Quaker Pagan Reflections

Yesterday, Jason Pitzl-Waters of The Wild Hunt wrote an email wondering what Pagans feel regarding this week's Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act , and about the ACA generally.  My first reaction was that I really had nothing to say on the subject... as a Pagan, that is.  I do have my own opinions, to be sure, but at first blush, I didn't see them as grounded in my religion. Upon further reflection, I have to say that, yes, I do. Pagans as a group are a pretty political bunch, and of course my Pagan friends have had a lot to say over the past few months leading up to the Supreme Court's decision.  I've heard from friends on the far Right, who would like us to abolish the Federal Income Tax (never mind the ACA) and friends on the far Left, who would like to see us abolish private insurance altogether, and nationalize health care entirely. What I haven't heard is very much discussion of the ACA grounded in our spiritual beliefs rather...

It is dangerous to express ethical or philosophical positions in poetry. People will react to the outward forms rather than to what is said. Great evil may be excused if it has artistic merit, and great good discounted if it seems trite or derivative. I think this is part of why the early Quakers were so stodgy, rejecting music and theater and always dressing in grey. I think it's also why modern Friends still place such a high value on plain speech. A rhetorical flourish might help me to win an argument with you, but in so doing, cost me the benefit of your wisdom. The corporate process of listening for the leadings of Spirit means listening deeply to one another, and that works best when each of us speaks our portion of the Truth with neither preamble nor apology, trusting that if the message is Spirit-led, it will be heard on its own merits. This is all true. And in spite of it all, I have written a sonnet. Light and Darkness One My mind cannot deny my body’s truth. The pa...

This past weekend, Mt. Toby Friends Meeting held a weekend-long retreat. About sixty Friends gathered at Woolman Hill, a Quaker retreat center that’s about half an hour to the north. Many of us stayed there Friday and Saturday nights; others commuted. The Friends attending included slightly more than half the regular attenders at our meeting. One of the queries that was asked early on in the gathering was, “What do you most long for in your faith family?” Some of us felt more comfortable with the phrase “spiritual community,” but the question was valid for all of us. What I said I most craved—what I have been longing for my whole life, really—are spiritual intimacy and a sense of shared meaningful work. I have had this at a couple of points in my life. At Oberlin I felt like organic gardening and left-wing Christianity could save the world, and in the Oberlin Farm Co-op I felt like we were beginning to do it. In my 30’s, in the Church of the Sacred Earth, I felt like we were inv...

I find myself almost incredulous at how deep a vein of contentment I can find in a single afternoon at home. I love my home: my house, my garden, my woods.  I've understood for many years that buying stuff, things , doesn't actually build much contentment once I'm not in need.  I'll think, when I contemplate buying a new whatzit, that once I have that whatzit I'll be happy; I envision all the good and satisfying things I will be able to accomplish once I have my whatzit.  And, of course, once I have purchased it, brought it home, and unpacked it, it's only a matter of days or weeks before I'm no happier in my daily round than before I got hold of it. This house has not been like that for me.  It's actually pretty rare that I come home without thinking, as I walk up to my door, open it, and slip inside, "I really love this house." I think that is because a house, like land, is not really a thing at all.  Properly considered, we don't o...

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 ...

And amazing. This is tonight's harvest.  After several nights of frost, and 18" of snow in a blizzard that left us without power for about 48 hours. Bok choi, carrots, Swiss chard, and mustard greens, gathered from the snow.

I love Saturdays. I have come to think of the work that I do on Saturdays as "farming."  Now, I know it isn't farming--not really.  We have a medium-sized vegetable garden and two dogs, and that's not a farm, by any stretch of the imagination.  But I keep thinking of a comment Joel Salatin made in Yes Magazine once, about how Americans have become used to thinking of our homes as centers of consumption, but how once, thinking of your home as a center of production (typically, a farm, for most of us for most of our history) was the norm. And between trying to live with less plastic junk and trying to eat more sustainably and locally, Saturdays at home have become very productive days.  And that productivity--the willingness to substitute patience, skill, and thrift for consumption--I've come to think of as a species of farming.  (My apologies to actual farmers, whose work I increasingly appreciate.  But thinking in this way works for me, somehow.) ...