End of the year, end of an era

Dear readers, I think I have gone as far on this forest path as I can go. I no longer fit comfortably under the heading “druid”, and I fit even less appropriately under the heading “pagan”. I have worn out my desire to have a single definitive label, category, or heading, which is probably no surprise to long-time readers. I have been moving slowly away from paganism, neopaganism, and druidry for a while now.

I have also, in the past year, thoroughly worn out my desire to join or to belong, to be a member of an organization and to follow a group program. I am no longer a member of AODA; my ADF membership will expire soon, and I have no plans to renew it. I remain a member in good standing of the Episcopal church that employs my husband (that is, I show up to make my communion at least the canonical twice a year, at Christmas and Easter), but I have no interest in active membership, nor do I wish to affiliate formally with the Order of Julian of Norwich as I formerly have done.

Druidry, especially of the Revival, will continue to be of interest to me, as will Tibetan Buddhism and the Anglo-Catholic Christianity I grew up with. Living a spiritual life, conscious, connected, and creative, continues to be of interest to me. And blogging will continue, I think, to be of interest to me, and I shall try to do more of it in a new place, at Notes of a Wayward Anglican.

The First Sunday of Advent was yesterday, a Christian feast that never passes without my attention. It was the feast of title of my childhood church, celebrated with as much pomp and festivity as our little parish could muster. It was also usually the season of the bishop’s visitation; I was confirmed during Advent at the tender age of nine.

I don’t think mainstream Christians are saying much lately about the Second Coming, maybe because it’s all the Evangelicals can talk about. Strangely enough, while the Gospels depict Jesus talking about the kingdom or reign of God, they don’t record his primary message as, “I’m going away, but I’ll be back and then you’ll be sorry.” I should no longer be surprised that a lot of Christian teaching, especially though not exclusively of the Evangelical variety, has nothing whatsoever to do with the plain sense of the Gospels, and yet I am.

In any case, in Advent the Church traditionally looks back to the birth of Jesus as the coming of the long-expected Messiah, looks forward to his return as the King of Glory, and looks inward to preparing for and welcoming his presence in the heart. Jesus will return as King to fix things that are broken, to put things to rights, to make sure that the world works the way God intended it to, that is, on principles of peace, justice, fairness, sharing, compassion, forgiveness. And then we shall all live happily ever after–except for those who don’t want to play fair and share their toys.

The myth of the Return of the King is deeply embedded in Western consciousness, whether as a Christian trope or not. When Tolkien’s publisher split The Lord of the Rings into three volumes, he titled the third one in a way that gave away the plot (Tolkien complained) but tapped into the archetype. It is vitally important that the rightful King be restored to the throne, so that the Free Peoples of Middle Earth can take their places around him, just as the lesser kings of Ireland took their places around the High King in the mead-hall of Tara. It is against the backdrop of that enthronement that Frodo suffers his slow decline and Sam his gradual flourishing; because King Elessar is on the throne, Sam can draw his family close and say, “I’m home”.

The Return of the King is what we are hoping for every time somebody publishes a new novel about King Arthur. There is no end of Arthurian literature, some of it focused on the history, some on the romance, some on the magic and mysticism. The BBC is currently airing its fourth series of the show Merlin, which pairs a youthful Merlin of peasant birth with a youthful Arthur who has been raised as a prince in a Camelot where magic is forbidden; he gets hid on the head a lot so that he won’t notice Merlin has just saved his life by magic, again. I am inordinately fond of this show and its extremely handsome young actors, Colin Morgan and Bradley James. There are moments when, despite being a prat much of the time, young Arthur Pendragon as played by Bradley James really does manifest the archetype of the True King, the one whose place at the center of things ensures peace, justice, and prosperity for all. The show is already hinting that the strength of Arthur’s kingship won’t be in winning battles, but in listening to people regardless of their station and bringing them together.

I love the archetype, but I don’t live in a monarchy and I don’t wish to. (Even if a monarchy looks better, some days, than the plutocratic oligarchy we actually seem to be living under in the U.S.) Nor do I think that Jesus will come back and reward a few right-thinking people and condemn everyone else to eternal punishment for short-term mistakes. In his recent book Apocalypse Not, John Michael Greer traces the myth of apocalypse back to the ancient cycle of the precession of the equinoxes, which was first observed very early in human history, and to the first man who interpreted a recurring cosmic cycle as a one-time historical even: Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. Zarathustra, a priest of the Iranian fire-religion that was very similar to the religion of the Vedas, successfully reformed that religion into a linear monotheism that looked forward to an end time, a shift in the cosmic principles that would be permanent and unceasing. Then his people, the Persians, handed on those concepts to the Jews who lived in diaspora in the Persian Empire… and the book of Daniel emerged, and the apocalypse meme propagated in Western civilization.

