My Pantheacon 2008 Report

I am finally recovering from the cold I had for the last few days. Which is unsurprising. Everyone around me has a cold, plus they ran rampant at Pantheacon, and I ran rampant at Pantheacon not getting enough sleep nor eating well.

It’s kind of bizarre to feel so collected after the Con. Last year I came away disappointed with ADF, interested in ogam and some of the CR stuff, although still resistant, and hugely impressed with Thorn and Feri. I was buzzed on the energy, of finding like-minded people, of Micah understanding (in his words) that missing piece of me, of our engagement. It was exciting and exhausting. This year, I feel more focused, and present. I know where my path lies ahead of me. Or, really, what path I will be taking but not necessarily where it will lead, although I have hopes and goals.

Overall the weekend was amazing. It clarified and redoubled my interest in both CR and Feri. I’ve come to realize, that a lot of the dissonance I was having was because I didn’t want to practice two faiths at once. But as an agnostic polytheist and an eclectic soul, right now I have to try to practice both. I resisted having a dual faith for a long time, but after working in both modalities all weekend, I came away both renewed in my faith and with a sense of awe and purpose. Ultimately, I see these paths containing intertwining lessons for me that I need right now.

I have to work at both of them and I have to remain intellectually honest about how much they can overlap and how much I need to keep them separate. Feri seems to say that it can encompass all, but I’m not a fan of swallowing my CR practice up into Feri. CR says it’s a religion and shouldn’t be mixed with other religions. That’s fair. I don’t think I would call myself CR in the community, although it closely reflects a large part of my practice.

What’s funny to me is that I’ve been moving here for a few months now, resisting it, being pained by it. Feeling like it was one or the other, but never both. And even though I had many examples of people practicing dual faiths (Gaulic ADF/Discordianism or Neo-Wicca/Quaker for two examples I feel are more extreme than my own) I didn’t want to go there. I thought it would be too much work. Frankly, it does look to be a lot of work. But work I love with Gods, Spirits, and Ancestors I love.

This is huge, but this is my work and I will embrace with a full heart and an active mind.

One word to sum up a religion

First off, I would recommend that everyone go and read this discussion on the Academic Pagans LiveJournal Community. It’s my jumping off point.

Some of my favorite one word descriptors were*:
Feri: Ecstasy (Alternately, paradox)
Reclaiming: Immanence
CR: Justice
CR: Truth
CR: Honor, Inspiration, Justice, Connection, Communion
CR: Truth, Honor, and Duty
Modern Paganism: Re-sacralisation
Wicca: Balance

I think these are all virtues and qualities that I aspire to, and it’s not surprising that these religions have inspired my own spiritual path. But I had a gut punch reaction to the discussion about Truth. It may describe why I’ve noticed myself leaning more and more towards CR as a spiritual path. Which has been surprising me. But that’s a discussion for another day.

My absolute favorite one word summary, the gut-puncher, is CR’s as Truth. Truth is honor, imbas, duty and justice. It also aides true community and hospitality. And these are all ideas I find are the core of my own growing sense of self and religious identity. What’s amusing to me is how hard I find many of these virtues. I am not comfortable and easy with truth, honor, or duty. And I find, at least, the gift for a gift idea of hospitality to be a little odd and limiting. But the more I work with them, the more I realize how good they are. How magical and freeing they can be.

I’m feeling the need to really think and meditate about Truth as the central idea of CR. It may not end up being the ultimate core summary of my own spirituality, but I think right now it’s a lesson I need to be working on and can easily see myself working on it for years.

*I took these from many different users, to give credit where it’s due read the entry and all the comments.

Contemplative Meditation from a Nun to You

I came across this meditation in my reading today. It’s from M. Macha NightMare’s blog Broomstick Chronicles. For background, she is very involved in interfaith programs where she lives and went on a retreat hosted by nuns of two different religions. The Christian nun shared this group meditation:

“Sister Marion showed us a teaching method used in her order wherein a short passage of the Bible is read aloud slowly, and really listened to. After a brief period of silence, they are read a second time. I volunteered and found myself in the odd position of reading just a few verses of the Gospel of Luke.

“We Pagans don't have a sacred text, per se; however, I intend to try this practice with a few lines of poetry, lyrical words about Nature, or maybe part of The Charge of the Goddess. I think it could enhance our understanding. As I get older, I find I enjoy contemplative spiritual practices at least as much as more active practices, if not more.”

You can find the rest of the entry here.

