As if the child abuse scandals from the last several decades and the complicity and cover-ups that seemed to reach to the highest levels of the Church weren’t enough, now there’s the crackdown on American nuns who, in their commitment to social justice and helping the poor, have been accused by U.S. priests and bishops of straying too far from sanctioned Church doctrine and not spending enough time denouncing feminists and gays. It’s also clear that pressure from Catholic religious leaders plays a large role in the Republicans’ “war on women” and some of the recent bills proposed to restrict access to birth control and health care for women, all in the name of religious freedom. For those of us who have been keeping an uneasy eye on the socially conservative, theologically strict and consistently anti-feminist Pope Benedict XVI since his appointment seven years ago, this most recent response of the Catholic Church really comes as no surprise.

And so it’s no real surprise that there’s push-back from atheists, secularists and humanists who’ve about had it with an antiquated, patriarchal hierarchy trying to actively interfere with the democratic processes of government. The anger and disgust is clear in a recent, full-page ad run in the Washington Post by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, asking “liberal” and “nominal” Catholics to quit the Church once and for all:

It’s time to quit the Roman Catholic Church. Will it be reproductive freedom, or back to the Dark Ages? Do you choose women and their rights, or Bishops and their wrongs? Whose side are you on? [...] The Church that hasn’t persuaded you to shun contraception now wants to use the force of secular law to deny birth control to non-Catholics. You’re better than your church, so why stay? Why put up with an institution that discriminates against half of humanity?

The language of the FFRF ad is harsh, and in many ways it over-reaches when it turns from criticisms of the Church as an institution to mockery of religious belief in general. In an editorial response, E.J. Dionne writes that he is not planning on quitting the Catholic Church any time soon, and he dismisses many of the ad’s arguments as just the “usual criticism” that liberal Catholics face, saying:

Catholic liberals get used to these kinds of things. Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.

I’m sorry to inform the FFRF that I am declining its invitation to quit. They may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can’t ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and lay people who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized.

Like the FFRF ad, Dionne makes no distinction between the Church as an institution and Catholicism as a religion, and his commitment to the latter means that he’s a part of the former, come hell, high water, or anti-feminist disciplinary crackdown on the very sisters and lay people whom he credits for inspiring his Catholic faith.

But Dionne’s response weakens when he tries to tackle the most interesting challenge presented in the ad, the belief that liberals, by remaining part of the Catholic Church, can help change the Church from within:

If you think you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a “good Catholic,” you are doing “bad” to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.

With more than a little snark, Dionne calls out the ad for its overuse of unnecessary quotation marks and off-handedly dismisses the accusation of being an enabler almost as if he doesn’t know what enabling looks like (like, say, dismissing criticisms of destructive behavior on superficial grounds such as grammar or tone). Yet for all his disagreement, Dionne doesn’t offer a single practical way in which liberal Catholics can successfully challenge, from within, the extreme conservative direction that today’s Church is heading.

Dionne’s best attempt is to recall the somewhat-feminist leanings of Pope John XXIII, who wrote in a 1963 papal encyclical that “far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument, [women] are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.” Yet in that same encyclical, Pope John XXIII wrote that while a man “has the inherent right not only to be given the opportunity to work, but also to be allowed the exercise of personal initiative in the work he does” — “women must be accorded such conditions of work as are consistent with their needs and responsibilities as wives and mothers.” Hardly the ringing endorsement of gender equality and self-determination for women that Dionne might lead us to believe.

But even if it were, his attempt to challenge the conservative Church from within consists of little more than “wishing” that Catholic bishops were more familiar with Pope John XXIII and “wondering” if the bishops realize how their anti-feminist stance strengthens the Church’s adversaries. Neither of these seem to be very effective or practical — let alone very compassionate towards women who have more at stake than whether or not Catholicism beats secularism in a popularity contest. Dionne himself acknowledges that these are by no means new criticisms of the Church, but fails to wonder why such criticisms are on-going if the liberal challenge from within were really all that effective. All the more discouraging is that American women religious, who might be the best example of liberal Catholics challenging the Church from within its own ranks, are getting a very real taste of how Church leadership responds when that internal challenge becomes too effective and wide-spread.

In the end, Dionne never actually addresses what is perhaps the most important point of the FFRF ad. Much of the Church’s political power derives from the sheer number of Catholics who count themselves members of the Church even when Church leaders do not really represent their views at all. In fact, representing the views of lay Catholics isn’t even in the job description. The Catholic Church is not, and never has been, a representative democracy.

Politicians looking to score votes and gain support see one massive block of well-financed power consolidated in the hands of a few conservative male leaders who dictate religious doctrine and ethics for millions. They form political alliances and propose religiously conservative legislation with that view of the Church in mind…. and they do so because, for the most part, it works.

One example of why it works is the Manhattan Declaration. Sponsored by conservative Christian leaders back in 2009, it was intended to “rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush” and to call President Obama’s attention to the “formidable force” that this conservative religious alliance has in pushing for anti-women and anti-gay legislation. As of today, the Manhattan Declaration has more 525,000 signatures.

