Typing like a maniac

I’d been talking about good motivation; I seem to have found some energy and application that I’d lost since university days. It hasn’t diminished or got any less vigorous; it’s just been sitting there, in suspended animation, waiting for me to remember it.

An avenue of study has opened up over the last few weeks and I’ve been dipping my toes in the water, no more. It’s warm. And I want to throw myself in and go wallowing around in all the wonderful images, ideas, theories and strategems and then swim off down the little rills that lead from this pool to other pools and to yet other pools… it feels like C S Lewis’s Wood Between the Worlds from The Magician’s Nephew. Actually, that’s a really good and coincidental analogy, come to think of it…

In any case, here I am in this pool of knowledge and I hadn’t looked for it - had never expected it to come my way. I’d been wishing for it without really knowing what I wanted, and now I have it. I am spending my evenings reading, making notes, typing responses, putting together ideas, testing them, reading reading reading. Thinking critically and in an organised fashion, for perhaps the first time in ten years. Frightening, exhilarating, astonishingly beneficient.

Why frightening? Because when my mind takes over it rules me completely, and nothing else gets a look-in. But it’s also frightening to note the difference between my mind now and the excuse for thinking I’ve made do with in the recent past. No comparison. I love to think, and to stretch my mind. I feel like a cat waking up from a long nap.

So Who Should Step Forward?

Should anyone?

There’s a movement afoot among the pagan community, in dribs and drabs currently, but it seems to me to be picking up momentum. I read this post from magickfortherealworld, in which there seems to be a call for some kind or organisation, some sort of concerted outreach for new members. The poster regrets the fact that paganism has no mechanism for promoting recruitment and inclusiveness. The reason Christianity has this mechanism is precisely because it was given as a Christian duty by the man himself. No-one can give pagans that duty or that right, in my opinion.

The Pagan community prides itself on allowing anyone to believe their own beliefs without judgement, and while this may be good, there seems to a lot more difficulty in creating a community because of it. 

If we’re to move forward, we have to preserve that which makes us unique. There cannot be any merit in making us into a pop-lite version of the very religions we seek to be different from. Not fighting fire with fire takes guts; more, it takes an acceptance of the long game and the effort required to push the battle beyond our individual lifetimes.

Our lack of judgement of other religious paths cannot be seen as a lack of moral effort; to allow the person next to you to express their views when their views make your blood boil, and vice versa, is the essence of tolerance and free thought. This is the battle we have to fight and win, not the numbers game.

There are obvious problems with paganism; its fractured nature, its difference, its lack of a concerted effort; in short, a lack of a unified message. Not easy to spin, nor to easily explain, or explain away. 

Pagans are taught not to push their religion/spirituality on anyone else and this keeps our communities small and isolated.

This equation doesn’t balance. We are not concerted, because we aren’t all going the same way. If we were, Goddess knows, we might just be unstoppable. But life is full of conflicts, and we’re just as conflicted as the next human and fallible religious group, and we know it. This is actually a strength.

Paganism seems difficult to the modern world because it makes you think and it isn’t easy to explain. All you pagans out there know how hard it is to lucidly describe, in words the layperson can easily grasp, what it is you do and believe. This is a threatening thing to be faced with. Once you have a name and a description, you can categorise and compartmentalise that which threatens you and file it away. 

I can’t agree with what is proposed in the post, for the simple reason that it is not that we are ‘pushed’ not to proselytise, but that there isn’t anyone to push us in the first place - and thank the Goddess for that. If we seek to emulate the world faiths that do have a positive mandate to ’spread the word’, who’s going to take the lead? Who has the authority? Surely, one of the defining characteristics of paganism is its plurality. There is no one true way… and so how do we shepherd seekers along it, if it is not defined?

