This is not a blog post.

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In this time of fluid demographics and long-distance community building, I find myself over and over running up against this single, searing question:

WHY do I want to be a part of [this] community?

Doesn't matter which community it is. The fact is, we have a choice now about which communities we belong to, a choice unlike any our ancestors have faced in the past. With online networking and social media sites, I can choose my friends, contacts, teachers and mentors from all over the world. When once it might have been impossible, or at least semantically meaningless, to "choose" to belong to a religion other than the one of my immediate family and neighbors, today I can choose to be Pagan and to network with others I've never even met in real life. Even within the Pagan community, I can choose to be a Revivalist Druid or a Celtic Reconstructionist, a Witch, a Hellenist or a Heathen. I can choose to be a participant on various online forums, email lists and blogs with almost unending options, and each choice will put me in touch with different people and different community expectations and standards.

So when I make these choices about what communities I'm going to belong to, I find myself more and more running up against that question: why? Why do I want to belong to your community? Is your community supportive, accepting, challenging, grounded, honest, full of humor and curiosity? Or does your community bicker and encourage in-fighting, playing to the lowest common denominator, drumming up melodrama and one-upmanship? What's more important to your community: popularity and huge membership numbers, or authenticity and sincerity in the relationships it nurtures and cultivates? Calculated politeness that just barely passes for "tolerance," or warm hospitality and celebration of diversity?

The Long Goodbye: Part Four

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It seemed I had two choices before me. The Page of Wands, a young, spontaneous and energetic form that could be the very embodiment of the internet as a medium, with its attention-grabbing multimedia and almost endless opportunities for someone to make a name for herself through charisma and laughter. Or the Ten of Pentacles, embodying formality, structure and an engagement with traditional patterns of expression that could lead to the fruitful, prosperous marriage of spirit and form characterized by generosity and exchange. And the third card? The choice that was not a choice?

Making a Clean Break

Last night, I had a dream. One of those dreams so vivid and blunt, it's hard to ignore the message. One of those dreams that just feels like a metaphor, even when you're in it.

I dreamt I was a student in college again, engaged in a class discussion led by a wise old professor. Yet this professor seemed to take particular pleasure in setting me up for embarrassment and frustration. As the discussion progressed, he would often interrupt himself or students as they explained their ideas or expounded on theories, and shoot a question at me. Being a dream, I can't now remember even what the subject was — but I do know that, again and again, I felt the frustration rise as I found myself interrupted, torn out of my focus on the ideas of others as they unfolded — forced instead to stand up to prove myself to these peers, to prove myself worthy of being there to learn. It wasn't enough to attend, to listen intently and consider carefully the concepts being shared. But more frustrating was that, each time this professor interrupted the flow of conversation to challenge me to a verbal duel, he allowed only a sentence out of my mouth before he veered back again, leaving me hanging there dumb, my words decontextualized and my thoughts unfinished. It felt for all the world like a goddamned Twitter feed — one hundred forty characters was all I got.

Until at one point, I finally managed to break out of it. The next question he asked me, I found myself speaking in paragraphs. Whole arguments cascaded out of my mouth in point after point, theories backed up by evidence and examples, counter-arguments considered and deconstructed. The professor seemed impressed, asked another question to prompt me... yet I could feel something slipping. The students around me began to talk over me in their own conversations. Someone behind me snickered. Mid-sentence, the professor interrupted me again, this time to tell me, "Well, at least you've finally demonstrated that you're not a complete idiot, which is a bit of a surprise. Some of your ideas were actually pretty sound. Of course, you're horribly boring, so boring that your dullness itself is offensive and detracts from the values of your ideas no matter what they are. You were more attractive when you weren't saying anything."

How Many Druids Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

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Well, I was so busy doing my best to write up an unbiased report on the recent news coming out of the UK about The Druid Network being granted religious charitable status by the Charity Commission — and interviewing lots of folks (including some who are kind of like famous people now, you know, if you're a Druid) about their own thoughts and opinions on the news — and then collecting and organizing all the information I could about US and UK nonprofit law to write up an article on the process of seeking status as a church or religious organization for minority faiths — that I never did get around to writing about what I thought of the whole thing. And now it seems I may have missed the boat, or the wave, or the tide, or whatever water-related metaphor you want to use [insert plug for Blog Action Day 2010 on 15 October here]. But — to twist a trope that's also been making its way around the Pagan blogosphere — I'm a Druid, and I have opinions about stuff.

Of course, I'll be honest, most of those opinions are about other people's opinions. The run-down of my own initial reaction to the news, which I read about first on The Pagan and The Pen goes something like: Hey! That's fantastic! Good for them! Even though I'm not a member of TDN because (a) I don't agree completely with the definition of deity that Emma Restall Orr outlines in her book Living Druidry, and (b) it seems like the Network is mostly focused on the UK more than the US — I still very much respect the organization's leadership and the projects they promote. Plus, their anti-hierarchical anarchic tendencies are pretty cool, and Jeff and I really enjoyed doing the freely-available-on-their-website Perennial Course in Living Druidry over this past year. Maybe this news will help them grow and inspire more people to take a serious look at Druidry and what it can offer as a modern spiritual tradition. Whereupon I forwarded the news and link on to Jason at The Wild Hunt to perhaps be included in the regular "Pagan Community Notes" feature... because at that point, it was of note to our community, but not actual news.

Interview with Phil Ryder about The Druid Network's Charity Status

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The following is an interview with Phil Ryder, Chair of Trustees for The Druid Network and one of the members most deeply involved in the four-year-long process of applying for religious charity status with the Charity Commission of England and Wales. I want to express again just how grateful I am to Phil for taking the time to answer my questions and give me, and all you readers, a little more insight into the long and difficult journey that TDN has made over the past several years. Congratulations once again to him and all the members of TDN on their success!

For my full coverage of this story, please hop on over to The Wild Hunt and stay tuned for my guest post tomorrow! To read the full text of the Charity Commission decision document, you can download the .pdf or visit The Druid Network's website.


Ali: Thanks so much for taking the time to do this interview, Phil! I know you and everyone at TDN must be very busy these days.

Phil: As you can imagine, I've been flat out trying to deal with the media folk — and on the whole it has been positive, within their limited ability to understand just what we are about. But I think it's important for everyone to understand just what this acceptance means and why TDN did it. I'm not sure we can cover everything in such a limited time — the amount of material we've sent to the CC would fill a very large book and covers everything from the anarchic setup of TDN through to explaining not only Druidry but all nature-based spiritualities and how they are religions. I know many shy away from that term — and I'm not keen either on the terms 'pagan', 'religion' and to some extent 'druid' — but 'religion' simply means to bind one to the sacred, and religions are defined by their identifiable method of doing that....

Oooops — there I go, going off on one! So, yes, fire away and I'll see what I can do to help.

Ali: All right, here we go!

Excerpts from the Qur'an and the Poetry of Rumi

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The most helpful book on the Qur'an that I have ever read is Michael Sells's Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations (with audio CD). In this book, he not only provides subtle translations of the text, a sound introduction to the history and cultural background of Bedouin/Arabic poetry at the time of the Qur'an's writing, and a thorough discussion of the role of recitation and verbal prayer within Islam — he also provides extensive commentary on each sura, exploring some of the many themes and recurring imagery throughout the text. Below are some excerpts from his translations of the earliest suras, along with my own attempts to paraphrase and expand on some of his commentary.



The Small Kindness (107:1-7)

In the Name of God the Compassionate the Caring

Do you see him who calls the reckoning a lie?
He is the one who casts the orphan away
who fails to urge the feeding of one in need
Cursed are those who perform the prayer
unmindful of how they pray
who make of themselves a display
but hold back the small kindness

Personal Values & Communal Values in Paganism

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For the second year running, June's "Pagan Values Month" has seen quite a bit of discussion... not about values per se, but about Pagan self- and community-identity. Eloquent and compelling arguments have been made by not a few of my favorite writers making the case that "Paganism" as a single religion may not exist,* and that continuing to speak and think about the so-called "Pagan community" in this way might not be helpful or conducive to... well, whatever they're hoping religious community is conducive to, I suppose. And what is that, exactly? Here is where I feel the question of "values" becomes essential, and perhaps the key to unlocking the question of self-identity and community-definition, rather than the other way around.

Defining Pagan Religion

The question of what constitutes a "religion" is not at all a new one for me. It became a running theme during my college studies, continually provoked and reexamined by an advisor who had specialized in the history of the Reformation during his doctorate work. To raise the objection that "Paganism" may not be a "religion" is to beg the question of how exactly we define "religion" in the first place. When I turn this question over in my mind, it seems to me that I run up against the same problem again and again. Our use of the word "religion" is almost as sloppy and ill-defined as the word "Pagan" itself; indeed, some might go so far as to imply that the whole idea of "religion" is a uniquely Christian concept that relies on a distinction between what is and is not similar to (mainly Protestant) Christianity.

Comfortable with Crazy: The Dis-ease of Trusting Truth

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"Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude."

