Praise Mama. Grok Earth. Thou art Goddess.
This is the sermon I gave today at the First Unitarian Church of Hobart, Indiana.
“Give me your moldy, your stale, your sprouting potatoes. Bring me that wilted, pitiful bag of salad you really meant to eat this time. Bring me your bananas too brown and mushy even to make bread with. Bring me your grass clippings and fallen leaves. Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming refrigerator, yearning to rot free. Give me these, and we will make life itself.”
Last week, I unsubscribed from my weekly Patheos Pagan channel updates. It had been quite a while since any of the posts in the email blast had interested me enough to merit a click. It was the latest step in distancing myself from what goes for mainstream Paganism today.
But last week, a couple of friends shared links to reports that a writer at the Patheos evangelical channel, Warren Throckmorton, had had his blog taken down. Throckmorton has been described as an “evangelical whistleblower” and an “evangelical watchdog”. He had previously written about the scandals involving Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill Church, K.P. Yohannan, and Gospel for Asia. Driscoll and Yohannan both have blogs at Patheos, which continue to be hosted there. Vistors to Throckmorton’s Patheos URL, however, will now see an error message. Continue reading “Then they came for an evangelical whistleblower and the Patheos Pagan writers said nothing …”
Today is the Spring Equinox (in the northern hemisphere). Many Neo-Pagans celebrate this day as “Ostara”. Although we like to pretend it has ancient origins, it’s little more than a bastardized version of the Christian Easter.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Continue reading “An Unorthodox Eostur: The Mesopotamian Origins of Ostara?”
I recently met someone who described himself as “Pagan-adjacent”, which I thought was an interesting self-designation. He was a (self-described) “angry atheist” who followed atheism to its logical end and was left wanting. He intuited that there was something else–something bigger and/or deeper–but no one seemed to be writing or talking about it. Then he discovered David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, which he experienced as revolutionary.
He told me that he knows “in his bones” that “the sacred is in the soil and the wind,” but he is turned off by a lot of what he sees in the Pagan community. By way of example, he told me about an encounter with a Pagan group where he heard one person talking about how great the divination app on her phone was. I know what he is talking about. What has a divination app to do with the sacred soil?
I’ve felt pretty much the same way for 15 years, for as long as I have been calling myself “Pagan” in fact. I came to the Pagan community because I thought here was where I would find that something bigger and deeper. But almost everywhere I look, I see the small and shallow. Almost everywhere I look, I see Pagans reproducing the disenchantment of the mainstream culture. Continue reading “Pagan with a small “p””
Whenever I hear a Pagan say that the winter solstice is a “minor Sabbat”, I can’t help but roll my eyes. What exactly makes it “minor”? Because Margaret Murray only listed the cross-quarters as witches’ sabbats? Because Gerald Gardner only added the quarter days as an afterthought and his followers like the way the druids did it?
There are 8 stations on the Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year. Why would one spoke of a wheel be minor and another major, especially in a tradition that emphasizes balance? And if one is going to be minor, why the winter solstice of all days? After all, it’s the day the light begins to return, the day most of Western civilization is praising the birth of the Son/Sun. Continue reading “7 Reasons This Pagan Celebrates Christmas”
I was recently invited to the New Orleans Pagan Pride Day this year to lead the opening ritual. I also led a couple workshops on activism and non-theistic Paganism and joined Bart Everson, Nicole Youngman, and Emily Snyder in a panel discussion on the same topics.
I wanted to share the opening ritual here. I’ve written before how protest marches can be like Pagan ritual. Here, I tried bring together elements of Pagan ritual with elements of political protest. I tried to bring together the myth of the Wild Hunt with social action, blurring the line between a religious procession and a protest march. Rather than standing in a circle with our backs to the world, I wanted the ritual to be focused outward. And I wanted to raise energy without dispersing it cathartically, so as to motivate social activism. I also wanted to tie the ritual to the place where the ritual was held, so references were made to environmental devastation, and racial and LGBT violence perpetrated in or near New Orleans. Continue reading “The Wild Hunt for Justice: At the Intersection of Ritual and Protest”
The Pagan Wheel of the Year bugs me. The timing of the cross-quarters bugs me. The meaning attached of several of the eight stations bugs me. And the names of most of the days bugs me. Right, now I’m just going to focus on Lughnasadh, though, since it’s right around the corner. Continue reading “Lughna-say-what? What to Call This Pagan Holiday”
I remember when I was in high school and Indiana changed its license plate to include the phrase “Amber Waves of Grain”. It pissed people off. I mean, really pissed people off. Because in Indiana, we grow corn and soybeans, not wheat. While technically corn is a grain, it’s not amber. While the phrase was poetic, it just did not speak of “home” to the people of the Hoosier State. That’s kind of how I feel about Lughnasadh. Continue reading “Why I’m Boycotting Lughnasadh Again”
This year, the summer solstice falls on June 20 or June 21, depending on your time zone. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year and the apogee of the light. In the Neo-Pagan religious tradition, the summer solstice is called “Litha”. It is one of eight holidays on the Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year.
The name “Litha” is first found in the writings of the the 8th century monk, the Venerable Bede, who recorded that “Litha” was Anglo-Saxon name for the intercalendary time between June and July. But the reason why Neo-Pagans use the word “Litha” has less to do with an 8th century monk, and more to do with Hobbits.
Yes, Hobbits.
To read the rest of the article at the Huffington Post, click here.
I remember when I left the Mormon church, I didn’t want to admit to anyone that I had been a less than perfect Mormon. You see, when you leave the LDS Church, the people who stay start looking for all kinds of reasons why you left, reasons which have to do with your own moral failings. They can’t admit that anything might be wrong with the Church, so something has to be wrong with you.
But I was a less than ideal Mormon. I didn’t obey all the rules, I didn’t pray as often as I was supposed to, and so on. Now I have the perspective and wisdom to recognize that nobody obeyed all the rules or prayed as much as they were supposed to. Well, maybe somebody did. But those people are scary. And they’re also a very small minority.
The same is true of Pagans, I think. I suspect that very few of us are practicing with as much consistency as we claim to. And that’s okay. Continue reading “The Shame of Being a “Non-Practicing Pagan””
Damn, I thought the Patheos controversy was cooling off. But I guess not.
David Pollard who manages, Nature’s Path, the UU-Pagan hub at Patheos, just posted an essay in which he attempts to defend his decision to stay at Patheos by attacking those who left. I feel compelled to respond because, as the Executive Director of CUUPS, David has quite the bully pulpit from which to spread his attacks.* Continue reading “Self-Deception is the Secret Sauce: A Response to David Pollard”
Patheos continues to struggle to reframe the narrative around the exodus of what is now more than two dozen authors from Patheos Pagan. (About 16 active bloggers left Patheos and 20 current and former bloggers have requested that their writing be removed from the site.)
Most recently, I noticed two significant changes that had been made to public information sites related to this controversy. Continue reading “Update on the Patheos Exodus”
My seasonal allergies mean that at those times of the year I most want to be surrounded by nature, it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to do so. This irony is a metaphor for an essential conflict at the core of my psyche, between the desire for communion with nature on the one hand and the desire to transcend nature on the other.
The Allergic Pagan 