A similar petition proposed by liberal Christians to counter the Manhattan Declaration and to affirm support for equal rights for all, regardless of gender or sexual orientation…. sputtered to a pathetic halt with less than 3,000 signatures.

This is too often what Catholic liberal resistance looks like. Trying to stay neutral on a moving train.

~~~

Though my own journey away from the Catholic Church culminated in a definitive break more than eight years ago, when it became known that a close family friend had suffered from on-going sexual abuse as a child at the hands of a trusted Catholic priest, my journey began much earlier than that. My devotion to the ideals of Christ — peace, social justice, care for the poor and the marginalized, the law of love — led me in search of a deeper spiritual authenticity that, according to the standards of today’s Catholic Church, had led me far astray from sanctioned Church doctrine long before I ceased to call myself Catholic.

In many ways, the Catholic Church abandoned me years before I finally woke up to the fact and left of my own accord. For years, I struggled with the feeling of being a solitary Catholic liberal crying out in the wilderness. Like Dionne, I felt beleaguered by atheists and secularists on the one side of me, criticizing Catholicism for being a monolithic monstrosity of backwards-looking conservative patriarchy, while on the other side of me were many of my fellow Catholics striving to make the Church exactly that. I braced myself against the notion of being an example of everything that a Catholic could be — open-minded, intelligent, and feminist while still being devoted to the basic teachings of the Church.

But eventually, the cognitive dissonance and the sense of betrayal were too much to bear. Unlike Dionne, I am a woman — and for that reason alone, no matter how devoted I remained to the church, I would never be welcomed into the halls of power. The efficacy of my “challenge from within” was inherently and irrevocably restricted. And though I valued loyalty and honored the traditions of my family deeply, I also came to realize that one of the Catholic Church’s most basic teachings — the teaching on which the whole damn structure hangs — is that hierarchy and inequality are divinely sanctioned.

I didn’t leave the Church because I no longer believed in Christ, or the sacred mystery of love, or the importance of religious community, or the valuable insights from Catholic theologians, saints and mystics in the past. I left because I no longer believed in the Church as a just or ethical socio-political institution. As my brilliant stepdaughter recently pointed out, “You don’t give any one leader a lot of power just because he seems like a good guy, because you never know whether or not the next one who comes along is also going to be good.” We didn’t reject monarchy in favor of democracy because all kings were bad; we rejected it because the political institution of kingship was itself an opportunity for abuse and injustice.

The same theology of hierarchy and patriarchy that buttresses the current institution is also the reason why Dionne is not, despite what he apparently imagines, participating in a democratic and representative religious community in which liberals and conservatives vie for influence. Dionne might appeal to the slightly more liberal views of previous Popes, but the fact is, as a lay Catholic he has no part in the process of choosing who the next infallible leader of his religion will be. The Catholic Church is not an institution steered by consensus. Conservative Catholic leaders are in power: they’re laying the tracks and they’re at the wheel. Liberal Catholics are little more than passengers on this train and they will, as American nuns are now discovering, one day face the angry countenance of the conductor demanding to see their tickets.

~~~

This was a difficult piece to write. Many of my closest friends, not to mention family members, are Catholics, and I hold great sympathy for those who have remained members of the Church despite the scandals and abuses over the years. They possess a degree of devotion and loyalty that is admirable.

My hope is that their devotion is not misplaced. That they do not make an idol of the institution. That they have the wisdom to see the difference between Catholicism as a faith, and the Church as a socio-political construct, and that they do not compromise the one for the sake of up-holding the other. My hope is that they follow the example of their sisters and women religious, rather than the examples of their priests and bishops. And to be honest, I hope that, in doing so, they will dismantle and remake the Church as we know it.

Because if they don’t, the Catholic Church will die, because it deserves to die. And a great tradition will be lost.

So what’s Faith, Fern & Compass, anyway?

It’s not just a podcast. It’s a challenge.

• A challenge to live more gently and attentively with the fierce joy, quiet sorrow and wild love of the earth.
• A challenge to reconnect with ourselves and with one another in a time of rapid technological progress and cultural change.
• A challenge to honor the ancient wisdom of the past while nourishing our sacred roots in the present and looking forward to the unfurling future.

Each week, we invite you to join us as we explore the challenges of nature spirituality in the digital age through ecology, art, politics and interfaith conversation. Become part of a growing community of spiritual seekers and creative contemplatives finding guidance in the wellsprings of personal experience, soulful relationship and the dark green tones of earth-centered spiritual practice.

Faith, Fern & Compass is an interfaith podcast rooted in love for the earth and hope for the future. I am just so thrilled to be working on it, and I hope all of you who read this blog will go check it out!

The official first season starts on May 2nd, but there are already some episodes available on the website — or you can subscribe on iTunes.

You can find out more about the podcast here and here.

