A Merry Beltane

The May Queen surrounded by her defenders the “White Women”
From the yearly Beltane Fire Festival on Calton Hill, Edinburgh

Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
- Rudyard Kipling

“Beltane, and its counterpart Samhain, divide the year into its two primary seasons, winter (Dark Part) and summer (Light Part). As Samhain is about honoring Death, Beltane, its counter part, is about honoring Life. It is the time when the sun is fully released from his bondage of winter and able to rule over summer and life once again.” – Christina Aubin

“Early Gaelic sources from around the 10th century state that the Druids would create a need-fire on top of a hill on this day and rush the village’s cattle through the fires to purify them and bring luck (“Eadar d? theine Bhealltuinn” in Scottish Gaelic, “Between two fires of Beltane”). People would also go between the fires to purify themselves. This was echoed throughout history after Christianization, with lay people instead of Druid priests creating the need-fire. The festival persisted widely up until the 1950s, and in some places the celebration of Beltane continues today.” – Wikipedia

“Up to 150 000 self-styled witches and warlocks, New Age practitioners and the simply curious are converging for May Eve revelries on the summit of the highest peak in the Harz Mountains, Germany, on Saturday night.” – Ernest Gill, Mail and Guardian

“I am very down to earth, pretty damn skeptical, raised as a non-believer of everything. My father is a fully-practicing atheist who hates any form of non- scientific thought! I don’t describe myself as a hippie, new- ager or anything like that and nor do I call myself pagan, but Beltane is probably one of the most important elements of my life.” – Clo Dear

“Why did the Labour Movement choose May Day as International Labour Day? It’s more that May Day chose the Labour Movement. Unlike Easter, Whitsun or Christmas, May Day is the one festival of the year for which there is no significant church service. Because of this it has always been a strong secular festival, particularly among working people who in previous centuries would take the day off to celebrate it as a holiday, often clandestinely without the support of their employer. It was a popular custom, in the proper sense of the word – a people’s day – so it was naturally identified with the Labour and socialist movements and by the twentieth century it was firmly rooted as part of the socialist calendar.” – Bonnie Hamre, About.com

“Although Beltane is the most overtly sexual festival, Pagans rarely use sex in their rituals although rituals often imply sex and fertility. The tradition of dancing round the maypole contains sexual imagary and is still very popular with modern Pagans” – BBC Religion and Ethics

A merry Beltane to you tonight and tomorrow! Spend it with someone special. Have a go at the old Maypole if you have the chance, give The Wicker Man a watch, and let us not forget the plight of the workers as well.

The Challenge of Minority Faiths

Salon interviews Christian Smith, a professor at the University of North Carolina who is co-author of the book “Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Teenagers”. While I disagree with his statistical findings on teens who adopt minority faiths like Wicca, I do think he has some cogent things to say about living as an adherent to a minority faith in a Christian-dominated landscape.

“There are two basic options when you’re a minority religion. One is to construct an isolated subculture or counterculture that you can center your whole life on — so you would have to be like the Amish, or Orthodox Jews in New York. You’d have to be part of an encapsulated community. But most people can’t or don’t do that and so that means that they are constantly exposed to values and practices of cultures different from their religion, and then that presents a challenge that they have to continually evaluate — they have to continually decide how to respond. Do they resist? How? Do they acculturate? It could also be, and I don’t have data on this, but most teens just want to fit in. They want acceptance, and so with teens of minority faiths, who have to deal with the ubiquity of Christianity, and have these cultural markers that are basically like neon signs that say, “I’m different, I’m weird,” many of them don’t want that.”

Which is why I’m surprised that he accepts that “less than %1″ of teens adhere to some sort of minority faith. I know from my own experiences as a teen Pagan that most of my companions led double lives so as not to “freak out” their parents. I think the sales of Pagan and witch-oriented merchandise targeting teens is far more indicative of exactly how many teens (on some level) claim a Pagan faith.

