PaganCentric

I’ve wanted to post this for some time, but had lost it somewhere along the way. I’m often asked general questions about what it’s like to be Pagan, and I never know how to answer it. That’s like asking what it’s like to be human. There is no simple reply. I’ve always thought that this piece sums it up fairly well, at least in regard to making a general impression, and I’ve long wanted to post it here, if for no other reason than that I think it needs to be preserved. Hopefully you’ll agree. ~ Claire

Pagans acknowledge that there is so much we could learn about the world and ourselves if we would just sit down and shut up occasionally.

Walk out into a forest alone, find a rock or a stump, and sit down. Clear your mind. Sit and listen. Don’t think. Don’t let your normal ingrained patterns of analysis and calculation run amok. Be silent. Sit. Listen. The wind blows softly through the trees, caressing quietly rustling leaves. Somewhere, far in the distance, a hawk calls out.

But this is only the surface. Be still. You’re still thinking. Stop it. Don’t analyze. Just be. Just sit there. And exist. You’re not a person anymore. You are a camera. You are a microphone. You observe and record. You do not analyze. The world is alive. You hear the soft rustle of leaves as a squirrel scurries across the forest floor. Crickets chirp near you. You didn’t hear them before. A lizard bolts silently from a nearby leaf and races up a tree. Your eyes follow it. Recording. And you see, stretched between two limbs, the fragile web of a spider. She busily repairs her damaged web. Near her, a captured moth struggles in its silk cocoon. Your eyes wander farther up the tree. The branches sway ever so softly in the gentle breeze. The leaves dance upon it. Thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. The forest canopy is alive with movement. The wind reaches down and caresses you, tickles your hair. It brings to your nose the earthy scent of pine. And musk. The sweet hint of new leaves. Life. All around you are minute sounds. Movement; the frenzied life of hundreds of thousands of insects.

This is what the world is like when you are not there. This is what the real world is like. The real world, without human beings, without human intervention, without human precepts and will, without human prejudice and arrogance. The world simply is. Just as you now simply are. And the magick of this life is all around you. It’s in you. You feel it. Breathe it. Your blood pumps it. You are it. It’s a tangible thing almost. Something you could just about reach out and touch. And if you open up, listen, breathe, feel… if you can be quiet… for just a moment… the wind seems to whisper. Something deep within you belongs here. Just like this. And when you leave here, you will never be the same again. Wherever you go, the frenzied living peace of the forest will remain within your soul.

The Earth has given you something that can never be taken away. And in return, you leave a part of yourself behind. The exchange can never be reversed. You are linked. On some subconscious and spiritual level, you have become the Earth. And the Earth has become you. And perhaps for the first time in your life, you belong.

Be quiet. And just be. Be yourself. Be alive. Within your heart the wind is blowing through the trees. And this is all you ever really wanted. Now you have begun to understand what they mean by “Earth-based” religions. Once you have communicated directly with the Divine, you understand that there is no need for churches or priests or organized religions. The Divine is waiting to reach out to you if you can only be still enough for a moment to listen.

~ Wicasta Lovelace

If I’ve been amazed by anything resulting from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s been the persistent anger of Far Right-Wing Christians to any suggestion that the ecological disaster that’s been created by BP’s stunning recklessness is a serious problem. Most of the Christians I have talked to have stuck their heads in the sand, preferring to continue to believe that there’s nothing Mankind can do to seriously damage the planet. Their God simply wouldn’t allow it. So they wind up spouting incomprehensible bull like “the Earth is perfectly capable of healing itself without our help”.

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[I felt compelled to share this article from the New York Times, about a loud Nigerian preacher, Helen Ukpabio, who is waging a war against witchcraft. Keep in mind as you read this that the actions of Helen Ukpabio are not ancient history. ~ Claire]

At home in Nigeria, the Pentecostal preacher Helen Ukpabio draws thousands to her revival meetings. Last August, when she had herself consecrated Christendom’s first “lady apostle,” Nigerian politicians and Nollywood actors attended the ceremony. Her books and DVDs, which explain how Satan possesses children, are widely known.

So well-known, in fact, that Ms. Ukpabio’s critics say her teachings have contributed to the torture or abandonment of thousands of Nigerian children — including infants and toddlers — suspected of being witches and warlocks. Her culpability is a central contention of “Saving Africa’s Witch Children,” a documentary that made its American debut Wednesday on HBO2.

Those disturbed by the needless immiseration of innocent children should beware. “Saving Africa’s Witch Children” follows Gary Foxcroft, founder of the charity Stepping Stones Nigeria, as he travels the rural state of Akwa Ibom, rescuing children abused during horrific “exorcisms” — splashed with acid, buried alive, dipped in fire — or abandoned roadside, cast out of their villages because some itinerant preacher called them possessed.

Their fellow villagers have often seen DVDs of “End of the Wicked,” Ms. Ukpabio’s bloody 1999 movie purporting to show how the devil captures children’s souls. And some have read her book “Unveiling the Mysteries of Witchcraft,” where she confidently writes that “if a child under the age of 2 screams in the night, cries and is always feverish with deteriorating health, he or she is a servant of Satan.”