I wanted to take some time to highlight that now, and to share my own thoughts about cultural (mis)appropriation and syncretism, particularly as it pertains to steampunk.

To begin with, I feel like I’ve stepped on a hornets nest of controversy that was there before I even arrived on the scene, and now I’m getting stung. In retrospect, though, this is no excuse — the ground is just the kind that might shelter a hornets nest, and I should have been watching my steps more closely to make sure I wasn’t treading thoughtlessly and causing harm. So I want to begin with an apology to anyone who has felt personally offended or hurt by my post. Please know that it wasn’t intentional.

From what I can gather, the steampunk aesthetic already has a reputation among some for being appropriative of other cultures. I am, admittedly, not actually very big on the steampunk scene, and so I wasn’t aware of this reputation. But like I said, that’s no excuse for insensitivity — I’m thankful for this opportunity to learn and think more deeply about this particular aesthetic and all its many implications. I hope that those of you who have arrived here angry or offended will have some patience with me as I explore where I was coming from when I wrote my original post, and where my thoughts have led me since.

When I wrote “The Gears of Chance,” I was thinking of steampunk primarily as a way of reclaiming an imagined future-past in which many of the mistakes of the industrial revolution and the Western addiction to oil (including not only the ecological and environmental damage, but also the imperialism and colonialism that the industrial revolution helped to make possible) were mitigated and circumvented, and creative alternatives like steam and wind power were captured by the inventive genius of skilled explorers and intellectuals. That, to me, was the “steam” part of steampunk — an ecological response of imaginative and sacred ambivalence to modern industrial culture, in which we acknowledge the advances we’ve made while still regretting (and, through fantasy and invention, try to explore alternatives to) the damages those advances have caused.

The “punk” part of steampunk was, for me, a concern for social justice that subverted the rigid social norms of class and gender found in the Victorian and Edwardian eras of European history. Modern steampunk’s creative blending and combination of historically “upper class” and “working class” clothing and style subverted the strict class distinctions that were enforced at the time. A similar approach to stereotypically male and female styles to create deliberately ambiguous or transgendered aesthetics in modern steampunk was a form of ritual “deep play” (in the postmodern sense), exploring the fluidity and complexity of gender and subverting the strict polarity that separated men and women in Europe for hundreds of years. (The Victorian era, especially, is known for its prudish sexual repression, particularly directed at women.) By playing with and intentionally subverting the social norms of the past regarding class and gender, I saw steampunk as deeply concerned with social justice in the same way it was concerned with ecological responsibility and sustainability.

But that’s not to say that steampunk doesn’t embody a certain ambivalence of its own. This is best captured in my favorite modern steampunk novel, Lev AC Rosen’s All Men of Genius, in which an upper-class girl dresses up as a man in order to trick her way into a renowned scientific academy. Rosen’s novel deals deftly with all of the social conflict and ambivalence of the Victorian and Edwardian historical periods that steampunk draws on for its aesthetic, and challenges the assumption of man’s control over nature even while celebrating the creativity and inventiveness of scientific study and technological innovation.

It was in this spirit, as a Pagan and animist who holds deep reverence for the natural world and appreciates the ambiguous role of science that gives us both appreciative insight into and destructive power-over that world, that I wrote about the “steampunk shaman.” Shamans and trance-workers in many cultures around the world and throughout history have occupied a liminal place in their communities, challenging social norms through their spiritual work. In many cultures, the shaman was one who suffered a particular illness or deformity, and that sickness was a sign of the shaman’s power and the place they occupied, a manifestation that they were already partly attuned to the spirit world. Shamans, ecstatics and mystics in many religious traditions have sometimes dressed in clothing of the opposite gender (or gone partially or fully unclothed), undermining community expectations about the rigidity of gender and sexuality. Shamans all over the world communicate with the spirits of plants, animals, landscapes and the elements through ritual, trance-work and other forms of ecstasy (including sometimes the use of entheogens), for the benefit of their community. In the steampunk aesthetic and its emphasis on skilled invention and creative genius, I saw a similar appreciation for the techniques of working with the material world and its living spirits in ways that could transform society, but which remained respectful of the natural world and its raw elemental power. The use of fetishes (objects of power that connect us to the natural world and the artifacts of our own culture) is a natural extension of a religious perspective that sees the physical world as imbued with spirit.

None of this, to me, is cultural misappropriation. Shamanism has arisen in many diverse forms all over the world even among cultures that have had no direct contact with one another. My theory is that steampunk is one such example of a new, emergent form of shamanism indigenous to modern Western culture, which is uniquely adapted to handle the ambiguities and uncertainties of a modern, industrialized society seeking a reconnection with the natural world. Although the word “shaman” can be controversial, most people no longer use it to mean only the traditions of ancient Siberia, but instead to refer to any similar role or function in the many different cultural contexts all over the world and throughout history. In this case, the role I wanted to explore and articulate was best described with the word “shaman.” (I considered using “priestess” or “mage,” but neither of those words capture the specific role of the shaman or trance-healer as a liminal presence in the community who mitigates between this world and the spirit world.)

