Muslims blame the Jews, Christians blame the Muslims, UUs blame the fundamentalists, fundamentalists blame the gays, the poor blame the rich, the rich blame the liberals and on and on and on. Bad religion says the world would be grand if other people would change, if they’d just be more like you.

There’s a time and a place for prophetic preaching, for raising awareness, for calling evil what it is and demanding it repent or be overthrown. But if the primary emphasis of your religion is on other people and how they need to change, you’re practicing bad religion.

Lukewarm religion (see Revelation 3:16) says you’re OK just as you are. The Mother Goddess watches over all her children, God loves you and wants you to be happy (and rich), the Buddha will teach you to transcend all your problems. Never mind all the suffering and injustice in the world – isn’t our church a great place? Isn’t our coven doing some great spells? Here – have some more opium.

There’s a time and a place to comfort the grieving, for gratitude, for celebration. But if the primary emphasis of your religion is on making you feel good about yourself, you’re practicing lukewarm religion.

Dangerous religion challenges you to examine your beliefs and then live up to them. It challenges you to commit to regular spiritual practice which will reinforce those beliefs until they become second nature. It challenges you to learn and grow, not so you can show everyone how smart you are but so you can serve others and the common good.

Dangerous religion is dangerous because it will force you to look at your whole self, including those parts you like to keep hidden away. It’s dangerous because it will tell you to do things that aren’t comfortable, and may be scary. But if you want to change the world, you have to start by changing yourself.

Bad religion. Lukewarm religion. Dangerous religion. Where’s the good religion?

Where ever you have the courage to look, to study, to practice, and to live out what you find.

Samhain Soundtrack

2011-10-30T14:45:00.000-05:00

I had a couple questions about the music we played at last night’s Denton CUUPS Samhain Circle. Here’s what I could find on YouTube.

Prelude: Dead Can Dance – The Host of Seraphim

This was intended to be a focusing piece – music to get everyone to stop their conversations, forget about everything outside the circle, forget about what had gone on earlier in the day and think about nothing but where we were and what we were doing. I don’t usually get anxious about circles any more, but I was very anxious about this one. In the six minutes it took to listen to this song that all changed for me.

Approaching the Labyrinth: Dead Can Dance – Sanvean

Walking the Labyrinth: Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares (The Bulgarian Female Vocal Choir) – Kalimankou Denkou (The Evening Gathering)

Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares (The Bulgarian Female Vocal Choir) – Messetschinko lio Greilivko (Love Song From the Mountains)

Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares (The Bulgarian Female Vocal Choir) – Polegnala e Pschenitza (Harvest Song From Thrace)

Returning From the Labyrinth: Faun – Lupercalia

Dead Can Dance – The Lotus Eaters

Simple Feast: S.J. Tucker – Come to the Labyrinth

I picked this video because it’s a live performance. Tricky Pixie is S.J. Tucker’s group project – that’s S.J. singing and playing guitar.

Damh the Bard – Morrighan

What Dies and What Does Not

2011-10-27T19:58:00.000-05:00

At Samhain we honor and commune with our ancestors who are not dead but who have moved on to another form of living. This isn’t only a Pagan concept – the Quaker William Penn spoke of this in Fruits of Solitude. You may recognize the second half – J.K. Rowling borrowed it for the introduction to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

They that love beyond the World, cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill, what never dies.
Nor can Spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle; the Root and Record of their Friendship.
If Absence be not death, neither is theirs.
Death is but Crossing the World, as Friends do the Seas; They live in one another still.
For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is Omnipresent.
In this Divine Glass, they see Face to Face; and their Converse is Free, as well as Pure.
This is the Comfort of Friends, that though they may be said to Die, yet their Friendship and Society are, in the best Sense, ever present, because Immortal.

Though our loved ones do not die, Death is a very real presence at this time of year. The final harvest of Samhain is a reminder to let go of what is dead.

What is dead in your life? What once nourished your Great Work but now weights you down? What served its purpose well but like the last cornstalk in the field now stands withered and dry?

Let it go. Return it to the elements from whence it came.

Let air become air.
Let fire become fire.
Let water become water.
Let earth become earth.
And let the spirits of the things
which have long since left us
find new purpose and new meaning
in their next lives.

Have a blessed Samhain!

Giving From Weakness

2011-10-25T21:34:00.000-05:00

Rev. Meg Barnhouse of First UU Austin has a piece up on UU World.org on the value of accepting help from others. She tells the story of being six cents short at the cash register and having it made up by a stranger who from appearances was much less well off than she. The (presumably) poor stranger’s charity bothered her – when she got to her car she dug out six cents and gave it to the man.

Would I have accepted an offer of help carrying something heavy to my car? Yes. He looked rich in physical strength, more than I was. I would have gladly accepted help from his wealth, but not from an area in which I assumed he was poorer than I. Allowing someone to help me out of their weaker place is too hard.

Rev. Barnhouse uses the story to examine her own stubbornness and illusions of self-sufficiency, and to encourage herself to be more humble and gracious in accepting help from others. I think there’s value in that lesson.

I want to look at this story from the other side. What can we learn from someone who gives from their weaker place? What can we learn from someone who gives from poverty? I see two important lessons.

When giving from strength we feel good. We like using our strength and we like doing good things. But the process of giving from weakness is the same as the process of giving from strength: we see a need, we have the resources to meet the need, therefore we should give. The difference is that when we give from weakness we fear that either our help won’t be good enough, or that we’ll give away something we’ll want later on, or both. But if the need comes from family – however you define “family” – we do it anyway. The family obligation to give and the desire to help those close to us are strong enough to overcome our fears.

When we give from weakness we affirm a family relationship with those to whom we give.

When we give from strength we give our surplus – the things we don’t really need. That’s a good thing. I mean, we could spend it on yet another toy and tell ourselves the money will trickle down to those who need it. And the surplus of the very wealthy can be significant – I could give away every last thing I have and it wouldn’t make a fraction of the impact Bill Gates does giving away what he’ll never miss.

When we give from weakness we give something we’ll miss – we make a sacrifice. The word “sacrifice” literally means “to make sacred” – by offering a sacrifice we transform something from ordinary to sacred. When we sacrifice we affirm the reality of life: there are hard, unpleasant, dangerous things that have to be done and someone has to do them. Sometimes that someone is us.

When we give from weakness we affirm there are things bigger and more important than ourselves.

As with everything, giving from weakness has its limits. Don’t be the old lady who can’t pay her electric bill because she gave all her money to a televangelist – make sure what you’re sacrificing for really is bigger than yourself. And don’t neglect your true needs – our world needs heroes, not martyrs.

It is good to allow others to help you – good for you and good for them. It is good to help others from your strength.

It is also good to help others from your weakness.

Onion Work

2011-10-23T20:05:00.000-05:00

Ruby Sara has shut down Pagan Godspell and started a new blog she calls Onion Work, subtitled “layers and tears.” The first few entries on the new blog sound a lot like the old blog: deep, conversational, and mystical. But the emphasis in Ruby’s life has changed and she felt like making a clean start with a new blog.

Her most recent post (Ruby’s blog posts are, in her own words, long and infrequent) uses a visit to a Christian church and participation in their spiritual formation class as a jumping off point for a discussion of gods and God. I’m not about to try to summarize it – go read it for yourself. Just make sure you give it the attention it merits – it isn’t something you can appreciate by scanning through it.

My own experience is similar to Ruby’s. I consider myself a polytheist because I’ve experienced individual gods and goddesses – and one god in particular I’ve experienced very intimately. Yet I have also had classic mystical experiences: a brief but overwhelming feeling of Unity, that All is One. To call those experiences “feelings” does not do them justice – they were very close to certainty… and my threshold for certainty is extremely high.

When I speak of Unity, I do not mean the “soft polytheism” argument that all gods and goddesses are merely aspects of one God/dess. The one God/dess of soft polytheism isn’t all that different from the God of monotheism – s/he is a distinct being with whom we can communicate. I will occasionally use that language (“the God” and “the Goddess”) in conversations with monotheists – it is useful for emphasizing that the Divine is female as well as male. But my prayers and meditations are done with and for individual deities – I practice “hard polytheism.”

When I speak of Unity, I mean The All. Everyone and everything. You and me, plants and animals, mountains and rivers, stars and planets, ancestors and nature spirits, goddesses and gods. We are all One. We are all related in ancestry and connected in life.

