Pagan Godspell

I’ve been thinking about why I spend more time talking about music, dancing, insects and voles rather than the Gods of contemporary Paganism.  Well, that’s mostly because Pagans worship a lot of different gods, in a lot of different ways (and because some of my gods are music, dancing, insects and voles).  Though I too have a pantheon, and my gods are important to me. 

Now, who the gods are, what they are, what they represent, whether they’re psychological constructs, people I made up to make my life make sense, real beings, forces of nature, and whether they’re infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, etc. etc. ad infinitum or all of the above (always a possibility, as Hecate sagely pointed out in her comments on yesterday’s post)…well, as they say, get 10 Pagans (or any other religious group) into a room and you’ll have 12 opinions.  I welcome yours!  Muckin’ around in there is a lot of fun, like playing with brilliantly colored thea/ological play-doh.  Though, as Caroline implied on yesterday’s post as well – it is more important to me how our beliefs about the gods affect our actions on the ground, how our thea/ologies operate on a day to day basis, how it affects our relationship with the Earth, our bodies, each other.  The abstract is fun dinner conversation – the concrete is “doing thea/ology.”  My relationship with my gods is dynamic, fluid, argumentative, instructive, loving, angry, ecstatic, and my gods, like me, are subject to the flow of Law in the bright scheme (skein) of the Universe.  I learn from them and co-create with them.  I also worship them. 

Defining worship too, is a tangle of silver threads.  This blog is one of the ways in which I worship, in which I grab ahold of things with my teeth and shake them happily (please refrain from envisioning me with flapping puppy ears here…though it may be too late), seeing what falls out and what stays together.  Then, of course, there’s all that dancing I go on and on about.  And of course, there are many gods that I do not worship per se, but that I admire or praise.

Today, for instance, I’d like to give praise to two (out of the thousands, or the 9, or the 12, or the 3, that I love, admire, praise, or worship):

1. Jason Pitzl-Waters has a wonderful post today celebrating the Feast Day of La Virgen de Guadalupe.  I have always felt a profound connection to La Virgen de Guadalupe.  While I would not consider her a formal part of my pantheon (out of respect for the traditions she embodies), I have always loved her strength and her power, and I give her much praise and honor on this her Feast Day! 

2.  Last night, I pulled into my driveway at 9pm.  When I got out of the car, I was immediately hit by the gorgeous silent hush that had fallen over the world.  There was a misty rain and silver fog draped everywhere, under a soft dark sky, illuminating the streetlights.  It was a pregnant silence – full of something wonderful.  I felt caught in it like a small animal – in complete awe of the moment, breathing.  I stood on the concrete as the mintues stretched on and felt every pinpoint of mist touch my face in blessing.  I was reminded to look at the tops of trees and imagine.  To this god (or gods) who washed me in Peace last night – Mother Night, the Rain, the Silence, I give thanks and praise.

In the face of the hush, the rest falls away – the purpose of prayer, the meaning of worship, the face of the gods.  For you, friends, I wish the blessings of your gods and a moment of brilliant hush. 

Winter is a-comin’ in, sing poor wren.

The majesty of the barren season is upon us.  Time for stretching out the soul – having a hot cup of tea curled up on the divan (not that I have a divan, but I have a comfy chair, and it amounts to the same thing – divan just sounds more…victorian), cleaning out the cobwebs and lighting beeswax candles.  An intense period of introspection.  The Longest Night comes, and around this time of year I always seem to have some kind of life-altering, mind-blowing, re-evaluating meltdown.  Normally I try to avoid this sort of thing, but this year I’m diving in.  Airing out some soul laundry, taking some inventory.  When that first beam of golden light breaks over the fields on the morning after that long dark night, I wanna feel it hit a fresh spot in my heart.

Thus, I have been contemplating what I call my Crabby Voice of Scientific Doubt.  A mean little snipe, always rushing in to spoil everything.  No matter how I believe with my mind, or even my heart, I can never seem to quite bring that feeling wholly into my breath, blood and bone, to know that all I believe is real, that magic is real, that my visits to the Otherworld are real journeys to real places, not mere explorations of my psyche.  I know that they are, I feel that they are, and then Crabby McCrabbercakes has to pipe up and demand concrete evidence – proof! proof! - in keeping with a scientific worldview that leaves no room for wonder, and rarely any room for beauty (notice I said a scientific worldview – I’m perfectly aware that science can be approached with an eye for beauty, truth, sustainability, goodness, respect for life, etc., though I’ve encountered this very rarely – I’m saying that, like most things, our civilization has perverted our desire to know and learn, our innate curiosity, and has turned it into a culture of vivisection, pollution and greed).