I want to make myself very clear: Although I appreciate the vital role of respect and appreciation for cultural context, I do not believe that any one culture “owns” shamanism, any more than I think any one culture “owns” religion, or science, or soccer. I do not support the belief that white people should be prevented from exploring and developing their own culturally-appropriate and contextualized form of shamanism simply because they are white.

That said, the question of cultural misappropriation is still a very big deal in the steampunk aesthetic, for one very obvious reason that I overlooked in my last article. And that is: it draws on eras of European history that were themselves deeply colonial and appropriative. Some of the defining features of the Victorian and Edwardian aesthetic were their incorporation of cultural artifacts from the indigenous peoples they conquered and colonized. Compounded by inventions that allowed for greater communication, globalization and technological progress, they were times when social justice often took a backseat to exploitation and consumerism (much like today, in fact) — and this included the “consumption” of aesthetically appealing aspects of other cultures without respect or regard for their meaning or context.

As Jaymee Goh pointed out on Twitter:

To recognize the heinous colonialism of the VIctorian era within steampunk requires respect for indigenous peoples. Steampunk is not rooted in European history, but in alternate history. Hence we expect greater sensitivity of such issues.

Jaymee (who writes a blog devoted to deconstructing narratives of colonialism and imperialism within steampunk) is absolutely right and calls attention to the very important fact that steampunk is alternative history, not history itself. Yet by drawing on these historical eras, steampunk evokes the ghost of colonialism and cultural insensitivity that are still very active in haunting us today, and we have to be very clear in dealing with those ghosts if we are to move forward with mutual respect and understanding. Jaymee probably assumes, because I am a white Westerner, that I am insensitive to the issues of continued cultural misappropriation and oppression directed against indigenous peoples — and she has no reason, based on reading only a single post of mine, to think otherwise. I don’t fault her for that. If anything, it goes to show just how important cultural context is, and how we can have misunderstandings and disagreements even among people who are all working for the same cause of social justice.

I think that steampunk — as a punk-aesthetic that deliberately seeks to confront and undermine social injustices — can handle (and work to redress) the inheritance of European colonialism in a healthy and respectful way. But it can only do so if people like me, who talk and write about the steampunk aesthetic, are careful to acknowledge the harm that has been done in the past by white European colonialism and cultural misappropriation. I failed to do that in my last article, which was a mystic-mythopoetic exploration rather than a cultural analysis of the steampunk trend. For that, I deeply apologize, and I hope that some of what I’ve written here helps to clarify my position.

Steampunk isn’t going away any time soon. It speaks to a deep ambivalence that many of us hold about the modern, industrialized cultures that we live in — societies in which computer technology seems each year to get more obscure and esoteric, in which skill and creativity are treated as less important than fame and wealth, in which ecological damage and environmental destruction persist despite our vast scientific knowledge about how the ecosystems of the world work and our own role in that destruction, and in which strict gender and class norms are often subtly (or not so subtly) reinforced even in the same breath as we congratulate ourselves on our diversity and tolerance. Steampunk looks back to the historical roots of modern culture in the generations before the first world war, picking at old scars and still open wounds, exploring what went wrong and what we might have done differently. It is absolutely vital that we engage in that process, even in the face of ghosts we would rather leave undisturbed.

The shaman, in all cultures, is the person who stands on that threshold of time and space, who enters the world of spirits and strange creatures, who has dealings with the ghosts of the restless dead, who seeks after the soul-shards that have been torn off and left behind through past trauma — and he or she does that work in order to restore the community to health and wholeness. I think that steampunk can open the door to this kind of sacred work. If we are careful, and respectful, and undertake that work with love.

The Clockwork Universe

We turn through a world of tension and pressure, movement and poise. Cycles within cycles that turn together, their teeth in rows — the still center of being, that emptiness around which every gear circles.

This is the clockwork of the universe, a shining mandala of interconnection and interrelationship.

The delicacy of craftsmanship expressed through the primal forces of the elements: forged metal, fire, water, steam and space. All these have their place, turn their way, in an intricate dance with one another.

This is not the Old Man Watchmaker’s dull work, some bauble set loose after a few quick windings to tick quietly in a pocket until it softly runs down.

This is a dance of power, a great engine of spirit churning. The hum and whirr of gears and springs, the hiss of steam, the roar and crackle of flame, all these are the melodies that make the Song of the World. A mandala of turning cycles and spirals, glimmering, polished and slick with grease. The work of soul is to keep the dance going, to slip into those spaces and join hands in the dance.

The Steampunk Shaman

The steampunk shaman knows the intricate patterns of the dancing world. Her wisdom penetrates the delicate work of friction and force, knowing exactly when to introduce the slightest pressure, and where, and how hard. No brute or bully pushing her will onto the world, she turns, she gives way, she waits in the center of stillness and open space, waits for the gears to shift into alignment.