And if we are connected in life, it stands to reason we will remain connected in death.

I don’t know what that looks like. I can’t explain it. It is, for me, anyway, the example of an ineffable mystery – something you can’t speak about because words can’t describe it.

I like Ruby’s metaphor of an onion. Reality has many layers. Reality isn’t just the layer of the material world. Its bounds aren’t limited to the layer immediately above and immediately below us.

Reality is the whole onion.

Practical Magic and Popular Culture

2011-10-20T19:50:00.000-05:00

AODA Archdruid John Michael Greer has a new blog post titled “A Lesson in Practical Magic.” Like most of his Archdruid Reports, this entry follows the theme of Peak Oil. But this one deals primarily with Joséphin Péladan, a French writer and occultist of the late 19th century. Péladan is an interesting character – go read John Michael’s description of him.

My interest deals primarily with one of Péladan’s principles for becoming an effective magic worker. Greer translates it (from French to English and from 1892 to 2011) by saying “the first of those principles is to limit and control the channels by which the mainstream media and their wholly owned subsidiary, public opinion, get access to your nervous system.”

Like a fish in water, the mainstream culture surrounds us and envelops us to the point we forget it is there. We forget we live in a consumerist society: the point of all this culture is to sell us something, or more precisely, to get us to buy what they’re selling.

It is easy to forget we live in an incredibly wealthy society. Yes, there is real poverty in this country and yes, the distribution of wealth is inequitable and getting worse for reasons that are largely unacceptable, but the fact remains that most of us spend a fraction of our income on basic necessities. We have large amounts of disposable income and many people and organizations want to get a piece of it. They try to convince us we need their clothes, cars, food, entertainment and gadgets.

These things aren’t bad in and of themselves. But when we swim in the ocean of popular culture, it’s easy to get distracted – to spend far more time and energy worrying about them than they’re worth. Dressing well takes a little time and a little money. Dressing stylishly takes more time and more money. Keeping up with the latest fashions – much less dressing in them – can be a full time job and cost more than all but the very rich can afford. But this is what popular culture tells us we must do.

So, how do we keep popular culture from embedding itself in our nervous system? You can’t simply drive it out. If you do, something else – most likely a different aspect of the very same mainstream culture – will fill its space. You have to replace it.

This is yet another reason why daily spiritual practice is so important – it crowds out harmful habits and replaces them with exercises that promote spiritual growth. In particular, devotional reading is extremely helpful. Not only do you occupy your time with something meaningful, reading stimulates thinking and contemplation, which leads to more learning and more spiritual depth.

Another very helpful activity is participation in a religious community. At regular intervals, you gather with other people like yourself: people who are doing their best to follow a spiritual path while swimming in the mainstream ocean. Our religious services – whether Pagan circles or UU services or something else – are regular reminders of our higher values and goals.

But the most important thing you can do is simply to be aware of who you are and where you live. When you stop and think instead of mindlessly reacting to the latest “big thing” on TV or the internet, it’s easy to figure out when you need something, when you want something, and when someone is trying to sell you something.

Sacramental Eating

2011-10-17T19:48:00.000-05:00

Crossposted with No Unsacred Place

We are born alive – and hungry.

For a short time we are sustained by our mother’s milk. It is given freely and lovingly (in most cases, anyway), but that gift is possible only because our mothers consume other life.

Eventually the maternal intermediary is removed and we begin a life-long process of consuming things that were alive only a short time before we eat them. This is what every animal on the Earth does. Some eat plants, some eat other animals, some eat both. Life feeds on life.

All life is sacred. All of Nature is sacred. But sacred or not, life feeds on life.

What is your relationship with food? What is your relationship with the living things that die so you can continue to live? Is it a conscious relationship? Is it an honest relationship? Is it in line with your values?

I see three general relationships people have with food.

A Mindless Relationship

The most common relationship people have with food is a mindless one. We see food and we eat it. If we like it we eat more. We give little thought to where it came from and even less to what it was before it was food.

This is not entirely a moral failure. Food is and has been scarce for most creatures most of the time for most of the existence of life on Earth. We have evolved with instincts that tell us to eat as much as we can when food is available because it may be a long time before we can eat again.

As with any mindless action, mindless eating has negative repercussions. Survival instincts developed to deal with scarcity are creating health problems in a society where food is abundant. An emphasis on “cheap” and “fast” has led to factory farming and factory food production with all the nutritional and sustainability problems they present. Fruits and vegetables are genetically modified and chemically treated because most of us will mindlessly buy big, pretty, uniform produce with no consideration for nutrition or even for taste.

Can we become mindful about what we eat, where it comes from, and what it was before it was food?

A Hierarchical Relationship

We’re all familiar with the food chain: little animals eat plants, big animals eat little animals, fast and strong animals eat big animals. Humans are at the top… except when we’re not, such as when we swim in the ocean or hike in grizzly bear country.

In a hierarchical relationship, we do consider what something was before it was food, but we draw a clear line at some point in the hierarchy. Things below the line are just food – we eat them because we can. Things above the line are seen differently – they’re too close to us, so we don’t feel right about eating them.

Some of us draw the line at animals: plants are food, animals aren’t. Others draw the line at mammals: fish and chicken are food, cows and pigs aren’t. Our language reflects our uneasiness about eating our closer relatives: we don’t eat “cow” and “pig” – we eat “beef” and “pork.” Even the carnivores among us look down on people who eat horses and dogs and monkeys… or at the least, we employ considerable intellectual gymnastics to rationalize the practice in terms of cultural sensitivity.

Can we examine our food hierarchies? Can we see that even things below our “this is food and that is a relative” line are (or were) alive? Can we remember John Barleycorn Must Die?

A Sacramental Relationship

Examining what we eat can be difficult. It can be more work to find out where our food comes from. It can be more expensive to buy food that is produced ethically and sustainably. And it can be troubling to consider that what is keeping us alive – and what is providing us with the pleasure of eating – was itself alive only a short time ago.

Feelings of guilt are not helpful. We have to eat – as does every other animal in the world. Guilt just encourages us to not think about it – to engage in mindless eating. Our eating will not be ethical if it is not mindful.

Every living thing we eat is a sacrifice. Is that sacrifice given freely? I know there are traditions among some indigenous peoples that their shamans will speak with the spirit of an animal and ask for a sacrifice to sustain the tribe. An animal will then be taken in the hunt. Far be it from me to tell a shaman what he did or didn’t do on his journey. Perhaps animals are more sympathetic to people who live close to the land. But the survival instinct is strong in every animal – including humans.

Whether it is given freely or not, every living thing we eat is a sacrifice. Its life is given – or taken – to sustain us.

Can we acknowledge that sacrifice? Can we give thanks, not just to the Earth Mother but also to the plants and animals that keep us alive? Can we honor their sacrifice by supporting ethical agriculture that insures the continuity of the species that die to feed us?

Wendell Berry, whose poetry inspired the title of the No Unsacred Place blog, said this:

We cannot live harmlessly or strictly at our own expense; we depend upon other creatures and survive by their death. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of creation. The point is, when we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament; when we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.

May all our eating be sacramental eating.

Your Sovereignty

2011-10-14T11:40:00.001-05:00

Sometimes dreams are psychological sorting and filing and sometimes they’re messages. And sometimes they’re messages for other people.

A friend told me about a dream she had that featured a raven. Ravens are associated with Morrigan, primarily from her role as battle goddess and psychopomp. But Morrigan is also a goddess of sovereignty.

Calvinists claim that God’s sovereignty is absolute – since he made everything and everyone, he owns it all, and he has the right to do whatever he wishes with it, including casting millions of his creatures into eternal torment. That’s one of the many reasons I could never be a Calvinist.

The Pagan concept of sovereignty flows not from ownership but from being. Everyone and every thing have inherent value and inherent rights in and of themselves.

Our secular laws are a mixture of the two concepts. They recognize that owners may in general do what they wish with their property. But our laws also recognize that living beings have at least some rights of their own. There is much legal leeway with what you can do with, say, dogs and cats – but it is not legal to starve or torture them. Parents have much discretion in how they treat their children, but it is not legal to abuse them or to fail to provide education and medical care.