- Robert Anton Wilson

I am not postmodern when it comes to my view of truth. I believe, as Fox Mulder did, that the Truth is, in fact, out there. Somewhere. I also tend to believe that "in here" and "out there" aren't as starkly distinguished as many people think, and so I spend a lot of time looking for truth within my own heart and mind, within my own body and bones and the concrete senses that used to inspire me to write teenage poetry about iced-over duck ponds and the spinning shadows cast by ceiling fans on hot summer afternoons. I trust in the world, in reality, and in my relationship with reality. That relationship, like most relationships, includes a lot of give and take and mutual influence, and it demands respect. The world is real. And, unlike that narcissist control-freak ex you've been avoiding for a year, I know full well that the world will go on without me. I believe in truth and reality, but I am not so arrogant as to think that I know them definitively.

So when I read a post like the one written recently by Sean Carroll (my cherished punching-bag stand-in for Scientific Atheist Fundamentalists everywhere), I find it hard to work myself into a sympathetic state of outrage and disgust over the ignorance of Creationists and their grabs for intellectual legitimacy in the media. Truth will work its own way out. You might say I have a kind of evolutionary approach to truth, in fact. A "natural selection" of ideas, in which clearly false or ultimately unsustainable, unsupported notions of pure fantasy will collapse under their own weight and reality will, once again, reassert itself. It always has. The world does not need us to believe in it in order to exist (though our belief in the world may be necessary if we are to go on existing, or living in any meaningful way).

Carroll divides the world into two kinds of people: Sensible People (who can be either friends, or worthy opponents in debate), and Crazy People (who are, at best, embarrassing allies, and at worst, crackpots). The Crazy People, Carroll suggests, should never be given even the appearance of legitimacy or credibility, should not be engaged with in debate. (One wonders why, then, he even bothers to keep a blog.) They can occasionally be mocked, in moderation, as a natural and healthy outlet for the frustrations of Sensible People, but that's as much attention as they deserve. In short, Crazy People should be isolated. Kept away from us (it's always an "us") Sensible People. And this attitude works well, if you believe that insanity and sensibility are absolute and exclusive characteristics. If you believe that truth and reality rely on the relative sanity of their believers for their meaning and value, then this perspective is just fine.

The problem with the view that Some People Are Just Crazy, of course, is its corollary, Those People Aren't Us. The certainty that Sensible People have the monopoly on truth, that they always know what's really going on around here and can safely make decisions not only for themselves but for the Crazy People, without input from the latter... that kind of certainty gets us into trouble. Trouble like the holocaust and global warming. That kind of certainty obscures all kinds of old habits--habits steeped in denial and disconnection, habits with their own special kind of insanity--habits that plenty of Sensible People stick to even despite all scientific evidence that a lifestyle of consumption is fatally unsustainable, despite all appeals to the bravery of compassion and loving kindness for fellow beings.

Last week, a man walked into a fitness club in my city and opened fire. Four women were killed and eight more badly wounded before the man, desperate, lonely and steady-eyed, turned the gun on himself. In his blog--in which he'd written detailed plans for the event and recorded his deepening frustrations at being unable to connect with women despite following lots of dating advice--he wrote that his pastor had thoroughly convinced him that "you can commit mass murder then still go to heaven."

Reality reasserts itself. Sometimes in painful, devastating ways. There is chaos in this beautiful world. The question is, how do we respond?

Some of us respond by locking down, by devoting ourselves all the more rigidly and strenuously to the certainty of our sensibleness and the danger of others' lack of sense. When we find ourselves confronted with sorrow, stress and insecurity, we tighten our grips and we try to increase our control of the situation. With the world divided into Sensible People and Crazy People, salvation can only come from the Sensible ones--they shoulder all the responsibility, they must carry that weight all on their own. When things go wrong, the Sensible People step in to fix it, to fix the mistakes others have made, to fix those Others, too, if they can.

This is the disease of Truth, of the one right way. This is why people like Carroll spend much of their time trying to control who gets to speak, why they expend energy censoring and shutting down debate when it doesn't seem to play in the favor of what is true and correct. And it's why the people they're trying to shut up--the Crazies, the fundamentalists and creationists and right-wingers--do the very same thing. Carroll would probably say the fundamentalists try to monopolize or shut down debate because they know, deep down, that in honest, open debate they would lose. But why should truth--the really real Truth--need such fanatic defenders as Carroll? Why isolate the Crazies? Isn't truth strong enough to withstand their insanity, maybe even rub off on them a little with time and exposure? It's almost as though Carroll is just a bit scared--maybe, way deep down--that Craziness rubs off, that Sensibility isn't as impenetrable a stronghold as he'd like.

What is the definition of "crazy" after all? How do we determine who is nuts and who isn't? Society has traditionally defined insanity as the condition of being unable to function adequately in the world--to feed ourselves, clothe ourselves, relate to others, do the simple things necessary for survival. And yet billions of religious individuals the world over, even including quite a few creationists, continue to eat just fine, raise children, hold down jobs. So what if they believe the universe was made whole-cloth six thousand years ago? They're quite likely wrong, of course, and holding a wrong belief may sometimes be a symptom of some underlying problem, or a cause for any number of unraveling negative consequences. But being wrong about the world is not, in itself, insane. Especially when those trying to correct you so clearly hate and fear you, and so can hardly be expected to have your best interests in mind.

The world, I have found, continues to exist regardless of my sanity. I have gone through times of depression and suicidal contemplations, times when neuroses and anxieties threatened to overwhelm me. I have had moments of profound clarity and connection, too, when I glimpse shifting patterns that seem to ease my way. Yet the world persists, in its messy beauty, giving birth to dancing stars while others die to dust. Almost as though my sanity didn't matter one way or another. This is the dis-ease of truth: the essential discomfort of knowing that your own strivings to live ethically, peacefully and rationally do not guarantee a safe and rational world to live in, and the humility of learning that your own missteps into irrationality and senselessness cannot overthrow the basic functionality and goodness of the world.

It is also an immense comfort. Knowing that we each have chaos and craziness within ourselves frees us from our need to control others with such a tight grip, it gives us permission to relax and reconnect for a moment, to give the larger wisdom of the world a chance to lift us clear of the fray. Indeed, there may be times when the Sensible People are marching calmly and rationally towards destruction, when we need to seek the chaos and creativity of our deep selves. Sometimes, doing what is good and ethical may seem a bit crazy, may seem futile or pointless; sometimes the way through a bad situation is obscure and beyond reasoning. Craziness offers us the gift of intuitive, creative engagement, fluidity and flexibility. It opens up our crazy pink hearts to tenderness and sorrow and allows these things to run their course without channeling them into systems of tension and pressure and stress.

This past Saturday, one of my best friends got married. The wedding was beautiful, a simple and hastily-planned ceremony and reception nestled among the sheltering maple trees and holly bushes of her new mother-in-law's backyard. Paper lanterns hung suspended among baskets of flowers and twinkling strings of lights twined the dark branches where fireflies, too, drifted lazily in the summer night heat. As the ceremony began, a few drops of rain began to fall. Watching my friend's lovely upturned face--her eyes shining with joy and tears--I remembered the murders from a few days earlier, I thought of the unwieldy institutions of consumption, denial and repression pervasive in our culture that can sometimes make us feel alienated and alone, I thought of how both the bride and groom had divorced parents and how half of all marriages these days end that way... I thought, you'd have to be crazy to want to get married, to believe in happily-ever-after and lifelong love. And my heart filled with happiness and gratitude.

Later, my boyfriend and I sat together at one of the tables left empty by everyone else who had sought shelter from the rain under the large white canopy. He'd forgotten his dress shoes and wore sandals with his slacks, and a purple tie that matched my dress. I sipped from the half-dozen abandoned champaign glasses, by now watered down by the weather, each reflecting the candlelight in a million different glimmerings of raindrops along their smooth curves and spiraling stems. Rain speckled our warm shoulders and smudged our eyeglasses, and we laughed each time the elderly usher came over to us, smiling kindly and almost knowingly, offering us wine, fruit and cake. Then, we would bend our heads together, my beloved and I, and murmur crazy words of gratitude and praise--for the night, for each other, for the lovely newly-wedded couple, for the children tottering around among the folding chairs, for the minister and his wife dancing slowly in the grass in front of the DJ's table... for all the craziness and love in the lovely, crazy world.

Relationship & Story: Exploring Ethics from a Pagan Perspective

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The beginning of June marks the beginning of the first-ever International Pagan Values Blogging Month, and I couldn't be more excited! I also couldn't be busier, as I juggle schedules, arrange for my summer vacation, plan for my up-coming birthday and help my boyfriend move into his new apartment. So, I hope you will forgive me if I kick off this month's posts with a review of two excellent books on "Pagan values" already out there in circulation and well worth reading: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, and The Other Side of Virtue, by Brendan Myers. Within the next few days, I'll also be guest posting over at Druid Journal on ecology, environmentalism and practical pacifism, as an introduction to a four(ish)-part series on the role of pacifism, violence and warriorhood in Paganism. I'll be updating here again to let you know when that post is up, so be sure to hop on over to check it out! Until then, enjoy the following review, first published in Sky, Earth, Sea: A Journal of Practical Spirituality (Spring 2009).

