Recent conversations with Pagans, in person and online, are bubbling up for me this morning, bringing with them troubling thoughts. Do we care more about our rituals than we do about our gods? It's happened more than once, lately, that the response to some concern expressed among us has been a rather pat, "I wrote a really good ritual about that, once." As though the authorship was the main thing; as though the performance of a ritual script was enough to settle whatever questions living posed us. I'm not knocking a good ritual. But surely, the point of ritual is communion, relationship, and change--not carving a notch on a staff or athame. We seem to think that rituals work if they're good theater, if they move a human audience. We rarely ask if they are of any interest at all to any other audience. Indeed, I've heard Pagans go on at length about how nothing any individual one of us can do would ever attract the attention of a god, and that those
Welcome to the online journal of a pair of Quaker Pagans.