Further, our laws are evolving away from the Calvinist view of sovereignty and toward the Pagan view. Less than 150 years ago, in parts of this country it was legal to own another human and to do what you wished with him or her. 50 years ago Michael Vick would have never seen the inside of a jail. But earlier this year Bolivia passed a new law proclaiming The Rights of Mother Earth.

Living things are never simply the property of another living thing. Not pets, not children, not Nature. They all have inherent rights. They all have sovereignty over their lives, sovereignty we must respect.

And so do you.

Sovereignty is the right to rule. We give our sovereignty – in part if not in whole – to parents and teachers, to partners and spouses, to employers and to governments. That’s not always a bad thing – children don’t have the experience and judgment to make many major decisions. The rule of law promotes orderly and ethical interactions within society.

But it can be a bad thing. We see plenty of examples of abusive parents, controlling spouses, tyrannical employers and corrupt governments.

Who have you given your sovereignty to? Who controls your life? Who do you allow to rule over you? Who is your king?

Are they ruling effectively and justly? Is your life flourishing under their rule? The land and the king are one.

Is it time to reclaim your sovereignty?

The Goddess of Sovereignty doesn’t tolerate ineffective or unjust rulers. Neither should you.

Samhain Circle

2011-10-13T14:50:00.000-05:00

If you're in the North Texas area, please join us for our celebration of Samhain on Saturday, October 29.

"Samhain" means "Summer's End" and perhaps in no other year have we been so glad for Summer to be over! Our Samhain Circle will include a celebration of Summer's end and a tribute to our ancestors. The highlight will be a candle-lit spiral labyrinth, which we will walk to make peace with ourselves and to begin - or to strengthen - our Great Work.

Click on the image for a larger version of the flyer.

Qualifications and Tradeoffs

2011-10-10T19:22:00.001-05:00

From a Google+ forward by Thorn Coyle comes this website titled “The Art of Non-Conformity – Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work, and Travel” by Chris Guillebeau. It’s another example of a person who has rejected the mainstream world and is living life his way. His blog entry today is titled “Qualifications” and he gleefully lists his own lack thereof, which hasn’t stopped him from doing what he wants to do.

I have very mixed feelings about messages like this.

On one hand I’m happy that someone has found a way to make a decent living doing what he loves – in this case, travel the world. His success is a testament to the fact that magic works – magic in the sense of Aleister Crowley’s definition of “creating change in conformance with will.” And if he motivates someone to walk out of a dead end job and start doing something less soul-sucking or even rewarding, great.

But I still remember that there are dirty jobs that someone has to do. I don’t think anyone dreams of working in a factory or picking up trash or standing behind a cash register at McDonald’s, but I’m glad some people do. And I’m very glad there are qualifications and gatekeepers for doctors and teachers and health inspectors. Some things really do require formal training.

Beyond that, there is an element of privilege in Guillebeau’s method. He couldn’t do what he does if he had a parent with a chronic illness he had to care for. He couldn’t do what he does if he had small children who needed to be in school.

He couldn’t do what he does if he was rotting in jail for stealing cars at age 14. One wonders if his life might be very different if his skin was darker… But in fairness, that’s more a comment on our society than on Guillebeau himself.

I’m skeptical of “motivational speakers” – in part because most of them make their living by selling you something, whether it’s their books, CDs, or “life coaching” services. Guillebeau is upfront about who he is and what he does. Dig into his site a bit and he says he expected to make $48,500 in 2009, while traveling the world. That’s a nice income for doing what most people would pay to do, but it’s hardly getting rich. He’s not claiming you can be a millionaire next month.

What his approach comes down to is this: we all make tradeoffs in life. He decided that experiences were more important than material possessions. That’s a lesson I learned a bit late… and even now I haven’t taken it to anywhere near the extent Guillebeau has.

But he made his tradeoffs consciously. That’s more than most of us can say.

I like his e-pamphlet A Brief Guide to World Domination. He talks about deciding what you want most, figuring out what you can offer that no one else can, setting goals, and then doing the hard work of making it happen. Here’s a very important paragraph:

If you want it badly enough, and are willing to make some changes in your life to cause it to happen, you too can take over the world… or do anything else you really want to do. Yes, you really can have it all. The only things you’ll need to give up are assumptions, expectations, and the comfort zone that holds you back from greatness.

That’s not entirely true. You can have or be or do anything you want – you just can’t have everything you want. You have to make tradeoffs. The question is whether you will trade away what mainstream society says you should want, or if you will trade away the desires of your heart.

We all must make our decisions. Make yours with your eyes wide open.

Initiation in the Western Mystery Tradition

2011-10-08T16:03:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday evening I attended a lecture by Dr. Paul Clark, Steward of the Fraternity of the Hidden Light. It was titled “Initiation and Archetype in the Western Mysteries.”

The best general online introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition is probably the Wikipedia page, although the subject is so broad and (if you’ll pardon the phrase) shrouded in mystery you could follow hyperlinks all day and still not have a definitive definition in your head.

Here’s my rough attempt at a definition: the Western Mystery Tradition is Universal Truth expressed through Western religion and culture. It draws heavily on the texts and teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Its expressions include Qabalah, Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn, and the many groups that formed in the 20th century following the breakup of the Golden Dawn.

It includes Wicca, at least in its original Gardnerian and Alexandrian forms.

I attended the public meetings of the Fraternity of the Hidden Light several years ago for several months. It was interesting and the techniques they taught were helpful – I could see the universal principles and techniques behind them. I left because I’m a Druid – I wanted to learn from and work with the myths of my Celtic ancestors. The myths of the ancient Hebrews, while both powerful and prevalent in the West, are too closely associated with the fundamentalist Christianity of my childhood. That doesn’t make them wrong, but it does make them very difficult for me.

However, I still drop in for the occasional special program. Here’s what I came away with.

Before the lecture I asked Dr. Clark about the keys to facilitating a transformative initiation experience. He said it was a combination of aspiration (wanting something to happen) and receptivity (being willing to accept whatever comes your way). Based on my experience with initiations (both receiving and officiating) I would agree.

Initiation is both an event and a process. The process begins with a calling: “deep calls to deep.” That calling is usually motivated either by pain (“something is wrong and I need to fix it”) or by curiosity (“there’s something more out there and I want to know it”). The person begins to seek, and the seeker becomes irrational, erratic, and lives on the edge – as illustrated by The Fool of the Tarot.

Initiation is a portal – the only way you get in is by declaring your desire and your intent. According to Dr. Clark, the only valid intent for esoteric studies is “to know in order to serve.”

Initiation is not an intellectual exercise. It works in the subconscious via symbols – symbols are the language of the heart.

The central task of initiation is aligning your will with the Divine will. You do this by diligent practice, especially the practice of meditation and visualization.

The lecture was less about initiation as an event and more about initiation as a life-long process, of esoteric study as a means of personal growth and of personal growth as a means of service to the greater good.

Paul Clark’s path is not my path, but we’re headed toward the same destination.

Why We Loved Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T18:56:00.000-05:00

Steve Jobs died yesterday at the age of 56. Tributes, biographies and features are filling the internet and I have nothing noteworthy to add to them. Instead, I want to talk briefly about how we (most of us, anyway) viewed Steve Jobs, what that says about us and what we can learn from it all.

Disclaimer: I’m not an Apple fanatic. I don’t dislike the company or its products, I’ve just never thought they were worth the price premium over comparable products from other companies. The one exception is the iPhone – I bought a 3GS two years ago when I finally decided to take the smartphone plunge. I like it and I’m going to replace it with a 4S now that my contract is up. But if I had started with Android I imagine I’d feel the same way about them.

The way Jobs ran Apple was at great variance with the values of many of his customers. Transparency is not an Apple virtue – Jobs was highly secretive. He sued bloggers for publishing product rumors and sent the police to recover a misplaced iPhone prototype. Neither is Apple a democracy. Jobs was a micromanager, down to providing scripts for customer service and technical support personnel. He was a workaholic who demanded long hours from his employees. He priced Apple products as high as he could get away with and he built his products in China where he paid suppliers (and by extension, their employees) as little as possible.

Why, then, was Jobs so admired, loved, and even worshiped?

First, both Jobs and his products were intuitive. A cautionary tale from my MBA studies said “the average VP of Marketing looks in the mirror and thinks he sees the average consumer.” For Jobs, though, that was true. He had a talent for understanding what would be well-received and what wouldn’t. Now, because Apple is a premium product, he didn’t have to worry if doing things “right” would cost a few more cents – he’d still make lots of money. That’s a luxury that designers of lower-priced products simply don’t have.