When her work is done, you might say it was all just coincidence, the wheels of fortune spinning out through inexplicable chance. This is the work of the steampunk shaman: she turns the gears of coincidence. Through creative nonaction, all action is done.

Like shamans of the ancient times, she dresses herself as her animal kin: leather and silk and feathers, fetishes and objects of power woven into her garments and hair. Practical, worn soft, stained dark here and there from the hard work of dirty hands. Delicacy married to hardship, beauty contrasted with sweat. She plays in the polarity of gender and class.

When she moves, the buckles of her boots clink like the sound of far-off bells chiming in some otherworld. She wears the chains and charms of her trade, delicate gems set in polished metal imitating the gears and springs of the clockwork universe, an ornamental mandala, meditative adornment.

These are objects of power and transformation, too: the artificial eye, the brass mechanical wings. The blending of humanity with the elements of earth come alive at a touch — the hard gleam of metal and the transparency of glass.

The Alchemy of the Forge

Magic is the work of transformation. The steampunk shaman knows the transformative work of the forge. She brings together will with love, ferocity with joy, as fire meets water in the darkness amidst hot sparks of light.

From the forge of her soul, will and love arise mutually tempered, sharpened to a point — a blade that will never go dull. Like the butcher who cleaves precisely between flesh and bone, slipping his knife into the emptiness within all things, she moves through the clockwork world with power and purpose, always sharp, poised, polished to a smooth edge.

Just so she also knows the mystery of the inventor’s workshop, of steam and pressure. She is friend to the elements, to fire and water — and the polarity between them from which tension arises into creativity, necessity into invention. She brings together will and love into fierce joy, held in careful check by a trained and skillful hand.

Her wisdom penetrates the delicate work of force and friction, knowing exactly when to release that pressure, let slip that quick hiss of steam that will turn the gears of chance and move the world.

Spring, Tension and Ritual Time

Time, too, is a spiral, the turning seasons and cycles spinning past, never quite repeating in their steady, interlocking motions.

Yet the steampunk shaman stands with one eye fixed, turned to that strange beyond-time. She watches the seconds sweep past as a hand across the face of the world, a thin wand turning around a central axis.

This is the dreamtime, this is the time of myth and ritual. Here and now, day and night flash past, millennia span no more than a blink of the eye, and the present expands as a presence whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere.

The steampunk shaman in her magical work enters the dreamtime of spring and tension, winding her circle about herself with a few steady turns. All time is now-time, past and future condensed, held together by the tension of her will. She compresses the spiraling spring of time into a perfect unending circle of space, marked off by the horizon, screwed tight to the axis of the world.

It is in this circle that she holds her power ready, moving delicately here and there, tinkering in the emptiness of the spacious present. Love and will build to fierce joy and power contained within the dreamtime of her magical work — she knows, in her wisdom, just when the release the pressure, to let the power go.

And when she does, the circle unwinds her will into past, present and future, time springing back into shape to move the world anew.

When her work is done, you might say it was all just coincidence, a series of events begun long before the magical act itself was even conceived. You might say it was simply the wheels of fortune spinning out through inexplicable chance.

This is the work of the steampunk shaman: she turns the gears of coincidence. This is her magic: the fulcrum, the steam, the dance.

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012.
Why not join in?

Photography Credits (under the Creative Commons license):
- “Chronospheres,” by Gita Rau
- “Time Travelers Picnic,” by Anna Fischer
- “blacksmith: spiral on fire,” by Bernat Casero
- “one eye on the time,” by Scribe

This issue focuses on sacred spaces and sacred places, exploring this theme from a variety of perspectives. In his opening letter “From the desk…” Aontacht editor Renard shares a call to action with readers:

To every druid who loves the earth. To all my fellow pagans and every person who walks an earth based spiritual path — I ask each and every one of you — hear the Call of Awakening and make a commitment to visit some of our important sacred sites this year.

Make a commitment to also visit some of the lesser known sites that have been abandoned and seek out ways to reach, restore and activate them.

In the spirit of connecting to those lesser known and often overlooked spaces, my Wild Earth feature article revisits the practice of Lectio Divina as an opportunity to connect to the story of place in the natural world around us, engaging more deeply with its beings and spirits through observation, meditation, prayer and silent contemplation:

Celtic spirituality presents a unique challenge to the practitioner of Lectio Divina: the ancient Druids, priests of our Celtic ancestors, did not write down their holy texts but preserved them instead as an oral tradition passed on through the generations. What little of this sacred oral tradition that we’ve managed to preserve until today comes largely from tales and legends written down by monks, with glosses and layers of Christian interpretation overlaying the original myths. Of these we often have to rely on translations and reinterpretations in order to render relatively obscure myths a little more accessible to the modern reader. Lectio Divina can be a fruitful practice for engaging with these ancient Celtic stories and uncovering their personal relevance and power, but there will always be limits on how deeply we can delve into these texts passed down disjointed over a millennium or more of broken tradition.