"The greatest achievement of spirit: the ability to transform nearly anything--even our suffering and tragedy--into art."

- Myers, The Other Side of Virtue

As the Pagan community continues to change and grow, establishing itself as a thriving contemporary spiritual tradition (or more accurately, traditions!), the needs of this diverse and somewhat chaotic community also continue to develop beyond those of first-generation neophytes looking for initiatory experiences and basic how-to guides. One aspect of this evolving need for a deeper, more complex engagement with the Pagan spiritual path--so familiar to those who demand "advanced" Pagan texts that move beyond the typical "Druidry 101," for instance--can be seen in the community's desire to establish its own unique sense of ethics and virtue apart from the divinely mandated good-and-evil dualism of a monotheistic mainstream. From the earliest modern practitioners of Wicca and Druidry, we find examples of moral formulations: the Wiccan Rede, the Law of Threefold Return, and the collection of Druidic triads, to name only a few. And yet many of us can see that these simple codes often leave much to be desired, faltering under pressure or deteriorating into self-justifying rhetoric. Two new texts published recently by O Books, however, rise to the challenge and take on the complex, wild and vital questions of ethical action and virtuous living, seeking new ways of approaching such ancient problems: Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, by Emma Restall Orr, and Brenden Myers's text, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us.

Both texts center on the idea of relationship, more specifically that between the self and the world (and those in it), as the defining aspect of what we should consider an ethical or virtuous life. Emma Restall Orr sets out in her book, Living With Honour, to provide a clear basis for making practical (or "applied") ethical choices apart from the moral doctrines laid out by monotheistic religions and secular culture, which have tended in recent times to be dualistic and hierarchical. The result is a uniquely Pagan conception of ethics based on the primacy of "honorable relationship," an on-going, active engagement with the world and those living in it, guided by courage, generosity and loyalty. While Restall Orr focuses primarily on how this relationship with the world shapes our everyday choices and behavior in order to form a healthy interconnection with other beings, in Brenden Myers's work The Other Side of Virtue, the author trains his attention on the engaged individual, exploring how a self-aware relationship with Immensities helps each of us to discover, as well as to create, "who we are." For Myers, self-knowledge presents a philosophical "problem," and the work of resolving it cultivates a person's virtue in the form of human excellence. Both authors, however, recognize a core ambivalence about assuming such relationship with the world will always be safely benign, challenging the easy dichotomy between good and evil so common to monotheistic religions. In searching for an alternative ethical foundation, both Myers and Restall Orr evoke Pagan and Druidic notions of creative story-telling as the means by which we might shape our lives with a sense of meaning, beauty and truth.

Emma Restall Orr's text might be considered, for many readers, to be the more practical and down-to-earth of the two. She devotes the first half of this clear-sighted and articulate book to deconstructing common (and commonly misunderstood) terms such as "Pagan," "morality," and "honor", as well as developing a broad understanding of the many schools of thought that have contributed to the study of ethics over the centuries. Leaping over whole philosophical systems in a single bound, she is likely to leave some readers a little giddy with vertigo, but her treatment is invariably sharp and fair, seeking the central tenants and common threads that will be most illuminating without risking oversimplification. Her careful exploration of the multifarious foundations and processes that go into making everyday choices--from emotion and instinct, to reason and the rule of law--prepares the reader for the "applied ethics" of later chapters. Further, her brief description of various Pagan traditions and their unique moral formulations provides a place for the contemplative Pagan reader to find an initial foothold of familiar subject matter, while also clarifying (for Pagan and non-Pagan readers alike) how one can establish and maintain a functional ethical model outside of the doctrines of monotheistic religions and secular humanism. Scattered throughout these sections of analysis and dissection are Restall Orr's characteristic flashes of narrative--dancing in the rain, savoring an apple, reading quietly in the park--which give flavor and moving insight into the potential of engaged ethical living.

These more poetic moments become less common in the second half of Living with Honour, as Restall Orr buckles down to the nitty-gritty and addresses many contemporary social and political issues of our time. Exploring everything from suicide and euthanasia to animal rights and vegetarianism, parenting and romance to ecology and materialism, she applies her ethic of "honorable relationship" with intensity and consistency. Her approach puts the individual's ability to choose freely, no matter how difficult or convoluted the circumstances, at the heart of an ethical life, and eschews any reliance on socially-imposed "morality" or external rule of law. This text does not aim to rewrite the shared assumptions of a Judeo-Christian mainstream, but instead celebrates the anarchistic, pluralistic tendencies of the modern Pagan community as essential to developing a sense of individual responsibility ("response-ability") that relates more directly and receptively to a world that is always complex and in flux. Because of her intensity, however, some of her conclusions may make readers cringe (especially those passages which call for strict veganism or which challenge the usual notions of death); her thorough deconstruction of our potential for careless exploitation is pitiless, daunting, even at times overwhelming. One might wonder how it is ever possible to have enough knowledge or power to be capable of making truly effective ethical choices in the face of a huge and infinitely complicated world.

However, her unfaltering emphasis on personal, responsive relationship softens her own tendency towards moralizing, saving the text from becoming just another example of imposing doctrine. Instead, Restall Orr works tirelessly to remind readers that ethical living must be guided, above all, by an open and ever-changing experience of the world itself, here and now. In the third and final section of her book, she addresses the feelings of fear, impotence, inertia and confusion that often keep us from acting according to our own sense of ethics. As an antidote to such feelings, she suggests a kind of stubborn, loving integrity that seeks for a meaningful, empowering sense of self immersed in an infinitely beautiful world. In these final pages, she tells a story of scared awe and gratitude, in which the choice to act ethically is rarely ever a choice at all, but only the natural response that empathy and integrity evoke in a receptive individual willing to place honorable relationship above pure self-interest or familiar fears.

In some ways, this poetic conclusion to Restall Orr's work leads naturally to the first chapters of Brenden Myers's The Other Side of Virtue, which opens with a warm circle of storytellers gathered around a crackling fire, inviting the reader to join. While Restall Orr finds powerful, ecstatic inspiration above all in the wildness of the natural world, Myers is clearly moved and motivated strongly by the shared life and work of community and locates the beginning of his discussion of virtue in this setting. The first "movement" of the text (which is structured like a song or musical score) plays informally with images and metaphors to be developed more fully later on, asserting aphorisms and even making jokes. Reading along, it is almost impossible not to begin to engage the text directly, chuckling aloud or scribbling notes in the margin, developing a dialogue, a conversation of ideas and possibilities. While Restall Orr prepares the reader to enter into the thick of ethical analysis by first covering the familiar ground of Pagan tradition, Myers uses a different approach to his task of defining virtue: establishing a sense of community that will run through the rest of the book and give landscape and texture to the path it will trace.

In the following three movements, Myers proceeds to examine the historical development of the concept of "virtue," beginning with the tribal culture of Heroic societies, through the developing emphasis on reason in ancient Classical philosophy, following the various permutations over the centuries as they produced humanism, romanticism and contemporary examples, real and fictional, of honorable heroes and great men. Throughout this discussion, Myers includes useful details about the changes in society and politics, as well as myriad quotations from ancient texts, to give context and perspective to the evolving definition of human virtue. His examination of particular thinkers and writers, such as Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, provide stepping stones through history for the reader; however, at times they give the text almost too specific a focus, as though standing in for whole schools of thought without giving the reader enough perspective to see how these trends weave together in a broader theory. Meanwhile, the influence of Judeo-Christian morality and its redefinition of virtue as that of passivity and obedience, so intriguingly mentioned in the book's overture, is left almost entirely unmentioned. Here is one place where Restall Orr's sweeping but sometimes overly broad discussion of philosophical concepts can compliment Myers's more specialized focus and remind the reader of the "bigger picture" that might otherwise be lost in the historical milieu.

If the discussion of virtue's historical development, although very well-researched and highly informative, feels a bit dense or cobbled together at times, the fifth movement of The Other Side is where Myers really hits his stride. In it, he attempts to lay bare the "logical structure" of virtue itself, as he understands it, and the slowly-unfolding weaving together of seemingly disparate ideas from previous sections is by turns masterful, musical and mind-blowing. Here we are confronted in a kind of pure contemplation with some of the "Immensities" (Myers's term) that Restall Orr addresses more directly and practically in the later chapters of her own work: the Earth, Death (or Time), and Other People; as well as some of the responses their presence in our lives can evoke: wonder, integrity, and humanity. For Myers, the issue of relationship--the place of the individual within a community and landscape--comes to the forefront in "threshold" experiences whereby a person's sense of identity and self-knowledge is challenged, shaken to its core and thus transformed by an engagement with something both infinitely knowable and intimately overwhelming.