The lack of a formal path, the lack of teachers, the lack of an accepted face of paganism is not a weakness, but a strength. It keeps us searching. It keeps us asking questions. It stops the ‘we’re holier than you’ argument. Finally, and I can’t believe it would ever get that far, but I bet that’s what Jesus thought too - it stops humans uniting in the name of the God / Goddess and going to war. If we need places to go, to meet, then we can find them. If we feel that it isn’t easy enough to bring our kind together, well, we need to effect long-lasting and slow-moving paradigmatic change, within our own individual societies. Witchcraft has only been a recognised faith path for 50 years in the modern world, and I don’t believe anyone seriously tries to include any of the preceding centuries in the pot for the purposes of census-taking. Fifty years isn’t long enough to form a coherent strategy in a religious movement unless you’re Scientology. And I don’t think, respect to them, that Scientology is an acceptable model for paganism to follow.

Without the doubt, the effort, the different paths, what are we? Children trying on their parents’ shoes. We’re better than this.

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This just seen on The Wild Hunt, discussing the internal construction of pagan religions and their perceived grouping. Very interesting indeed, in the light of the above posts, the discussion happening over at magickfortherealworld’s blog and comments here.

The Increase of Disorder

Bear with me, my friends; this could be a long one!

The full moon seems to be fostering this enormous outpouring of drivel ideas from me, and you are to be the recipients!

Having dinner with Seshat’s Voice last evening, we got onto the subject of group dynamics, both on the small group and the macro level. What happens across human experience when you get a large amount of people all supposedly going the same way?

The premise starts with the sowing of a seed, of an idea; in this instance, it was Gardner’s drawing-together of Wicca with a coherent-enough belief system and historiography. Gardner had a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve, what he wished to set in motion; he had enough natural showmanship and a deep enough need for publicity (note I say ‘deep enough’. He wasn’t as much of a headline grabber as some who came afterward) to set the scene effectively and with an eye for the future.

Almost immediately things began to suffer the effects of entropy. And entropy is a good construct to use here; the ‘increase of disorder’ neatly describes the process which Wicca underwent in the years after 1939.

By 1949 and the publication of ‘High Magic’s Aid’, Wicca was already established and becoming known (Davis 1.1:45). Gardner was certainly the most influential spokesperson for Wicca. Behind him and to each side, however, were an increasing band of associated and interconnected personalities. Gardner was 65 by the time HMA was published, and by 1955 was no longer the undisputed head of his order. It had, in effect, grown legs and run off.

Gardner may be credited with his title ‘The Father of Modern Witchcraft’ whether you believe he was initiated into a pre-existing tradition or made the whole shooting match up. In a sense, from our vantage point in 2008, it’s irrelevant anyway. It is Gardner’s personality that enabled his great success in introducing a most unusual and some might say subversive religious system into post-war Britain; his knowledge and the uses he made of it that caused such widespread acceptance amongst the intelligentsia. And almost immediately that his success was beginning to manifest itself, others were setting out their stalls in similar fashion.

Julia Phillips discusses the competing hereditary tradition claims made by Robert Cochrane, Alex Sanders, Charles Cardell (2004:5) and Eleanor Bone (2004:12). We learn that denouncements of Gardner were beginning, particularly from Cardell, who appeared to have a mounting antipathy for Gardner, from the very start.

It might be said at this point that, by the time of the breakup of Gardner’s coven, he had become something of an enemy to himself; Doreen Valiente claimed that one reason she left the group was that Gardner invoked ‘Gerald’s Law’ which enabled the investiture of a new, young and presumably beautiful High Priestess. This effectively displaced Valiente; and seems high-handed and egotistical of Gardner to say the least. He clearly wanted to retain control. The argument flared up again over the introduction of The Laws - which Valiente and her Partner Ned Grove suspected Gardner of inventing after the fact as a bid to retain power (2004:10).