So what to do with the Voice?  It will never be satisfied, since I can’t bring it tokens from my visits to the Otherworld.  And ignoring it only makes it louder (kind of like me).  So this winter I am endeavoring to dance with it.  No fighting, no ignoring, just dancing.  Listening and letting go.  The waltz of faith.  Let the burden of proof fall on her snipey shoulders if she wants it so badly.  I know how I feel when I hit the Silver Desert (as Gabrielle Roth calls it) in my dancing.  Sometimes I think my struggles with belief come more from trusting my body’s knowing than anything else.  My body knows it’s all real, but years and years of body-hating prompted by a culture full of body-hating has laid an extravagantly difficult path in front of me, inextricably tied to every point of my life, and in this way to my spirituality.  If I can belief what my body tells me without question, I will be miles closer to laughing the Voice into silence.  But I’m not quite there yet.  Closer, but not there yet.  For this winter, I begin by tossing out some of the cobwebs accumulated by refusing to dance with the Voice, and begin a fresh relationship, the boogie of belief.

So when that finger of light touches me on my cheek and my breath frosts around me on the morning that sees the darkness breaking for one more year, I can open my whole self to the moment and sit in true stillness (the kind that comes after shaking a rockin’ tailfeather) with the Voice, in silent being, like old pissant friends, sharing some Peace, knowing that in the sunlight and the ice crystals and the bare branches, there dwell my gods. 

And they remind me always that when I dream of new chicks hatched under the watchful eye of their small mother hen and new hay and gold-green woods, as I did last night, I know this is a message from the coming spring.  So when the first crocuses bloom in the upcoming months, there’s my proof.  S’all I need.

A post wherein I try to bite my own ass.  Metaphorically.  Nevermind.

So.  I’m a writer and a poet and a bookfiend and a scholar (sorta) and, of late, a blogger.   I’m also a talker (this may shock you – sit down and breathe deeply into a paper sack until you cease to hyperventilate).  The logic follows then that I’m into words.  And so I have been, my entire life - particularly the art of the written word.  Words have been my solace, my weapons, my beloveds, the gatekeepers of rapture.  I have done the can-can and the merengue with words all while sitting on my aforementioned posterior and have loved every minute of it.  And as I’ve noted, I have also caught myself unintentionally doing a really great impression of the “Mystical Magical World of Reading” bus guy from SouthPark.  Books have been, are, and will be one of the great romances of my life.  I once read a small article in some “news” magazine (you know, the ones that look more like fashion magazines but claim to be hard-hitting) about the decline of reading in America and I cried.  In fact, I still can’t think about that.  Let’s move on.

More, the written word has been a fundamental part of my spiritual development.  Like many Pagans, it was a book that introduced me to the path of my heart.  And many, many more spirituality, Witchcraft and Pagan books have guided me along the way to where I am today.  Ficition novels inspire me on my quest for communion with the Gods, spirits and the Beloved Earth.  Poetry is lighter fluid poured directly on my heart’s fire.

And yet, here’s the part where I bite myself in the ass.  Cuz see, it’s a tragic romance, our culture’s (and my) relationship with the written word.  And more and more the writing on the page begins to fail me.  I have realized how much of the doing of my religion I have sacrificed to the reading about my religion.  I despair at the loss of oral tradition.  I eagerly pursue performances by dancers, musicians, storytellers, and wonder why we do not have a stronger amateur vein of this gold in our communities.  We have stopped telling our own stories out loud, have stopped singing our histories, have stopped believing in the organic movement of body knowing in the world for the illusion of permanence and fact hidden in the written word.  And still, the thought of a world without books made me feel as though someone has poured ice water down my shirt. 

And then, just as I stepped hesitantly outside my fuzzy little bookworm comfort zone, I read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, which thoroughly and utterly rocked my world, and wholly articulated my growing concern with our reliance on the written word and how it separates us from true knowing.  Sensorial knowledge.  Our bodies.  The Earth.  So now I have more questions than answers (a healthy state to be in, but not an overly comfortable one), and a new struggle blossoms on the horizon of my spiritual journey.  What would it look like to put down our books and our articles and our blogs en masse, or even reduce our reliance on them by any real amount?  When we separate ourselves from our words by writing them down, what are the consequences for our communities, our relationships (with the natural world as well as each other), our bodies?  When I speak out loud, my words resonate through the filaments of the universe – they contain power because they come from my body, which is of the Earth.  Certainly the written word has a similar power, but loses its organic presence.  It loses the present – becoming immediately abstract.  What kind of work must we do in order to make ourselves even half ready to live in a world without the primacy of the written word?  What are the theological implications of doing so?  For perhaps the most obvious example – what would the “Religions of the Book” look like without the Book?  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and then the Word was written down on paper and stagnated there, and what happened to God (a preserved God under glass)?  Likewise, for Pagans, it would be excruciatingly difficult to be a solitary anything – thus the inextricable ties between the written word and the abstraction of the individual self.  A world that depends less on the written word is a world that depends more on community.  On relationship.  On the nuance of facial expression, tone, body.  On the feel of grass beneath your feet in the morning in June (all speaking to you, all oracles speaking, all prophets, the birds, the sun, the wind).

