Midsummer Flummox

Here it is, the summer solstice, one of the most significant pagan holidays, and I’m just not sure how to celebrate it at all. I’m still kind of stumbling about with regards to how to express my newfound faith. I have been developing a fairly close relationship with my gods, and that has brought a lot to me spiritually, but I still am looking for some kind of practice that will tie my spiritual life together more fully. And I am still convinced that an exclusive devotion to Hellenismos just is not the right answer for me. I have more to say on that than I said in that earlier post, but it is a bit off-topic at the moment, so it will have to wait.

I have an attraction to Druidry, and I have continued to think hard about the Ancient Order of Druids in America, but that path doesn’t seem to have quite clicked yet. Part of that is pure laziness on my part and chaos in my life (annual training with the National Guard, studying for the bar exam), but a lot of it is pure stalling and hesitation or a lack of a clear beginning, a point at which I commit myself and say “okay, I am actually going to do this, starting today. I’m not really sure what is holding me back.

But in any case, I’m sitting here on the longest day of the year, feeling like it should be somehow both festive and spiritually significant, but feeling that it is in fact neither. And I’m not sure what to do about it. I kind of wish I had some like-minded pagans to celebrate and worship with. Actually, that’s one of the reasons I’ve been looking into the ADF: they have a grove (relatively) nearby, with even a group of Hellenic druids who get together to worship separately.

Any ideas?

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Beltaine Exploration

After I finished with final exams, I was able to take a day for myself and go tromping around the woods. It was a few days after any reasonable dating for the holiday (the full moon was on the 9th, but I wasn’t able to get out and about until the 15th), but it was close enough and my most practical option.

So I spent a day exploring undeveloped parkland in Montgomery County, which was a lot of fun. Most of these areas are parcels of land bought by the county and technically part of the park system, but with no access or anything–they’re just pieces of woods that you can go play in if you can find a way to get there. The day was tough on my allergies, and I wound up really exerting myself with a day full of exploration, but it was a lot of fun. I even found a cool snake under an old corroded piece of metal. Getting a chance to be outside in nature does me a lot of good and generally makes me feel a lot saner.

My other project for the day was to try out the Beltaine liturgy from Greer’s Druidry Handbook, as a way of kicking off my AODA candidate year. So one of my goals while exploring was finding a suitable place for a ritual. It took me a bit of time and expense to gather all of the needed materials (and I wound up not having a sprig of hawthorn, or any idea of how to find one). I used a katana instead of a medieval European-style sword because it’s what I have on hand, and I wound up just putting my white altar cloth on the ground for lack of anything more altar-like. I also made an on-the-spot substitution of gods, invoking Aphrodite in the ritual instead of Niwalen (I already have a close relationship with Aphrodite, and she seems like an entirely appropriate goddess for Beltaine).

Honestly, I could have come into it with better preparation, so it was a definite learning experience. Without a sprig of hawthorn, I just used a sprig from a sapling nearby, which was a little unsatisfying. And I had to carry the book around with me because I hadn’t learned the liturgy very well. No spiritual fireworks went off during the ritual, but when I was finished, I had a sudden and very interesting sense of spiritual wholeness and satisfaction, like I had accomplished something that was actually significant.

My location was kind of fantastic, with a few exceptions. It was pretty difficult to get access to (I had to park on the side of the highway and tromp in past some backyards), and there were an insane number of ticks, but that’s partly an issue of season and not going to get much better in any wooded area. But I was flicking the little buggers off of my arms and legs all day long. Those issues aside, it was a wooded hilltop with a bunch of clearings covered in this vibrant green ground cover, and the hill was almost entirely surrounded by two branches of a little creek. It was the kind of place where you could almost feel a spiritual presence. If I get the chance, I would like to go back.

I wasn’t wild about Greer’s seasonal liturgy before I gave it a spin, and now I’m rather excited about it. This is not to say that I am prepared to accept it as scripture or anything, but I would like to try it again. The holiday-specific stuff didn’t drive me wild–really it is just an offering, an invocation of deity, and a meditation session (it was hard fro me to concentrate when I was imagining ticks crawling all over me)–but the general opening and closing of the Druid’s circle was pretty awesome, and I will definitely keep using that, even if I wind up cherry-picking the rest.

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Concerned About Christmas

I absolutely love Christmas.  I love the music, the decorations, the cookies, the shopping, the presents, the smiles, and the colored lights. The commercialism of Christmas just doesn’t bother me.  It’s fun, and its only once a year (commercialism the rest of the year bothers me).

I can remember each Christmas distinctly going back to when I was six years old, and I have hazy memories of Christmases before that.  These memories are some of my favorite memories, some of the best and most important times I have shared with my family.  Christmas for me is the true mark of the turning of the year and the passage of time.

The spiritual side of Christmas has always seemed incredibly important as well.  The religious side—the birth of Jesus and all it means for the world.  It is amazing to me.  Of all Christmas carols, I like the sacred ones the most.  While I love the glitz and the sparkle and the watered-down-TV-special stuff, the things about Christmas that are really meaningful to me—really meaningful, are the baby in the manger, no room in the inn, shepherds watching their flocks by night, a new star in the sky, angels proclaiming the birth, and the three wise men.  All that Christmas means, explicitly and symbolically, is precious to me.  For most of my life, the sacred meaning of Christmas has been enough to hold me to Christianity even when my faith was weak and other options seemed more interesting.

Because of my attachment to the sacred core of the holiday, last Christmas was hard for me.  It was the first Christmas in my life where I had serious doubts about whether or not I was a Christian, and so I was not sure what to think or feel about Christmas.  We weren’t going to church at the time, so there were no Christmas services.  I just wasn’t sure what to make of Christmas, and it made the holiday confusing and even a little bit painful for me.  If I am not a Christian, then what is the point of Christmas?  And Christmas has been so important and valuable to me, that losing it—or even losing just its sacred core, is something I don’t really know how to cope with.

So here I am, a year later, and not really any closer to figuring out what I believe—or what I want to believe.  I can’t call myself a Christian and feel honest about it, and so I don’t know what to make of Christmas.  But there’s something in that sacred core of the holy day that I yearn for.  What do I do?

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