Quaker Pagan Reflections

(3rd of 3 Ruminations on Class Issues) The Spiritual Journey so far: Prologue I: Peter In Kenya Prologue II: A Liberal Christian With Balls Part I: A Refugee Looks Back Part II: Leaving Home Part III: Who Am I? Part IV: Learning About Race and Gender Part V: Watching My Students Drown Part VI: Animal Bones Where I first consciously bumped up against class issues was in one of my first teaching jobs, when I was in special education.  One class I taught was 20th Century History, to a group of five high school students with issues ranging from severe dyslexia to mild or moderate retardation.  Three of them were overtly racist, and it was clear from day one that a lot of high-falutin’ liberal political theory was not going to talk them out of that.  Like any good public school teacher, I challenged racist language whenever they used it.  But how much actually got through?  I remember trying to explain to a kid that being proud of his Italian-America...

(2nd of 3 Ruminations on Class Issues) The Spiritual Journey so far: Prologue I: Peter In Kenya Prologue II: A Liberal Christian With Balls Part I: A Refugee Looks Back Part II: Leaving Home Part III: Who Am I? Part IV: Learning About Race and Gender Part V: Watching My Students Drown Part VI: Animal Bones I left Yale for three reasons:  I seemed to be the only biology major in the entire school who wanted to be a biologist rather than a doctor.  (“Failure” at Yale: not getting into any medical schools.)  The neighborhoods of New Haven surrounding the school really were dangerous to walk through, with several muggings and rapes of students every semester.  But the thing that really drove me away was how the dynamic of rich white Yalies ensconced within Gothic battlements with moats and iron gates amidst a sea of urban blight, violence, and poverty was a recipe for explosive racial tensions, both town/gown and within the student body.  Everyone kn...

(1st of 3 Ruminations on Class Issues) The Spiritual Journey so far: Prologue I: Peter In Kenya Prologue II: A Liberal Christian With Balls Part I: A Refugee Looks Back Part II: Leaving Home Part III: Who Am I? Part IV: Learning About Race and Gender Part V: Watching My Students Drown Part VI: Animal Bones I started writing my spiritual journey a couple of years ago, right after coming back from a visit to Kenya.  I was trying to go more or less chronologically, and I got bogged down trying to write about an event in my 20’s—transferring schools from Yale to Oberlin—that was full of pain and passion at the time but now, looking back on it, feels like musty old history. I’m picking it up again because there are conversations beginning at my Quaker meeting about issues of race and class and inclusivity in our meeting.  The next three pieces of this journey come from things I wrote as part of that dialogue, starting with just trying to get my bearings on where I...

“Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf.” - Terence Mckenna If we accept that land is alive, and has spirit and the ability to communicate to us how (and whether) it wants to relate to us, how do we find out what that is? I've said that I respect Andras's family's patience in learning to hear from their land before diving in to constructing sacred sites on it, and it's something that I think Peter and I share.  But what is it that we're "hearing," and how are we best to listen for it? This is where Andras's ideas and mine diverge--in theory, if not in practice. I'm tempted to go into detail here, explaining some examples of what happens when Pagans don't listen to the land, but instead arbitrarily impose their preconceived notions about what kinds of shrines they "get" to construct on land once they own it.  Unfortunately, if I give specific examples, those who have been to those sites or were the ones to build them will ...

At the beginning of February, I got to go to Earthspirit's  Feast of Lights .  When I was there, I got to attend  Andras Corban Arthen's "Sacred Land: an Anamanta Workshop." I've enjoyed Andras's teaching ever since I was a little Witchling and I took his Witchcraft 101 classes.  It was nice having beginner-oriented stuff that wasn't condescending or lightweight, and even though it was obvious in his survey of all the different sorts of Witches he'd encountered that he liked his own tradition best, he did real justice to the subject, and offered enough practical ideas that I took home something to think about. Twenty-five years later, and he's still at it--making me think.  Not enough of us really think about how our Paganism connects us to the local landscape.  I know that I've thought about it more and more since moving to our house at the edge of the woods , and I was ready to look at my relationship with the earth in new ways.  I got...

I've been laboring for a while to put into words just what makes community such a necessary part of spiritual life.  I don't mean by this that it is wrong or a failure for any of us attempt to stay faithful and connected to our gods alone; I don't mean to echo the words of Gerald Gardner, who said we could not "be a Witch alone."  Sometimes all magic, whether of a Pagan or a Quaker variety, has to happen in solitude.  Sometimes there is no community that is hearing the music we hear; sometimes we are called away, on our own; and sometimes, solitude is for a time precisely what we are called to experience. But solitude in itself can never allow us to find our fullest spiritual growth. Without a community around us that is also striving for direct experience of Spirit, our own efforts in that direction will be held back.  For one thing, when the men and women around us are good at going deep, they tend to pull us deeper along with them.  I think of that a...

If you are a reader, you probably know the feeling.  Having moved from one house or apartment to another, you find yourself wanting to take down a particular book, and you know exactly where it is... in your old home. That kind of phantom access, to a world that is no longer there, is more and more familiar to me as I age.  So often I will catch myself in a reverie, thinking of a friend or vista from my past... and somehow, the past feels like that misplaced book: I know exactly where it was, and it is a struggle, sometimes, to remember that I will never again walk down the halls of my old high school (they've torn the building down) or jump off the swingset I had as a child, or crawl inside the hollow log that used to lie hidden in a wood that is itself, no longer there. The past feels present to me, and I reach out my hand for it, only to discover with puzzlement over and over again that it is gone--at least, gone in the shape I knew. Last spring, we lost a neighbor ....