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[This sounds like pre-school stuff from kids, not something adults would come up with. A pox upon their houses, I say. ~ Claire]

From Advocate.com:

To prevent Constance McMillen from bringing a female date to her prom, the teen was sent to a “fake prom” while the rest of her class partied at a secret location at an event organized by parents.

McMillen tells The Advocate that a parent-organized prom happened behind her back — she and her date were sent to a Friday night event at a country club in Fulton, Miss., that attracted only five other students. Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn’t much to keep an eye on.

“They had two proms and I was only invited to one of them,” McMillen says. “The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to.”

Last week McMillen asked one of the students organizing the prom for details about the event, and was directed to the country club. “It hurts my feelings,” McMillen says.

Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls. “They had the time of their lives,” McMillen says. “That’s the one good thing that come out of this, [these kids] didn’t have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom].”

In March, after the Itawamba County School District refused to allow McMillen to bring a female date to the prom, the district canceled the event altogether. McMillen and her lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union challenged that decision in court, and a judge ruled the district could not bar McMillen and her date.

The judge declined to force the school district to hold the prom because a parent-sponsored, private prom was being organized — and the understanding was that McMillen and her date were invited to that event. But Hampton says McMillen was never invited and organizers made it very difficult for her to find information on the time and location. That prom was later mysteriously canceled, with the Friday night event at the country club officially replacing it.

• Original Article

[I posted this in 2009, but discovered that it's been getting such a response this year that I thought I'd re-post it. ~ Claire]

Ever one to ruin the fun, I couldn’t let today go by without making a few comments about Saint Patrick and the annual holiday that’s held in his honor. Most of the people I know will be wearing green in some form today, thinking of all things Irish, drinking green beer, and possibly honoring that ancient Irish tradition of getting drunk and fighting. In other words, Saint Patrick’s day is a good excuse for partying, and few people will put any more thought into it than that. That’s fine. It’s a secular holiday in the United States, even if the day is named after a Catholic bishop and missionary, and so it should all be taken with a grain of salt.

If most people know anything about Saint Patrick, it’s that his one claim to fame is that he drove the snakes from Ireland. What most people don’t realize is that the snake is a Pagan symbol, and that the snakes referred to in the Saint Patrick mythos are not meant in the literal sense, but refer to Pagans; i.e., Saint Patrick drove the Pagans (specifically, the Druids) out of Ireland. So what is celebrated on Saint Patrick’s Day with drinking and much cavorting is, ironically, the spread of Christianity throughout Ireland and the subjugation and conversion of the Druids.

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There are a number of good reasons to be outraged by a leaflet that’s being handed out by Christians, but I’ll leave you to make up your own mind about it by reading the article.

The first thing that bothered me is that the leaflet came to light because a young girl in Bristol, Virginia, who was working in the drive-through at a burger joint called Hi-Lo Burger, was handing the leaflet by a customer. She wasn’t standing on a corner or bouncing through the local mall with her goodies half hanging out. One would assume that if she was working in a fast food burger joint, she wasn’t exactly dressed like a skank.

More than anything, though, what bothered me most was the unimaginable contention that a woman who dresses in a manner which the American Taliban believes is “ungodly” is partly at fault if she is raped. Think about that. Isn’t that the old mentality that a lot of women are familiar with from our unrelenting Christian neighbors? If a woman is raped, wasn’t she asking for it in some fashion? Shouldn’t she have taken better precautions? If someone smashes down her front door and rapes her as she tries to flee in the bathroom, shouldn’t she have installed better locks on her house? And if she works in a public place and ever wore anything the least bit suggestive, wasn’t she responsible for that man wanting to come there and rape her in the first place?

All you need to know about this leaflet can be summed up by the following quotes;

“Scripture tells us that when a man looks on a woman to lust for her he has already committed adultery in his heart. If you are dressed in a way that tempts a men to do this secret (or not so secret) sin, you are a participant in the sin.” It also states. “By the way, some rape victims would not have been raped if they had dressed properly. So can we really say they were innocent victims?”

I think all victims of rape who read those words will find a knot twisting up in their stomach. We’ve all put ourselves through that self-recrimination game, wondering what we might have done to deserve such hatred from another human being, that they would do such things to us. Reading such filth as the “Women & Girls” leaflet makes most of us feel like we’ve not only been raped, but we’ve been spit upon by those who we thought might empathize with us.

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There are a number of issues which come to mind when I think about the following story. Foremost is the dismissive attitude of the author. He starts off his story by pointing out that the placement of a Christian cross in a Pagan worship area is “hardly destructive behavior”. That immediately made me think of the reactions one would get here in Asheville if someone went around erecting pentacles at Baptist churches.

