Quaker Pagan Reflections

It’s raining. Just another rainy summer day.  I hear the sighing of the traffic moving by on the road.  The spatter of the drops from the gutter against the stones of the porch.  The softer sound of individual drops against the leaves and soil of potted plants, and beyond that, the steady, murmuring sound of rain on maple leaves, hemlock needles, pines. Probably because it is summer, and now that I am a school teacher, my summers are very much like those I had when I was a girl, growing up in a very similar New England landscape, my mind flows backward over all the rainy summer days of my childhood and adolescence.  Days I spent much as I have spent today: reading books, listening to the rain, venturing out into it, to the garden where a bird sits on a fence post, indifferent to the rain but timid of me. I wonder, idly, how many rainy summer days I have lived in my life, surrounded by wet maples and wet grass.  A thousand?  I make some...

Do I Pray? Cat asked me that over dinner last night, and I found I couldn’t easily give an answer. What, exactly, is prayer?  I find very different definitions if I think about it as a Quaker, as a Pagan, or (just recently) as a student of Tarot, and all three are different from what I thought of as prayer back when I was Christian. As a Christian, prayer meant talking to God.  There were prayers of praise, prayers of thanksgiving, and intercessory prayers asking God to help others or ourselves.  I did all three of these.  Sometimes it was spontaneous, standing by myself in the woods or in a garden, and sometimes it was recitation from the Book of Common Prayer or the monastic Ordo, but the God who heard me was always abstract and distant.  My prayers, like everything else about my spiritual life, were notional.  I thought about God, I had feelings about God–really intense feelings–but I never felt God . I remember once in a prayer and d...

Both Peter and I earn our living as teachers.  He teaches high school science–biology, chemistry, and environmental science–and I teach high school English.  All seniors this year, for me: they graduate tonight. Teaching Punctuation. Orr, 1869. Teaching offers an incredible amount of stress, an inconceivable workload, and more knowledge of the human heart than I perhaps want to have–some years, at any rate.  The best of humanity shows up in American classrooms…and the worst.   But I never need to wonder if my work has meaning in the world, and every year offers me another chance to get something right I didn’t get right before. It is also a job with a built in seasonal cycle–perfect for a Pagan–and built-in opportunities for reflection.  Every year, I can look back on a finite packet of my life, cock my head to one side, and think about what it has all meant. The end of every year of teaching offers its share of “To Sir with Love” momen...

Racism “involves an emotional dynamic that has disordered the heart both of society as a whole and of every person in the society… I want to know, as fully and exactly as I can, what the wound is and how much I am suffering from it. And I want to be cured; I want to be free of the wound myself, and I do not want to pass it on to my children.” –Wendell Berry, quoted in Yes Magazine’s current special issue on racism . This quote gave me a kind of shock of recognition when I came across it: this is exactly how I feel on the subject of racism. A couple of weeks ago, I was meditating on the ways witnessing against racism was so obviously connected to my life as a Quak er, but I wondered how it connected to my life as a Pagan. I’ve heard plenty of Pagans questioning it.  What does a political movement have to do with our religion?  Why do those of us writing about this have to go on and on about it? As I thought about it, I found myself thinking things alon...

Before I became a Quaker, I didn’t think about prayer very much. Oh, I engaged in it, from time to time, both in terms of formal, ritual invocations and spontaneous, sometimes heated conversations with my gods during hard times.  But it was not the first tool I would reach for, in my spiritual toolkit–probably spellcrafting was. Memorial Candle. Cat Bishop, 2015. I still do spells.  But more and more, I turn to prayer, both as a regular spiritual discipline, and as my go-to option when I am out of options.  In fact, I hope that I’m beginning to see prayer as an option to turn to sooner than that, because there are times when prayer is the only thing that comforts me–and because, after fourteen years as a Quaker, it’s getting to be a little embarrassing that I forget that prayer is an option that’s always open to me. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, in part because two Quaker friends of mine have written a book about prayer.  But ...

I am a Yankee.  Right down to my Pagan soul. My understanding of what it means to be a Pagan is to try to live in right relationship with the gods, the land, and the people, including the ancestors.  My gods are those that are comfortable in New England’s woods and hills.  My land is this rocky landscape of New England.  And my people and my ancestors–on Mom’s side, at least–are New Englanders: sea captains and dairy farmers, teachers and laborers.  Whatever granite is in this place or in my ancestors lives on in me and in my Pagan practice. Old Man of the Mountain stamp And that granite is why I am so driven to speak out against racism. To help me explain what I mean, I’m going to go ahead and borrow an ancestor: my friend Kirk White ‘s father. A Yankee like a Rock Kirk’s ancestors, like mine, were among the first Englishmen to arrive in North America.  Like mine, this landscape was where they found their home.  And like me, ...

By now, if you are a Pagan Internet addict like me, or one of the less than “. 25% of all of Pagandom ” that attended this year’s PantheaCon , you have already heard about the controversy sparked by PantyCon , the satirical workshop schedule that is, apparently, an annual feature of the gathering.  Among other offerings was this mock workshop listing on racism: Ignoring Racism: A Workshop for White Pagans Large Umbrella Pagan Group Isn’t all this talk of social justice and racism just tiring? Don’t you wish you could just ignore it and put out meaningless statements of pure pablum? We’ll discuss how to ignore requests for consideration by pagans of color, cover up racist actions of high-ranking members, and pretend that you don’t understand the resulting outrage. Remember, #AllLivesMatter, except when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient. Large Umbrella Pagan Group has been around for long enough that they think that they can get away with this stuff. This has...