The irony of writing about these questions is, of course, obvious.  I am nothing if not ensconced in hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy is the modus operandi of Civilization.  Anyone who questions our society is forced to live in hypocrisy – this shouldn’t stop a single one of us from questioning, challenging, critiqueing, and acting.  Thus I will not stop engaging in the written word at this time – it’s an effective tool within the system, for all that it is a creation and co-creator of and a collaborator with that system.  I understand that it, like civilization itself, operates as an addiction at the same time it gives opportunity.  I will continue to read, and write, for as long as I can do these things.

Oh, but at the same time – I seek community.  I seek storytelling.  I dance.  I pray aloud.  I sing.  I build altars to the Gods – the Spirits and Powers.  And I think myself into uncomfortable knots.  I ween myself off the belief that the written word is Divine.  I wonder at the possibility of an Earth re-enchanted, literally, by the singing of its histories and the ability of all the people to truly listen and hear Her speaking. 

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. – Victor Hugo

At least, I think Victor Hugo said this.  I’ve seen it attributed to various other artists, but Victor Hugo was the first I was aware of, so let’s pretend he said it.  I don’t think he’ll mind.  When a certain megabillion corporation that exploits childhood for its lucrative niche market potential but will remain unnamed makes an egregiously, offensively banal animated version of one of your most tragic and difficult and beloved novels, one thinks you’d be a little too tired from all that spinning in your grave (even a decade later) to bother caring if a certain Pagan blogger attributes some quote to you that you never said. 

*cough*  Right.  I was going to talk about music.  Which indeed washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.  So much so that I believe it may be the one place where all religions can truly come together.  I know of no religious person who discounts the power of music, and I have met many, many non-otherwise-religious people who have told me flat out that music is their religion.

In fact, I’m willing to bet a signed first edition of Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon (not that I have one, but if I did…) that you nodded when you read that.  Out of all the statements I’ve ever made about religion, the importance of music is the single issue that I’ve received not one argument against.  Nobody has ever said “music?  meh.”  Now here I am coming awfully close to generalizing – which is a baaaad thing, I know.  So it’s not to say that there’s no one out there who doesn’t really feel that music is important to them spiritually or at all, just that I’ve never met any of these people.  And every hardcore music-lover I’ve ever met has never failed to talk about it in religious, spiritual terms, often with looks of rapture on their faces.  Of course, what music is spiritual for any particular individual will differ hugely.  Somebody is going to feel the Spirit when listening to Africa by Toto.  Others are going to be vaulted into holy communion with Beauty while listening to Sweet Honey In the Rock, or maybe Tool.  Or hip-hop.  Or gospel.  Or jazz.  Or classical, opera, funk, pop, be-bop, oldies rock n’ roll, house, ambient, new age, world, folk… forever and ever Amen.

But I would postulate that it is often the same ecstasy that washes over an individual when they listen to the music of their heart’s breath – and certainly I’ve been to concerts where I’ve felt a community of individuals connect on that fundamental level to sing together and worship at the root of the Holy that can be felt at any good religious gathering.

So what does this mean?  That maybe religious leaders around the globe should get together, stop talking to each other (assuming they were to begin with), and start singing, listening, dancing?  Communicating what is illuminative in their faith purely through music – no words.  What an interesting approach to conflict management that would be.  Or to communication at all.  I do believe these are the fundamental underpinnings of the classic “golly I like you but I’m incapable of really saying it cuz I’m an adorable goober so here’s Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler that says what I would say” mix-tape (or CD for all those people who left the 80s…unlike me apparently). 

So.  Imagine an interfaith dialogue that consisted purely of music.  Imagine a church of music.  Where people gathered to share music with each other in Holy space – where listening fully to another’s heart songs was the method and the sermon.  Where words can only be used when set to music – where singing is the prayer.  These places are already all around us – what would it look like to make the spiritual part of music truly overt – to create a church where music isn’t a part of the religion, it is the religion?

Well…I’d go anyway.