Unlike Restall Orr, who believes that an open engagement with the world usually renders the "ethical" course of action obvious and natural, Myers suggests that we develop our sense of virtue, or human excellence, precisely in those situations when an Immensity calls our most fundamental assumptions about the self and the world into question--that is, precisely when we are least certain of what we once believed to be obvious. His discussion of how these experiences shape us, however, is remarkably similar to Restall Orr's. He too emphasizes our inherent ability to choose as both a revelatory and creative act, at once revealing ourselves to our own self-awareness and helping to create those very selves. The choices we make are shaped by our sense of story (what sociologists might call, on a larger scale, our mythology, what Druids might call our "song") and the role we see ourselves playing as that story unfolds. There is no guarantee that Fortune will be kind or an Immensity benign--in fact, the potentially transformative nature of threshold experiences might be considered inescapably destructive, even traumatic to some extent. But with a strong sense of story, rather than a reliance on traditional definitions of right and wrong, we both discover and create meaning and beauty in our lives through the choices we pursue at such times.

Of course, the study of ethics and the exploration of virtue are not precisely one and the same. On the one hand, virtue is only one way among many to approach the question of ethics (including relativism, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.); on the other hand, there are certain amoral or nonmoral aspects to our understanding virtue itself (such as beauty, physical skills and even good fortune), so that it is difficult to see one as fitting snugly as a subcategory into the other. It may be a gross simplification to say that virtue concerns the effects of a relationship with an Immense world on the nature and knowledge of the self, while ethics is the study of how this relationship is expressed in our behavior and practical choices in everyday life. Yet it seems these two approaches are essentially the ways in which two remarkable contemporary Druid authors have chosen to explore a subject of vast complexity and vital relevance for every human being today. These two books, published so fortuitously within a few months of each other, should most definitely be read together, and read more than once. The questions they raise and problems they wrestle have continuing importance fundamental to our perception of ourselves and the world we live in with one another. And as our own stories change and evolve over the course of our lives, these texts will continuing to offer fresh new insight and possibilities for meaning, beauty, knowledge and truth.

• Brenden Myers, The Other Side of Virtue: Where our virtues come from, what they really mean, and where they might be taking us, O Books, 2008.


• Emma Restall Orr, Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics, O Books, 2007.

Angels, Demons & Old Men in Bathrobes

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Walking home from the movie theater just now--beneath the glorious sun filtering down through the overlapping translucent dark-veined jade of a thousand leaves exhaling praise for root, water and earth towards the endless cloudless cerulean sky--I couldn't help but admit to myself that I have a deeper anger with the Catholic Church than I'm usually willing to acknowledge.

What else could explain the tears of relief? Quickly blinked away, of course, but still. When that bomb of antimatter exploded miles above the Vatican, and the walls themselves which men had made, the sculpted columns and stone angels, the repressive brick and dusty mortar, trembled to their very foundations and almost fell.... there were tears of relief in my eyes. I almost cried, watching a Dan Brown movie. Starring Tom Hanks. Of all the ridiculous things!

But this morning started out poorly, when it comes to the Church. The report released yesterday about the thousands of cases of child abuse in Ireland, actively covered up by this corrupt and decrepit institution, was weighing heavily on my heart, as was the continuing controversy about the Frosts mentioned in T. Thorn Coyle's blog recently. What we human beings sometimes do out of a sense of tradition and institutional order. The day was already hot by the time I left my apartment for lunch, and I wanted nothing more than to be somewhere dark and cool for a little while, somewhere where I might find an hour or two of relief from grief and that creeping feeling of helplessness. I walked past the movie theater on my way to the vegan restaurant and noticed they were showing "Angels & Demons," the new film based on Dan Brown's prequel novel to The Da Vinci Code. I decided to catch the 2:50 PM show. Why? Because I'm a fan of Dan Brown and his work? Certainly not. Frankly, I think his writing is irritatingly trite, his plots contrived (seriously, the butler did it? that's your surprise ending?), and his "puzzles" obvious; not to mention his terrible disregard for even basic historical research. (Before you object that "it's just fiction!" let me say this: there is no reason why good, well-written fiction can't also include accurate information about the histories and mythologies it invokes and portrays.) So, why see this new movie, then? F**k the Catholic Church, that's why.

To be fair, the movie was quite passable as entertainment. Happily, I know absolutely nothing about the Illuminati legends the plot centered on, and so I wasn't tortured by the constant interruption of my academic background in comparative religious studies about the rampant inaccuracies and misinformation (as I had been when I read The Da Vinci Code several years ago). I was just another ignorant movie-goer, enjoying a hot afternoon in the air-conditioned theater, munching on my Junior Mints and sipping my Pepsi, indulging myself. Sweeping camera shots of Vatican city and the breath-taking architecture of the chapels and cathedrals dotting the maze of streets had me aching to travel to Europe. To see history. Real history, not the fledgling kind we have here in the United States. Thousands of years of history, thousands of years of humanity thriving and writhing, moving and breathing and living together, building things and tearing them down again, rejecting and incorporating bits and pieces of the past into the ever-evolving mishmash of the present. The setting alone was worth the six dollars. Well, that and Ewan McGregor in a priest's collar.

Still, the ending left me disappointed. (For those of you concerned about spoilers, skip the rest of this paragraph.) I was grateful that the Illuminati threat turned out to be an elaborate ploy of the real antagonist, intentionally playing on the fears of the Catholic Church to throw off suspicion. Yet there was something about the noncommittal twist revelation that left me cold: no, there was no institutional conspiracy, just a single man, one crazy extremist. The Church was flawed but well-intentioned after all, and all those creaky old men in their lace bathrobes and slippers were justified in the end.

But the truth is... those same creaky old men are the ones who, in real life, sit comfortably behind their gold-adorned doors, shuffling papers and blocking investigations into abuse scandals. They are the ones who, when electing a new pope in real life, chose a man known for his theological rigidity more than his ecumenical openness, a man who has gone on to pronounce statements of dismissal and intolerance against several of the world's religions, a man who has retracted and undermined most of the progress made since Vatican II towards more inclusive, feminist language and symbolism within Church writings and ritual. The truth is, it takes no crazy extremist kidnapping cardinals and calling in bomb threats in the name of strengthening the Church; the men who justify child abuse and corruption for the sake of the institution appear mild and innocuous, doddering old men in bathrobes and funny hats. Movies like "Angels & Demons" play on the flash and flair of the single maniac, when the truth is much more subtle, much more insidious.

The funny thing is, for a long time I was the first one to speak up, to defend organized religion and even the Catholic Church itself against my more vehement atheist friends. I understood the metaphor of the garden lattice screen, offering a basic support over which the organic life of the spiritual laity could grow. I appreciated and admired the complex mythologies, art and ritual of organized religion; really, I still do. I tried for a long time to be a "good Catholic" as well as a good follower of Christ, a good Druid, a good person. But the grief and pain of disjoint and contradiction weighed too heavily. How could I remain part of the Church, how could I intentionally choose to be a member of a religion that rejected me, rejected my calling because of my gender, and rejected my basic sense of decency in the name of some greater need for institutional preservation? How could anyone knowingly choose that?

Walking home from the theater, breathing in sunlight and the sighs of trees, I kept thinking that the Catholic Church has so little faith in the God they claim to worship, and so little faith in us. I found myself pleading--with the Church, with myself, with all of us--to trust. Trust. Trust in human beings to preserve that which is good and beautiful and meaningful, trust in Spirit to work its own way out in the hearts and minds of people living their lives with love and kindness and hope. Trust that huge, sprawling, stagnant institutions are not necessary, and never have been, that they cannot protect us and they rarely serve anyone but themselves. The world is so beautiful, messy and wild and utterly full of light, and we all seem to spend so much time trying to build up walls that shield us from that understanding. If only we could find it in ourselves to trust, to let go a little more, to relinquish our need to control and to be certain. If we could admit to our mistakes, our flaws and our abuses, instead of pushing them off on others or striving to conceal them. If we could trust ourselves and each other to be strong enough to face a world untamed by institution and authority, if we could pull down our own idols of power and remember instead our empathy for the disenfranchised, the impoverished and the suffering. If only... if only....

...

My father called just now as I was writing. He is a good person, a loving, gentle man and a supportive father; he's also Catholic, born and raised. I asked him what he thought of these abuses, about the cover-ups and reluctant apologies that come only long after denial and obfuscation have ceased to be an option. He grew quiet, almost bashful, and could only say, sadly, that it was something he had to deal with, that he had worked through his own anger about it, and that it helped to remember it was only a few, not everyone in the Church, not even the vast majority. Then, he put my mother on the phone, who warned me against my "judgmental tone." But this is not judgment--this is my expression of sorrow and anger, and I cannot apologize for it.

What sorrows me deeply is not that the whole of Catholicism is corrupt and misguided. There is so much good there, really, in its mythologies, its rich art and music, in its Mysteries and in the good, kind people who live peacefully and decently in their own ordinary ways. What grieves me is precisely that such abuse and suffering are caused by a few, a few men with power, who then use the goodness and kindness of others as a justification and a shield to hide behind. What confuses me is why, in the face of such corruption, that kind and decent vast majority doesn't rise up in angry protest and denounce and reject and rebuild anew, rather than shuffling their feet and submitting passively to the whims of its leaders. This is the downfall of hierarchy: that nothing will change simply because the majority hopes and prays and wishes for change. This is not a democracy: the laity doesn't get a vote, they do not have a voice. And while there are many ways to respond to and address the corruption of those in power, I cannot see my way to the choice made by so many, to remain silent and sad instead of taking action. I wish I could better understand them, but I have made my choice, the only one I felt I could make in keeping with my conscience: I chose to leave.

