Diametrically yours…

During the last few days, Samuel Skinner and I have been holding a dialogue on the subject of theism vs atheism. We have discovered that we couldn’t be more widely opposed in our world outlook, our beliefs, our understandings, our assumptions. From my own point of view, the process is, and I hope will continue to be, a wonderful learning curve; I hope I am beginning to understand what it is that Samuel proposes.

I do not agree with him, I don’t feel able to concur with more than a handful of the points he makes, but he’s got me thinking, and that’s good enough.

I would say that Samuel was sent along by Them to teach me a lesson and to make me question my assumptions, to get my mind working and to force me to be categorical about my belief structure. I’m grateful for the lesson; I’d be interested to hear what he says about the reasons for his visit here!

Curiosity sent me searching around; there really is a whole other world of opposition out there. I think witchcraft believes itself to be under pressure from entrenched evangelical religions primarily; to that I’d add militant atheism.

Perhaps, and this is only an idea of mine, the challenge of atheism is its persuasive logic - how wonderful it would be if everything one believed in was empirically provable, attainable, real.

And then, one must consider the macro position. This isn’t a discussion about the Craft, Christianity, or the particulars of science; it’s a polarity dance about faith vs no faith. Who’s right?

Death as rebirth

There’s a man in the village who is dying; he’s in his last days. He has Alzheimer’s, and other sicknesses, and he’s over 90. His wife tends him, and they have nurses to help. He has no idea who she is, and can’t feed himself, or talk coherently. He can’t get out of bed or walk.

I knew this man when he was a hale pensioner, walking his dogs, with a kind word for everyone. A village stalwart, part of the furniture, always there.

When I learned he was dying, I felt sorry, but glad; because he will be able to let go of the body that has failed him, and will rise above all the illness, indignity, and lack of communication he has suffered over the past few years. He will get back his essential spirit and be able to move forward once more.

His impending death got me thinking about my own; we’re all to travel the same road, and few of us know when we’ll be called over. Pragmatically, I suppose all any of us can do is to be ready, as ready as we can be, to face Them.

When I am where he is now, I hope that I will be able to say with equanimity that I look forward to a great adventure. That I am not afraid. That I anticipate amazing things. I believe that in the process of dying we move toward living once more.

Over the last week this has been a recurring theme amongst us bloggers; the petite morte, the death card, death of old ways and perspectives. Death is transformative, galvanic; it is the means by which all things begin. It is not an end, it cannot be; the circle is unbroken.

Rebalancing

Over the past few days, many of my fellow bloggers, for example TSW, have discussed the masculine in the divine; they’ve talked about contacting the God.

This is a part of the spiritual sphere that I’ve never really had success in identifying with. I know He’s there; I know He sees me and that he’s just waiting for me to make the move forward.

For whatever reason, perhaps most importantly acculturated resistance to male Deity, I have switched from God to the Goddess. I am aware that this is not a spiritual leap forward; swapping one gender for another is at least an acknowledgement that another gender in divinity exists; but it isn’t a recognition of Both, of the balance that surely is out there for the searching.

Women are important; femininity is important, but there’s no getting away from the fact that masculinity is equally important. And these themselves are simply the two poles; between them are all the grades and permutations of gender, of sexuality, of being.

My task between now and Midsummer is to find and speak to the God.

Get Growin!

Like everyone, we were out in the garden and in the fields this weekend- just too gloriously perfect and hot to be inside, blogging!

I was reading the Llewellyn’s 2008 Magical Almanac in a quiet moment, and there was an excellent article about connecting with the earth. You can’t do this at the keyboard, but I think that many try to. You’ve got to get grubby and feel the soil upon which you stand between your toes. So that piece of reading made me think.

Then, as so often happens, I was given an amazing book about living off the land - ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ by Barbara Kingsolver (thanks again, M!!). She makes the point early on in the work that there are many children today who have no idea of the life-cycle of a plant, from sprout to flower to seeds, or indeed where vegetables come from. Less so in Britain, perhaps; but in America, there is a whole generation who find the idea that vegetables grow in dirt awful and unhygienic. See also this great post from Starhawk which expands on this point. And that’s all before you start explaining where meat comes from. Animals? Prepare for litigation - you’re traumatising my child!