Luckily, there is another approach we can take that will connect us with our Celtic ancestors through our love of the natural world, an essential aspect of Celtic spirituality both then and now. When we see nature itself as a constantly-unfolding story about the deepest, most sacred truths of life and death, we can adapt the practice of Lectio Divina as a creative approach to meditation that can strengthen our relationship with the earth.

You can read the full article in the newest issue of Aontacht Magazine, available free on the Druidic Dawn website. (You can also download a high quality .pdf version of the magazine here.)

The theme for the next issue of Aontacht Magazine is: Healing, and submissions are due by May 15, 2012. Check out the submission guidelines for how to share your work — or drop me a line!

Environmentalists spend a lot of time telling everyone how close we are to destroying the planet, or at least disrupting the delicate balance that allows the human species to survive on it. But they spend almost as much time complaining about how it seems like all that their fellow environmentalists ever do is run around frantically preaching doom and gloom, trying to harass and frighten people into action.

It’s only natural. When you see a loved one in danger — whether they’re suffering abuse or neglect because of someone else’s ignorance, selfishness or greed, or because there’s an on-coming mac truck speeding down the street with the breaks out — your first response is to cry out in alarm, to yell for help! You don’t stop and wax philosophic about the numerous existential and ethical reasons why your curmudgeony old aunt deserves not to be hit by a truck.

Many of us feel the same way about the planet and her diverse ecosystems and wild places. It’s hard to take the long, calm view when the mountain you love — this mountain, right here, right now — is being stripped and raped for coal and natural gas, or when the river you love is being polluted and all its diverse lifeforms strangled and suffocated by toxic waste. It doesn’t even occur to us that we need to explain why it’s important to protect these habitats and landscapes from destruction and abuse. The reason is obvious: because we love them.

Why aren’t we better at expressing our love and appreciation for the earth? How can we communicate more effectively and meaningfully with a larger audience? What can modern Pagans do to share the love and protect the planet?

You can read the full article here.

Many of the small communities scattered throughout Appalachia, where mountaintop-removal mining has done so much damage already, face the destruction of cemeteries that have been part of the wooded wilderness for centuries, left to become overgrown and sometimes forgotten as younger generations leave the area. These grave sites might not be officially registered or marked on any map, leaving them vulnerable to destruction from mining companies that buy up property and indiscriminately strip the landscape bare in an effort to reach the valuable coal deposits underneath. What minimal laws there are protecting cemeteries only apply to registered sites marked off by a fence and regularly maintained by a caretaker, and the historical value of family cemeteries can be difficult to prove, especially in cases where graves are unmarked or headstones have fallen into disrepair.

People like Dustin White and Larry Gibson, whose anti-mining environmental activism in West Virginia centers around the protection of family cemeteries and grave sites, have been marginally successful in protecting some hallowed ground. These cemeteries remain like small islands, grave-studded copses of trees surrounded by acres of bare rock and debris.

Reverence for the dead transcends religious boundaries and connects us not only to our history and our ancestors, but also to each other. How can we transform this shared sense of the sacred into action to protect the earth and her ecosystems from destruction? What would it mean to live our lives as though not only cemeteries and grave sites, but any grove of trees or open meadow were hallowed ground?

You can read the full article here.

I thought I was being rather clever when I wrote “I’m a Pagan” on the slip of paper, folded it once and dropped it into the basket along with the others. A split second later, the doubts and second thoughts came rushing in — what if I was the only one? what if it was rude to bring up religion in this kind of setting? what if I was accidentally about to “out” people who didn’t want their own religious identity known? — but before I could snap the slip back up, the energetic blond woman who was leading the team building exercise had already moved on and half a dozen more anonymous pieces of paper scrawled with interesting and curious facts were already fluttering down into the basket along with my own.

Then the team building and ice breaking began in earnest. I’m pretty good at this game. Rule #1: when nobody knows you, you never have to admit to anything. Rule #2: everyone’s just as nervous and distracted as you are. Rule #3: if it’s something that’s true for everybody (some jokers wrote things like “I love being out in nature” — like anyone who didn’t would even be in the room that night), make for the nearest chair. Rule #4: if you’re the quirky one out, accept it with grace and pride.

The team leader, head of the Volunteer Naturalist training program for the city parks who would be our teacher and guide for the next six weeks, stood in the center of the circle of chairs and drew the first slip of paper. “I bike to work,” she read out loud. About a dozen or so of the sixty people present rose from their seats and, giggling like grown-ups more used to business casual attire and office decorum, slunk and skittered their way around the room in a game of musical chairs until all but one had found a new place to sit. The game continued…. We learned how many of us were afraid of spiders, how many liked the color green, how many loved the wild and gorgeous Pacific Northwest (all of us, duh), how many of us had kids. We learned that Mary had run a marathon when she was 65 years old, and that Tom had climbed Mount Rainer five times (each proudly strode into the center of the circle, the quirky one out, to a round of applause).