And in some ways, I know that inside of me is still an angry child raging against a parent Church that, in a time of most pressing need, turned away and chose the selfishness of self-preservation over the love and acceptance it had always promised. That gave me no choice but to leave, to strike out on my own. The child in me is angry and sniffling back her tears, and squaring her shoulders, and promising to herself that she will be stronger for it, that she will face the world with courage even in her solitude, and grow up to be the kind of woman who will not turn her back on those in need.

Re-Membering Theology: Part III

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Now this is the story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down, so I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there, and I'll tell you how I became Priestess Sparklepony.

Part III: The Everyman Spirituality

Nah, just kidding. Where was I? Ah yes... It seems believing in a Savor just isn't part of my spiritual make-up. So it goes. But even now, this is a fairly recent realization about myself. You would think that, having been raised in a religious tradition to which salvation was a fundamental belief, I would have noticed sooner my basic disinterest in the idea (and instead run headlong for the hills that sang to me). You would think that, but you'd be wrong. Being part of a huge "poor Irish Catholic" extended family was simply part of my heritage, part of who I was, and growing up in a fairly small, fairly conservative area (blessed with farms and woods and vast stretches of open land that have since become strip malls) meant that almost everyone I knew just happened to be Christian, and those who weren't just happened not to be--without the threat of real diversity always looming, no one found it too much to accept warm-heartedly the three Jewish girls or the one kid who fasted for a month and prayed facing Mecca.

Yet not all of the Christians I knew were the Savior-needing types. There was plenty of diversity of personality; some, like myself, were grateful and happy and amazed by the world, we were the ones who sat in church and said "Praise be to God" like we meant it (but only ever mumbled "we are not worthy to receive You" half-heartedly). We didn't moan and worry ourselves over being sinners; we didn't lose sleep at night about going to Hell when we died. It was easy to get away with simply not thinking about these things. Everyone else took our healthy-mindedness to be the natural result of having the "right" religion. Obviously, a good relationship with God (i.e. through Christ) manifested in positive ways in a person's life. My childhood was pervaded by the sense of Christianity being the Everyman's religion--a religion that anyone could believe in, no matter who they were. Which is not to say that everyone should or ought to believe in it. But nothing stopped them. A Christian who studied physics or biology? Sure. A Catholic lawyer? No problem. A doctor, a philosopher, a horse-groomer, a dentist, a bricklayer, even a soldier--Christianity was the come-one-come-all faith. It didn't ask you to turn off your brain, it didn't ask you to condemn others, it didn't ask you to grovel or weep. All it asked was that you allow yourself to be saved. Such was the Christianity I was raised to believe in, which it took me so long to leave behind.

Which brings me, in a very round about way, back to the current murmuring roar throughout the online Pagan community (which may or may not be a community, though that's certainly a handy term for a bunch of people who all get together to talk about things, exchange ideas and debate about whether or not they constitute a community*). In some ways, the more or less all-accepting anything-goes attitude of the Pagan community reminds me a lot of the Catholicism I knew as a child. I still have conversations with my father sometimes, when he asks me what it is that I believe. Interconnection, compassion, love, creativity, inspiration, truth, justice, freedom, all those big, vague words that can move mountains or fall flat. Inevitably, these discussions end when he smiles and insists, "Well, you can believe all that and still be a Catholic!" And I smile back and say, "I think the Pope would disagree." Recent blog posts wondering sadly "what we [the Pagan community] did to lose" deo and other intellectuals remind me of my kind-hearted, well-intentioned father. It also reminds me of a Simpsons' quote (no, not the "everyone is stupid except me" one), the one where Rev. Lovejoy cries out to God what he did to lose his flock, and God replies, "What did you do to keep them?"

People leave spiritual paths for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the conflicts are deeply ingrained and apparent from the beginning, making a particular path insufferable for even the shortest time; other times, a creeping sense of disjoint or struggle comes over a person after years of traveling a spiritual path. And sometimes, a person simply loses interest, loses that sense of connection and ceases to find anything worth the staying. It seems to me that the very first thing we as a community need to think about, is: what do we do to keep the intellectuals and philosophical types? What is it, in other words, that Paganism offers? If it offers merely the appeal of the exotic and the strange, then it is unlikely to satisfy for very long. Likewise, if all it offers is a broad tolerance of everyone, without being able to articulate a specific worldview that is uniquely "Pagan," I think we will always feel slightly at a loss when people drift away or slowly lose interest. If the Pagan community is to hold onto and truly encourage its diversity, if it is to develop a philosophical depth and intellectual rigor, it must offer something more satisfying and more substantive than mere permission. It must offer something worth the struggle, worth overcoming the sense of disjoint, worth working through the boredom and disinterest and distraction that can so easily crop up for anyone in any spiritual tradition. I believe that Paganism can and does offer something, though what exactly that is may take a long time to fully understand.


*"Network" is such a computer-age word; social "networks," business "networks"... I prefer more organic metaphors.

Still Druish.

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It seems change is in the air right now: bloggers I've been reading for a while deciding to leave Druidry for some other spiritual path, podcasters announcing they've gone completely atheist in their wise ol' thirties, even the online journal I was writing for folding after only two published issues because, from what I can gather from extremely vague and veiled messages from the main editor/publisher, there were personality and/or political clashes with another leader in the community.

But I'm still here, anyway.

I certainly can't speak to the reasons others have for these kinds of changes. The Pagan community has always been a group in flux, made up of many seekers used to striking out on their own, pursuing new directions when traditional paths start feeling stale and restrictive. Still. I've always believed there was something very important about "going deep," making a commitment to a particular path and dealing honestly but quietly with the obstacles that path presents to us.

It took me three years of studying Pagan-ish nature spirituality before finally officially calling myself something other than just plain "Catholic." For two more years, I called myself a Christian Druid, and although that name might still apply, the usefulness of the Christian label has, for me, finally worn off. The mythology still speaks to me, perhaps even moreso than to most self-named Christians I know (Christmas Eve Day I made my family watch a National Geographic Special on the historic roots of the Gospels, followed by the film "Jesus Christ, Superstar," which still makes me cry a little at the end). I only officially left the Catholic church last winter, when the current Pope Benny made some very anti-feminist statements harkening back to pre-Vatican II days, and a close friend of the family sat us down to tell us about her brother's lawsuit against the Church for molestation when he was a child. These were the two straws that broke the proverbial camel's back. Not doctrinal doubts or even my increasing bored with the somewhat conventional social atmosphere of my old church... I could have dealt with those, as the kind of routine obstacles that come up when one is part of a community. After all, I was part of the community too, which meant by remaining a member I could help to influence the social atmosphere and the diversity of doctrinal attitudes and spiritual experiences. It never seemed a realistic option to just "drop out" as though my religious community were a sports team or after-school club I'd joined while going through a phase. It took a few key current and on-going events that I simply could not forgive or allow myself to be associated with--the continuation of institutional and dogmatic oppression of women, and the active cover-up of child abuse and molestation--to finally push me all the way out.

And even that wasn't without angst. I have, for a while now, been going through a time in my life when cynicism often dominates and my moral life seems guided by the realization that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you simply cannot get others to change for the better. All the more reason to commit yourself to an ethical life of love and integrity... But leaving the Catholic church because I had finally accepted that no number of ordinary good people could sway the leaders of hierarchy to take moral responsibility was still a difficult and sad decision. Sometimes I find myself hoping that the Church itself will finally collapse as it drives away more and more of the moderate believers who prefer their perfectly ordinary kindness and faith unsullied by misogynistic back-sliding and abusive cover-ups. But this is my own cynicism again, the cynicism that prefers to see people struggling daily against a broken system than somehow living happy lives in spite of it.

I can't imagine anything so severe ever happening within the Druid community, or the Pagan community as a whole. The nice thing about lacking core institutions is that institutional corruption and oppression are harder to come by. So once I came upon Druidry, once I felt its "rightness" and fit for me, it seemed my natural home. I doubt anything others in the Druid community did could drive me away, no matter what politico-personality conflicts arose. And since Druidry is just the name I have come to apply to the spiritual path I've been pursuing all along--even though that path has incorporated many different things over the years, from Buddhist-like meditation to a focus on art and poetry to shamanic journeying in dreams, sleeping and waking--I can't see what could lead me to abandon the label that I was so slow and careful to adopt in the first place. Druidry, for me, was never something I learned from a few 101 how-to books, like those on crocheting or building model airplanes. It was never a hobby, and only a craft insofar as living your life everyday with a certain degree of aesthetic awareness and self-discipline is an on-going craft. Druidry isn't something I do--it's merely part of who I am. I often don't know exactly who that is, of course, and years will pass as my beliefs about and relationships with the world around me, spiritual and mundane, evolve in ways I'd never expected. This, to me, is all just Druidry--just as, for years, it was just as much "just Christianity."