Then in the second paragraph he uses a phrase which always knots my brow. He desrcibes Tech. Sgt. Brandon Longcrier as “a self-described pagan”. That’s a dismissive phrase which suggests there’s something wrong with being Pagan. I often wonder why these same people don’t refer to the subjects of their stories as “a self-described Christian” or “a self-described Jew”.

My point is that the issue at the heart of the story is the disrespect of a sacred Pagan space by Christians. That intolerance, at the core of why this is an issue to begin with, is self-evident in the dismissive attitude of the author in regard to the Pagans in this story. That is what most Pagans face on a daily basis.

A good friend once told me that the best way to understand an issue is to simply reverse the principals. If you’re a Christian and you don’t understand why this is such a big deal, imagine how you would feel if someone erected a large wooden pentacle in front of your church. What messages do you think those responsible would be trying to send you?

- Claire Mulkieran

Cross Placed at Air Force Pagan Circle
By Joshua Rhett Miller
Friday, February 05, 2010

A large wooden cross was placed at an Air Force Academy worship area for pagans and other Earth-centered religions, prompting an investigation by academy officials, though some caution that it’s hardly “destructive behavior.”

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said an Air ForceAcademy staffer spotted the cross — erected with railroad ties — lying against a rock at a worship area for pagan groups at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Jan. 17.

Tech. Sgt. Brandon Longcrier, a self-described pagan who sponsors the group that worships there, said the incident was similar to someone leaving a pentagram or a pagan symbol at the academy’s chapel altar and claimed he and others are victim of a hate crime. In an e-mail to Weinstein’s group, Longcrier said his group had been “thrown under the bus by the system we trusted” and that the “hate crime” has been ignored.

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The answer to this question depends upon your meaning of the word “God”. If you’re referring to the narrow definition of “god” to mean solely the Christian concept of “God”, then perhaps the answer to your question is “no”. Pagans are not Christians. However, it’s not that simple. Many Pagans, myself included, believe that there is only one god, and that all religions on Earth reach out to this god in their own way. So, using that definition, thinking of “God” in a larger sense, as a entity or force than cannot be bound by narrow human conceptions, the answer to your question would most definitely be “yes”.

Many Pagans realize that the nature of “God” or the Divine is something that cannot be described by our limited human perceptions. So we make up whatever concepts we need in an attempt to explain that which cannot be explained. This is religion. Many human beings fail to realize that The Divine is not the same thing as religion. I’ve meant many Christians whom I would contend do not worship God at all, but worship Christianity itself. As I have Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and, yes, Pagans. It is too easy for us to believe that our way is the only way. To concede that other religions might just be as valid as ours contradicts everything we believe in. So therefore, if someone belongs to another religion and they do not believe what we believe, and we are the one, true way and the only path to God, then we contend that those who follow those other religions cannot possibly believe in God.

This is not true.

To understand what Pagans believe, you must first acknowledge the concept that for a Pagan the concepts of the “Goddess” and the “God” are simply metaphors to help define and shape our understand what the duality of The Divine, the feminine and masculine aspects that exist in all species. Few Pagans think of the Goddess and the God as literal, sentient beings, as many Christians think of their God sitting on a throne in a city in the sky where the roads are paved with gold. To us, these are metaphors which help foster our understanding of the dualistic nature of The Divine, just as that wise, benevolent being sitting on a throne is a metaphor that helps Christians conceptualize their relationship with The Divine. You see, to us, it’s entirely possible that both Pagans and Christians are correct in their basic concepts. We both reach out to the same Universal energy. Christians call in God or Jesus. Wiccans call it The Goddess and The God. Pagans call it by many names.

So, if you can accept that our concept of “God” is different from yours, and that perhaps we’re both worshiping the same thing, then one would have to concede that Pagans most definitely believe in God. We just describe it differently.

~ Claire Mulkieran

[The following was  taken from an excellent article by Joe Kernan in the Warwick Beacon. - Claire]

In a recent “special report,” Costa Mesa, California’s conservative Citizens for Excellence in Education proclaims Halloween nothing less than anti-Christian, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times.

“When the roots of this holiday are traced,” the report contends, “nothing but deadly evil is unearthed.”

In places all over the country, schools are replacing their Halloween parties with “fall festivals” because of parental concerns about the holiday’s religious roots.

“There is a kind of amazing concern for the demonic world among Christians these days,” says Newton Malony, a psychology professor at the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena who was quoted in the Times story. “A lot of people believe very strongly that there are demons, and to participate in Halloween is to encourage the demons.”

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Five women were paraded naked, beaten and forced to eat human excrement by villagers after being branded as witches in India’s Jharkhand state. Local police said the victims were Muslim widows who had been labelled as witches by a local cleric. The incident occurred on Sunday in a remote village in Deoghar district.

Correspondents say the abuse of women who are branded as witches is common, but rare footage of the incident has caused outrage across India.

Police went to Pattharghatia village after being informed about the incident by a group of villagers.

“On Sunday morning the victims were taken to a playground where hundreds had assembled to watch the ghastly incident,” deputy inspector general of police Murari Lal Meena told the BBC.

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