What’s the antidote to the apocalypse meme? How do we know that the world will *not* end at the Winter Solstice 2012, just as it did not end in May or October 2011 as predicted by Harold Camping? (Read Greer’s book: He explains why we think it might, and why it won’t.) The antidote to the apocalypse meme, I guess, is to look at cycles rather than lines. Night is always followed by day, winter by spring, sleep by waking. On this basis we speculate that as birth is followed eventually by death, death is followed somehow by rebirth. The point of sunrise slips backward against the constellations; at present it’s still creeping through the sign of Pisces, and won’t cross into Aquarius until around 2600 C.E. After Aquarius comes Capricorn, then Sagittarius, and so on, and when we work our way back to Aries, we’ll just start all over with Pisces, if any people are still here on earth to look at the sky and take notice.

In my own life I’ve started to think of spirals. IF there’s any progress in life, it’s in spirals, in circles that are not closed but a little bit open, in coming back to the same places with new experiences. I come up against the same issues over and over,  until I want to beat my head against the nearest wall, but I’m beginning to remember that neither I, nor the issues, are exactly the same each time; going around the cycle has changed me and the issues and in that knowledge there’s a chance to change further, consciously.

And now I shall leave you with this video from Penelopepiscopal of my favorite Advent hymn:

 

Another sign of winter

On my way to work this morning, I saw buds on the tulip magnolia trees by the Episcopal church. It’s a funny thing: The tulip magnolia buds in November, and the fuzzy buds endure the whole of winter, rain snow sleet and hail, before they open in April. When they bloom, the flowers are on the trees for two, maybe three weeks, at most, if the weather is perfect. The buds wait all winter for their two weeks of glory. I wait with them because I know how splendid it will be.

Singing the sacred Word

On Saturday we went to our favorite pizza place for lunch after our morning yoga class. The owner was there, a lovely friendly man who happens to be a Muslim; I’d guess he’s Egyptian based on the name of the restaurant. After he took our order, he went back to the table where he usually sits between customers. From somewhere behind my back, I heard a low rumbling noise.

I spoke softly to my husband. “Is he chanting the Qur’an?” He nodded.

I’ve often seen him with his Qur’an, a large, handsomely bound copy, the size of an American “family Bible”. I’d seen him read it but not noticed him chanting, singing it aloud. As I waited for my pita sandwich, I thought about a PBS show on India I had watched, maybe last year, where a woman scholar displayed a manuscript written on palm leaf, unbound, wider than its height. She identified it as the Rig Veda and, pointing to the first lines on the page, chanted them aloud.

It occurred to me then that chanting or singing is what one does with the sacred Word. It is what Brahmin priests and Tibetan lamas do with their Vedas and sutras. It is what Christian monks do, or did, in their celebration of the Daily Office; St. Benedict says in his Rule that brothers who cannot read must be given time apart from work or prayer to memorize the Psalms and other Scriptures. It is what the synagogue cantor and the boy having his bar mitzvah do with the Torah, the Tanakh. And it is what the bard and the scop did with the hymns and histories of the Northern peoples, before they were written down.

Behind all of those sacred texts, pre-Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Christian, behind all of those written words, lie layers upon layers of singing and chanting. On their album The Sacred Bridge, which features Jewish and Christan music of the Middle Ages, the Boston Camerata performs Psalm 114, “In exitu Israel”, alternating between the Hebrew text and the Latin. The tune is the same for both, the Hebrew melody that the Church adopted and called the tonus peregrinus, the wandering tune.

Even when literacy became a primary skill of learned people, reading still meant “reading aloud” when it did not mean “singing together in ritual”. The greatest minds of Europe up to the modern era moved their lips when they read and would have thought it bizarre to be told not to do it. But what happens when the sacred Word becomes primarily, even exclusively, a thing preserved in a book and read silently to oneself in private, outside a community of those who teach how to sing it and how to understand it?

What happens is fundamentalism. The most eccentric doctrines of American Evangelical Protestantism, such as the Rapture and the quibbling between pre- and post-Millenial Dispensationalists, come out of the minds of men who read the Bible to themselves, for themselves, in private, absolutely confident of their right to understand it in private, apart from 1500 years of the Church’s interpretation. They were no longer interested in singing the sacred words in community, or in what the Fathers of the early Church had to say about a passage; they were certain that the Holy Spirit was directing them to see a long-neglected truth, an essential part of the Christian message. But the end result of their confidence is the televangelist, the Left Behind books, a theology that predicts the day and the hour that Jesus bluntly said no one knows and says that Real True Believers will not have to die to enter heaven–they will simply be whisked away to watch in comfort while everyone else suffers.