Briefly, just some of the subsequent fracturings and reformings of the emerging religion may be summarised thus, and there is no chronological order imposed here; 

Valiente and Grove left the Coven, in bad humour with Gardner. Robert Cochrane represented himself as a hereditary witch in the style of Gardner, and in opposition to Gardnerian Wicca. His coven, the Royal Windsor Cuveen, was reinvented as The Regency after Cochrane’s death in 1966. Eleanor Bone, despite being initated by Gardner, still laid claim to an external lineage. Alex Sanders claimed both an external lineage, AND obtained initiation into a Gardnerian coven, then left to form his own coven on different lines. Maxine Sanders joined him, and they later initated the Farrars.

Within this melee we can see the constant jockeying for position, the political one-upmanship and above all the strength of the personalities involved. It appears to me as though there is a mechanism at work here, one which is active in any group gathered around an emotive and valuable central theme.

Another similar situation I have heard of recently, from the Rationalist Humanist, in fact, is the formation of modern Tae-Kwon Do. Similarly to Wicca, it was formalised around 50 years ago. Similarly to Wicca, it suffered internal schism and personality-led breakaways from the central core. These schisms continued, across continents and decades. Now, the form of Tae-Kwon Do practised by the majority of adherents in the UK is so markedly different to that practised by Korea, where it originated, that even a lay person can differentiate between the fight-styles. This shows once again the power of an idea, ownership of that idea and the lengths inspired or angry people will go to to preserve their version of that idea intact.

The purpose of this essay is not to mourn the schismatic nature of Wicca, nor hark back to an earlier ‘golden age’ of the form. My purpose here is to examine entropy at work and see whether it is creative or destructive to the form upon which it acts. And taking Wicca aside for a moment, I’m interested to see whether the form causes the entropy, or whether the entropy is simply what happens when you gather strong personalities together under a supposedly common banner.

Entropy is all around us; we fight it constantly and rarely win. When you gather humans together, the old adage applies; any more than two and a faction will form. When you multiply that natural tendency for partisanship with intelligence, spirit and a nascent social and political force, which is what Wicca was in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, you’ve got an explosive combination. I’m actually surprised Wicca survived at all.

Regarding destruction, the argument could of course be made both ways; Wicca has changed immeasurably from the original distillation by Gardner; we are reaching a visible limit for the threads of lineage driven initiation. At some point, the juice will dilute no further; validation may well become nigh-on impossible. ‘New’ branches of Wicca, and of witchcraft in general, are in the frame; new means by which one can be initiated are discussed. The ‘New Age’ has made self-development a realistic possibility for anyone. Not everyone agrees with these new paths; it goes without saying that there is debate, not all of it polite.

Having said all this, the destructive impulses within Wicca are remarkably weak. Wicca is changing, splitting, arguing and agreeing almost constantly, and yet there are no truly entrenched positions across the board, and so no really heart-rending breaks can occur. There’s still the great urge to ’stick together’ and sort out the differences amicably. This is encouraging stuff.

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… and here’s an interesting sidebar from The Wild Hunt on this issue.

 

Bibliography

A History of Wicca in England, Julia Phillips, 2004 Revised Edition

From Man to Witch: Gerald Gardner 1946-49, Morgan Davis, v1.1

The Meaning of Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, Red Wheel/ Weiser 2004 Edition

Personal Notes and Wiki

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 ‘Loving Attempts’ to Convert Us

While reading on The Wild Hunt today, I noticed that Jason Pitzl-Waters brings up an interesting topic. I have been discussing elsewhere the calmness that witchcraft brings me; not least in the fact that I am not called upon to either convert others to my way of thinking nor required to engage in theological disputation. The pact is simply between me and my Deities.

Rabbi Yehiel E. Poupko, Judaic Scholar at the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago discusses his dislike of the aim stated by the Christianity Today editor, Stan Guthrie, to call for a new push by Christians to undertake the conversion of all Jews to Christianity forthwith, using what he terms ’loving’ and ‘respectful’ attempts.

I’m not sure I have words to express what this brings up in me, but I’m going to try.

