Pagan Godspell

I have just read an absolutely brilliant, brilliant article by Barbara Ehrenreich regarding the need for communal, collective joy, festivals and ecstatic rituals.  I can only encourage everyone to read this outstanding piece.  I am consistently impressed with all of Ehrenreich’s work of course, but this particular article hits home with me on many levels.  I give it a Good News Triple Gold Star Award for Inspiring a Radical, Authentic Shimmy While Wearing Red Boots and a Skirt Made of The Starry Sky.

From the article:

My own Calvinist impulses–inherited in part from those of my ancestors who were genuine Calvinists, Presbyterian Scots–tell me insistently to get the work done, save the world and then maybe there’ll be time for celebration. In the face of poverty, misery, and possible extinction, there is no time, or justification, for the contemplation of pleasure of any kind, these inner voices say. Close your ears to the ever-fainter sound of drums or pipes; the wild carnival and danced ritual belong to a distant time. The maenads are long dead, a curiosity for the classicists; the global “natives” have been subdued. Forget the past, which is half imagined anyway, and get to work. 

I can relate to this, and I’m no Calvinist (partnered with one, though, so I know a little somethin’ about it).  It’s a struggle to remember that joy is something we must believe in, we must partake of, we must drink deeply and dance out everywhere, particularly in the midst of our despair and all the Holy Work we do for the planet and for those we care about.   Sometimes I feel that the world has decreed celebration and ecstasy extravagances we simply cannot afford.  Yet, without them, we are completely and utterly lost.  This is another reason why I open my arms and laugh out loud at the crazy loving and fierce dancing of my fellow Pagani.  Drumming and dancing, ritual masking, ritual play, these are work – important work.  The work of being human, of being animals, of being authentic beings on the sweet Mama.

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The prehistoric ritual dancer, the maenad of ancient Greece or the Caribbean practitioner of Vodou, did not believe in her god or gods; she knew them, because, at the height of group ecstasy, they filled her with their presence. Modern Christians may have similar experiences, but the primary requirement of their religion is belief, meaning an effort of the imagination. Dionysus, in contrast, did not ask his followers for their belief or faith; he called on them to apprehend him directly, to let him enter, in all his madness and glory, their bodies and their minds.

Oh my yes.  I may use the words belief and faith in my conversations – but this Knowing, this Ecstatic Gnosis, this is what my religion speaks to at its heart.  True community, and thus true communal joy and spiritual ecstasy, are sensual, embodied.  Relationship is embodied.  Intellectualized belief and theology will never be fully alive until they are wed, fundamentally and at their core, with the gnosis of the awakened body, in all its diversity, range of motion, range of appearance, range of expression – all bodies are sacred bodies.  They are the manifestation of Holy Multiplicity and are the instruments of True Relationship - how could they not be?

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The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression. Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting and dance?

Why not indeed?  Dance dance dance, Pagani!  Dance and do not waste time!  We fight with ritual, because of ritual, and for ritual.  To touch that divine explosion in the center of our gut – to make everything love.  To make ourselves known to the world.  To know the World.  Grok Earth.  Pray without ceasing.