Jobs gave people what they wanted even when they didn’t know they wanted it (yet). He made his products attractive, and he made them cool.

Second, Jobs fit the I-did-it-my-way, self-made-man myth that is so popular in America. He dropped out of college. He studied Buddhism in India. He co-founded Apple in a garage. He got fired from the company he founded, had successes elsewhere, then came back to Apple and led it from near-bankruptcy to the major success it is today. And he did it all his way.

Most people who insist on doing things “my way” ultimately fail, because they let their egos get in the way of their good sense. I don’t know if Jobs listened when it counted or if he was the one-in-a-million whose “my way” turned out to be the right way. But in any case, he fit the myth and so we loved him.

Third, even the most radical among us recognize success when we see it, and we recognize what it takes to achieve it. Success takes hard work and lots of it. It takes dedication and a refusal to settle for less than the best, no matter what it costs. It takes saying “no” to a million opportunities and a million distractions to focus on your core mission.

Success requires taking risks and then refusing to fail. It takes refusing to allow others to cause you to fail.

And when you do fail, success requires admitting it, moving on and going right back to work, just as hard, just as dedicated, only this time a little wiser.

There’s a lesson in there for you and me, but for today let’s just admire a man who gave us some really cool tools and toys and who built an empire doing it.

Be blessed, Steve Jobs, as you cross the veil and go where ever it is that secretive Buddhists go after death.

Re-enchantment, Part 2

2011-10-03T21:44:00.000-05:00

I’m still thinking about Sharon Knight’s call to “re-enchant the world.” On Saturday I talked about some of the ways we can do this: through the arts, in Nature, and through our own magical work. But how do we create an enchanted world when the disenchanted world keeps intruding? And even if we can, what right do we have to live in a magical world when so many people are living in a world where it’s a struggle just to survive?

Pagans aren’t the only ones thinking about this. Here’s a link to a CNN.com article about how Christian ministers are struggling with what to say about our bad economy. Should they teach people to do what they have to do to get by, or should they preach against the unjust structures that make it so difficult for them to succeed?

Should we even be trying to re-enchant the world? Is the primary goal of our religious, spiritual, and magical practices to make our lives happier or is it to help us build a better world for everyone?

Why do we have to choose? Why not both?

Our spiritual practices and magical work keep us connected to our Source. That Source gives us the strength and determination to do what we have to do to make a living for ourselves and our families. Making a living gives us the material resources to contribute toward the betterment of society. It also enables us to engage in deeper spiritual practice – it’s a lot easier to be spiritual when you don’t have to worry about paying the rent or affording your kid’s medical bills. The deeper practice points us toward the Great Work of our souls.

If you don’t make time for the practices that keep you grounded, if you don’t re-enchant your world at least a bit, you’ll burn yourself out. If your re-enchantment becomes escapism, you’ll end up being one of those people Karl Marx ranted against when he said “religion is the opium of the people.”

Stay connected to your Source through dedicated spiritual practice.

Do what you have to do to make your way in the world.

Make the world a better place. You don’t have to fix everything – you don’t have to fix anything. You just have to do what you can do.

Live a magical, enchanted life.

Find your Great Work, and do it.

It all starts with dedicated spiritual practice.

Fire Spinning

2011-10-02T13:41:00.002-05:00

Although we had a lot of rain at the OBOD East Coast Gathering, Saturday night turned out very nice. We had a roaring fire, songs, stories, jokes... and this performance by Alexis Hosea from New York. It turned out surprisingly well for something shot by a rank amateur with a point & shoot camera.

Enjoy...

Re-enchantment

2011-10-01T21:09:00.000-05:00

Sharon Knight is the lead singer of Pandemonaeon and a Pagan in the Anderson Feri Tradition. Last week she wrote a piece for her blog titled “To Re-enchant The World” where she said

To re-enchant the world implies that it has been disenchanted. The concept of disenchantment appears to have been coined by a turn-of-the-century German Sociologist named Max Weber, to express the loss of mystical, magickal, or religious worldviews in favor of purely scientific, mechanistic, and capitalistic worldviews.

While this is very appropriate for our time, it is not a new phenomenon. Over 200 years ago, the English poet William Wordsworth wrote

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As an engineer I know the benefits of science and rationality very well. As a Unitarian Universalist I applaud the use of reason in religion (though that very same disenchantment is behind the fundamentalists’ insistence on a literal interpretation of scripture). As I’ve stated many times, I like living in our technologically advanced world with smartphones and hybrid cars and air conditioners and general anesthesia.

But it’s not enough – we need to re-enchant the world. The question is how?

In an e-mail to fans of her band, Sharon says we need “a little more Harry Potter and a little less bank fraud.” She’s right – the arts play a huge part in re-enchanting the world. Books and movies and music allow us to travel through time and space, to bend the laws of Nature (but not the laws of human nature – that’s what makes good fiction so believable), and they show us what life could be like if we didn’t waste so much time “getting and spending.”

Spending time in Nature helps to re-enchant the world. The great outdoors is just as big and just as awesome as it was when you were seven or eight or nine. There are adventures to be had in your back yard, messages in the clouds and stars and wisdom in the trees. Getting outside is the easiest, simplest, and cheapest way to put a little magic back in your life.

Re-enchant the world by doing some enchanting. I don’t talk a lot about spells and charms and potions, mainly because my practice is primarily religious, not magical. But folks, magic works. Sometimes it works by changing your circumstances. Sometimes it works by changing you. Sometimes it works in ways you wish it wouldn’t – in the words of Stephen Sondheim, “wishes come true, not free.” Magic is no substitute for hard work… but hard work is no substitute for magic. Do both.

We cannot and should not deny reality and live in an imaginary world – remember Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised. There are things that must be done. Do them. But don’t let them eat up your whole life.

Keep an eye out for Proteus rising from the sea, and listen for Triton blowing his horn.

Immersion

2011-09-27T19:05:00.000-05:00

crossposted with No Unsacred Place

Every now and then we need to immerse ourselves in Nature.

The idea of living in cities – much less in suburbs – is a very new phenomenon. Even after cities became commonplace – when “civilization” began – the majority of people still lived on the land. It wasn’t until 1920 that more people in the United States lived in urban areas than in rural ones. By 1990 75% of Americans lived in cities or suburbs – away from the land.

That presents a challenge for those of us practicing a Nature religion. Through regular spiritual practice, we can form and maintain relationships with Nature and the Spirits of Nature no matter where we live.

But at least occasionally we need to spend a few days in Nature, on the land, away from our cities and suburbs and air conditioners and smartphones. Every now and then we need to immerse ourselves in Nature.

Through a scheduling coincidence I’ve done that the past two weekends. The first weekend was spent camping in the woods, while the second was spent at a Druid gathering held at a kids’ summer camp. Each time I’ve come back physically rested, mentally restored, and spiritually revived.

When you immerse yourself in Nature you realize how little you truly need. A tent or a cabin, some bedding, a source of light, food and drink. You don’t need a showcase kitchen filled with stainless steel appliances to cook a meal – a fire or a camp stove works just fine. You don’t need a closet full of clothes – what you can wear or carry works just fine. So much of what we think we have to have is the result of psychological manipulation by the advertising industry. Immersing yourself in Nature helps you separate needs from desires and desires from artificial stimulation.

When you immerse yourself in Nature time slows down. With no TV schedule, no traffic and no appointments, life can proceed at a more leisurely pace. You wake up when you wake up. You eat when you finish cooking. There is little you have to do, and when that’s done, you’re left with yourself, your fellow humans, and the rest of Nature. Meditation comes easy (or at least easier). Conversation comes easy. You remember how to tell stories, to share experiences, to exchange ideas about what’s really important in life.

When you immerse yourself in Nature you see things you normally overlook. Spending a few minutes outside each day is helpful – and critical – but there is only so much you can see on short excursions into Nature. Not only is there more to see in the wild, you have more time to see it and fewer distractions to prevent you from seeing it. Step out into your back yard and you may see a tree. Spend a day in the woods and you’ll see bark and limbs and leaves. Go for a walk around the block and you may see a squirrel. Spend a day in the woods and you’ll squirrels eating and storing food and playing. There is so much for us to see if we’ll only take time to look.

