Community

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The Pagan Experience’s Monday Musing: Any writing for the letters C or D: As with the format of the Pagan Blog Project that The Pagan Experience has replaced… this week, write about any topic that starts with the letter C or D.

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I was going to write up Druidry, but I started to and realized that I couldn’t think very well due to having the flu this week, and since it’s dear to my heart, I’d like to give it the attention it deserves. So I will most likely be writing about that later. For today, I think I’ll take it easy and riff on C for Community (and circle/choir/church/coven/coterie, hehe).

For the past year I’ve been attending the Pagan-friendly and non-creedal Unitarian Universalist church in order to connect with community. It’s like church and also not. I am practically allergic to the word church, but to me this is really more of a social club for intelligent and compassionate people. The “sermons” (at least where I attend) are more in the realm of philosophy and social justice, and the music is always fantastic and uses inclusive language. I love the sorts of people it draws (professors, librarians, activists, liberal Christians, Pagans, Buddhists, humanists…people who love knowledge and love the world), and I love the organization’s ethos, so I chose to seek community there. There used to be a chapter of CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) in the area, but currently there is none. I know some of the other UU Pagans, some of whom ran the local Spiral Scouts circle that my kids went to.

I grew up in a strongly communal setting, where my neighborhood was kind of like an extended family, and I was aware that my entire state (Utah) was full of such neighborhoods (wards) that were all affiliated with our church and shared the same religion/culture. And my family itself was huge… clans of six kids (or more) who all had six kids… I have somewhere around 70 first cousins and 36 nieces and nephews. I am used to existing in large groups (even though I’m an introvert.) The way they practiced community often didn’t include healthy boundaries (and the patriarchal authoritarianism…) but it doesn’t have to be like that.

Hearth Goddesses

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The Pagan Experience’s Monday Musing: Deity and the Divine- This will be the third week’s topic every month and an opportunity for you to share with everyone those who guide, inspire and inform you.

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In last month’s Deity and the Divine post, I mentioned being more of a naturalist Pagan and pantheist and animist who views the universe as deity. I view God, herself, as an anthropomorphized conceptualization of that which is bigger than us, and if we are gendering it, I like to give the balancing feminine in my naming of it, since the masculine has taken over for so long in our civilization. Ideally, if there wasn’t an imbalance to fix, I’d prefer balance in these biophilic traits ascribed to the divine, but I think of the divine as beyond gender, ultimately. Beyond human. Beyond living things, even, though including them. Everything that is, is God. Not just the sum of her parts, though… everything that is includes our experience, thought forms, and qualia. That’s why my concept of God includes the archetypes and cultural deities, too.

Western civilization is a little obsessed with categorization, separation, and crisp definition.  Reality is a bit more blurry at the edges than that. The five human senses can only get you so far in a world and universe that wasn’t made specifically for humans, but evolved with many different kinds of beings and senses and didn’t evolve “for” anyone or anything. It just became, and is becoming what it is. We can follow along and observe with whatever senses we can evolve, and participate as the human part of the universe, of the whole. I am part of the human expression of God/dess. As are you. Thou art God.

Earth Our Mother

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The Pagan Experience’s Monday Musing: Earth– The word “earth” has multiple meanings. What does it mean to you? How do you use its definitions to support your work?

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[Link to my chosen background music for this post. Opens in a new tab. Won’t auto-play.]

As with Terra and Gaia, Earth/Hertha/Nerthus is a personified goddess. I think civilization has always acknowledged her as Mother. We keep calling her by goddess names, even in monotheist eras.

I find it a little odd that we also call soil “earth”. Mother as the sum of her parts – the physical matter of her body, but reduced to the rocky sediment. But really, ocean is as much “earth” as soil is. Air, lava, and living organic matter are, too. You and I are “earth”.  So this wording from our language draws my eye to the separateness and stage-set attitude of Western Civilization being “on the earth” rather than “in the earth”. On a ground or stage, rather than deep within the biosphere… itself deep within the universe. Above, on top of, dominating, walking on… Planet as mostly inanimate prop to play out the lofty human drama, instead of the reality that Pagans know of planet as living home and community to which we belong and mother from which we emerged… inseparable from ourselves.

I see soil as deep and fecund, and the ground as a lot more than a simple surface.