Elementarily, there is nothing loving nor respectful in attempting to encroach upon another person by seeking to change their view of their religion. Never mind that Jews are born Jewish; it’s not a lifestyle choice, it’s a way of life as well as a religious conviction.

Were it another religion in the frame, it would make little difference. By seeking to convert someone, you are at one stroke denying the right of the person to choose, denying their vocation, denying that their essential humanity is on a par with yours. In short, you are saying that they don’t know what they’re doing. But that you do.

And who the hell died and made Christians the guardians of the world’s one true way? A young, historically ambivalent religion, piggybacked as it is on the weight and gravitas of thousands of years of Judaism, ruthlessly promoted by the Romans, by the missionaries, by British Colonialism, and now by the mindless, inexorable, blindly multiplying clap-happy weight of the Christian Right?

I seek actively to avoid discussing my religious convictions with people unless they have expressly asked me, or have come here to read what I have to say; I consider the information intensely personal and I would be mortified if I thought something I had said had influenced a person to act a certain way in this regard - morally, it would make me responsible for them.

It is not given to mortals to guide other mortals to the gods. It is not our job on this earth. It is certainly not our job to do so under the guise of feeding, watering and educating those who have nothing, as so many Christian organisations do. Blatant, unrepentant arrogance and cultural hegemonising.

I’m not keen on any form of witness, on any form of proselytising, of any form of mission to convert. It seems utterly wrong. In Christianity, ‘no-one comes to the Father except through Me’ does not me ‘me’ the worshipper. It means ‘Me’ - Jesus. And there’s plenty of people out there who can read and make up their own minds. Including the Jews. Who we must assume, have largely made their choice already!

Ronald Hutton talks in ‘Triumph of the Moon’ about our ‘post-Christian’ society. Balance is certainly required. I can’t pretend to be anti-Christian - the precepts are good, and I was brought up in the faith and regard it fondly but not with outright reverence. I do, however, freely admit that I am anti-evangelical. I actively want interfaith discussion, where every faith can dispute respectfully and learn about each other’s beliefs. But I agree with Rabbi Poupko when he says that ‘mutual sacred rejection’ is required.

We must have the strength to see the strength in other faiths, without surrendering what is unique, special, irreplaceable in ours. We must be prepared to learn from other faiths what is similar to our own, to realise that perhaps, we are not so widely divergent as we would like to assume. But nowhere, nowhere in this bargain do we get floor-time to pitch our manifesto. That would subvert the entire process of learning through faith, and would largely make the efforts meaningless.

 

Prof Hutton, Dillington House

This afternoon to Dillington House, Somerset, to a lecture on the pagan religions of the ancient British Isles by Ronald Hutton. He spoke for an hour, without notes, with great enthusiasm and erudition, encompassing all the latest scholarship. Interestingly, recent re-evaluations of the excavation at Paviland Cave, South Wales have shown the ritual burial of a young man with red-dyed cloth and broken ivory ‘wands’ to be the earliest ritualised human burial anywhere in the world.

At around 30,000 BP, human intellectual evolution seems to have taken an extraordinary leap forward; the human mind turned toward the afterlife, the spiritual and the intangible; burial began to be ritualised and musical instruments, implying song and dance are found. At around 6,000 BP we see the advent of the adoption of farming, a paradigmatic change of enormous proportions for the previously hunter-gather populations of North-West Europe. This change included the importation of completely new species, such as goat, sheep and cattle, and new crops, encompassing nearly all the cereals grown in Britain today. People were thinking bigger; this is seen also by the emergence of earthworks and covered mounds in profusion; almost 40,000 are found around the North-West European facade, and no two are precisely the same. Hutton nevertheless sees potent possibilities for a formal religious idea behind these constructions; they took a great deal of time and effort, which might have been better spent seeing to the necessities of life. Clearly, these mounds were important, in a way that surpassed everyday living.

