Quaker Pagan Reflections

Over at The Wild Hunt , Jason Pitzl-Waters has just posted his coverage of new revelations   regarding Marion Zimmer Bradley and child sexual abuse. When the story broke this spring of Kenny Klein’s arrest for child pornography, I felt a powerful need to speak to that story, and to share what I could of the professional expertise I’d gained as a therapist working with survivors of childhood sexual abuse.  I was grateful that Jason gave me a platform for sharing that work, and that so many people read it and understood it. I’m not writing from that perspective today.  Today, I’m granting myself the luxury of responding just as myself, for myself, as the human being who carries the memories of doing the work that I did ten years ago. What follows… is about me.  This is what I feel today. I feel sad.  Of course I do. I’m saddened, not so much because of the place Bradley has had in so many Pagan hearts as because it is simply one more story of ...

by Peter Bishop Each month, Cat and I light candles in observance of the full moon and in honor of the Mother Goddess, for whom the moon is a symbol. It’s a practice taught to us by our Wiccan teachers about twenty years ago and one we still follow even after thirteen years in the Society of Friends. Looking up at the sky this past month, I found myself thinking about how people have been looking up at the moon with wonder and following its cycles since before we were fully human. In a sense, we’ve been doing this forever. This year at school I’ve been teaching an astronomy unit for the very first time, and as I lit my candle this month I was also thinking about the origin of the moon. Four and a half billion years ago the planet Theia, about the size of Mars, collided with the Earth. Theia disintegrated completely, Earth’s crust was melted, and the Earth’s axis was knocked into its23½ degree tilt, giving us the seasons. If there was life on Earth back then, i...

One of the dangers of being Quaker--or Pagan--is a privilege at the same time. Quakers and Pagans share a somewhat counter-cultural view of our society.  In slightly different ways, most Quakers and most Pagans believe that human society is flawed in bitterly destructive ways that must be confronted and changed.  We look out at a world burdened by the selfish exploitation of whole nations of human beings, and of the ecosystem itself, and we know that things as they are are not OK. David Shankbone 2011 The privilege and the danger that arises from this is that of associating with activists. It's a privilege, of course, to have a chance to be inspired by those who are willing to risk imprisonment or even death to be faithful to their spiritual convictions.  This inspirational force is excellent for warding off complacency and the kind of internal self-congratulation that degrades possessing a moral compass into mere spiritual materialism and self-worship. When...