One of my favorite memories of Pagan life is of the time, halfway through a camping retreat in Vermont, when about a dozen of us snuck off to a local pancake house for breakfast.

I should be clear about this: this wasn’t one of those big gatherings, like Freespirit or Starwood, where the locals would logically be expected to know there were bands of Pagans in their town.  It was a small gathering, invitation only, of no more than thirty or forty of us on private land.

We weren’t wearing garb.  Any visible pentacles were small and innocuous.  I don’t think we were even wearing tie-dye, and, though we would have smelled of wood smoke, so would any number of other campers on that sunny summer day.

We’d gone into town for pancakes, real maple syrup, and deliciously hot coffee in stoneware mugs.  All around us was the usual crowd of breakfast-eaters: farmers done with their chores, local families, carpenters and loggers and friends meeting over eggs and bacon.  Surrounded by good smells, laughter, and chatter, our group sat at one long table, telling stories and getting caught up on new jobs, how the kids were doing, new romances, and all the other details of life that old friends will catch up on when given a chance.  We had almost finished our meal when a woman from a nearby table approached us, bent low over us, and said, “Excuse me for asking.  You guys… are Pagans, aren’t you?”

We said that we were, and she nodded in satisfaction.  “I thought so,” she said.

Something about how we talked to one another. Something about how we interacted with each other.

Of course, there are parts of the country where the remarkable thing about this story would be that the stranger was not reacting with fear or suspicion.  And I don’t mean to minimize the good that is simply an absence of prejudice.   But that would not be enough to make this a favorite memory for me.  No: it was the fact that what identified us as Pagan to this outside observer was our warmth, our interconnectedness.

As important as the ecstatic parts of my religious life are to me, both in terms of my Quaker worship and my years of ritual and trance work as a Wiccan and in other forms of Paganism, what I wind up coming back to again and again when I reflect on what has been most important in my spiritual growth, is my life in community.  It is the warm and loving, and sometimes heated and tempetuous relationships I have formed in twenty years as a Pagan that have done the most to shape me into the person I am: hopefully, a woman the gods can approve and love.  Certainly, my interactions with the gods have shown me the woman I would like to become.  But it has been within the dojo of Pagan community that I have made the most progress in learning to fulfill the goals the gods have set for me.  Without the practice of attempting to live a life of authenticity, courage, and compassion while being inspired, angered, and confused by my fellow Pagans, I think I would have made very few gains over the years.

Another memory, from the years before I developed the friendships and connections of my Pagan community, reflects what I mean.

Almost the first thing I learned, when I became Pagan, was trance journey.  It began with working solo.  I had books to guide me, and many of the books featured trance work meant to be engaged in by a group, with one person reading out loud from a script.  Working alone, I had no one to read a script.  (I was much too self-conscious, back then, to read into a tape-recorder.)  So necessity required I give up the scripts early.  Likewise, without a partner, I had no one to beat a drum for me. So I settled on a focus on my own breath, and began exploring an interior landscape based, at first, on what scripts from my books suggested, but then more and more focused on encounters from dreams and from previous journeys.

Many of the encounters I had in that first year of working alone are still important to me.  Many of the landscapes I visited I still return to.  Sometimes I speculate on which mythological landscape they are related to–but that’s really beside the point here. Imagine that they come from whatever mythology makes sense to you.

On those journeys and in those dreams, I came to recognize a series of spirit-beings.  It was at that time that I began to connect with the goddess I work with to this day, a figure who once told me, when I asked her name, that I could call her “Rosie.”

Like a lot of imaginative people, I was very uncomfortable sharing my inner world with other people. So this means of working–going off to my own room, casting a circle, focusing on my breath, and finding my lonely way to an interior landscape–was very satisfying to me.  No risk, all gain.  I felt like I could go on this way forever… but I also sensed that I was reaching the limits of what I was going to be able to learn from books.  So I centered myself, went into trance, and went off to find Rosie, to ask her to guide me to a teacher.  Maybe even to be my teacher.

There exist a number of techniques for deepening trance.  I had discovered several of them.  My journeys, at that point, tended to be full of smells, textures, sounds.  They could unfold with a good deal of richness.  Places were distinct, specific, recognizeable.  And, as my books instructed me, I always made a point of retracing my steps in the reverse direction at the end of my journey, in order to “go home” to ordinary waking consciousness.

On that particular day, I had no real problem finding my way into trance, nor finding my way to the specific place in a wood where I often met Rosie.  But when I framed my question to her, something new happened:  the trance simply ended.  Like being dumped out of a wheelbarrow.  I was just done. With a strong non-verbal sense that this was not what Rosie wanted me to do.  I would not find a teacher in the spirit world.

I’ve come to recognize that my loner instinct needed curbing.  That the gods were indeed interested in engaging me in deepening relationship–but that they recognized that the way to make that happen was going to involve more than lip service to the immanence of spirit in the world.  I was going to have to go out into the physical world, and into the scariest part of the physical world at that: the social world, of prickly, pretentious, quarrelsome, judgemental human beings.  I was going to have to find my way to the gods through the hearts and minds of my fellow men and women.

I took the lesson to heart.  Oh, I still do engage in trance journey from time to time, and other forms of ritual and worship as well.  The direct encounter with Spirit is what I love best about my religious life.

But I have come to realize that, without interaction with humans, I would be incomplete.  I need to practice whatever wisdom the gods lead me to in that toughest of arenas: human community.

I don’t know how I would have fared had I become Pagan in the age of the Internet! With so many online forums and groups, it is perhaps possible never to connect with another Pagan face-to-face.  I might have been so sorely tempted by that that I would never have ventured out into the deep wild water of direct human community.  And that would have been a shame.

Because real community will hurt you, betray you, let you down.  And that’s a feature, not a bug.  Oh, I’m not saying we should welcome betrayal into our communities, or cultivate disillusionment as a path to wisdom.  But there’s a way that compassion and love and mature spiritual vision will not thrive in an ideal world. We need to be buffetted a bit by the kind of storms that are inevitable in an imperfect group of humans.

And, baby, they’re all imperfect.  That wonderful clan of Pagans whose warmth so impressed an outside observer was wonderful–but also engaged in a schism from another, larger group of Pagans, with plenty of acrimony on all sides.  We were all learning how to work on perfecting our spiritual selves in the midst of imperfect community.  None of us were (or are) perfect people, and yet we thought our communities ought to be!  We hadn’t yet mastered the delicate balancing of boundaries and generosity, love and limits, that spiritual maturity demands.

And if we’ve come closer in the years since–I hope I have, at least–it is only because we struggled with one another to find out how to do it: how to be real, and committed to one another, and still striving for something better–together.

In an Internet world, it has become easier to throw away people when they cause us pain, and to simply drop communities when they (inevitably) experience conflict.  It has become easier and easier to stay home, stay safe, and only journey inwards to find what we want of the spirit world.

But I don’t think that’s what the gods want of us.  I think the gods want us to keep it real, keep it present, get invested, get bumped and sometimes bruised among our fellows.  And, in the process, to mature, both as individuals and as a people.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect…

–E.M. Forster, Howards End

Cat Chapin-Bishop blogs at Quaker Pagan Reflections.