3,000 BP saw the end of construction of these large structures - climate took a downturn, sending Britain from temperatures comparable to that of the South of France to that of northern Germany. This, added to the deforestation practised by Neolithic man against the almost total forest cover which overtook Britian during the last interglacial, caused a reconcentration on the business of living once more, this time focussed outward onto trade and the demarcation of property - bronze requiring tin and copper, which was hard to come by.

Traditional sources for information about pagan religious practise have been largely discounted. Both the Welsh bardic records and the Irish epics have been judged to be inaccurate or at least unverifiable accounts. The best information we have comes from Roman sources - everyday people, some born British and assimilated in to the Empire, some posted here with their husbands, never to see their homelands again. One woman, Vibia Picata, put up an altar to ‘the celestial goddess of the woodlands and the crossroads’ - this is Hecate.

Perhaps it’s enough to acknowledge that the information is there; there is no more rich ritual landscape in Europe than Britain. There is more evidence to be found here than anywhere; and historic excavations can be re-interpreted, as Paviland shows.

The question is not really what the archaeological evidence can prove, but how far the extant evidence can support the weight of assumption placed upon it. Have we got any right to hark back to an earlier pagan religion at all?

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The Process

There’s a lot of me that wishes I was back at the beginning of my learning about wicca again. What would I do differently? What would I read that I haven’t read, do what I haven’t done? I have no regrets about my path, quite the opposite in fact; I simply feel the need to audit what I’ve done so far, decide where I’ve got to, and where I’m going next.

Lots of ‘I’s in there! It’s all about me, of course.

When there’s you and your gods in a room alone, and only you are blogging, it does all tend to get a bit insular, a bit egocentric. There’s a part of me that regrets the lack of a dialogue; Christians that I know claim their god speaks to them daily. There’s a sneaking part of me that believes Gregory House on this subject; if they speak to God, they’re religious; if He speaks to them they’re insane.

I want to think a little about the claim that gods speak and people hear. I find the assertion that god speaks to people comforting, and at the same time when those people claim it has happened to them it also sounds really smug and self-satisfied. Why do they merit special attention?  On the other hand, what else would the devout expect but that their god should communicate with them, the righteous? And if they expect it, who’s to say their expectations aren’t being fulfilled? Quite often, we get what we want. We hear what we want to hear. And if it conveniently bolsters our faith, well, it’s both a self-fulfilling prophecy and the best thing that’ s ever happened to us.

In the years since I’ve been studying and striving and learning and doing and praying, I cannot ever say that I have been in communication with my Goddess and God. I have felt Them, I have felt near to Them; they’ve never approached me and spoken to me. On balance, I’m glad. In the Christian tradition, God spoke to man through an intermediary; the premise being that the voice of God unbaffled would kill the one who heard it. This seems reasonable to me.

And really, why would They? What would They need to tell me, to communicate to me, that would make it essential to speak to me directly? I’m only me. I’ve been put on this planet to do my best and to exercise my free will to make choices which will eventually determine my future lives. Will I be good? Will I rise above my base human state?

This is the rub, people; if God speaks to you, you cannot fully exercise free will, which negates the purpose for which we were put here on Earth. We were put here to struggle, to strive to be better, to experience and to feel and to think for ourselves. If God tells you what to do, you have simultaneously scored the biggest home-court advantage in the world and circumvented the purpose of mortal life.

The Art of Defining Without Defining

A conversation that I had with M on our field trip has stuck with me and I wanted to share it; it centred about the impossibility of stating your beliefs and getting someone else to understand you correctly.

Now, this on the face of it, doesn’t appear to be a difficult thing to do. A, on WW this week, asked for answers to some similar questions for a college project - she wanted to know what we believed and what way we would define Wicca should we have to. I gave her the requisite three-line answer and thought no more about it.

However, it’s one thing being dispassionate and concise to someone who is already in the life; you can short-circuit the process because you know they know what you mean by certain words - or if not, that they will not willfully misunderstand you.