I love books. I work with books. I practically worship books. But the sacred Word in a book too easily becomes the dead letter that Paul of Tarsus said can kill. The Spirit gives life–the spirit being the breath that carries the chant, the spoken word, the song sung, the memory of the people.

Belonging to the land

I’ve borrowed my title from a post by Nimue at Druid Life in which she writes feelingly of this sense of belonging as a distinctly Druid idea and as a basis for ethics and practice. “If we belong first and foremost to the land,” she writes,

… then we do not belong to our human communities above all else. We are not the property of the state, or owned by our employers. This affects how we perceive ourselves and our human relationships. We are not owned by the job, or by the demands of human expectations. We belong instead to the land, and consciousness of that allows us not to be ruled so easily by misguided cultural norms, or social pressures. We are also less inclined to see the land itself or anything that lives upon it as property to be owned by humans. We belong to it, it does not belong to us.

I’m not sure I would agree that the sense of belonging is the defining characteristic of Druidry, but I certainly agree that it’s an important one. What I want to point out here is that Nimue lives in Gloucestershire, in southwest England, and I live in Maryland, in the mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., in North America. The land to which Nimue belongs is not the land to which I belong. The United States of America is an enormous land compared to the island of Britain, but while I have travelled some, I have never lived anywhere but this one city, in this state, not too far from the western edge of the Atlantic.

I think there is a challenge for those of us who are Druids in North America, Australia, South America, or indeed any place but Northern Europe and the U.K. to belong to the land we live in and not imagine we belong to the land our traditions come from. At least, I know it’s a challenge for me, and I imagine I’m not alone. Many of the trees of the Ogham grow in North America as well as Europe, but they are not the same species. The British holly and the local holly are not identical; the British robin and the American robin are two entirely different birds, alike only in their orange bosoms.

I dream of visiting England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. I imagine that I might feel more at home there than I do here, in the only place I’ve ever lived. But unless I actually move to the U.K. (not bloody likely), the land to which I belong is the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and my Druidry has to work with that fact. So I’m working on it.

The Druid and the Witch

I’ve been re-reading one of my favorite books on witchcraft, The Clan of Tubal Cain by Ann Finnin. While it could have used a stronger, more thorough editing (sadly true not merely of many Pagan books but of many books nowadays), it is an interesting and important book, I think, for two reasons. First, it is a candid memoir of the development of a distinctive tradition of witchcraft in the United States, deriving from a British source other than Gerald Gardner; second, it is a useful manual of magical training aimed at producing a skilled individual who can work closely with others using a common body of symbolism and method. I highly recommend it to any reader who is interested in Craft history, magic, or both.

What strikes me most on this reading, however, is something very simple: There is such a thing as a Witch, and I am not one. That is, there is definitely a certain kind of personality, a certain flavor of magic and mysticism, a certain body of symbols and experiences, that are “witchy”. Whether people call themselves witches, Wiccans, Feri, Faery, or what have you, some people are witchy and some aren’t–and I am not.

It would be easy to fall into stereotypes here, but I don’t think one has to. The wanna-bes who traipse around looking like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, even when they’re just headed to the grocery store for a quart of milk, are the extreme of the type, the caricature, and like any caricature, they have only a superficial resemblance to the real thing, an exaggeration of the most obvious features. I would characterize the witchy temperament as the contrast of black and white: The blackness of a dark hooded cloak in the shadows, the white of a full moon at zenith in a clear sky. The witchy temperament is lunar, nocturnal, and a little bit lunatic, a little deranged by the moon, yet at the same time severely, even cruelly practical. The witch crushes herbs and then brews potions or makes soup with the same attention and the same magical awareness. The sweeping of the broom both cleans the room in a mundane and physical sense and readies it for the magical circle about to be cast.

Witchiness is beautiful, fascinating, even admirable. I have no doubt that well-trained, cohesive covens around the world are doing important magical work with this lunar and telluric power, the intertwining power of full moon light and earthy darkness. But I am not a witch. There is probably not a witchy bone in my body. Whatever witchiness truly is, I don’t have it.

I’m a druid.

