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 ...

My last two posts were a personal reflection on some of the ways that trying to live my spiritual life true to the experiences I've had over the past seven years may have changed who I am in very basic ways. When I began writing them, I didn't yet see the ways these posts dovetailed with the topic of my guest blog at The Wild Hunt . Now, though, they seem intimately connected: when we approach our spiritual lives as lived experiences, we necessarily open ourselves to the possibility of radical change--change at the root. That's unnerving, of course. But if we rise to the challenge, and allow our understandings to change in response to our experiences of God /the gods, I believe we will find ourselves living as we were meant to live, and growing as we were meant to grow. If we have the courage to be willing to let go of what we believe our religious life ought to be about, and instead, accept it on our own terms, we might just learn a thing or two. If you are interested ...

(Continued from Part 1 of 2) So, from the moment I felt the first stirrings of the Spirit of Peace within me, my easygoing relationship to polytheism was under threat. It would all, from a Pagan point of view, have been so much easier if I had only been called by, say, Pugsley the Peace God. No problems accepting a Quaker Pagan whose god was one among the many! But it is not Pugsley I follow, and that does complicate matters. There are, after all, Pagan gods whose interests are those of the warrior, and many Pagans have personal codes which more closely resemble Bushido than the peace testimony. One of my favorite Pagan scholars and writers, the courteous and peace loving Brendan Cathbad Myers , has just written a book, The Other Side of Virtue . I'm looking forward to reading it; I have listened to the chapter he read aloud at Deo's Shadow , and I found it fascinating how he drew the connections he did between heroic cultures, their literature and history, and a possibly s...

Sometimes, as I'm posting yet another reflection on yet another interaction with the world of Quakers, I'll ask myself, "What's so Pagan about Quaker Pagan Reflections?" Once or twice, doing some completely unrelated thing--folding my socks, for instance, or making soup--I'll hear a tiny voice saying, "You're a Quaker." As in, unhyphenated, plain ol', stop-being-so-bloody-precious-about-it, Quaker -style Quaker. Regular readers may have noticed that I drop the "G" word around here with some regularity. God --as a word, at least, capitalized and used as a singular proper noun--makes regular appearances in my writing. My weekly and even monthly routines revolve around my Quaker meeting, to an extent that they no longer do around the local Pagan community. I no longer run a coven, teach classes on Paganism, or even write about it, as something separate from my Quaker life, all that much. I may very well attend no Pagan gathering...

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 ...