Over on The Wild Hunt, they’ve been discussing an alleged murder, where the supposed perpetrator has said she is Wiccan, and that she killed with her athame in self defense.

A commentor on one of the posts has mentioned that the alleged murderer is “unknown to the larger Pagan community.”  In these days of Wicca 101 books on shelves at most every book store, telling you how to initiate yourself, how does one’s standing in the community prove whether or not you’re Pagan?

Let’s think about that for a minute. Does this matter? Does it mean that asking for an excused absense from school for your child for a Sabbat in New Jersey means you’ll have to prove you’re Pagan, and that the way to do so is to be known by others who say they are Pagan too?

What about court cases and child custody? Will be be expected to trot our our community membership cards in order for the court to accept our beliefs?

Don’t  get me wrong – I think being at least passingly familiar with your local Pagan community is a good thing, no matter how the community functions…I just don’t think community involvement should be the standard of being Pagan.

Interestingly, along the same line of thinking, I ran across Project Pagan Enough this week:

As Fire Lyte says, “Project Pagan Enough seeks to say that – no matter your beliefs, practices, looks, or loves – you are Pagan enough.”

In case I haven’t mentioned it lately, there’s a whole list of reasons why I’m a Bad Pagan(TM), and most of them fall under the heading of “not Pagan enough.”  Not participating much in the larger community due to taking care of my own shit probably ought to be on that list.

I’ve been reading the blogs of a few big-name bloggers who recently went on a “mission trip” to Africa. While there, they learned what poverty looks like, up close and personal. They encouraged their readers to sponsor children. They saw both the natural wonders of the area they were in, and the misery of the people.

Several have said that they’ve come back, and are feeling spiritually broken – under attack – because they feel overwhelmed by this new knowledge, and by the comparison of their very comfortable lives at home to the lives of their hosts.

I think, though, that they’re not any more broken than they were when they left…it’s just that they see their disconnection from the world now, whereas before they could safely ignore what their consciences told them was true: Most of us talk a good game, but rarely get off the couch, and when we do, it’s only to move to a slightly less comfy position.

We don’t step out of our comfort zones.

We don’t help people who don’t look/act/think like us.

We think taking care of the earth means separating paper and plastic for the recycling guy to pick up.

I think being more mindful of our place in the world and the privledges we have come to expect is a good thing; I don’t think beating ourselves up over it serves any purpose other than to look for a way to close the door on the knowledge that we *are* separated from the world around us by the things we say and do.

…specifically, the smallest ones.

Granted, this issue comes up regularly in my head because I have a toddler, and I’m Pagan.

It seems to me that there are a lot of “Pagan Parenting” resources, if you’re willing to look for them, but that most are geared towards teens and tweens, and most assume that the child is something of a blank slate – they basically become Pagan 101 for big kids (actually, most are Wicca 101 for big kids, but that’s another essay)…and that leaves those of us with littles, exposing them to Pagan beliefs every day, in something of a black hole.

Part of the problem, of course, is fear – fear that others will use our religion against our children, fear that “concerned citizens” will try to have our children taken away. But the truth is that there are bullies everywhere – even Christian kids get bullied…and if the rest of your life isn’t in a shambles (ie, your house isn’t filthy, there’s food to eat, the utilities are working, and your kids have a place to sleep), even children’s services isn’t likely to do more than ask some questions.

Another part of the problem, though, is how things are structured. Because our communities are so small, most of us are solitary practitioners most of the time, or we belong to covens and circles meant for adults. While there are more and more Pagan “church” organizations out there, it’s still hard to find places that are really open to having children in ritual, or who have plans for the Pagan version of “kids church” and/or “Sunday school.” It leaves us with no obvious way to fulfill both our personal spiritual needs and those of our children.

We don’t know *how* to raise our kids as Pagan children, because we weren’t Pagan as children, and we see so few children who really are Pagan. We see parents who raise their children to be open minded…parents who teach their children to write in magickal alphabets and to recite lists of correspondences…but these are the outer trappings of being Pagan, like going to church is to Christianity. Sure, most Christians go to church, but not all who go to church are truely Christian, and so it is with lighting incense and colored candles.

This sort of hole for parents of younger kids frustrates me…and you’d think it’d be a source of inspiration for an aspiring writer, but right now, what I need is simple, straightforward information, because I’m the mom of a toddler, and chronically sleep deprived.

It occurred to me this weekend why there’s such a clamoring for “more advanced” books. Yes, it’s partly because there are so many books for beginners, or near-beginners, and not a lot beyond that. But I think a bigger problem is that after a few years, we get stuck in this sort of mid-life crisis mode. 

Merriam-Webster (via dictionary.com) [1] says a mid-life crisis is “a period of emotional turmoil in middle age caused by the realization that one is no longer young and characterized especially by a strong desire for change.” And that captures a big part of it. We’re not newbies, we want to move forward, and we don’t know what to change or how to change, but something should change, because we’re more experienced now.

I realized that this is the root of the problem while taking a Reiki II class this weekend. While the instructors are competent and knowledgeable, I felt that I got very little new information out of the weekend. Energy work is energy work, guided meditations are guided meditations, and “energy exercises” are just modified (and somewhat non-sensical)  t’ai chi/qigong type exercises, and from my experience, the real thing has a lot more energy, especially when movements are done one after the other as a flow (and that flow teaches more about energy flow than any single exercise could) than the modified versions.

Maybe I would have felt different about this 8 or 10 years ago, before I had the understanding of energy work that I do now; before I’d had experiences that take things well beyond what we were learning in this class.

