Pagan Godspell

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower has a name.  Well, haha, okay, it has many many many names.  But one of them – one precious to my people, is that of Beltane, the season of Fire.  Beltane is the Feast of the Greening of My Blood, the Quickening of Summer, the Festival of Celebrating Heat.  I imagine red tulips, sexy, pulsing with the fat sweetness of almost-summer, the promise of the beginning of the growing season, lettuce, spinach, radishes (you have to love radishes – the newbie gardener’s delight – almost instantaneous results, big, crunchy, spicy red radishes practically five minutes after seed planting).  Fire, love, Faery, green stars.  Drums.  Ecstasy.  Wild nights.  Yum.

I can wax a million words on each of the other 7 blessed Holy Daze of the contemporary American Pagani (though as a follower of more or less Celtic ways I tend to emphasize the cross-quarters, I recognize that all eight including the solstices and equinoxes is becoming generally recognized as the Pagan cycle of religious holidays), yet – when it comes to Bealtinne, Festival of Lush, of Ripe, of Juicy, of Mmm Oh Yeah, I get kind of lost for words.  Beltane, I would explain if we were face to face, is here – and I would place my hand over my heart and my stomach – a ball of Something Very Great in the core of the body.  Beltaine (day of the multiple spellings) is by far the most ecstatic of the high days in my book, and as such it never seems to need formalities, words, rituals.  It needs music, body-humming dancing, laughing, eating, and, if yer of a notion, the practicing of the happy horizontal tango nigh unto perfection.  It’s an epicurean immersion in the delights of corporeal being.  It’s the Highest Mostest Day of Embodied Bliss.  The celebration of the gorgeous arc of the flesh in harmony with the Earth. 

My first Beltane holds one of my sweetest memories – flush with being 18 and new to college, I was crowned May Queen at a tiny local gathering on a gorgeous misty day, and I tasted the wholly sacred fire of mead for the first time in my life – my first communion with the honeybee, who has since become my most precious animal relationship and a part of my Fetch soul, my beloved sister.  I remember it as a uniquely sublime day – a day of perfect joy, lots of raucous laughter, and community sharing.  It was loud, but shot through with something ineffable and feral and beautiful.  It’s never the ritual itself that I remember from that day, but the essence of it.  The essence of Beltane.

It’s therefore for me both a little strange and a little familiar to discover then that as Beltane draws near, I find myself withdrawing further into ecstatic silence, not frenzy (though there is delicious shivering joy to be found in the silence – it’s just not what I usually think of as celebrating orgiastic joy).  I have been intermittenly attending a local Quaker meeting, in an effort to reacquaint myself with blessed Silence.  I like the Religious Society of Friends for a number of reasons, which has been rather evidenced of late, I suppose.  There is something uniquely powerful about a group of people together gathered to merely sit and soak in the silence, waiting on the Light.  As an earth-based religious person, I am filled during these intense periods of hush with images of the red rocks of the southwest at sundown, the bonelight of the desert, the lush spring ripeness of dawn striking a sunken stretch of green grass at the cusp of a creek.  I imagine the light of the Golden Hour before sunset, when the whole world is washed in grace, and I marinate in it for as long as possible.  The green fuse that drives the flower is the green pulsing light of juicy life – and the light of Beltane is the light that falls from flower petals, shifting according to the time of day.  The silence invokes the Light.  In all the times I’ve seen the Light in its most brilliant manifestations, it has been accompanied by a breathless, pregnant quiet.  In the stillness of trembling beauty we wait in as a people, we possess for a moment the wild grace of the animals that we are, kin to deer and hares.

So there’s a Beltane secret in the Silence that I’m only just (re)discovering – the same that is found in the heart of dancing and shouting (both of which I enjoy immensely and wouldn’t give up for the world).  In the heart of the green fuse may we all find our stillness, our wildness, our crazy gorgeousness, our laughing, our dreaming.  Forever and ever.  Blessed be as Blessed Dances.

What a great time I’ve chosen to break my news fast.

When horrific tragedies like that at Virginia tech happen, it takes me a day or two to even process the information.  I become overwhelmed.  I wonder about the kind of fallout we as a people experience and will experience as the corporate emotional cost of reeling from this kind of tragedy after tragedy builds in us as a society.  As always – I move towards questions about the way faith dances in the world, even its dans macabre.

How do we, as Pagans, respond to horror?  We are a path determined to celebrate ecstasy (at least, this is my impression/opinion, which is, as ever, perhaps mine alone), which is a critical piece to keep alive in a world where many other religions seem to me to be focused heavily on images of redemption (which necessitate something to be redeemed/saved from), images of tragedy, grief, and the way in which religion acts as a solace in those instances.  I think solace is critical as well, but not at the expense of celebrating the glory of life on our green planet, or the precious ecstasy of our embodied being.  The key, of course, is to find ways to appeal to both of these critical pieces – to find joy without ignoring the needs of the grieving, and to grieve without ignoring opportunities for joy.  Christianity seems pretty on the spot when dealing with times that try our souls and minds – churches organize almost instantaneously to offer opportunities for communities to come together and share tears, prayers, just being with others in grief.  We Pagani are simply less organized, less willing maybe, or perhaps just at a loss as what to do as a religious people when these situations arise.  As Hecate points out, the disorganization on our parts as Pagans is one of our more endearing qualities to me as well, yet, like Hecate, I wonder that we do not do more, and wonder why we do seem to de-emphasize questions of how we might respond religiously to these events.

Ultimately, again, my faith is about celebration and ecstasy.  I do feel that we focus on these aspects of religion as a society so rarely that I think our contribution to religious thought in this manner is absolutely critical and we should not ever lose our focus here.  Yet.  Yet.  There is always and forever the matter of authenticity – and no religion can claim authenticity that denies a piece of the complex nature of being who and where we are.  To pray out horror, to learn to cry out in rage and sadness and grief – these are fundamental.  We cannot be brothers and sisters in the Holy Order of Hystericals without them. 

I may not be articulating well today.  My numbness has not yet shifted.  I can only hold those families and friends of the many dead in my prayers to the Mama.  I can only wonder and fear and rage and cry and love whom I love with a fierceness.