While I was visiting my parents over the past week, I got into a brief discussion with my younger brother. Although growing up he had always been the loudest in his complaints about attending weekly Mass and Sunday School afterwards, now he attends church regularly, goes to Bible studies and prays every night. I asked him what it meant to him to be religious--and after citing all those ways in which he acts religiously, I asked again, "No, I mean, what is it like? What do you experience as your religious life? Those are all social things you do, but I want to know why you do them..." He explained to me that it was a way of reminding himself to seek God, to listen for him and to make room for his presence. "It feels like there's Someone there with me," he explained, "Someone present in my life who helps to guide me and comfort me." Then he asked me, "And what about you? What is--what's it called? Druid-ish-ic?--what is that like?"

I told him: Being a Druid is like searching for the presence not just of one God, but of all things--everything has Spirit, everything has a song. When I pray or meditate, I'm not just listening for that one Someone, I'm listening for the Song of the Whole World, and how we all fit into it. I quiet myself down and connect, and then I reach out to sing my own soul's song, the best way I know how. In Druidry, we can feel the whole world living and breathing around us, pulsing with sacredness and inspiration. We sing, we tell stories, we study old myths and new myths, we decorate our homes with pieces of art and expressions of nature--but mostly, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to be fully present to the world.

And my brother replied, "Well, I think that whatever people believe or practice, if it helps them to live a good life, then that's what's most important." He's pragmatic like that. He just graduated college and is about to step into the cut-throat world of business marketing--so I have to agree, if Bible study will help to keep him grounded (and bring his attention on occasion to the lilies of the field and Jesus overthrowing the money-lenders' tables in the Temple). I'm glad, then, that Someone out there is keeping an eye on my little brother.

Language and Morality

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I'm annoyed. This is going to be one of those entries. Be forewarned...

Well, today at work a guy accused me of being judgmental.

He was complaining about our manager giving him an overloaded schedule this week in response to his request to work more hours, and another guy chimed in that maybe he asked her (the manager) while she was PMSing. As I overheard, I remarked casually, "Well now, that's a sexist comment." And the guy jumped down my throat--not the one who'd actually made the comment (who acted apologetic and kind of shrugged it off as a bad joke), but the other one. He asked me why it was sexist, and I responded, "Well, by definition--making an assumption based on a person's gender and treating them as merely a stereotype of a group rather than as an individual... that's sexist by definition."* "You don't think women behave irrationally when they're PMSing?" he challenged. "I think that some individuals will behave irrationally under certain circumstances, like when they're tired or uncomfortable," I explained, "and that others may just be a bit irrational in general--but no, making a statement about an individual based on the assumption that all women are irrational during their periods [a generalized stereotype based on a person's sex] and that they cannot control their irrationality as well as men, who don't 'PMS' [a devaluation of women based on that stereotype, see definition below]... I think that's sexism plain and simple and no, I don't believe it to be true." He then accused me of just trying to force everyone to be "P.C." and of being judgmental because I was "making a judgment about someone else's judgment instead of actually listening to that person."

Language

Okay, firstly--words. Words have power. Let me say that again: words have power. I try to avoid saying things I don't mean, and I try to respect the amazing and beautiful power of words when I do speak (including their ability to communicate subtlety, humor and irony--all of which I'm pretty good at picking up on and I don't call people out on sexist remarks when I can tell they're just trying to be funny and not meaning it seriously--though I also think that kind of humor is a bit distasteful). I'm a writer. I love words. I'm also a feminist (i.e. I believe that men and women are equal) and I believe that it is important to treat people as unique individuals in any circumstance, rather than merely as a member of particular groups, biological, cultural or otherwise. To treat a person merely as a member of a group to which they belong is an act of existential violence against the unique and complex individuality of that person (even if attributing positive qualities to the group, like saying Obama must be good at basketball; and even if that person chooses to be a part of the group through lifestyle, association or activity, like saying all [golfers/cat-lovers/police officers/etc.] behave or think the same way.

Of course, it gets tricky, because often people don't want to count positive stereotypes as a form of racism/sexism/classism/etc., and at the same time plenty of individuals like to associate themselves by choice with particular groups because they want to benefit from the image or ideas that group evokes (think of the teen who dresses "goth" so that her peers will get a particular view of her as a hard-hearted, poetry-reading rebel). All the same, striving to connect with individuals as unique beings is something we owe each other and ourselves, because otherwise we're walking through a shallow world of warped reflection, like a hall of mirrors. By treating people as stereotypes, what we're saying is, "Everything I know about you is just something I know about myself, projected out into the world." If you treat all women as potentially irrational during "that time of the month," then you're acting on your own beliefs and opinions warped to suit a projected "other", rather than learning something about the individual women in your life and responding to their unique realities. In short, you've cut yourself off from actually being present to the real world; you've substituted your assumptions about reality for reality itself.

Of course, I didn't have the opportunity to explain any of this to this particular coworker because he was too busy righteously defending others' right to be "politically incorrect." Now, apparently the term "politically correct" was invented in the 1980s by conservatives trying to undermine liberal efforts to increase awareness of--you guessed it--the power of words (in particular, the power of words in relation to group and social identity). To throw out the accusation of "P.C." at a person was basically a way to shut down any attempt at rational discussion by using a similar circular logic that this coworker today tried to use on me. The argument goes that if you attempt to think carefully about people's word choices and encourage yourself and others to speak with more accuracy, sensitivity and awareness, then you forfeit your right to criticize others' unthinking use of language. Obviously the argument is clearly fallacious when stated in such clear terms, so let me put it the way it's more commonly phrased: if you make judgments about appropriate language, then you're being just as "judgmental" as you're accusing someone else of being, and therefore you have no right to criticize them because you're just as bad.

Judgment

In addition to assuming that the problem with sexist/racist/etc. language is that it is "judgmental" (when it is, in fact, just the opposite--it eschews any actual judgment, accurate or otherwise, in favor of unthinking prejudice), this faulty logic relies on obscuring the multiple meanings of the word "judgment" itself. Since it is an argument in favor of the thoughtless use of words, this actually seems rather fitting.

Being "judgmental" has a strongly negative connotation, because it evokes the sense of imposing our own moral judgment on another person, usually with a verbal condemnation and/or poor treatment. What is the difference, though, between making a moral judgment about a person, and making a "mental judgment"** about a statement or concept? It seems to me that there's a big one, and while the former may be personally, socially or even philosophically offensive, the latter is essential to living a thoughtful, inquisitive life. What P.C. nay-sayers tend to do is confuse the two kinds of judgment, reducing them to one and the same thing, and then badger those of us trying to make thoughtful "mental judgments" into feeling guilty for imposing "moral judgments" on others, when that is precisely what we are trying to avoid. Then there are "mushy-thinking liberals" (a term a friend of mine adopted from, I believe, Chomsky), who focus on the censorship of language, rather than on an investigation of what such language actually communicates. This overly-P.C. crowd is often too greatly worried about hurting people's feelings or coming across as morally "judgmental", but they fall into the very same trap as the conservative anti-P.C. people. Whatever the motivation (attempting to shut down rational discussion as a kind of power-play, or wanting to appear all-accepting of others for the sake of one's personal gratification at the expense of actual thoughtfulness), the end result of such a reductionist definition of "judgment" is the same: it makes thinking itself look like a social and personal flaw.

One way to avoid this is to make a careful distinction between imposing moral judgments on other people, and making mental judgments about "objective" facts. Notice that in the conversation that began this post, I remarked that the comment was sexist, not the person. According to the definition of "sexism" and the nature of the comment itself, this was a fair assessment of objective reality, rather than a projected moral claim. Of course, it is generally agreed in our culture that sexism is more or less "immoral." (Of course, as I've already noted, language also affords the opportunity for satire and irony, for instance by utilizing "immoral" language deliberately and self-consciously to undermine the power of such language. I love Stephen Colbert's humor for this very reason. He has mastered the art of making claims or asserting ideas in such a way that he lays bare their utter absurdity, and his feigned sincerity heightens that ridiculousness while putting us on guard against individuals who actually would assert such claims in all seriousness. If the comment had been made with ironic intent, then my observation that it was sexist would not hav been a moral judgment at all, but rather just stating the obvious, kind of like ruining the punchline of a joke by observing the particular play on words and/or expectations involved.)

Morality

There are many good reasons why sexism, racism and all forms of prejudice are considered inherently immoral (as I've already outlined above). However, once again, there is a difference between claiming a statement is sexist because it is immoral, and claiming that it is immoral because it is sexist. In the first instance, I am imposing my own moral judgment on another person and attempting to censor them based on those moral claims, essentially trying to make them play by my own moral rules. In the second instance, I am observing that a given statement, as an objective entity, fits the established definition of "sexism" and should probably, therefore, be reevaluated for its moral implications. See the difference?