When you immerse yourself in Nature you’re reminded of your place in the Universe. A thunderstorm sounds very different inside a tent than it does inside a house. Your seemingly-important plans and schedules can be altered by ordinary wind and rain and heat and cold. And looking up at dark skies and seeing thousands of stars (instead of the dozens you can see in cities and suburbs) reminds you that the universe is vast and we are so very small. We’re a part of Nature and a part of Life – but only a part. It’s not all about us.

I like technology and the modern world. Travel and communication have made it possible for us to learn and experience more than could have been imagined even a few hundred years ago. We live longer and easier lives than did our preindustrial ancestors.

But as good as all that is, it is no substitute for forming and maintaining strong connections to the land, the sky, and the sea. It is no substitute for experiencing Nature and the Spirits of Nature, live, raw and wild.

Every now and then we need to immerse ourselves in Nature.

OBOD East Coast Gathering

2011-09-25T21:29:00.000-05:00

I’m back from a wet but wonderful long weekend at the OBOD East Coast Gathering in Pennsylvania. We had rain, an Alban Elfed (Autumn Equinox) ritual, rain, Druid grade initiations, rain, Bardic grade initiations, rain, workshops by OBOD Modron Thea Worthington and Touchstone Editor Penny Billington, rain, workshops by various other participants (I led the Daily Spiritual Practice workshop), rain, good food, rain, mead, and rain.

Did I mention that it rained all day Friday? It’s been so dry in Texas I’ve forgotten what those days are like.

This is the second year for the East Coast Gathering. Those who were there last year say it was 90 degrees and sunny the whole time. Apparently Texas isn’t the only place with some fickle weather.

As with the House of Danu Gorsedds I attended in 2009 and 2010, this was a chance to spend a few days immersed in Druidry. The combination of rituals, workshops, fellowship and a beautiful natural setting were a great way to relax and see what Druidry can be.

I’ve explained Paganism enough times I’m pretty comfortable doing it as an “elevator speech,” but at times I’ve struggled to define Druidry. “The revival of ancient Celtic beliefs and practices, reimagined for the 21st century Western world” is accurate, but doesn’t really convey the depth and meaning Druidry has for me. Thea Worthington offered this definition that I really like: “Druidry is the art of wild wisdom.” It’s the spirituality Nature teaches us, if only we’ll slow down, go outside, and listen.

The rain stopped on Saturday and by Saturday night we were able to have a Gorsedd around a roaring fire. The children (and a few adults) presented a condensed version of The Tale of Gwion Bach, followed by music, storytelling, and firespinning. Arthur Billington was amazing on the guitar – his knowledge of and skill with American folk and blues is outstanding.

Special thanks to Lorraine Soria, who not only organized the event but also served as chief cook. She – and others – worked most of the weekend so the rest of us could go to workshops and socialize. I said it there and I’ll say it again here: thank you, Lorraine.

Thanks also to Lorraine and the other Druids for giving me a key part in the Druid grade initiations. If they had let me pick a part, that’s the one I would have wanted. It was a honor to help bring three people into the Druid grade. It was also an honor to help bring nine people into the Bardic grade. May their studies and practice bring them greater wisdom, and may that wisdom bring them to greater service.

The East Coast Druids are planning another gathering next year, from September 20 through 23. A lot can happen in a year, but it’s on my calendar and I hope to be there again.

Thea Worthington, a Druid from Texas, and Penny Billington

The Death Penalty

2011-09-21T19:27:00.000-05:00

The death penalty is in the news again. The national and international attention is on Troy Davis, set to die tonight in Georgia for a murder of a police officer in 1989, even though seven of nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony and the physical evidence is questionable.

Texas (the capital punishment capital of the Western world) has just executed one of the men involved in the racially-motivated dragging death of James Byrd. And another convicted killer received a temporary stay of execution from the U.S. Supreme Court.

The origins of capital punishment do not lie with Moses or Hammurabi – they are far older. The origins of capital punishment lie with our evolutionary urge to strike back at people who hurt us. This is why you will find “normal” people calling for punishments that would make Torquemada faint, particularly when the victims are children or animals.

The very old roots of capital punishment make it difficult argue against it, since most proponents’ reasons for supporting it are emotional, not rational. As with so many issues, we make up our minds intuitively and then find reasons to support our decision, while ignoring reasons to oppose it.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t logical arguments against the death penalty – there are, and you probably already know them. It isn’t necessary to protect society, since we can sentence someone to life in prison with no possibility of parole. It isn’t a deterrent, since few murders are the result of rational decision-making. There is the chance of executing – killing – an innocent person. Those executed are disproportionately black and poor.

And none of that matters to someone who only wants to quench his evolutionary thirst for vengeance.

Fortunately, we have other urges, like compassion. Those who kill – even the most psychopathic serial killers – are still human. They are still more like us than not like us.

I’m no pacifist – attack me and I’ll defend myself. But there’s a huge difference between defending yourself and seeking vengeance. Affirming the humanity of killers doesn’t mean condoning their crimes or leaving them free to kill again – life in prison is sufficient for both.

While it is legal for me to shoot someone breaking into my house or threatening my life, even here in Wild West Texas it is not legal for me to chase that same person down the street and shoot him as he’s running away. Why, then, is it acceptable for the state to kill him in my name?

This is not “justice.” Justice is reparative, restorative – justice fixes things that were broken. Where a murder has been committed, justice is not possible – a second death is simply another body in the graveyard.

We have a choice: protection or vengeance .

We have a choice: recognizing the humanity of all or pretending that some people aren’t human.

We have a choice: ending the killing or continuing to feed our lust for blood.

End the killing now.

Temples

2011-09-19T19:06:00.000-05:00

Star Foster at Patheos has a new piece up on Ephesus, which is best known in the West as an early Christian site but which was known in antiquity for its massive Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The history in Star’s article is good but what grabbed my attention was this musing on the religious implications of a people who built and rebuilt a grand temple, until they stopped.

the creation of devotional objects and buildings, their maintenance and their use in rites, are all merely outwards symbols of internal devotion. If the internal devotion is gone, the practice becomes rote superstition, and who is willing to invest in maintaining rote superstition? Are temples an investment in our devotion? [emphasis added] A reminder of what we already hold true and a sign to ourselves and others that we are faithful?

For the ancients, temples were a sign of devotion and prosperity. It was an investment in their own culture, values and future. Worth thinking about as our numbers grow.

Did the people of Ephesus say “Artemis has blessed us so we will build this temple for her and to remind ourselves to honor her”? Or did they say “we want to show everyone how rich and powerful we are, but we also want to look pious – we’ll build a temple to Artemis”?

Large ornate buildings are never a physical necessity. They are tangible statements about the values and priorities of those who build them. They are symbols of identity and pride. They can also be symbols of vanity. And they can be all of that at the same time. Look at examples from mainstream American culture: government buildings, corporate headquarters, shopping malls, football stadiums…

I don’t know why the Ephesians built their grand temple over and over again, whether it was gratitude or pride or vanity or some combination of all three. But I do know this – temples are a concrete expression of multi-generational thinking.

Until the modern era, large construction projects could take decades, even centuries. You don’t start building a temple unless you’re confident there will be people to finish it after you’re dead and gone. You don’t build a temple unless you’re confident there will be worshippers and pilgrims for years to come. You don’t build a temple unless you’re convinced the needs of future generations are as important as the needs of the current generation.

Should today’s Pagans build temples? Honestly, I think we’re a couple decades – and maybe a couple generations – away from having the the resources to devote to large symbols of status and pride. And even when we have the resources, the Druid in me would prefer they be spent on forests and groves instead of bricks and mortar.

But the fact that we’re even having this conversation means we’re beginning to think in multi-generational terms.

And that’s a very good thing.

How Much Is Enough?

2011-09-18T21:30:00.000-05:00

My biggest criticism of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd is that too many of them use the label as an excuse for avoiding the hard work of spiritual practice and the accountability of religious community. But that criticism raises the question “how much is enough?” How much spiritual practice is enough? How much study is enough? How much social action is enough? How much witness is enough? How much worship is enough?

In the small Baptist church where I grew up, one of the preacher’s favorite expressions was “get on fire for God.” His meaning was clear – he wanted everyone to be fully engaged in every activity of the church, and he wanted everyone reading the Bible and praying every day.

