Quaker Pagan Reflections

To the many Pagans who said supportive things about my last post --thank you. Your kindness was much appreciated. That said, this one is going to be a pretty Quaker-centric post--I don't want you to think your support wasn't important, though, so I'm mentioning it first. If, to strain a metaphor I used in my last post , the Quaker family had put me out on the street, it would be difficult to explain the many supportive comments I received. I wrote that last post, " Theologically Queer ," feeling braced against rejection by the Quaker community. But almost as soon as the post went up, folks began trickling out of the house and sitting down next to me on the curb. Really kind, lovable folks. And nobody called me names, or even pointed out how silly I was being. Nope. They just came out to see how I was, and to wait patiently with me until I felt a bit better. Peggy Senger Parsons --a woman I consider to be one of the spiritual grown-ups of the world--came out and ...

A few months ago, I had the chance to speak at length to religion-writer Matthew Streib . The article he wrote, " Pagans Find a Sometimes Uneasy Home Among Quakers ", has just appeared on the Modern Reformation website. Others whose work or interviews contributed to the article include Stasa Morgan-Appel , Carl McColman , and Marshall Massey , all of whom might be familiar to readers of this blog. For more on the "small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan," see Streib's article .

I was recently at Jeff Lilly's Druid Journal , and a post and comments thread there evoked something from me I've been trying to say since summer, though it has never come out right before. Maybe it isn't right even yet, but it's the closest I've come... As we've written before, Peter and I deliberately sought out workshops and activities at New England Yearly Meeting this past August that we hoped would be challenging to us. Obviously, we're what would have to be termed, not just liberal Quakers, but universalist Quakers. At different times and in different ways, Peter and I both have taken a look at Christianity, as it is currently practiced and understood in our culture, and determined that, to say the least, it did not "speak to our condition." I've never been Christian--Peter was at one time, but walked away. (That's a story I hope he'll share some day, so I won't touch on it here, for him.) Instead, the religious path t...