Take another example: the other day, a different (male) coworker called another (female) coworker a fat cow who looks like she spends all her time out drinking instead of home taking care of her kids. My knee-jerk reaction was to criticize him for making such a mean-spirited comment, because to me such maliciousness is never justified even if the observations it attempts to communicate are accurate (which I don't think they were this time, in any case). This is a moral issue on my part, growing out of my belief in loving-kindness and respect for others, and so my attempt to censor his behavior was, in this case, a moral imposition on my part (one that he rightly pointed out I have no real right to make). I wanted him to play by my moral sense of fairness and kindness, but he has the perfect right to be a nasty jerk to another person if he likes, regardless of what I think of his behavior. On the other hand, I do have the right to guide my own actions according to my moral commitments, and since I believe that sharing my beliefs with others in a respectful, open way is also a moral act on my part, I have the right to communicate my opinion of his behavior and explain my reasons behind it.

So is calling out a statement for being "sexist" morally judgmental? Well, in some ways, it is a moral act on my part, since I probably wouldn't have bothered to do it if I didn't think sexism was wrong, offensive and morally damaging to both the person making the comment and the comment's target or object of reference. I feel that it is morally right to point out the harmful or thoughtless behavior of others--in a kind and respectful way--not as a way of condemning them or imposing my beliefs (which would be morally judgmental), but in order to encourage dialogue and discussion--an equal, free exchange of information and ideas for the betterment of all involved. It would appear that, since my coworker took offense to me calling the statement sexist, he too most likely believes that sexism is basically immoral, and so I have no need to impose my own values on him as we already agree about the fundamental moral issue at stake and differ only in its application. (Either that, or he's playing by the social rules that say a person should act offended when they feel a remark is intended as a slight or insult, whether or not the remark actually offends them. I tend not to act offended unless I'm actually offended, which confuses people sometimes, because I laugh off mean-spirited jibes while occasionally being hurt by comments that people intended to be complimentary but are, in fact, not. See below.)

Despondence

The fact that this coworker has three times now suggested that my intelligence is not a desirable quality but rather an unfortunate idiosyncrasy (twice in accusing me of being "judgmental," and once while actually hitting on me(!) by saying I needed to be "relieved" of the thoughtful expression I'd developed while reading an interesting book) has me generally annoyed, but also feeling a bit despondent.*** This last exchange--during what he clearly considered a flirtatious encounter--was obviously meant to be some kind of complimentary come-on, an appeal to my romantic feminine nature. Why I would want to be "relieved" of my thoughtfulness in favor of some frivolous romantic "fun" is beyond me. I find conversation and discussion to be fun, and more than that, fulfilling. I also appreciate levity and joy, though rarely would I characterize such things as mindless or frivolous, at least not in their ideal forms.

So yes, I am discouraged, even gloomy, about the social relationships I often find myself in. It might sound arrogant to say that I am more intelligent than most of the people I know and work with on a daily basis, but the truth is that, intelligence (whatever that is) aside, I am definitely more thoughtful. I have no need to make this claim about myself--they make it for me. But while they seem to think it's an unfortunate side-effect of having no "life" and nothing better to do, I see it as one of my best qualities, something I really love about myself and that I want to share with others. Thus, I often feel drawn to people who exhibit a similar thoughtfulness or at least hint at it through off-handed remarks. Sometimes the very same people who intrigue me with such remarks also come across as being judgmental and kind of rude, for the very reason that they're willing to make controversial statements based on personal convictions. Right now, for instance, I'm crushing on a guy who, I'm pretty sure, thinks I'm just another thoughtless, good-because-the-Bible-says-so kind of girl. The very fact that he might be indifferent to me because of this incorrect perception has me intrigued (unlike those who are indifferent to me because they know I'm not an easy lay, who don't interest me at all, and sadly make up the vast majority of guys I know). But it's also frustrating because I'm afforded so few opportunities to demonstrate my depth and personality, and he has no real reason to give me any, as far as he's concerned. I don't want to make the same mistake with others. Which is why I always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, to engage them in conversation, to explore the reasons behind their actions. I don't want to make the mistake of assuming someone is just silly or shallow when they're just quiet or reserved.

Which is why I agreed to go on a date with someone who has been dropping hints of his interest for, gosh, over a year now, despite my friendly indifference and my interest in this other guy. I had some qualms about it--is it right to go on a date when you have a feeling it's not going to work out? Am I obligated to inform him of my interest in someone else, or would that just be needlessly hurtful? Have I come to treat men as a commodity, waiting for a perfect guy to come along who has all the right "features" (like a compatible morality, similar interests, thoughtful mind, sense of humor, self-control, reserved nature, cute little goatee and a nice smile) instead of focusing on the feelings a person might be able to evoke (or, on the other hand, is it right to allow feelings alone to dictate relationships rather than attempting to engage another person on all levels, mental, emotional, philosophical, etc.)? Sometimes, I admit, I may over think things. I want to do what's right. In the end, though, right or not, I agreed to go on the date.

And I sat here all evening waiting for his call.

And it never came.


Definitions

*sex·ism (noun)
1. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles.
2. discrimination or devaluation based on a person's sex.


**judg·ment (noun)
1. an act or instance of judging.
2. the ability to judge, make a decision, or form an opinion objectively, authoritatively, and wisely, esp. in matters affecting action; good sense; discretion.
3. the demonstration or exercise of such ability or capacity.
4. the forming of an opinion, estimate, notion, or conclusion, as from circumstances presented to the mind.


***de·spond·ent (adjective)
1. feeling or showing profound hopelessness, dejection, discouragement, or gloom

Ambivalence

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A really interesting, thoughtful, unique man named Lance recently posted to the AODA online message board about "ambivalence"--his struggle to come to terms with contemporary diversity and tolerance of us paganish people, when only a few decades ago he had to battle against isolation and alienation to construct a sense of "specialness" and self that was integrated with his love of nature. He ended his post by asking if any of the older AODA members remember this struggle themselves, and share in his ambivalence about "how to shed my Bearskins and become human again."

Without thinking, I shot off a response. Perhaps it will go a little ways in explaining my recent absence from the online community. It seems my bitterness always rears its calloused head when spring is at its peak. The bitter and the sweet, dear readers, the bitter and the sweet.

Lance,

Remember it!? I'm struggling through it now. My childhood was, in many ways, the complete opposite of yours: I was a weirdo among weirdos, I had companions and other nature-loving and art-loving geeks to turn to, I had fellow conspirators (con-spirators)... we made up clubs and pursued hare-brained schemes (newsletters, rock bands, art shows, homemade movies). It was wonderful.

Now that I'm an adult, I find myself utterly isolated from all such individuals except through this virtual world of message boards and email. Most of the time I can't even bring myself to keep up with the voluminous postings of this group (not to mention a few others I follow) because I know that once I get sucked in, I'll forget to leave my computer for hours at a time, and in the end I'll still feel dissatisfied and lonely. Where are all of those people I knew as a child? I know full well where they are: they're all here, online! The only people in the woods are joggers and dog-walkers; the only people in coffee shops are businessmen, and students plugged into the WiFi. For all I know, those very same businessmen, students, joggers and dog-walkers go home each night, light a candle to 'Bridget' and post to their tantalizingly counterculture blog--but I'm beginning to despair that it makes any real difference, to the living community in the here-now.

Safe to be 'other'? Safe to be strange? Safe to be a variation, maybe, a new customization, just one more of the many colorful models of the same product (now also in "green")! Safe to be an excuse for people to believe themselves liberally-minded and tolerant of difference without asking them to exert the effort of actually connecting with others, with the existential Other...

Forgive the outburst. I'm learning what you must have learned a long time ago: how to survive by the skin of my skin alone, how to somehow believe that my strangeness, my "specialness", justifies itself and needs no real-life community to engage and transcend it. I'm trying to learn how to make choices in the face of indifference and impotence, rather than outright oppression; how to persist in the stubborn adoration of life and interconnection in a culture whose metaphor for such things is not the forest, but the computer.

And, between you and me, I don't think I'm doing too well at the moment.

--Ali

A second letter to Lance:

Lance,

I'm reminded of the different dystopian worlds of Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. In one, the oppression is overt--the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of the State and its favored class, the repression of free information, thought and expression. In the other, oppression sneaks in through the backdoor and is pandered to the population not in the name of any institution or ruling class, but in the name of the people's own comfort and pleasure. I didn't mean to belittle your own childhood experiences, or to paint mine as somehow idyllic or ideal (a father who beats one moment and hugs the next is still abusive, and no better, I think, than the cold, unloving, emotionally-abusive parent (which I had in the literal sense)). But I think there's something important to note, that many people overlook, in the difference between obvious violence against the individual that can be identified, named and resisted, and the violence against the individual that takes the form of assimilation and commodification, to be sold back as good and desirable for that very individual it most denies and demeans.

