We're guest blogging over at The Wild Hunt today. Come see!
When Nora, Peter's grandmother, lived with us , our household was the nucleus of an active local Pagan community. Over time, dementia eroded more and more of Nora's ability to retain anything she learned about in the present, so she wound up discovering again and again that she was living in a family of Pagans. Over and over, we would have made some reference to our Paganism, and Nora, having forgotten about it for the time being, would ask us to explain again what it was we believed. We would explain, yet again, about all of life being sacred to us, and nature being the source of our inspiration. Each time we did this, we would reach the point in our discussion where she would protest, quoting the line from Tennyson about " Nature, red in tooth and claw ." Nevertheless, we would insist that that was where we looked for the holy, and eventually, she would exclaim (just as she had the time before that): "Well, then, you're all heathens!" When we ...
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I was to have attended another private Pagan retreat week this coming week--the first in about two years--but the closing on the house conflicts with it! Still, I hope to go next year, and perhaps organize a morning meeting for worship among that tribe. :-)
I miss spending more time with my Pagan community. But I got to keep the lessons they taught me, and the friendships, and I still love to spend time there when I can.
I should write more about that, I think. I go through waves of intense fear and anxiety, almost to the point of paranoia, when I try to fully enter a new community for the first time. Thus far, it has always been worth it--though I've been burned, and badly, more than once.
Souris--the bit about betrayal by other humans in community as a bug and not a feature has been hard won. I did not feel this way once upon a time. Certainly, my becoming Quaker has intensified my sense that forgiveness is both harder than we like to believe and more essential to living fully and freely and in the Spirit... but I was growing into that knowledge anyway.
Probably the place I've written about that process the most clearly is in my spiritual journey series, especially in parts 8 through 12. It is still something I wrestle with constantly: I am by nature judgmental, at least a teensy bit arrogant, and quick to anger.
Happily, I think I'm also quick to love, and relatively quick to let go of anger. But this process of learning that, pitiful as human beings are, it is my job, as another human, to learn to love and forgive them... it has been both difficult and rich. And I'm not done yet!
Thank you for your comments. Blessed be.