Assuming people in the life understand you carries little or no detriment; if they don’t it doesn’t have huge implications because they’re already on the same side of the fire. They are unlikely to be alienated.

But if you’re talking about friends, about family members, well, that’s different.

This comes back to the broom closet debate. The old chestnut. But it’s an ever-present bone of contention because people like us are constantly having to wrestle with it. Who to tell? And what do you tell them? And how do you say the words?

There is a natural need to present the facts as you see them in a way likely to appeal to the interlocutor; we want to be understood so we already begin second-guessing the recipient of our confidences by trying to couch the news in a way they are likely to find palatable, or at least understandable. Already, we are needy; we need them to like what we have to say; on the most visceral level we’re begging for their buy-in.

The most likely result of this is that whatever you say is likely to be inaccurate, or at least not the full picture.

M and I agreed that definition can be limiting as well as dangerous. How about trying to describe what we are not?

It sounds negative, but really, when you take away what we are not, only positives remain. Surely, that’s good news for anyone who’s listening?

Saying what you think

This isn’t as easy as it appears.

There’s a widely-held view in the Pagan community that seeking to engage in a character debate, or any other kind of debate on the validity of the Pagan faiths, is a bad idea. And then there’s this, from The Wild Hunt, this morning - ‘aw, shucks, ma’am, it’s not a religious insult, I was only drunk’.

Mix it up? Don’t mix it up? Come out fighting or stay in the cupboard with the spiders and that broom, which doesn’t look like such an effective weapon when arrayed against the might of the Fundamentalist Right?

Do we rise above all this, and turn our backs and walk away? Or stay, fight and get tarred with the same brush? Does it matter that there are more of them than us? Surely the whole point, particularly for Wicca, is that we don’t seek to witness and to enrol new members.

I’d like to think that there can be a new method of worshipping, one that doesn’t involve getting as many people as you know ‘into the gang’. This is what I practise - personally, it’s a direct reaction to the Born Again mentality I was asked and then forced to adopt when young and a member of the Christian Church.

I have an enormous amount of respect for those of other faiths who seek to go about their lives and days, first attending to the beams in their own eyes; face it, we’ve all got a few. Looking to their own shortcomings first, wrestling with their own demons and not seeking to impose their religious reasoning on every person they meet.  They live their lives by their faith, it shines though every pore. These are the people, of whatever faith, who can lead and therefore inspire by example. They have my admiration; and frankly, who would you rather emulate?

The broom cupboard is an enormously vexatious question for me. I’m not in it, but neither am I out and prancing around clanking with pentacles. There are people who know and there are people who don’t. There are those in my family that know, and those that don’t.

 And really - know what??! It’s not like I grow an extra head at full moon, or whatall.

In recent years I have been doing a good line in not thinking about it and therefore not having a problem, but that’s just not a useful means of dealing with the situation. My thoughts turn to militancy. Where would feminism have got to if the girls hadn’t stood up to be counted, bras on fire? We’d be in a right old mess. And none of our generation, so carefree, so blase about our respective freedoms that we don’t even see them as such, would have the chance to ask a question like I am today, because we’d be too busy fighting in the trenches and trying to be heard. Underground movements only stay underground for a limited amount of time.

And then there’s the possibility that we could learn from the mistakes of past generations and superseded faiths and look critically at what might be the best way to move things forward, so the majority would be happy. Two problems here of course; you’ll never please all the people all the time, and the obvious one - we are NOT organised! Just like Mrs Tweedie’s chickens, we are a loose convocation at best; all autonomous, all slightly different in our approach, but I would argue none the less strong for that. To be seen as divided and therefore weak is not so much of an issue in this case; it is our very difference whilst all being roughly on the same side of the fire that gives us our strength - the ability to be polytheistic and truly interested in who and what others worship, to accept that your view isn’t the only one, to know that everyone’s path may be different. Perhaps we have moved forward, after all.