That infuriated me. I remember screaming (inside my head, anyway) “not everyone is called to be a preacher!” I had no desire to be “on fire” for God or for anything else.

When I found the path to which I was truly called, things changed. All of a sudden I was engaging in spiritual and religious practice because I wanted to, not because I thought I was supposed to. After 18 years of Pagan practice (the last 10 of them seriously) I haven’t lost interest – which borders on the miraculous for someone with such a short attention span and wide variety of interests. Clearly, this is my calling.

But at times I wonder: is it enough? And then I wonder if that question is the remnants of that Baptist preacher, or if it’s my own perfectionism… or if it’s a certain god telling me I need to do and be more than I’m doing and being.

I came across some blog posts last week that bordered on scary. First was this one from Rev. Victoria Weinstein, aka “PeaceBang.” In the discussion about the Spiritual But Not Religious, someone asked if all religions didn’t start out as something somebody just made up. Here’s PeaceBang’s response in total:

No. They started as a shocking, disturbing and demanding theophany to a usually unwilling prophet who was then called to sacrifice everything he previously understood or intuited as good — not as a comfortable feeling in some privileged person’s tummy that kept them comfy.

The big hammer came from Juniper of Walking the Hedge. Juniper is a Hedgewitch – a contemporary shaman, more or less – and also a contributor to To Fly By Night, an excellent book on Hedgewitchery. Juniper’s post is titled “It’s All Rather a lot of Bother.” Juniper lists in detail some of her spiritual obligations – things she must do to maintain relationships with the spirits who work with her. It’s quite informative and I encourage you to go read the whole thing. But here’s the part that grabbed me.

There is no such thing as “good enough” in a spiritual practice, especially when that “good enough” means you did next to nothing at all. A spiritual Path is not supposed to be easy and the gods don’t like lazy people.

The gods, spirits and ancestors do not reward people who do not do the work to earn their respect. If you want to develop a relationship with the Otherworld and the Spirits of the Land you have to earn it. You cannot simply show up with your hand out expecting a prize, for no work, like a spoiled child.

For someone who is still too literal-minded for his own good, hearing “there is no such thing as good enough” is a bit disturbing. But when a Hedgewitch and a UU minister are singing the same song, I have sense enough to pay attention.

I spent this weekend in the woods – both physically and spiritually (I had intended to get this post up before I left, but between crises at my paying job and getting ready for the trip, I didn’t). The Denton CUUPS group had a combination camping trip and Mabon ritual… which had nothing to do with Mabon and everything to do with communing with our deities.

What I experienced was too intense to share in a public forum. It was both challenging and comforting. It was comforting in that I am now certain there really is such a thing as “good enough” and I am also certain that I am not called to the strict obligations both Juniper and PeaceBang described. But it was challenging in that I am now equally certain the work I have been called to do has its own obligations and while I take them seriously I have not given them the priority they require.

Not every distraction comes via the TV or the internet.

How much is enough? All that you are called to do. No more, and no less.

Evolution - The Great Story

2011-09-13T20:56:00.000-05:00

I’ve never been very passionate about evolution. 10th grade biology plus some extra-curricular science reading convinced me it was an accurate explanation for the development of life. That allowed me to check that box on my “things I need to know” list and move onto other subjects I found more engaging. But over the past couple years I’ve found myself delving into evolution more and more frequently, and referring to it more and more often in my religious-themed writings. I asked myself why – I think the reasons are worth sharing.

Evolution is a frequent battleground in the culture wars. Most of the people who deny the reality of evolution do so because it conflicts with their reading of their sacred texts. These same people use those same sacred texts to justify denying rights to gay people, denying the validity of any religion other than their own, and using government to promote their religion over all others. We frequently find ourselves opposing them and we need to be fully informed.

There is honor and value in defending science, particularly when school curriculums are challenged. But debating these people isn’t a good use of our time. They believe the fate of their eternal souls depends on evolution being false – no facts are going to change their minds. This article from Science 2.0 does a good job of explaining “The Missing Link Fallacy”… and the comments demonstrate the futility of debating creationists and intelligent design proponents.

Evolution (along with the Big Bang) is the creation myth of the modern world. And just in case any creationists are reading this blog, by “myth” I mean “story that provides orientation and meaning” not “made up story.” The creation stories of our ancestors tell how our tribes and nations saw their beginnings, but we live in a bigger world than they did. We need a story that tells us how all creatures came to be – evolution is that Great Story.

Evolution confirms our connection to the Earth. The origins of biological life are still unknown. Perhaps some day we will discover and even duplicate a natural origin… or perhaps we never will. But in either case, it is very clear that we weren’t placed on the Earth, we grew out of the Earth. To say that the Earth is our Mother is much more than a metaphor. And if the Earth is our Mother, then like our human mothers the Earth is due our love, our respect and our reverent care. Christians who practice stewardship for what they see as God’s creation are our allies on environmental issues, but how much stronger should be the Pagan commitment to caring for the Earth because she is our Mother?

Evolution confirms our kinship with all humanity. The findings of archeology and paleontology are supported by the findings of genetic analysis and linguistics – our species originated one time, in East Africa, and spread from there. We look different and we sound different and we have developed different beliefs and practices, but we are one species. The fossil record is littered with extinct species –ultimately, we will succeed or fail as one species.

Evolution confirms our kinship with all living things. There is an unbroken line from the first single-cell organism to more complex life forms to the beautiful diversity we know today. We all grew out of the Earth and we all share the same Mother – they are our relatives. And if they are our relatives, they are due our respect and care.

Evolution reminds us to be humble. The Western monotheistic religions teach that we were created in the image of an all-powerful god. This has not proved to be a helpful teaching. Instead of acting divinely, we have acted as though the Earth was ours to exploit and as though we could make another one if we ruined this one. Evolution reminds us that our origins are much lower and much simpler, and as Pagans, we know that while our gods and goddesses are bigger than us, even they aren’t all-powerful.

Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 165 million years. In the end, something changed and they couldn’t adapt – they’re now extinct (birds are the descendants of those dinosaurs). Evolution tells us that if we don’t adapt – or if we modify our environment beyond our capacity to adapt – we will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Paganism is a Nature religion and most Pagans worship or at least revere the natural world. Shouldn’t that mean we know the science behind it? If, like me, you never gave evolution much thought, I encourage you to do some reading and studying. While I find Richard Dawkins to be a lousy theologian, as a biologist and a science writer he’s brilliant. I read his book The Greatest Show on Earth last year and I highly recommend it.

Most of us have experienced the wonder and awe of Nature while watching a sunset or walking through a forest or gazing up at the moon. The evidence for evolution and our connection to all of the natural world is every bit as amazing.

Together in Faith

2011-09-12T20:20:00.000-05:00

David Sparks of Temple Spiritualis Compassare and John Beckett of Denton CUUPS

Last night I had the honor of participating in Together in Faith, a 9/11 Service of Remembrance and Hope held at the First United Methodist Church of Denton. I was one of the "faith group representatives" who spoke on the theme "I believe" - what our religions teach that can help us all to live together in peace.

When Rev. Pam Wat of DUUF asked me to represent Pagans in this service, I was a little nervous. It's one thing if your UU minister invites Pagans - it's another for the other clergy to accept them. I shouldn't have worried. Rev. Matt Gaston of First Methodist met me at the door, welcomed me, and thanked me for participating. He and his colleagues sincerely wanted as many religious groups represented as possible.

And I wasn't the only Pagan. David Sparks of Temple Spiritualis Compassare was invited to participate in the litanies of Remembrance, Penitence, and Hope. David already knew some of the local clergy from his work as a hospital chaplain.

Everyone I encountered last night was welcoming and friendly. At the reception after the service I had a couple people ask about my Awen and Cernunnos pendants - it gave me a chance to talk a little more about Paganism to people who may not have known a thing about it.

Speakers were limited to 100 words - if they had let religious leaders from a dozen or so groups say all they want, the service would have run about five hours and the congregation would have walked out! That was a challenge - in 100 words I couldn't explain what Paganism is or why I felt like the interfaith service was so important. All I could do was express a couple key concepts and hope people would get them at one level or another. After numerous revisions, here's what I ended up saying:

I believe the Earth is the Great Mother of us all. And because we are all children of the Great Mother, we are all brothers and sisters.

In the millennia since we became human we have formed many tribes with many colorful traditions. I believe we can celebrate our own traditions, find great meaning and inspiration in them, and still honor the different beliefs and practices of our sisters and brothers.