Being a human being is hard work. No amount of material, moral, social or spiritual progress will ever make it any easier. I happen to agree with Aristotle that a human being cannot become most-fully-human (cannot work towards virtue, i.e. human excellence) in isolation from the human community. Nature has been a comfort to me, immensely, but it remains inherently inhuman (though not inhumane) in its company. I refuse to believe that the sense of human community I experienced among friends growing up was merely the result of a protected and pampered life, that it somehow spoiled me, made me weaker or incapable of dealing with "the real world." Instead, what I see mostly among my peers these days are people who don't know what they're missing and therefore can't be bothered to work for it. And it does take work, and not all of that work can be done alone in the woods.

That's one reason why I was drawn to Druidry after several years of trying to get comfortable with Witchcraft (and failing). Among practitioners of Witchcraft, it seems that the outcast, the persecuted individualist, is still romanticized and set up as an archetype to be imitated and praised. It perpetuates, in some repsects, the (especially modern) myth that there is an irresolvable conflict between the individual and the community--one must choose either absolute conformity for the good of the community, or unavoidable isolation for the sake of the self. In Druidry, though, the individual's unique gifts (of art, insight, magic, craftsmanship, wisdom, knowledge, etc.) are not rejected by the community, but integrated and celebrated. The tensions between individual and community are not played down or denied, but engaged with and utilized to raise both the individual and the community to higher levels of freedom and meaning.

To buy into the myth that real community among unique individuals is just the pipe-dream of a coddled mind is, to me, unacceptable. I am a human being, not a bear or a tree, not a consumer, nor a mind floating in a vat somewhere. My animal requires certain things in order to become most excellently itself, and the mindful, honest presence of other human beings is one of those things. I refuse to put on any skin but my own, even if it proves too dull for television and too thin for the wilderness.

--Ali

A Quandary of Cats

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As I promised one reader in the comments of the previous post on John Michael Greer's book, A World Full of Gods, I'm going to take some time to explore and elaborate on what I think is the main flaw in his reasoned argument against monotheism and in favor of polytheism. After tonight's post, though, I'm hoping to return to a more poetic-creative form of writing for a little while, not only because I sorely need to keep those writerly muscles in shape, but because I find myself growing increasingly cantankerous with all this political and religious polemic in the air. February in Pittsburgh tends to be a dreary month--the sun slants slightly higher and longer than before, but more sleet, rain and snow blow in from the west and cake the streets and buildings in treacherous gray sludge. Even on the occasional warmer days, the sludge and mud persist, and you get to thinking that those obnoxiously bright morning birds must be wrong. So, after this, enough with the nitpicking for a little while. I need to ready myself to receive spring as she deserves.

I agree with Nettle's statement on the previous post, that "one god" versus "many gods" is not just a disagreement about number, but indicates a fundamentally different way of defining "deity." I suspect this distinction is why I found Greer's book so very frustrating--he treated it as exactly that: merely a disagreement about number, and nothing more.

The most telling example is Greer's "Many Cats" analogy for deity. In this inventive tale, several neighbors all endeavor to cultivate relationships with a mysterious being they call Cat. The "monofelists" believe there is only one Cat, and because they disagree about its appearance (sometimes black, sometimes tabby, for instance) and its food preferences (one neighbor leaves out milk, another kibble, yet another canned food), each accuses the others of merely imagining things, feeding rats by mistake, or simply having a less than perfect understanding of how Cat truly looks and behaves. The "afelist" of the neighborhood doesn't think there's any such thing as a Cat at all, while the "polyfelist," who is portrayed as clearly the most reasonable and knowledgeable of the group, laughs and says there are actually several cats in the neighborhood, each with its own territory, food preferences and personality.

Now, this allegory is, indeed, very helpful in illustrating Greer's personal conception of what deity is (or, in this case, what deities are), but rather than exploring the difference between monotheism and polytheism, it takes for granted a polytheistic worldview. What Greer fails to address is the possibility that, as he himself has pointed out earlier in the book, people actually experience deity in vastly different ways; in other words, the "monofelists" are assumed to be experiencing a limited or singular example of something that is inherently multiple and, furthermore, could easily be known as such with minimal effort. There is no way of illustrating from within his imaginary world, for instance, what an experience of deistic unity or transcendence might be like, and so the reader is left to assume (most likely without even realizing the bias) that such things cannot be aspects of deity, but are instead something else.

Greer's Many Cats analogy immediately strikes me as a very different version of the Blind Men & the Elephant metaphor, and perhaps a fairer comparison between monotheism and polytheism might be found in comparing these two different stories and how they conceive of the nature of deity as fundamentally different. In both situations, the foolishness of supposing that one person knows everything is apparent, but the nature of what is unknown and/or not personally experienced is vastly different. In the Cats story, there is nothing all that mysterious about the Cats themselves, and each person's ignorance lies in their unwillingness to listen to others. Greer seems to suggest that if "monofelists" simply treated others' experiences as being as valuable as their own, they would naturally reach the "polyfelist" conclusion. In the Blind Men story, however, our very ability to experience the Divine in its Fullness is what is limited. Our own limitations--not just those imagined of others, but those we ourselves experience and recognize--gives rise to our ignorance, so that even when we do listen to each other and give one another as much credence as we give ourselves, we can still only guess at what it is we think we know. Even if the Blind Men worked together to run their hands over the entire elephant, in other words, they would still be missing a certain kind of experience: in this case, the visual experience of seeing the elephant as a whole.

The difference between the two stories is in the supposed limitations, or lack of limitations, of human experience of Spirit. In the Many Cats example, the "polyfelist" is just as sure of her definitive knowledge of what Cats really are as Greer accuses "monofelists" as being. But it is still rather easy to imagine such a "polyfelist" having a moment of heightened experience in which she catches the briefest glimpse of the unity and interconnection of all beings--including Cats-- that transcends her previous understanding of each Cat as a separate being (and in fact, both Greer and Jordan Paper, author of The Deities Are Many, say that polytheists can and do have such "mystic" experiences). What if, upon mentioning such an experience to her "inclusive monofelist" neighbor, the "polyfelist" discovers that this kind of transcendence is precisely what the "monofelist" has been referring to all along?

So what kind of experience is this unity and transcendence, then, and what is being experienced? Does it not point to a kind of relationship to Spirit that belies the certainty of both the "monofelists" and the "polyfelist" as Greer portrays them? Is it not possible that unity and transcendence are just as likely to be attributes of deity as any other attribute of power, personality or presence? Greer describes the "retreat to a ground-of-being definition of God" as the result of monotheists backing themselves into a corner, but in my personal, direct experiences of this kind, it is precisely the opposite: it is a moment in which a new kind of experience transcends and unites the multifaceted and varied nature of previous experiences of deity, without denying or replacing them.

(Another, specifically Christian example of such a phenomenon is the experience that "everyone is Christ." This does not mean that people do not have unique personalities, individual and autonomous wills, or conflicts of interest, and that we should instead paste the "Face of Jesus" on top of everyone's true face and ignore all differences. Instead, it means just the opposite: recognizing the sacred uniqueness of every being, including ourselves, and as a corollary, respecting that uniqueness and individuality as itself a manifestation of a common, deeply-rooted Spirit. This might seem, again, to be mere dissembling or, even worse, to be downright illogical. Yet I have had personal, direct experiences of "seeing Christ" in other people.)

If Greer claims to respect such experiences as essential, even foundational, to one's religious life, then I do not see how he can so easily dismiss them as mere doctrinal semantics. He may, of course, have polytheistic explanations for these experiences--or even go so far as to claim that these experiences are themselves essentially polytheistic--but to me, this is as underhanded a strategy under the guise of "open dialogue" as that of monotheists who claim there's no such thing as a true polytheist.

I find it amusing when Greer, towards the end of his book, accuses monotheists of digging their own graves, setting up the potential for disbelief in other gods so thoroughly that it was only a matter of time before their own deity came under fire as well. I have already written in this blog about my understanding of atheism as part of the process of the spiritual life, and I hold to my assertion that to challenge simplistic, overly-anthropomorphic views of Spirit is entirely healthy, even if one must tread dangerously close to utter nihilism or reductionist materialism. I am also reminded of several scholars of Christianity's early development, who note that, for polytheists of that time as well, monotheism was effectively a form of atheism, denying the existence of the gods and goddesses so poignantly loved and worshipped in polytheistic traditions. But then, according to most monotheists today, polytheism itself is a form of atheism in rejecting the underlying unity and coherence of the animating Spirit in favor of "disjointed" and fragmentary forms. Funny, that after millennia, we are all still wrestling around in Square One.

It seems clear to me that neither monotheists nor polytheists are atheists. especially now that, thanks to philosophical systems like materialism and humanism, we have such clear, self-proclaimed examples of what atheism and non-theism look like. Rather, monotheists and polytheists simply disagree about the definition of deity itself, what it should include and how it can be experienced by human beings. Any exploration of either view, in particular an exploration which seeks to compare one against the other, must recognize this most basic difference. Only then can we begin to approach these religious worldviews on their own terms, rather than in the terms of those imposed upon them from the outside.


And now, for your viewing pleasure
(because you stuck with me this far, dear reader),
I give you: