Quaker Pagan Reflections

They probably should never let Pagans own Bibles, much less read them. (Too late now.) I'm up to Job . Though this post is going to be more inspired by an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish's play J.B . , based on Job, than by the Biblical text itself. Bear with me. Job is probably the central book of the Bible for Pagans, whether we've read it or not. However monotheists might come to terms with it, Job cannot satisfy the polytheistic Pagan mind. Job, of course, is the story of the long suffering and faithful man whose trust in God is put to the test by God--and thereby, indirectly, the omnipotent, omniscient God himself is tested. And (theoretically) vindicated. Theodicy: "The vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil," says my Oxford American Dictionary, though "suffering" is probably a better word, to my mind, than "evil". The intellectual problem, as Archibald MacLeish had his version of Satan put it,...

I’ve become quite lax in the last few weeks about throwing around the word “God.” I talk about “the light of God” and I don’t really stop to ask which God. Quaker worship and Quaker conversations tend to encourage that. The Light that we experience in meeting really doesn’t announce itself by name, and the Biblical names for G*d that Christ-centered Quakers like to use simply do not map onto Quaker experience (at least not onto my experience) or onto the Biblical narrative with anything like one-to-one correlation. When I first became Pagan, when I tried for the first time using a polytheist perspective in thinking about the divine, I asked myself What are the Gods? And what do they want of us? I don’t claim any Revealed Truth on this question, but the tentative answers that I came up with twenty years ago still work for me. I imagine a thundercloud, and lightning striking the ground. The clouds are undifferentiated and cover the entire sky (God is one, infinite and unknowab...

Part I: A freaky little book Part II: A Convergent Conversation / Small Gods Part III: The Human Face of God / And the LORD saw what He had made… Part IV: A few things missing Part V: An Evolving Covenant / The Initiatory Challenge Postscript: The Expulsion from Eden Afterward: Why does it matter? This series of posts began as entries in my journal, and I had some concerns that publishing them could seriously offend people. I’m glad to see that the comments so far have been positive. More than that—I’m glad to see that I’m not being taken as just sarcastic and cynical. The Human Face of God People talk about the God of the Old Testament being grand and majestic and cosmic, in contrast to the New Testament where Jesus takes on human form so that we can relate to him. And, yeah, the chapters prior to the Flood have God doing things like creating Heaven and Earth and establishing day and night. But those creation stories really seem like an afterthought. Gods se...

Part I: A freaky little book Part II: A Convergent Conversation / Small Gods Part III: The Human Face of God / And the LORD saw what He had made… Part IV: A few things missing Part V: An Evolving Covenant / The Initiatory Challenge Postscript: The Expulsion from Eden Afterward: Why does it matter? Fair warning: I am a starry-eyed neophyte in the area of Old Testament theology. I’m reading the Hebrew Scriptures for the first time, and while I’m gobbling down several commentaries along with it, my observations here are anything but scholarly. Fair warning #2: I'm going to be a bit irreverent at times. So many of the stories and anecdotes in Genesis are as familiar to me as Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood, and when they’re told out of context, they have that same kind of storybook quality as the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but when the stories are read within the whole book of Genesis, but without all of the pious Christian preconceptions that I grew up wi...

OK. This one's going to be a bit notional. Here goes: I've been challenged by A. Venefica of Symbolic Meanings and Mahud of Between Old and New Moons to participate in their mythology synchroblog on duality . You might think that would be an easy task, for a Pagan trained in two traditions of Wicca. After all, Wicca is known (sometimes a bit sneeringly ) among other Pagans for its duotheism . The Mysteries of Wicca are expressed in terms of duality, and especially that of gender. Male/female. Goddess/God. In Christianity, the world is understood through relationship: the relationship between a Father and his children (and especially, his Son). In Wicca, the world is also understood through relationship: a sexual relationship between the Goddess and the God, and a parental one with the world that is the product of their union. The world is not made, not created, but born out of that love. (I am aware there are variations on this theme. Please do not write me and no...

I had a somewhat interesting experience with spontaneous prayer today. Heavy snow is often good for that. Our Fulbright exchange teacher, Mr. R., carpools with me to and from work each day--a very reasonable arrangement, since I'm his mentor teacher this year. I've enjoyed the exchange of educational ideas a lot, and the cultural exchange has been pretty rich, too. The initial difficulties I had , trying to communicate with him around religion, have mostly resolved since my earlier post on the subject; on a day near Samhain , he was asking about American Halloween customs, and somewhere in the midst of my multi-cultural, multi-religious attempt at explanation, something clicked. He made the connection between Hindu traditions honoring ancestors and the dead from his native India, and my family's Samhain practices. There was a brief, deeply awkward silence--as a Christian and (I thank Marcus Borg for the terminology) a Biblical literalist, he disapproves of Hindusim--and...

This one's not part of my spiritual journey series , though it reflects on it to some extent... Yesterday, in meeting for worship, one of our members described having had pointed out to her, on a recent tour of Salem, Massachusetts, the site where a Puritan-era Quaker had chosen to "go naked for a sign"--as a testimony against Puritanism, presumably. That member then asked us, in a quiet, powerful voice, how we make our lives speak. After settling back into worship, a series of related messages came through. I'll report only on those that spoke to me strongly: In our modern world, how do we choose words to make ourselves "naked" and vulnerable to one another, and how do we choose words to separate us from one another, to hide us, and to make us safe? If we must have a name for ourselves as a people, why not "pacifists"? The practice of "going naked for a sign" goes back to Isaiah, Ch. 20, where Isaiah was directed to do so by God, as a...

Spiritual Identity and Membership Series: Part 1: Quakerpagan or Paganquaker - Part 2: Membership and Identity - Part 3: Marshall Massey Replies The following is a reply by Marshall Massey of Earth Witness Journal to my post about Membership and Identity. I think it raises points that are important enough to both Quakers and Pagans that I want to feature it in a post of its own rather than have it tucked away as an appended comment. Marshall’s reply: --------------------- Friends Peter and Cat, you don't have to publish this comment on your site if you don't want to; you can read it and then delete it, and that's fine with me. I'm not sure what I am about to say is better discussed on an open forum than in private e-mail. But since I am mentioned in the opening paragraph of this post, I believe I have a bit of a duty to respond. The truth may be either that there are many things we call "divine", or that the divine has many faces. Different paths take one t...