Quaker Pagan Reflections

I spent most of today's meeting for worship lifting rocks. That may not sound very much like worship, or very much like fun, but, in fact, it was both. Here's how it went: Very often, when I enter the meeting room at Mt. Toby, I pause a moment just inside the door, and let the richness of the waiting silence rise up in me. For just a moment, I like to savor the sense of standing at the edge of the sacred precinct, the temenos. Our meeting room is plain. Some members complain about the slight musty smell from the carpet. (It's kind of a guilty secret of mine that I almost like that smell; it is such a reminder of the basement rec rooms of my youth that I immediately feel six years old when I smell it.) Others complain that, surrounded by so much beautiful farmland, our windows are placed too high to see through. I, however, love our meeting room with a deep and perhaps idolatrous love--entirely in character for a Pagan Quaker. And part of what I love about it is the way...

One of my favorite bloggers, though his posts are not so frequent as I might wish, is Will T., of Growing Together in the Light .  Today, scrolling randomly through the lists of places my visitors came from on their way to my blog, I encountered a link to a post of Will's I hadn't read before, from 2006. I haven't anything to add to it, or any insightful comment or anecdote to carry it into some new territory.  But I feel that I must quote it here, because it is so beautiful and so true:  … I felt that we had dropped down until we had come into the gathered silence of the Meeting for Worship that has been going on since before the world was formed and which will continue on until after the world has ended. The world is being held, will always be held, has always been held, in this worship. I was blessed to step into this worship briefly but it is still going on.  Now, even though I cannot usually feel it, and sometimes I forget, I know that the world is being held in this ...

There was a lot that was rich today in our meeting for worship, and I am tempted to try to transliterate it all onto the page of this blog. But I don't think I could capture the life of the messages, and that's not really what I think I need to write about tonight, anyway. Instead, I want to write about something that rose for me that was entirely personal: an encounter with the god with arms. Liz Opp at The Good Raised Up recently picked up the thread of my Quaker Pagan identity posts from this month , and used them to reflect on the process of transitioning from one spiritual identity to another . In responding to her post, trying to reflect once again on what it is in Paganism that makes me continue to identify as Pagan as well as Quaker, I think I implied that I do so primarily out of loyalty to Pagans as a people. I think I implied it because I have wondered it--is this my only real reason for staying? I don't often write here of my relationships with the gods of ...