I kept waiting for mine to be read, wondering how I would handle it if no one else got up. Being a Pagan wasn’t as impressive as being a retired marine biologist, or hiking sixty miles through wilderness every summer, or many of the other amazing and wonderful things that my fellow volunteers had listed. But when the team leader had passed around the blank sheets of paper, telling each of us to write down one fact about ourselves, that was the first thing that came to mind. It was why I was there, after all.

My spiritual life has always been firmly rooted in my love of nature and the wild outdoors. As a kid, I made up nature clubs and collected money to donate towards charities that protected endangered species. I spent hours and hours in the park at the end of my block, exploring the suburban ecosystem of field and creek, the crayfish and butterflies, spiders and voles, sparrows and water-striders and rabbits, and the red-tailed hawks that sometimes glided above it all with sharp, wary eyes. It was only natural that my growing adolescent fascination with mysticism and soulful poesis would eventually lead me to Paganism and earth-centered spirituality as that sacred dwelling place my love and passion would carve out among the religions of the world. But all the while I still retained a distinctly practical edge as well — the concern of the environmentalist for ecological justice and sustainable lifestyles, and the fascination of the student for all things warm and wriggling across the ground in all their biological, botanical and bodacious beauty.

So when I found myself having to move away from my home state and her sylvan mountains to a new city on the other side of the continent, on the shores of a whole new ocean, there were two impulses compelling me to get to work. The first was a soul-deep need to connect to this new land, to find a way of living among the towering pines and sharp-taloned ospreys and snow-capped volcanoes and billowing storms blowing in from the west across a vast expanse of unfamiliar sea. The second was a simple desire to learn, to find out the basic facts of ecology for the area, to be “in the know” about environmental issues that faced my newly-adopted community and what role I could play in lending a helping hand.

The Seattle Parks Volunteer Naturalist training program seemed like a perfect opportunity to meet both of these needs. For six weeks in the spring and another six in the fall, volunteers would spend Saturdays and Thursdays out in the field, learning about the many habitats of the Pacific Northwest to be found throughout the city parks — forests, meadows, saltwater shores and freshwater ponds — and the many plants, animals and insects that shared the local landscape. After more than a hundred hours of teaching, training and shadowing veteran volunteers, we’d begin giving back to the community in our turn: teaching programs to school kids and the general public, leading nature hikes, giving talks and demonstrations in the urban green spaces all throughout the city. By reaching out to urban and inner city schools that couldn’t necessarily afford expensive field trips to wilderness destinations, we’d bring the natural world to them, opening the eyes of the next generation to the beauty and wonder of wilderness to be found all around them, even in the heart of the city. As one of the program managers explained our first night, during our potluck and team building introductory exercises, we’d be working to make sure that this city would someday be filled with the kind of passionate, ecologically-conscious adults who have learned to cry out, “No! Don’t cut down that tree! Don’t build that dam!”

So naturally, I signed up. Plenty of Pagans talk about being “earth-centered” — and many of us reach out to that holy Mother Nature for solace, support and respite in times of spiritual need — but I knew that the only way I would ever really feel at home in my new city would be to get my hands dirty, and start digging deep.

And when a fellow volunteer, a stranger I’d never met, stood in the center of that team building circle and finally read out, “I’m a Pagan,” I stood up with grace and pride, prepared to be the token Druid of the group, ready to answer questions and talk earnestly about how my spiritual path had led me to be in that room, making that commitment to my community and the land I knew I would come to love.

But to my surprise and delight, I wasn’t the only one. Five or six others stood up from their seats, too, and the game of musical chairs began. I was shy and distracted (see Rule #2), so I can’t say I caught any names or exchanged any meaningful, knowing looks with those fellow Pagans whose spiritual callings had also led them to give their time and energy and passion to this shared cause. But I know now that I’m not alone, I’m not the odd one out, and maybe I have more in common with this new city and its people than I realized.

There are more of us out there than you think. We may not always be flashing our Pagan flair — sometimes we’re wearing worn old hiking books and mud-spattered rain coats instead of shimmering ceremonial robes, sometimes we put aside our pentacles and wands for a good pair of binoculars and a sturdy walking stick — but we’re out there. Walking the walk. Doing the work.

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012.
Why not join in?

Part of my identity as someone with a Celtic spirituality is the inescapable fact of exile. I am not only a person with Irish heritage living in the multicultural milieu of modern America, but I am also a polytheist and Pagan trying to connect with my ancestors across millennia of lost traditions from my place in a monotheistic, Abrahamic mainstream culture.

It is within that diaspora — that exile — that I will have to discover, or forge, an authentic spiritual life.