Questions Most Likely Never Answered

Leading proponent of Creation Spirituality and friend to many Pagans Matthew Fox who was censured and later dismissed from the Catholic Church (he is now an Episcopal priest) has 22 hard questions for the new Pope. Here is one of them:

“Why do you denounce Buddhists as “atheists” and “autoerotocists?” Why do you condemn Hindus? Protestant churches? Pagans? Goddess worshippers? Native American believers? Feminists? The practice of Yoga? (You write that it gets you “too much in touch with your body”). Is your church–mother of Inquisitions and Crusades and anti-Semitism–without sin and the holder of all spiritual wisdom? Why did your church never excommunicate Hitler?”

I’m thinking an answer won’t be quick to come.

But Will He Catch Them?

Just thought I would point out that Jay (AKA The Zero Boss and a fellow Juggler) has re-started his Pagan blog “Kensho Godchaser”. He is off to a great start so add him to your Pagan blogroll, you’ll be glad you did.

Unitarian Universalist Discordian

This past Sunday my local UU church had a guest sermon from a local Discordian. It talks about Jesus, Bob, St. Syadasti, and the nature of belief.

“Howdy, folks. My name is Jonathan Prykop, and I’m a baptized Catholic, born-again Discordian, ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, and recent zealous convert to Unitarian Universalism. I’m what you might call a freelance minister in this town, preaching in any church that will have me, and so I would like to thank Jesse Spencer-Smith and the Worship Committee for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today, and I thank you for coming to listen. I’d like to especially thank Maryly Crutcher, my partner in crime, without whose help I could have never pulled this service together. Before we begin, I’d also like to clarify that the opinions expressed in this sermon are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of this church or the Unitarian Universalist Association.”

Worth a gander, it was certainly an entertaining service.

The Return of Birthing Rituals

Neat article on a new trend towards ‘birth-circles’. My favorite quote was from a Catholic attendee “the pagan aspect was a bit of a shock.”

Is That Triumphalism I Smell?

Catholic World News waxes rhapsodic over the new Pope’s coat-of-arms.

“An especially distinctive element in the new papal coat of arms is a bear with a pack-saddle, the so-called ?Bear of Corbinian.” There is a charming legend involving a bear that is told about Bishop Corbinian, who preached the Christian faith in the ancient Duchy of Bavaria in the 8th century and is honored as the spiritual father and patron of the archdiocese. It is said that while he was traveling to Rome a bear mauled his pack-animal. The saint then rebuked the wild beast, and commanded the bear to carry his packs to Rome. Once he arrived there, however, he let the bear go, and it lumbered back to its native forest. The meaning of the legend is clear: Christianity tamed and domesticated the ferocity of paganism and thus laid the foundations for a great civilization…“

Thanks for all that civilization Christianity! I’m going to go read that part in the history books where Constantine finds an empty patch of ground and totally creates the whole idea of civilization! It is SO awesome. Laws, government, medicine, science, art, like the power of Jesus was really flowing through him to be able to invent all the stuff from nothing.

Quote of the Day

“The conservatives say their rights are trampled by keeping prayer out of schools, out of tax-supported buildings and out of courts. What absolute nonsense. They remain free to worship and pray with their families when they wake up, when they take their children to school, when they come home, when they dine, when they go to their place of worship. The only restriction is on their right to impose their religious moral views on others. What the religious right wants to do is mandate its version of morality as the only acceptable version. There is a simple way to test this. How would the religious right respond to the invocation of a Santaria prayer or Wicca prayer by a student at a school event? Or, an invocation by an adherent of Satanism? I think we all know there would be uproar.” – Ira Cohen, Letter to the Ventura County Star

Allowing prayer in public schools means (in the end) allowing ALL prayers, not just the Judeo-Christian variety. Keeping government buildings and schools free of public religious expression is the best compromise against allowing faith-based tyranny.