All the work we did in the garden this weekend got me thinking about food production. We eat quantities of salads and tomatoes all summer long. Why not grow them ourselves? We live in the heart of a busy city - what better way of taking something back than using the free sunlight, water and dirt and producing something worthwhile? I have a blind spot where vegetable growing is concerned. If it’s a plant to please and smell nice, I can manage it. If it actually has to serve a useful purpose, well, something breaks down and I can’t see the point. If you analyse this as an attitude, it’s simply bizarre. So enough shilly-shallying! The thought of being able to gorge ourselves on flavoursome, juicy, tomatoey tomatoes (and face it, when can we buy those is Britain??) as well as putting up gallons of tomato sauce for the winter seems to be enough of an incentive. Plus basil, peppers and chillis and you have all the raw materials for hundreds of tasty meals.

At a stroke we could: reduce the food miles of the salad and tomatoes to nil. Produce properly organic salad vegetables, with probably enough spare to give away or barter for other things. Learn about heritage and rare varieties and grow for flavour, something commercial tomato growers fail to do.

Above all, we’re putting in place a system of seasonal growth for benefit and food, which will teach us more about our land and the uses it can be put to; and it will teach our young sprout that food doesn’t come from the supermarket - it comes from the earth.

 

Dawkins, faith and atheism

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor has struck a bell for inter-faith trust and dialogue by taking a firm stance on respect for atheism. In this article on Radio Four this morning, he called for a deep respect to be shown to those who profess no faith. This surprised me, but cheered me at the same time. It is, of course, not the same as saying ‘love thy neighbour, even if they’re a witch….’, but it goes some way towards it, I feel. As it happens, Jesus never qualified the ‘love thy neighbour…’ thing; the only requirement was that you love your neighbour as you love yourself.

Richard Dawkins chooses this moment to wade into the fray. The prominent researcher and author of ‘The God Delusion’ seems to be leading a charge for militant atheism. As a layperson, it sounded to me as though he is calling for those who have faith to prove the veracity of what they believe by empirical standards. How is this to be done? And why should it be necessary at all?

Faith isn’t to be discounted as irrelevant simply because the basis of it has no scientific proof. Science and religion have long been at loggerheads. I haven’t trolled through all the debate on this subject, and I wonder if I did what would change about my feelings.

Richard Feynman said, loosely, that physics was the search for what God had written, or words to that effect; we’re using science to interpret the inscrutable will of the divine. I agree with this. It’s one thing to deride faith, to see no value in it, to reject it as irrelevant. It’s another to tell other people that they should reject it too. Dawkins is welcome to his view, which will be hailed by some and rejected by others, but he loses his privileges right about the place he starts laying down the law.

Humans are allowed to be illogical, allowed to believe in something ‘unbelievable’, allowed to delude themselves if it makes them feel better, to have an ‘imaginary friend’ as Dawkins so patronisingly puts it. They can think, make choices, feel emotions and therefore cannot be wholly rational - if they were, they would not be human.

I have a faith. I seek not to explain every item in my faith structure. I’m happy to feel and be, and not have to account for every move I make. I find Dawkins interesting; he states that God either exists or He doesn’t. The onus of proof is with the believer. If that means he finds that he can’t take me or my ilk ’seriously’, that’s ok!

Dawkins has missed the point, despite having a brain the size of a planet and a towering intellect; people don’t believe because they can see the proof before their eyes; they believe because they have faith that the truth lies in their understanding of the divine.

It isn’t a mistake that the name Vera comes from the Russian Vjera, meaning faith, which coincides with the Latin word vera, meaning truth. Both are derived from verus, true; perhaps the faith makes truth and vice versa. This doesn’t need a proof. It just is.

 

 

The key is remembering

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.- George Santayana

This jumped out at me from, of all places, my Facebook profile - there’s a nifty little quotation widget which often gives me pause for thought. Never more so than today.

I’ve spent a lot of time (some might say a disproportionate amount of time) over the past few months, really trying to look hard at my past and to learn lessons to employ in my present and future life. I’ve been trying to recognise that I’m not headed somewhere; that the destination is not the point of the journey.

So often, we keep on reiterating behaviours; we seem stuck in a rut, or dogged by the same run of bad luck. I reckon that at least some of this can be put down to not learning lessons effectively enough.

This is especially relevant to the wider stage; to us collectively as witches. There’s got to be a case to be made for not slavishly claiming a past, but for selectively looking at the past and learning what we can from it. It doesn’t even have to be our past, nor even the one we are seeking to claim for ourselves; history, no matter whose it is, can provide universal truths.

If we do claim a past, a lineage, it’s only reasonable to suppose that we’d look critically at the history we seek to claim and analyse it. It’s not enough to use historical and mythical gravitas as a badge of honour - it’s information, it’s knowledge; and the test of a wise man is the use which he makes of it.