From the Earth we came, and to the Earth we shall return. From One we became many, and from many we shall be One again.

Throughout the country there was considerable disagreement over how to commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This group thought the best way was to come together in peace. I was happy to be a part of it.

For more on this event, see Cindy Breeding of the Denton Record-Chronicle's coverage of the service, and her story of how the event came together. I've got a draft article ready for the new Lonestar Pagan news site - it will be up as soon as it's edited.

Social Security

2011-09-09T19:52:00.000-05:00

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

While I try to stay informed, I do what I can to stick to the news and avoid political commentary – it just gets my blood pressure up. But every now and then something slips through my filters and raises said blood pressure to the point where I have to say something. This is one of those times.

I’ve had it with Rick Perry and Rush Limbaugh all the other right wing talking heads calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” This is not a debate tactic. It is not a policy proposal. It is not political theory. It is a lie – a deliberate falsehood told with the intent to deceive and manipulate.

The intent is to associate Social Security – the most effective and, dare I say it, the most loved government program in the history of this country – with a white collar criminal who enriched himself by deceiving his clients. Nobody knows who Ponzi was, but everyone knows his disciple Bernie Madoff, who is justly rotting in jail.

Social Security has always been the “third rail” of politics – touch it and die. That’s a problem for politicians who are philosophically opposed to it. The human brain doesn’t work on logic, it works by association. Say “Social Security” and “Ponzi scheme” in the same sentence enough times and people will start to associate the two. That can finally make it possible for politicians to abandon the collective care of our elders without losing their elected offices.

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

The facts aren’t in question. Social Security isn’t an investment scheme, legal or otherwise. It’s a public pension plan. It operates on the principle of collective responsibility – each generation pays for the retirement of today’s elders and its retirement will be paid for by tomorrow’s adults.

There are some aspects of the plan that invite confusion, especially by those who want to be confused. Those who pay more Social Security taxes while working will draw more benefits once retired, up to a point. That ceiling is used to justify a cap on Social Security taxes – no taxes are collected on income over $106,800 per year. And due to the increased payouts expected when the baby boomer generation retires, taxes were raised and supposedly placed in a “trust fund” to be drawn down in later years. But the facts remain – Social Security is a public pension program, not an investment plan.

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

The idea of retirement is very new. In tribal societies, elders simply worked less as their capacities declined. Of course, in tribal societies, not a lot of people lived to be very old. Throughout most of civilization, families have cared for their parents and grandparents – thus the motivation for large families, to insure that someone could take care of you in your old age. But in almost no situations were people expected to take care of themselves up the the point of death.

Where there were no adult children to care for their elders, or when those adult children didn’t have the resources, it went badly for the elders. Even if we wanted to return to a “your children are your retirement plan” arrangement, modern Western society has destroyed the extended family. If there are no jobs where you live, you’re expected to move to where the jobs are. I’ve done that three times, moving from Tennessee to Indiana to Georgia to Texas. It’s hard to take care of your parents and grandparents when they’re half a country away.

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

And so we’ve developed other arrangements for caring for our elders. I remember the HR presentation on retirement when I started my professional career in 1984. It said “financing retirement is a three-legged stool: employer pensions, Social Security, and personal savings.” Employer pensions are all but gone – small businesses never had them and corporations say they can’t afford them. This puts even more pressure on personal savings. Over the last 4-½ years the balance in my retirement account has gone up 3% (in total, not per year), even though I’m saving 12% of my pay and my employer is adding another 3%. My rate of return is negative. If I was nearing retirement I’d be seriously worried – as it is I’m just hoping the economy improves enough for it to start growing again before I get too much older.

At least I make enough that I can save – people in low-wage jobs need all they make and then some just to get by.

If you’re very frugal or very lucky – or if you’re rich to start with – you can finance your own retirement. The majority of us can’t.

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

The opponents of Social Security feed people’s evolutionary selfishness and suspicion of others.

“Why should I have to pay for someone’s retirement when they weren’t responsible like I am?” This is the part of the lone wolf myth Perry et al are trying to popularize. Maybe they were irresponsible or maybe they had bad luck or maybe they never made enough to be able to save. As the current economy has shown, you can do all the right things and still end up screwed.

“Why should I have to pay for someone’s retirement when they don’t need Social Security?” This is the other side of the lone wolf myth. The fact is that very few people “don’t need” Social Security. Keeping them in the system reinforces the idea of collective responsibility and collective benefits.

“I could do better if I took the Social Security taxes and invested them on my own.” Maybe you could and maybe you couldn’t – see my own example above. More importantly, would you?

You pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars each year for car insurance – odds are you rarely collect on that. Is car insurance a scam? No, it’s the principle of shared risk – you pay a little now to eliminate the risk of having to pay a lot later.

“Social Security is unsustainable – we have to end it.” This is simply not true. Even if we did nothing, future benefits would still be roughly 75% of what’s been promised. That’s not good, but it’s hardly reason to blow up Social Security. With small tax increases and a reasonable increase in the retirement age, Social Security can be sustainable indefinitely.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t structural problems or that there are no instances of gaming the system or that Social Security can never be changed. But the bottom line is that for all its shortcomings, Social Security is the #1 reason why most elderly people in this country aren’t living in poverty.

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

We need to rethink retirement.

In a society where people live longer, it’s reasonable to expect people to also work longer. But is it reasonable to have the same retirement age for construction workers and office workers? Is it reasonable to expect people to carry a full workload right up until they retire and then shift to idleness?

If there were more jobs suitable for older (and by “older” I mean 70, not 50) workers – part time, not physically demanding – then we’d need to pay fewer retirement benefits. We’d also stop throwing away valuable economic and societal resources – an extravagance we won’t be able to afford once the impact of lower birth rates hits.

In the end, though, this is not an economic or a political issue. It’s a moral issue. It’s a religious issue. We cannot be a good, moral society if we don’t take care of our elders. If any politician (or anyone else) has a better idea on how to accomplish this goal – for everyone, not just those who work for the right companies and pick the right mutual funds – then I welcome it.

But stop attempting to associate our current social contract with a criminal scam.

Caring for our elders is the collective responsibility of society, not an individual responsibility.

Spiritual But Not Religious, Again

2011-09-08T19:31:00.000-05:00

I’m coming in late on the most recent flare-up about the “Spiritual But Not Religious,” but some of you may not have seen it, and in any case I have a few things I want to discuss.

This episode began when this essay by Rev. Lillian Daniel of the United Church of Christ was published in The Christian Century, a long-running magazine for mainline Protestants. It’s titled “The Limits of Self-Made Religion” and it was inspired by someone who cornered Rev. Daniel and proceeded to explain why he is “spiritual but not religious” and why he no longer attends church – reasons Rev. Daniel finds weak and self-centered. If you haven’t read it yet I encourage you to do so – especially if you consider yourself spiritual but not religious.

The article began circulating widely last week and it generated a lot of responses. UU World linked to this one by Rev. Tony Lorenzen who says we should be spiritual AND religious, and to this one by Rev. Kit Ketcham who says “I'm on both sides of this question” and then justifies (I think) her fence-sitting. Rev. Victoria Weinstein (aka “PeaceBang”) had this blog post blasting the spiritual but not religious and then this much calmer followup where she encouraged ministers to be as passionate and committed about teaching spiritual depth as they are about leading social justice.

I’ve had a couple of things to say about this in the past: this one where I complain that “calling yourself spiritual but not religious is all too frequently an excuse for spiritual laziness” and this one following Amy Martin’s recent service at Denton UU where she explained the Spiritual But Not Religious phenomenon more sypathetically and in more detail.

That’s the background. Here’s what I want to add to this conversation.

“Spiritual But Not Religious” is a spectrum, not a monolith. There are people who call themselves spiritual but not religious or “none of the above” (to use Amy Martin’s term) who are genuinely unsuited for the religion they know and who are actively searching for the right fit somewhere else. There are people who recognize they need to work on themselves for a while and who are diligently reading, studying, praying and meditating before joining or rejoining a community. I was there once, for about a year.

Then there are people who use the term “spiritual but not religious” to justify their avoidance of the hard work of regular spiritual practice and the accountability of religious community. This is spiritual shallowness and laziness. If I’m being perfectly honest, I’ve been there too. And there are people at every point in between. When we talk about the spiritual but not religious we need to recognize we’re speaking in high-level generalities.

