Quaker Pagan Reflections

I ‘ve been having a really wonderful spring. Four different essays of mine have been included in new anthologies, one of Peter’s writing projects has finally come to fruition, and I’m thrilled about them all. First, I was asked to contribute an essay on preventing and addressing sexual abuse in the Pagan community to the anthology on Pagan Consent Culture edited by Christine Hoff Kraemer and Yvonne Aburrow .  Since my copy arrived, I have spent an awful lot of time simply admiring it–there is something wonderful about having something you’ve written in an actual, physical book. As for reading it–well, Peter has been hogging my copy for weeks now.  The spirituality of sexuality is something of a ministry of his–in fact, this spring marks the conclusion of a five-year project he’s been part of, working on a statement of Quaker sexual ethics.  His book–or rather, his committee’s–will also be on sale this summer, through New England Yearly Meeting, the bo...

I ’m feeling a bit torn this morning.  It’s time to head out to meeting for worship, and I’ve been kept away from worship far too often this winter; I really feel the need to be there. On the other hand, I’ve been just a little under the weather for the past two weeks, and physically exhausted for no reason all weekend.  If I go to meeting, I doubt I’ll have the energy for anything else: not shopping for groceries, not cooking the staples for the week, not grading the stack of student essays on my desk. And certainly not celebrating Beltane.  And that does not seem acceptable to me. So I’m staying home, but, as I said, I’m feeling a bit torn by all that needs to be done, and how little energy I seem to have this week to do it with. Which puts me in mind of a story… Once upon a Beltane , Peter and I were at a Church of the Sacred Earth retreat in northern Vermont.  Despite being almost on the Canadian border, it was warm that year, and we wer...

Sign Number Five Is Ready for Business… Dear Thief  Who Keeps Stealing My Black Lives Matter Sign,   Thank you. W hile I realize it was never your intent to encourage me, I want you to know: your efforts have made a real difference to me.  In the nine months since I first put up a hand-lettered Black Lives Matter sign in front of my house, you have taken or vandalized it five times. Now, I know that’s not record breaking: one friend in the area has had her sign stolen or vandalized nine times.  Still, I want you to know how much your efforts have meant to me. When the Peace and Social Concerns Committee of my Quaker meeting took the suggestion that we, too, put up a sign in front of our building, the one reservation that I heard expressed was that the Black Lives Matter movement was “just on social media.” And it is true that without the connections I’ve made through social media, I might still believe that racism was on the ropes, a thing o...

I spent most of today’s Quaker meeting in tears. This is a thing that happens to me sometimes. I’m working on not being too self-conscious about it when that happens, or at least not fighting it.  I used to say that I wished I wouldn’t cry when I feel spiritually full–or at least, that I could cry more attractively.  (I’m the sort who gets a blotchy face and a runny nose when I cry.)  These days, I’m trying to be tougher, and more faithful: If Spirit wants me to cry, dammit, I’ll cry.  If Spirit wants me to get a runny nose, I’ll bring a hanky.  (I specialize in big ones.) I’m telling you this because I don’t want you to think I’m a gushing sentimentalist… but maybe I need to toughen up about that, too. If Spirit wants you to see me as a sappy, ridiculous woman, I’ll be seen as a sappy ridiculous woman. So be it. Today was a day my waterworks were turned on. At our meeting, ten minutes into worship is when the little kids leave.  ...

L ast night, as I laid the hearth for my family’s celebration of Imbolc, I found myself reaching for my camera, to take a quick shot of the altar… and then I hesitated.  I’d laid that altar for Brigid; what did it say about me that my instinct had been to photograph it for a blog? Not This Year’s Altar, Cat Chapin-Bishop, 2013. I realized it didn’t feel right to snap a picture of the hearth–that, in a way, it was no different than drinking the offering we’d left there.  The altar was not for me, and it wasn’t even for my community, but for my gods. It felt like photographing the altar would have been a kind of theft. In the end, I left the picture untaken. One of the dangers of writing about my spiritual life is that I risk getting my priorities scrambled.  It’s the “here I am wasn’t I” of meditation raised to a near-infinite degree; by recording my spiritual life, I risk making the recording, and not the life, the center ...

I t has been cold in New England this week.  More than once, I’ve awakened to find the temperature in my bedroom had dropped to a brisk 54 degrees or so (about 12 degrees Celsius), and the windchill outside something in the single digits.  It is hard to force myself out of bed in the darkness, and my fingers hurt as I turn the key in the lock to my front door when I leave for work. Photo by Peter Bishop, 2012. But as I commute, the sun comes up, and the sky becomes so large overhead.  My classroom is flooded with winter light during the school week, and at home, I bask like a lizard in the strong, sloped sunshine.  Counter-intuitive as it might seem, I love this time of year. Sometimes I say that to friends online, only to have them answer as though I must be being sarcastic.  This is the time of year I begin to receive reports from friends in warmer climes about the warm weather they are having, or even the new starts in their gardens. ...

I remember when Martin Luther King Day was first declared a Federal holiday, how Arizona’s Governor Meecham repealed the previous governor’s establishment of the holiday there, and how Jesse Helms led opposition to it in Congress, on the grounds that King was unpatriotic, a Communist sympathizer, and not “important” enough to be honored with a holiday. We all knew what they really meant, just as I knew what the childhood friend who dismissed it as “a black holiday” was calling black people in the privacy of his own mind. It was the 1980s, and it was pretty clear that what people who had trouble with celebrating Martin Luther King Day really had trouble with was racial justice. Which is why it may seem odd that now, in the year 2016, I’m having some trouble with Martin Luther King Day myself. One of the more painful things I’ve observed, since I began speaking out against racism, is the degree to which white people have taken a sanitized, safe, domesticated version of ...