Worm Food

Let us now discuss that topic that few enjoy, death and what to do with our body after we shuffle off this mortal coil.

UU blogger Philocrites found an excellent article on “green” burials that brought it to mind.

“Not for Ray Karno. On a Saturday morning earlier this year, he trudged up a soggy path to the crest of a ridge overlooking Mill Valley. Below, a sun-splashed meadow melted into woods thick with eucalyptus trees. ”Beautiful,” he said. ”This is a dream come true for me.’ Upon his death, the Oakland man wants his body brought to a spot like this one, wrapped in unbleached cloth, and lowered into a grave marked by a tree or indigenous stone. No embalming, coffin, or headstone. All natural. ‘To me, the idea that I could become worm food is an honor,’ Karno said.”

Green burials like cremation has been growing in popularity lately for a variety of reasons; environmental concerns, the cost of a traditional burial, and the slow erosion of the dominance of Christian thought on Western cultures. Few people understand how much our burial methods today conform to a Christian mindset. Modern Pagans much like many Eastern faith traditions don’t have a myth of bodily resurrection, and as such no corresponding need to preserve the body with chemicals and expensive caskets until the “day of judgment”. Green burial grounds may (for now) be a favored compromise for minority faiths since the grounds are usually left unconsecrated.

“To avoid legal complications and bureaucracy, the grounds are often not consecrated, but priests can bless individual plots. Often with no headstone, the legal requirement of marking each separate grave for the burial register can be left to a shrub, tree or even an electronic chip.” – Guardian Unlimited

This leads to the question of eventually creating Pagan burial grounds. In the face of the near-complete dominance of Christian-consecrated grounds and the attending rules of such establishments it is hard for modern Pagans to arrange a burial that fits his or her world view (heck our Wiccan veterans can’t even get a pentacle on their headstones). There is at least one Pagan-run burial ground (cremated remains only) in existence but this will hardly suit the needs of our growing (and aging) population.

So as the second and third-wave modern Pagans reach retirement age and eventually death we will need to address exactly what we want done with our remains and who we want to steward our resting places. Something to ponder.

Communicating

A Wiccan decides to read the Bible straight-through and gives his impressions of the good book and how well modern Christians embody it today.

“Sorry man, but I don’t see any Christ in many of the present day “Christian” churches. Instead they remind me of college fraternities where a select, chosen few are welcome and the rest are turned away at the door. I think of the megachurches (here in Dallas there is a church that is commonly referred to as either Fort God or, if they have a festival going, Six Flags Over Jesus) and am forcibly reminded of Jesus throwing the moneylenders out of his Father’s house.”

The post prompted a progressive Christian to muse on how outsiders view Christianity.

“I think this article by a Wiccan responding to the gospels is fascinating. It also reveals quite a bit about how we are or are not perceived as churches. It’s a background that I kind of share, so I have a lot of sympathy. My question is how we can honour this kind of searching without being imperialistic and triumphalistic. How can we affirm what is really of lasting value in this search and gently challenge the stuff that gets in the way of the gospel -and what is the gospel for this person anyway? Sometimes our ‘gospel’ turns out to be nothing of the kind, merely a set of propositions that make sesne to us and which we suppose, therefore, ought to be accespted by others.”

Andii @ Nouslife (the Christian blogger) also tries to make sense of what was really going on with the recent ‘Episcopagan’ scandal.

“I just wonder whether this sense of the counter-message of church structures and legalistic Christianity is part of what is going on in this story of an Epsicopal Priest reaching out to Druids… it’s hard to tell but I suspect that he was/is trying to affrim a real spiritual search which is rightly picking up important things that just do not seem to be representable in the church as it is currently configured and it makes it really hard to know how best to deal with it.”

I personally see this sort of inter-faith blog reading as an important step to real tolerance and understanding (on both sides). Maybe we can start to agree that progressive and liberal Christians have many values in common (and many common causes) with the modern Pagan movement.