Quaker Pagan Reflections

I was out in the back yard a few weeks ago, and I looked up and saw the full moon, brilliant and sharp in a clear night sky.  Seeing it, I found myself quietly singing a song by the ritual performance group Mothertongue : "The Moon is high at the witching hour, Children come to this place of power; Our hands are raised to four directions, Spirit force is born again." I felt a wave of awareness of the magickal quality of its beauty, very like the feeling I once had of walking into a Benedictine monastery when I was a young man and feeling the Holy Spirit settling over my shoulders like a warm blanket. And somehow, the beauty reminded me of how important it is to me that the Gods are persons.  I’ve been reading Plotinus, a neoplatonist philosopher, and he’s fascinating.  His Enneads are one of the foundational texts of western mysticism and magick…but he’s missing something.  It’s the same thing I found missing in the Tao Te Ching .  Taoists and neoplatonists both stri

Cat at Laurelin.  Peter Bishop, 2011. Welcome to the new, hopefully improved Quaker Pagan Reflections. Between leaving Patheos Pagan and this post, Peter has finished the last edit on his novel and begun to pitch it to agents, I have been in negotiations with Anne Newkirk Niven of Pagan Square to carry our blog starting this fall, we have redesigned our layout, and--oh yes! I have also retired from my work as a high school English teacher. It has been a summer like any other, in many ways: bike rides and trips to the beach, gardening and canning and time with friends. It has also involved daily trips to Peter's parents in their assisted living center, grief and worry over their failing health and their futures, and for me, a fair amount of soul searching around what to do with Act III of my life. We have spent more time in meetings with caseworkers and at protests than at the beach, and I have been focused on trying to discern how to be faithful to the promptings of Spiri