But the question remains: where do I go from here? I’m not a rank beginner, and haven’t been in a long while. I’m relatively comfortable in my practice, but looking for something deeper.  It’s like you start out on a path of stepping stones across a lake, and in the beginning, they’re close together, and as you learn more, each successive stone is a little farther away, until you get to a point where you’ll have to jump if you want to reach that next one without getting wet.

In modern American society, when you want to learn something, you find a book or a class or a seminar of some sort, and come out of it with some new insight. So, we go looking for those familiar forms.

However, we’re also talking about a mystery religion – a religion of experience. Books on these sorts of experiences are hard to write, since so much is just not explainable. There aren’t even all that many books that say, “this is what I did, I got something out of it, maybe you will too,” books out there, so it’s hard to know where to go first.

Most classes and seminars held at local shops (and even those at the few festivals I’ve been to) tend to either be introductory in nature (e.g., Wicca 101, Intro to Crystals, Basics of Runes) , or skill-based (e.g., make your own ritual clothing, how to make jewelry). So much so, that most of the time, there are few workshops that even sound interesting to me.

Maybe there are other festivals with more experiential workshops – if there are, they’re mostly too far for me to manage attending any time soon.

Reiki at least was a specific skillset that I didn’t have…and yet, much of what we did, I already knew, having figured it out on my own and then moved on a while back.

So, where does that leave us? I suspect it leaves us still trying to figure out how to reach that next stepping stone on the path without falling and hurting ourselves in the process. And maybe the real trick here is to jump off the stepping stones all together, and swim around a bit until we reach a dry spot.

[1] mid-life crisis. (n.d.). Merriam-Webster’s Medical Dictionary. Retrieved May 28, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: компютриhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mid-life crisis

Or, The Trials and Tribulations of Being a Hard Polytheist in the Modern Pagan World

I generally consider myself to be a hard polytheist: I believe that the various and sundry Gods and Goddesses are separate individuals.

But I believe this for a rather odd reason. I figure if it appears that there are many different Gods, with different personalities and histories and spheres of influence, it’s most practical to act as if they really are separate, until and unless there is some final convincing proof that they’re all from the same source. After all, if there is some single ultimate source, it had a good reason for appearing to be many different deities, so why not play along?

This pragmatic approach to religion disturbed some of my co-workers in the interfaith group when we discussed such things. They asked my opinion on what happened after death, and I said that I generally thought there was some form of reincarnation, except on days where I was feeling particularly skeptical, but that I also wasn’t convinced it mattered. When they asked why, I said, “Isn’t it true that most religions – certainly the religions of every person in this room – teach that we should do the best we can with this life, in order to get the best afterlife we can?” Well…yes…. “Ok, then why does it matter whether I get another life after this to try again, or weather I go to heaven or the summerlands, or some other afterlife – in the end, what really matters was what I did with this life. Everything else is just details for the divine to sort out when I die.”

This general take on things leads to some interesting problems in the community [1] at large. For example, I am a priestess of, and have studied with, a Dianic coven. In typical Dianic style, this group works with the triple-goddess archetype, and while they occasionally invoke (and even channel) specific Goddesses, it’s not done outside of the idea that this is just an Avatar of The Goddess (TM). Note that word “just” – when used this way, it often means, “merely” – nothing more than whatever you’re describing – which takes away the importance of the entire subject of the sentence.

When I started working with this group, a lot of my friends asked: why affiliate yourself with a group you don’t completely agree with?

The first bit of truth: there aren’t any groups out there that I agree with 100%.

The second bit of truth: If there was a reasonably serious recon group that allowed syncretic worship and innovation, and still allowed for the “mystery” and “magick” that Wicca takes as part and parcel, I’d be there in a heartbeat. In fact, if I thought I could get past the bad experiences I’ve had with a handful of more public covens, I think I’d manage to be quite happy and spiritually enriched in a solid BTW coven that allowed for some creativity without being overbearing or too entrenched in “One True Wayism.” I can’t be the only one who wants this type of thing.

Thus far, though, I haven’t found any groups that fit that combination. I’m sure some readers will say that their group is what I’m looking for. I’m open to suggestions, but really, I’ve investigated a lot of groups – recon groups, Wiccanesque groups, umbrella-type Pagan groups that claim to cater to everyone. You either get too fluffy, or too stuffy.

And frankly, those umbrella groups are the worst of the worst: “We are open to all paths!” they insist, but they follow the 8 Wiccan holidays with Wiccan style rituals…which doesn’t seem very interfaith to me, just like I don’t find “interfaith” groups comprised only of Catholics and Protestants to be particularly worthy of the interfaith definition either

So…what benefit is there from a group I disagree with on things, that other people around me consider fluffy? This one focuses on personal growth. It allows for calling specific Goddesses by name. Whether I see them as individuals is not important to the overall function of the group. But the downsides…no Gods. No men. Less than accurate scholarship.

I suspect before this is all done, I’ll end up creating my own little group. Because having walked away from my Dianic coven when they took off in directions I didn’t need to go, I kind of miss the overall group worship experience. And if all I wanted out of my worship experiences was to be with other people, I’d re-join a Christian church – it’s at least as far from my own practices as the average eclectic Wiccan group is these days, and it’s a much more functional community.

[1] and by community, I mean the loosely connected set of Pagan folk out there of various varieties, not that they’re actually a community – community involves shared interests, culture, or location, and I’m not convinced we Pagans really have any of these on a grand scale. But that’s another essay for another day.