Quaker Pagan Reflections

To write is to share the truth of your life, of your heart. Now, I don’t mean to be pretentious here.  I’m aware that, while Quaker Pagan Reflections has a certain value, it’s not earth-shaking or transformative.  Neither Peter nor I are a Walt Whitman, a Henry David Thoreau, or even an Ursula LeGuin.  But we do our best to speak our own truths, our own hearts, and on some level, our relative lack of skill is not the point.  We’re trying to be honest–we’re trying to share what is real in our lives. In my life offline, I am a teacher in a small, rural high school.  The kids aren’t perfect (what kids are?) and we don’t have all the resources we need (what public school does?) but we’re a small enough school so that hardly anyone gets lost in a crowd.  I get to know my “kids,” my students.  I get to know their stories–not always, but often. And I get to teach them writing–and, with seniors, I get to guide them through what can be the ...

If I had a prayer that I were going to recite on a daily or weekly basis, what would it say? The question came to me recently when I heard “A Prayer for Today,” written by Phillips Brooks.  He was an Episcopalian theologian in the 19th century, best known for having written “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”  The prayer was sort of a riff on the Lord’s Prayer, and like the Lord’s Prayer, it gave a laundry list of a dozen or so of what the author felt are the most important things in life.  There were parts of it I liked a great deal, other parts less so, and of course it had to conclude “in the name of…our only…” because Christians—even the most liberal of them—seem to feel they cannot honor that one manifestation of the Divine without putting down all the others. But never mind that.  Hearing it got me thinking, if I were to write my own ‘prayer for today’ to bring before the Gods or to hold in the Light, what would I ask? Cat and I have had an occasion...

I am utterly inconsistent in the spiritual language that I use.  One day, I will write “Spirit.”  Another day, I will write, “God,” or “gods.”  Here’s why: Outside my window, I can hear the forest breathe. It is a hot day–one of the last really hot, humid days of a New England summer.  Thunderstorms are predicted for the afternoon, and they will be fed, in part, by the moisture that the trees–swamp maple, sugar maple, white oak and hemlock–are transpiring into the air above the woods. The forest is breathing, breathing out in a long, deep, sighing exhale, and its breath passes over the and through the tops of the trees. And through my window, I hear the breath of the land. I hear the life of the land. Between the waves of wind that ruffle the leaves, I hear the soft, high music of crickets, singing their death song to the summer.  I hear the hawk perched in the top of a white pine.  I hear a different set of sighing waves, as traffic pa...

I took a vacation last week.  And I got to spend much of it at one of my favorite places in the world: Schoodic Lake, in Lakeview, Maine. My family has been going there since the mid-sixties, when my grandparents built a “camp” on the lake.  My grandfather had lived his whole life in Maine.  He was a farmer’s son who started out as a truck driver, then worked his way into sales. He raised four kids during the Great Depression, and sent them all to college, too.  In fact, each of his children went on to earn a graduate degree, and to excel in their professions: college professor, nurse, teacher, lawyer. The postwar years were good to my mother’s family, and to a lot of families.  Lakeview, home to a spool mill that closed before the war, found a new life as little home-built cabins sprouted all along the shore, my family’s among them. My father and my uncles helped my grandfather to build his camp from a prefab kit, and the cabin’s four...

Many years ago, a goddess at a spinning wheel sat me on her lap and nested my hands within her own. This did not happen during my waking life, but during a trance journey inspired by a a powerful dream; a goddess whose name I do not know placed the thread she had been spinning into my hand, and showed me how to spin. Now, when a spinning goddess places her thread into your hands, you don’t have to be a specialist in mythology to begin thinking of possible layers of meaning. This happened in the years that I was a coven leader and a teacher of Wicca, and it seems clear that part of what I was being guided to do was to learn to take the threads of others’ lives into my hands, and to work with them with skill. Twenty years later, I hope I lived up to the work that I was given. But it’s not the obvious, symbolic meaning of that vision I am thinking about today. In fact, as I look back, it’s the physical aspects of that journey that strike me most. It seems to me now...

I have a taste for gods and for cilantro. So I was struck by a conversation David Dashifen Kees started recently. “Some people are colorblind,” he wrote. “Can people be god blind? I.e. Unable to see some or all types of deity? Discuss.” I think Kees is onto something here. It seems to me that there are some real and profound differences hard-wired into us around how (and whether) we see Spirit in the world, and maybe whether we care to look into the subject at all. Setting aside thoughts on how lots of people seem to substitute a blind adherence to a creed, and wave allegiance to it like a flag of loyalty, I think there are real differences in how humans are drawn to religious experience or not–and, among those who are drawn to the spiritual encounter, how we perceive it. With the exception of those who would turn Mystery into an excuse for a tribal loyalty test, I don’t think these differences are moral in nature. It seems as though they simply are . I’m someon...

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Christian. Like many Pagans–like many Quakers–I have an intense Bible allergy.  That book has been used as a blunt instrument to bludgeon human beings out of their own consciences for far too long, and no member of my society has escaped their share of blows, I think. However, unlike many Pagans, and unlike many Quakers, I have friends who have been able to share with me glimpses of another Bible, a different book, which actually has been a light for them as they’ve done some extraordinary and humane things.  Their Bible is not a blunt instrument, and is only ever understood in the “Spirit that sent it forth.”  I have learned that it can be worthwhile to challenge myself and my personal Bible allergy by listening to their Bible, when they speak from it, and even attempting to read in it myself, in that same Spirit. “I hate the Bible,” I have said. “Begin with the prophets,” one of my friends replied.  And sin...