When I imagine the Witch at work, I see a solitary woman or a group of men and women, gathered on a hilltop beneath that mesmerizing full moon. When I imagine the Druid, I see a man (yes, that’s my first thought) or a woman or a group of people gathered in the open beneath the sun.

Of course, it’s not that simple–Witch = Moon, Druid = Sun. But the images are there. Druid Revival groups have typically held their rituals “in the eye of the sun”, in daylight, visible to the public. ADF’s rites are open to the public on principle. While Druids usually gather in a circle, that circle is an open space, not a magically sealed sphere like the witches’ workspace. Solitary or small groups of Druids may, of course, meditate, do magic, practice music or write poetry in private, but the Druid rite is a public celebration, not a secret one.

The Druidic temperament, as I see it, is at once scholarly and romantic, a poet with a Ph.D., a scientist who sings folk music in coffeehouses. (Which I have done, by the way.) The Druid is more respectable than the Witch by mundane standards, but secretly more daft. The Doctor of Doctor Who is a druidic type; so is Rupert Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which featured quite a few witchy types–Willow, Jenny Calendar, and Willow’s girlfriend Tara. Take any Anglican who’s gone round the bend a bit, and you’ll get a Druid (e.g., your humble blogger). The Druid is a singer, poet, rambler, nature enthusiast, birder, philosopher, absent-minded professor, librarian or archivist, the person who remembers, organizes, has bits of knowledge at hand.

Of course these words are themselves romantic, poetic ramblings, delivered when I should be taking a shower. To every Pagan his or her own path, the inner road to freedom and happiness, for the benefit of all.

Winter is here

A mourning dove and a small flock of sparrows are foraging in the bushes just outside my front door. After watching them through the window for a bit, I grabbed the only bird guide I could find (where is my Peterson’s???) and tried to identify the sparrows. They are not the English house sparrow but a true, native sparrow with a distinctive white “eyebrow”. I turned a page in my guide and saw the entry on the dark-eyed junco, a frequent visitor to these parts and one I have no trouble recognizing. When I looked up from the book and out the window, I saw the first junco of the season coming in to forage under my bushes.

The druid’s grove

In the past couple of weeks I’ve gradually been moving my focus of practice at home from a shrine atop a marble-topped chest of drawers, with a deep windowsill behind it, to a smaller shrine on my desk, with a shallower windowsill behind it. Part of this process has been relocating our home computer so that the big desk can be *mine* again. I can write in my journal, light candles and incense, and gaze out the window at the courtyard in front of our house, with its large Japanese maple tree, even larger magnolia, and small tiered fountain.

So far the shrine consists mainly of my staff, hung with a grapevine wreath that I decorated in orange and brown ribbon; a candelabra for seven votive candles in seven colors, straight out of the Pyramid Catalog; a cauldron full of ash and sand for incense and a tea light; a blue-glazed cup for water; and a pretty good reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere draped with a strand of amber beads in honor of my patron, Grannos, who was often syncretized with Apollo. A piece of art paper in sage green with brown leaves covers the white-painted windowsill. A cheap cloth runner in brown and black embroidered with a few green and orange leaves hangs over the desk. (I bought the runner and some other goodies at a Michael’s craft store.)

What is a sacred place? What is a holy place? What is the difference between sacred and not-sacred, holy and not-holy? I’m not sure I know. Many books on pagan paths, Wiccan, Druid, and other, recommend making an altar or shrine or some kind of sacred place in the home as a first step in practice. That was something I didn’t have to be told; I’ve had a home shrine on and off since I was a teenager and began saying the Episcopal Daily Office. I sat on the bed looking toward a statue of Maria Kannon and read the Psalms and prayers. My husband has a shrine at his own desk; there are deity statues and candles on all three of our bedroom windows, and the mantel over our gas fireplace hosts gilded Buddha statues, traditional icons of Mary and Jesus, and a plaque of the Lares and the family Genius.

What is a holy place outdoors, a sacred place in nature? Again, I’m not sure I know. The weekend before last, my husband and I went walking, or maybe I should say hiking, in a local park. After taking light rail to the park, we circled the lake on a track that eventually wound away to the northwest and came out from under the trees by the side of a busy road. We ate lunch seated on a fallen log covered with filmy fungus and reluctantly decided our best bet was to retrace our steps–about a two-hour walk, having come that far. By the time I was halfway back to the light rail stop, my feet were throbbing in my inadequate shoes. By the time I boarded the train, everything ached from my waist down. We stopped on the way home to buy frozen lasagna, ibuprofen, and epsom salts. But it was worth it to see the lake, the trees, the jolly dogs pulling at their leashes, the diversity of people exploring the trails. Did I have any great spiritual or mystical experience? No. But it was unquestionably part of my druid practice.