A Perfect Weekend

To Somerset, to visit dear friends S and K, who welcomed me in, and bade me be at home. Nothing could have pleased me more!

Saturday was gorgeous; a visit to Glastonbury made me laugh at some of the more eclectic types wandering about, but there but for the grace of the Goddess…. nearly bought a fake flower and ribbon chaplet but managed to restrain myself when I saw the price!

S took me to the Chalice Well Garden - amazingly beautiful.  Here’s a few pictures which may or may not do justice to the orderly and well-stocked state of the garden, which could best be described as being of a sumptuous simplicity. If only I could get mine to look like this!

The collonade was simply amazing. A calming and centring entry to the garden proper.

The pool was a gorgeous rill, across odd-shaped pans, and the noise was indescribably soothing and calming. The water runs all the way from the top of the garden, in the well proper, to the foot. The energy likewise flows down the hill and away across the plain. Quite the most lovely place I’ve been this year.

… and here’s the well itself. We forgot ribbons; but I was able to cobble an offering together. I felt accepted, and the strength and peace the visit gave me has lasted.

We had a superb dinner out on the Saturday night - two druids, myself, S and K: between the five of us we cleared the restaurant. Too funny. Drank a skinful, retired extremely pissed at 1.30am and not a trace of hangover in the morning - even better!

The place in which my friends live is so soft, so welcoming, so much the opposite of harsh and unfriendly. It’s a world within a world, totally isolated and approachable only by single-track lanes. It’s like a magical hideaway.

I don’t know how to say how much this weekend has meant to me; the gifts, the cheer, the encouragement; rare people and a rare place; perfection.

 

Witches - an ‘unreached people group’

Forgive the nauseating marketing-speke for a minute and try and get the old noggins around this for an impressive show of unity. I’m seeing centurions marching out, looking for little unreached groups to over-run and hegemonise. What a picture.

If the Christian right are seeking to subvert inter-faith discussion in order to profile the alternative religions for a marketing hit, then all we can do it shake our heads and leave them to it. We can learn a good lesson, however, about the breathtaking presumption of faith - mine’s better than yours, I was told by a book and some guys who were told by some other guys; they must be right as they’ve been talking about this for 2000 years! Everyone agrees they’re right! Oh, and the Guy in the Sky is on our side, so sorry, you’re off to a burny place. Or you can get on the bus with us!

This is the central point. A great deal of the legitimisation for the worst excesses of evangelical Christianity, and for other faiths of a totalitarian bent, comes not from our present era, but from the past. I was discussing the Bible with an evangelical Christian during the week, which was a sobering experience. The history seems to be the mandate to act. The history, perhaps this isn’t going too far, is the means by which justification is made for things done today.

If there was ever a good reason to claim no lineage at all, then this seems to be it.

I look at modern witchcraft and I see a free faith, untrammeled by the constraints of historical practice. We don’t have any marks to hit simply because it’s always been done this way. We can innovate, choose best practice, take note of mistakes made in the past and work past them.

Validation through the historical record can only ever be in the favour of the winning team, in this case Evangelical Christianity. If you control the presses, the News will always be ‘Good’.

To the hills!!

I was walking across the yard at work, mindlessly happy, enjoying the sunshine and giving thanks for the bright day and the smell of the sap rising. Suddenly I wanted to be striking camp and preparing for a day’s hiking into the mountains. The smell of the cut grass and the leaves was an immediate reminder of camping trips of old, emerging from the tent into the early misty morning, stretching, getting the kettle on for tea and then taking the mug for a wander round, savouring the peace and the lovely views.

Despite living amongst the most beautiful landscape in Britain, I feel curiously divorced from the land, no matter how hard I try to be at one with it. Perhaps this rediscovery of a lost love of walking will help me do better; to make your way slowly (and at times painfully!) across a landscape, to recognise each feature on your map, to camp out and not be insulated from the elements and so removed from them - this is a valuable experience. For me, I think it must be a form of ‘required reading’. I need to do it periodically to refresh my most basic memories of what it’s all about.

Beltaine

Loreena McKennitt- Huron ‘Beltane’ Fire Dance

As a symbol of hope, of growth for the future, nothing beats Beltaine. The fires of renewal will burn, and the Goddess and the God will meet in the wildwood and become one.

I will be praising Them, and making offerings, tonight. Red thread on the Rowan tree, milk and cakes below, a small fire with prayers for those who have troubles, and wishes for the future twisting up from the bowl in the smoke and sparks to meet with the Moon above.

I’m posting this uplifting and purposeful piece of music after being inspired to do so by beweaver. This should get us in the mood! Blessings to all on this great day in the year.