This is no different from every religion in the world. Every religious organization I’ve ever been around has had people who took it seriously and people who showed up when they felt like it. There are Christians who study the Bible and there are Christians who pull verses out of context to support their prejudices. There are Pagans who honor their gods and goddesses and there are Pagans who look up a goddess in a book and greet her with a list of stuff they want. There are UUs who work for social justice and there are UUs who talk about the work that others do. As a group, the spiritual but not religious are no better and no worse than any other group.

Ministerial defensiveness is understandable but not helpful. If you buttonhole a minister and dump on her with a bunch of shallow, self-centered ideas about spirituality, then you deserve all the snark you get. That’s just rude. But when Rev. PeaceBang lists her qualifications and the sacrifices she’s made to become a minister and then compares herself with a cardiologist, that invites the wounded and the cynical to assume she’s saying “I’m the authority – obey me!” I’m not saying she should be warm and fuzzy when she’s justifiably angry, but a professional needs to understand when an insult is personal and when it’s not. Refute childish claims to spiritual superiority with mature questions and challenging facts – an approach Rev. PeaceBang herself recommends in her second blog entry.

This controversy is helping us to correct the popular definition of “religion.” Our society has shifted the wonderful concept of religious liberty from the idea that you’re free to join whatever religious community seems right to the idea that religion is strictly a personal matter. But religion isn’t something you do on your own. The earliest religions were all about the tribe – how to obtain the blessings of the gods and ancestors so the tribe would prosper. The Abrahamic religions have a mixture of individual and communal emphasis: the Ten Commandments are about personal behavior, while most of the prophets are about building a just society. That’s a gross oversimplification, but it illustrates how religion has a strong group element.

When the SBNR say they’re “not religious” they’re literally correct. They’re not religious because their spirituality (such as it is) is focused entirely inward. If this controversy helps people to understand that religion is about a lot more than what you believe, that it’s about building and supporting a community, then that’s a good thing.

So, how should we respond? Unlike some religious and/or spiritual movements (say, Christian dominionists or Islamic militants), the spiritual but not religious don’t present a danger to the rest of us. We don’t have to convert them or correct their errors. We just need to be the best religious people building the best religious communities we can. Sooner or later the seekers will turn into finders and some of them will find us. If we’re healthy and thriving some of them will stick around. Some will realize their shallow childish spirituality isn’t satisfying and sustaining and will start looking for something deeper. They should find us living that depth.

Good religion is hard work. At the individual level it requires dedicated practice. At the group level it requires cooperation, compromise, and a commitment to a long term vision of something bigger and better than yourself. Religion is a human institution, and as such it is subject to all the failures of human endeavors.

But when it’s done right, that work will build a religious, and yes, a spiritual base that will support us in tough times, celebrate with us in good times, and most importantly, provide a means for the transformation of our souls and of our world.

And that’s something no mere “spirituality” can provide.

The Necessity of Work

2011-09-05T14:54:00.002-05:00

To say I have a complicated relationship with work would be an understatement. The picture to the right is a scan of a Peanuts card I bought in the 3^rd grade. It is – I think – the oldest of the few childhood mementos I have kept. At that point in my life – and really, up until I left home for good after college – “work” meant my father dragging me out to cut grass or work in his garden… “garden” being another major understatement. You don’t keep an International Farmall to tend a mere garden.

One day when I was either particularly brave or particularly tired, I asked my father “why do I have to do farm work?” I still remember his answer: “I’m trying to teach you responsibility.” I didn’t see how what I considered slave labor had anything to do with responsibility, but I had sense enough not to push it. In total my father was a good guy, but he grew up in the Great Depression in a poor family with eight children and he had little patience with a nerdy kid who wanted to be indoors reading instead of outdoors being a productive worker.

All that farm work did teach me one thing – I learned I wanted no part of manual labor. Any time school got tough – particularly the first quarter of my junior year in college when I wanted to drop out – I remembered working outside in the heat and humidity and I went back to studying.

Unlike some Pagans, I have no romantic ideas about living off the land. The Earth does not give up her bounty with ease. Crops require plowing, planting, watering, weeding, guarding, harvesting and preserving. Animals require feeding, watering, and general care – every day. Sometimes twice a day.

Somebody has to do that work – somebody has to grow the food. Maybe you do it for yourself and more likely you pay someone to do it for you, but somebody has to do it.

And if you’re going to pay someone to grow your food for you – and make your clothes and build your car and produce all the other things you consume – you’re going to have to have some way to make a living.

This is the necessity of work: there are things that have to be done and someone has to do them. And you have to make a living for yourself and those who are counting on you.

This isn’t a particularly popular idea these days, but it is a very pagan (lowercase intentional) idea. Our ancient ancestors understood there were things that simply had to be done. You don’t have to like them – you just have to do them.

Today we hear advice like “follow your bliss” and “do something you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” There is the strong idea in our society that we should all have jobs that are interesting and fulfilling and fun. They should be safe and secure, always challenging but never demanding.

I used to work with a man whose dream was to fly helicopters. He joined the Army out of high school, got into the right training programs, studied hard, worked hard, and qualified to fly Black Hawk helicopters. He had been flying for two years when his father had a heart attack and died. He was given a hardship discharge and went home to run the family butcher shop. Follow your bliss? He did what he had to do.

Most of us do what we have to do. We need to eat, we need a place to live, we have children, spouses, and parents depending on us to provide for them. There are things we want and things we want to do that don’t come free.

And so we work. Perhaps we can find a way to make a living doing what we love. Many of us prepare for a career with college and internships and then hope we can find a paying job in our chosen field. Sometimes we end up taking the best of a limited set of options. If we’re successful we not only do what we have to do, we make it possible to do what we’re called to do.

I like to think I now have a mature relationship with work. If I hit the lottery today I would turn in my notice tomorrow, but I know that’s unlikely – particularly since I haven’t bought a ticket in ten years. I have a job that’s a good match with my skills. It can be stressful at times, but most days the expectations are reasonable. I’ll never get rich, but it pays enough. And it’s all indoors. I am thankful for it.

And I am thankful for those who do the jobs that are dirty, stressful, unpleasant, dangerous and tiring… but necessary. May we remember to honor those who do what must be done.

Happy Labor Day.

The King

2011-09-04T19:29:00.000-05:00

I just finished listening to the new Wigglian Way podcast. The Wigglian Way is one of the longest running Pagan podcasts – now in its 6^th year, with 87episodes. It’s one of only a few I’msubscribed to – while it’s light-hearted and humorous, it has plenty of good contentand very little of the “morning drive radio” silliness I hear on too many podcasts.

This episode included host MoJo’s commentary on thearchetype of The King, taken from Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. I’ve heard lots about this book but I’ve yetto read it – this isn’t a book review or even a podcast review so much as somethoughts that occurred to me as I was listening to the podcast.

“The land and the King are one” – the King brings order to societythrough right rule. When the King isjust and wise the land and the people will flourish. If the King is unjust or ineffective theGoddess of Sovereignty will withdraw her blessing and crops will fail, enemieswill invade, and other troubles will beset the realm.

Who or what is King of your life? Who or what rules your realm? Is your King (or Queen – this is not agender-specific issue) wise and just? Orare there signs the Goddess of Sovereignty is displeased?

This is not a concept we encounter much in UU and Pagancircles. The idea of monarchicaldecision-making is unthinkable – we believe in the democratic process and inconsensus. More than that, we believefacts should drive decisions. We’rereasonable, rational people – if we collect enough data the correct decision shouldbe obvious.

If that was true we would not have such deep division in ourpolitical world. Liberals andconservatives aren’t at each other’s throats because they disagree on thefacts. They’re at each other’s throatsbecause they disagree on core values and foundational myths.

This is not a political post and I am not advocating areturn to monarchy. This is a post abouthow we choose to live our lives as individuals. And my personal experience is that when your King is not your True Will,when you try to let decisions make themselves, when you act without thinking,then sooner or later your harvests will be less than they could be and lessthan they should be. They will not beenough to sustain your soul.

Why are you in this world? What great works did you set for yourself before you were born? What have your gods and ancestors called youto do? This is your True Will. Are you doing it? Does it inform your every decision?

Is your True Will the King of your life? If not, what do you need to do to make it so?

The land and the King areone.