I learned religion in a small stone building defined by the smell of incense and the nature of its acoustics. A church doesn’t feel like a church to me unless it smells of beeswax, incense, Murphy’s oil soap, unless it houses the reserved Eucharist, unless the ministers of the altar wear special clothes. It is consecrated, sacred, set apart. Before we passed from the church hall into the sacred space, we crossed ourselves with holy water, a purification, a reminder of baptism. If my ancestors built temples, they were mostly of wood; if they worshipped in sacred groves, those groves are long since cut down.

John Michael Greer once had this bit of wisdom concerning the druid grove: “A grove is a druid’s field of action.” That is, where your druidry happens, that is your grove. Where your druid practice is centered, that is your grove. Where you live, think, feel, and act as a druid, there is your grove. Which means that your neighborhood, your workplace, your city streets or county acres, the whole planet, the galaxy, the universe, are all, at least potentially, part of your grove.

Everything is sacred. Everything is holy. Find a small part of it to pay attention to as your sacred, your holy, your altar, your grove–your reminder that everything deserves that kind of attention.

Naming of Ancestors

It’s the Eve of Samhain in the Northern Hemisphere, though astronomically the day is still a week off. I feel inspired to name some ancestors today:

• My mother, Edith, a creative and talented woman thwarted by her own fear, who died during a play after performing her character’s death scene.
• My grandmother, Edna, Edith’s mother, the person I called “Mom”, the true maternal force in my life.
• My father, Robert, who drove a truck for a living, cheated on my mother habitually, and spent much of his time in a fantasy world of his own making and yet was a good father to me.
• My great-aunt Margaret, my maternal grandfather’s sister, who was lamed for life at birth, wore a heavy metal brace on one leg, married and divorced, lived alone, worked on her feet all day, and never was described as “handicapped” or “disabled”.
• Roger, my father-in-law, an educator, administrator, consummate organizer, who died of pancreatic cancer four years ago.
• Miss El, the elderly neighbor lady who babysat me occasionally and was the first person to talk with me seriously about religion, when I was just a little kid.
• Midge, the organist at my church when I was in my late teens, who taught me to read neumes and sing plainchant properly.

And some others, not precisely ancestors but worthy of memory:

• Harvey, the partner of a dear friend of mine, the only person I know who died of AIDS; he was probably around the age I am now.
• George, one of the finest tenors I have ever known, who wore a Fourth Doctor scarf and turned me on to Babylon 5, who died of kidney disease before he turned thirty.
• Mark, a co-worker, a Romanian defector who spoke seven languages and could make puns in most of them, who taught English writing to native speakers, who also had kidney disease but ultimately died of pancreatic cancer.

I will remember you.

 

Burnout

It’s the end of October, and NaBloPoMo is coming up, along with the better known NaNoWriMo. For once I don’t think I’ll be participating in either of them, although I’d like to blog more, and I’d like to write a novel, too. But I’ve finally realized, I’m burnt out–not on writing or even on blogging specifically, but on druidry. On religion, on magic, on spirituality. On my ceaseless, restless hunt for a label, a system, a program, a path, a practice.

I know I am not alone in my search for The Right Path (for me). I see plenty of other people, particularly in the world of blogging and online journaling, who go from Wicca to Druidry to Feri to Hellenismos to Buddhism to Wicca, and round again, hoping to find a place to feel at home, but never quite fitting in. I’m also certain I’m not the only seeker who grew up with a religious tradition and then didn’t so much rebel against it as grow out of it, like a hermit crab getting too big for his shell. And I’m probably not the only seeker who is interested in stories, songs, poetry, images, practices, but very tired of clerics, dues, rituals, membership cards, establishments.

So for the moment, all bets are off. All labels and nametags go back on the table. I would like to keep writing here, as I seem to have a few faithful readers, but what I write about won’t necessarily be “druidry” or even “paganism” or “religion”. It might be about the Artist’s Way or what I’m reading or the local weather or even wacky British television.

As I was walking to work this morning, I had one of those random inspired thoughts that I only get when I’m walking or showering (and I know I’m not alone in finding those two activities conducive to inspiration). It was a trio of alliterative words: Conscious, creative, connected. The life that I want is one which is conscious, creative, and connected. In future posts I’ll try to explore what I want to be conscious of, what I want to be connected with, and what being creative means to me. I hope you’ll come along for the rest of the journey, even if it’s only a walk around the park.