While I like the idea of doing this with the Charge of the Goddess, or selections from Starhawk’s “creation myth” from The Earth Path, I also think that poems would be of particular use here. Especially primary source poems from Ireland and Wales. I can see doing this with a lot of the poems credited to Tailsen. Or evening use this as part of a longer meditation series with the three cauldrons from the Cauldron of Posey. And this would be an excellent use of Graves’ The White Goddess, since his work should be read as a poetic inspiration rather than historical fact.

13 Virtues - Wisdom

There are many tasks involved in finishing the Dedicant's Path in ADF. One of these is to write about the 9 virtues. The requirement reads as such:

Written discussions of the Dedicant's understanding of each of the following nine virtues: wisdom, piety, vision, courage, integrity, perseverance, hospitality, moderation and fertility. The Dedicant may also include other virtues, if desired, and compare them to these nine.(Suggested 125 words min. each)

I have given a few months thought on these and come up with 13 virtues for myself. 9 of them are from the ADF dedicant's manual, 3 of them are virtues that are personally important to me regardless of spiritual path, and one comes directly from my own intrestes in CR.

This is the first in a series of 13, and is from the ADF Dedicant's Path.

Wisdom

Dictionary Definition. Accumulated philosophic or scientific learning : Knowledge : ability to discern inner qualities and relationships : Insight : good sense

Dedicant Handbook Definition. Good judgment. The ability to perceive people and situations correctly, deliberate about and decide on the correct response.

Of the two, I prefer the dictionary definition provided here. One reason is because it includes “accumulated philosophic [and] scientific learning.” Education is an essential part of wisdom, which is missing from the dedicant handbook definition. While I believe that an iron-age Celtic woman could be wise with little or no formal education in a pre-literate society, to be uneducated - and uninterested in being educated (either through self-study, group-study, or more formal styles of education) - is an unwise choice in modern society and leads to serious gaps in a person’s understanding of the universe. This intellectual source is the first of three that I believe are necessary for wisdom.

Before I can discuss the next aspect vital to wisdom, I must take issue with the dedicant handbook’s use of “correctly” in its definition, as in “the ability to perceive people and situations correctly”. While some situations may have a correct way of being perceived, most do not. Also, I would argue that humans even more rarely have a correct way of being perceived. In my own definition I would substitute the word clearly for correctly. Clearly could involve seeing many sides, not just one correct side, as the term “correctly” implies. I feel that clearly perceiving a situation or a person calls for emotional maturity and intelligence that creates empathy and compassion. This emotional component is the second source of my three aspects of wisdom.

To round out my personal definition of wisdom, I think much can be gleaned from the Irish legends regarding the salmons of wisdom. Druids and poets would often wait for years to catch a salmon that had eaten the hazel nuts of wisdom and so could bestow wisdom upon those who ate them in turn. From these legends I can understand another source of wisdom. It is wisdom gained from ecstatic spiritual practices, especially meditation. I see these legends as metaphorically speaking of searching the still space within for wisdom, or in an Irish Celtic context imbas. Ecstatic practices allow a person to discover inner truths and insight, in other words to eat the salmon of wisdom. This may take years to consciously develop, but is necessary to create real and well-tempered wisdom.
For me wisdom is based on the triad I have discussed above: intellectual, emotional, and spiritual sources. While each on its own is important, it is the combination of the three that leads to the deep wisdom that is a virtue.

Teachers and Inspiration

My first draft of this was all about me trying to explain my conflicted feelings towards ADF, both the love and the, um, not love (hate is too strong of a word here). But the more I wrote, the more I realized that’s ridiculous to even try to explain it in one entry. It would be horrifically abbreviated, unless I wrote a treaties and I have better things to do with my time and this blog.

And as conflicted as I am about ADF, you should hear me discuss Feri and Reclaiming traditions, another large influence on my own religion. Yeah, I know, I just took two pagan religions, each vastly different from the other, and cited them as my religious inspiration. I find that both have different aspects I’m drawn to and to be fair, I’m really conflicted with Feri and Reclaiming as well.

And since I’m listing my influences I’d have to add CR and Buddhism. I know, I just outed my self as eclectic. *gasp* The horror. I guess I’ll have to live with it.

I find the spark of the divine in all religions, I just have an easier time connecting with it through certain theologies and not through others. More often, I find the works spiritual elders (Ian Corrigan, Ceisiwr Serith, Starhawk, T. Thorne Coyle, M. Macha Nightmare, Anne Hill, Dianne Sylvan, Rumi, Buddha, the Dali Lama, Ram Dass and Erynn Rowan Laurie to name many of the people who inspire me) help me access and refine my own sense of spirit and connection to it. These people inspire me, the religions they belong to and the practices they teach inspire me. My spiritual home cannot be captured expect perhaps in the rhythm of the city, an expanse of the night sky and the breath of a tree.