We're guest blogging over at The Wild Hunt today. Come see!
Pagans often argue about how to define who we are. What are the boundaries--between Wicca and Witchcraft, between Heathens and Pagans, between polytheists, pantheists, and non-theists... While I could do without the acrimony, we're a new as well as an old religious movement, so it makes sense that like any adolescent, we are fascinated by questions of identity. I will admit to preferring the Quaker approach to identity, though: rather than trying to create the definitive checklist of belief that make someone a "real Quaker," Friends typically share a body of testimonies and questions for reflection with those who are drawn to the Religious Society of Friends. "Do you feel this same sort of spiritual leading?" Friends ask one another. "Does this speak to the condition of your soul, as it does to ours?" Queries, not checklists of doctrine, hold the ways Quakers approach discernment, including around membership. And though no individual can declar...
Comments
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.