My ancestors were from islands. The ridged, tough knuckles of earth thrust out of a wide, hungry, churning ocean. The gathered-together lands. Thick forested valleys, rolling meadowy hills. Huge slabs of granite flecked with crystalline mica catching the sunlight in carved spirals and shadowy dolmens half overgrown with moss where once their graves dug deep to meet the Otherworld to join the Shining Folk. Here and there, the bones of the place shown chalk white beneath the damp rot of rich soil dropping off into bluffs that raced to meet the sea in a single quick-caught breath. These islands where my ancestors lived braced and breathed deep as wave after wave of invaders washed across their rough and intricate shores like storms blown in by the ocean winds. That is always the way with islands, after all.

Eventually, my ancestors left. Some of them came from Wales and settled in the dusty old Appalachians of the New World, digging coal from the belly of the earth to burn for a little light and heat. Some of them were driven from Ireland by famine, near-poverty, disease and religious persecution, to a country that promised prosperity, freedom and a chance to begin again. A whole continent stretched out before them, wide and awake to this kind of pilgrimage.

And what about the Shining Folk, the ancient gods who lived in the earth, rooted in the emerald-mantled lands on the other side of the ocean? The gods made the journey in memory only, as saints and fairy tales and old legends for children’s books. The names of places in unfamiliar languages were clumsy and awkward on the tongue, the places themselves slowly forgotten. What bend in the river was the goddess Boann’s sorrow? What dip in the land hid the lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne in the heather? Where stands Tristan’s stone, or Brigid’s oak? What is the city of sovereignty where the four directions meet?

The word insular comes from the word meaning island. The word exile from the Latin, to wander away.

I’ve lived all my life landlocked in the foothills of those dusty old mountains where my ancestors once set down to rest in their wandering. My family is part of what’s known as the Celtic diaspora, a word that speaks to the dispersal of a people from their homeland like seeds cast out for the winds to carry, putting down new roots where they can. I live in a wide country, as wide as a continent spanning vast, immense, full of forests and deserts and grasslands and mountain ranges between two long shores. This is the kind of place that my ancestors discovered generations ago, who once were from the gathered-together lands.

It is a challenge to live in exile from the home of my ancestors and the dwelling place of my gods. The gods of this land where I live now still weep and rage over the slow and heart-sick loss of their own children, the indigenous nations of Iroquois and Navajo and Chinook and so many others whose ghosts wander in an exile of their own across the broken earth. When I speak to the gods of this land where I live now, sometimes there is a deep shame and grief in that prayer, full of penitence and regret for what my ancestors have done. When I pray to the ancient gods of my ancestors, who suffered wandering and exile of their own, sometimes there is only silence in return.

As someone born and raised in the United States, I have no real cultural heritage except the heritage of a multicultural, multiracial, multifaith modern America. It is a culture that has borrowed ruthlessly and often crassly from the peoples it has colonized and occupied. It is a culture molded out of appropriation and misappropriation, disrespect and consumerism, and far too much war and militarism for an anarcho-mystic poet like me.

And yet, in this wide open space, there is so much room to wander. That is a blessing. My ancestors, like the ancestors of so many other modern Americans, were often extremely insular in their attitudes: one true faith, one right way, one blessed nation with a manifest destiny. Such insular thinking — dividing and separating “us” from “them,” the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the damned, the rich from the poor, the citizen from the alien — once thought to conquer the whole world. But here in exile, here in our wandering-away, we discovered a land too vast and unconquerable to be that small an island. Here in this wide country, many faiths rub elbows and new spiritual traditions are born out of the most unlikely marriages. The old gods are revived in new forms. The stories take on new shapes and there are new stories, too: the stories of science, the stories of jazz, the stories of technology, invention and art.

If we are here, in part, to learn the burdens and flaws of ancestry that we carry in our blood and to restore ourselves and our descendants to a place of freedom, balance and harmonious relationship with the world — then maybe this exile, this wandering-away from the islands we called home, is really a kind of sacred work.

In Irish Celtic tradition, there is a phrase: “beyond the ninth wave.” Like so many things in the Celtic tradition, it has a double meaning.

One of its meanings is exile, banishment. When in the ancient Book of Invasions the Sons of Mil invade the emerald isle, the druids of the Tuatha de Danann order them back beyond the ninth wave from which they must return to claim their rightful sovereignty over the land. People fleeing the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-1800s were said to be journeying beyond the ninth wave to seek new lives and new hope in America and Canada, entering exile and diaspora at the price of their lives and the lives of their children.

But there is another meaning, too. In Irish tradition there is the imramma, the sacred sea voyage that takes the wanderer on a soul-journey beyond the ninth wave to mysterious lands — islands of youth, of summer, of apples, of strange creatures and lovely women, and all the many shimmering dark-deep mysteries of the Otherworld.

To go beyond the ninth wave — to wander-away into exile — is to go on a pilgrimage in search of the gods themselves, to seek our ancestors of both blood and spirit where they dwell. To reconnect, to weave a new way forward, to make that pilgrimage — maybe that is not so bad a heritage after all.

This post is part of the Pagan Blog Project 2012.
Why not join in?