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Edited on Thu Apr-19-07 02:33 AM by intheflow
We've had a number of pagans coming into our fellowship lately. Apparently there's a large pagan population on the Mississippi Coast, who knew? Unfortunately, their arrival has kind of freaked out some of the older members--especially the lapsed Christians who grew up in the Deep South. They've rejected hellfire and brimstone, they may call themselves mystics or agnostics, but they still identify strongly with a kind of cultural Christianity. While I don't identify as only pagan, I wanted to educate the older members about paganism so they could stop being so fearful and start embracing what I think promises to be our biggest membership growth potential. Anyway, it's not the deepest or best-written sermon I ever delivered, but the pagans in the congregation sure liked it, so I thought I'd share it with you all.
Coming Out Pagan
I have a secret to tell you. Come closer… I'm a pagan.
It's taken me a long time to identify as a pagan. Even as I stand before you, it sounds weird coming out of my own lips. My insides are a little squirmy just thinking that I'm pagan. It feels dirty. It feels wicked. It feels scary, as if I'm purposefully staring down my own personal highway to hell.
But what is that about? I don’t believe in hell! Or at least, not the classic afterlife hell. The hell with brimstone and fire and a red demon with a pointy tail. If I believe in a hell, it's a psychological hell inside our own heads. Or maybe a hell on earth created by centuries of humans inflicting pain on other humans and our planet.
I think what I'm feeling is the result of years of cult programming. No, not pagan cult programming. Christian cult programming. Because even though I wasn't raised in any church, popular Western culture has bought into the Christian hype about paganism. One need look no farther than The Wizard of Oz to discover a witch abusing her power. Even the Harry Potter series, in which witches are portrayed in a favorable light, is under a constant barrage from some vocal Christian groups for corrupting the morals of our youth. So I'm pretty sure the anxiety I've been carrying with me most of my life about identifying as pagan is the result of a brainwashed life.
But I've been doing some research on the subject, and I'm here to tell you there is nothing—NOTHING—inherently evil about paganism. In fact, I'm even going to go out on a limb here and state that many, if not most, of the folks in this room this morning are pagans.
How can I make such an outlandish claim? Surely Mike isn't a witch, boiling up spells along with his crawfish last night! Surely I am not a witch, delivering this sermon as an incantation designed to convert you all to devil worship! And it's true, I am not a witch. I am a pagan, and they are very different things. Or not. Wait, this is getting confusing. Let's start with some basics:
The word pagan comes from the Latin word paganus, meaning "civilian, country dweller." In other words, it originally meant something like "country bumpkin," that is, not a city sophisticate. Obviously city people were educated, and the educated were Christians. But it's important to remember that that was only so because the only school in town was run by the Christian church. The educated were indoctrinated by their own education to be Christians, and so the bias began. The country dwellers may not have been "book learned," but they were street smart in their own ways. They were farmers and fishermen and tradesmen who lived and worked in the country. They were educated by the natural world around them. They understood living in the cycles of nature.
Of course, one might argue that those early pagans drew a lot of misinformation from the natural world. Science has yet to find wood sprites or faeries or leprechauns. But it does not follow that that makes their beliefs bunk. Early Christians certinly misunderstood Jesus' message as they killed Jews in punishment for Judas' betrayal—-and never mind that Jesus himself was a Jew.
Apart from the root of the word, there are a couple definitions I found in Merriam Webster. The first defines a pagan as a heathen, "especially: a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in ancient Rome)." A second definition is "one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods: an irreligious or hedonistic person."
A quick word on the first dictionary definition. It says that pagans are heathens who especially believe in a pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. This is not necessarily true for all modern day pagans, but more on that in a bit. Right now I want to address the second definition which I believe is a cultural expression of that same brainwashing I mentioned earlier.
"One who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures; a hedonistic person." The Christian church is infamous for two things: assuming anyone who isn't a Christian has no religion, and suppressing human sexuality. A classic example of the former is Europeans coming to the shores of this country and forcefully converting the heathen Indians to Christianity. They did not see the Native American's elaborate rituals as religion because they had no Book—and so were obviously not learned! Spirituality didn't matter to the early Christians, they were literalists to the core. If it wasn’t Christian church approved, it was sinful and evil. Worse, it was no religion whatsoever.
Yet it was so dang popular! Those heathens were notorious for not giving up their rituals and beliefs! What's a Christian to do when faced with such stubbornness? Well, sure, you could try beating those pagan beliefs out of them. Sometimes that seemed to work, but often times it just resulted in those ungrateful heathens trying to rise up against you, and possibly kill you.
Obviously another tactic was needed. Propaganda was just the ticket. In making the case against pagans in Rome, for instance, one need only look at the Roman elite who worshiped Bacchus to see that all pagans were drunks and sex fiends. The problem was, Roman pagans did not only worship Bacchus, but a whole pantheon of Gods and Goddesses. Some of those Gods and Goddesses were very severe, and that severity served to balance out the hedonism of Bacchus. Yet the smear campaign worked. Paganism and sexual immorality have been tied together ever since.
So what the word pagan boils down to simply means, in effect, "not Christian." That definition covers a lot of territory, including, probably, more than a few people in this room. Still, to call folks pagan is probably disingenuous on my part. There I go projecting on you all again! But you get my meaning—the word "pagan" has been interpreted and manipulated over the centuries to vilify people whose beliefs were different from the dominant culture.
Today, many pagans prefer to call themselves neo-pagans. There are two reasons for this. The first is to reclaim the word pagan and redefine it as something new in a post-Christian context. The second reason people is because we white people are literally reinventing paganism because many of the European indigenous religions were stamped out of existence. We can still see hints of them in Christianity: the pine boughs at Christmas. Bunnies and eggs at Easter. But the rituals themselves have been lost, and so neo-pagans seek to reinvent rituals to replace those which have been lost. They do so by studying the indigenous religions which have survived: Native American spirituality, African spirituality, Far East philosophy, to name a few more prevalent strains.
One final note on what paganism isn't. Paganism isn't Wicca, or witchcraft. Some pagans might self-identify as witches, but not all pagans are witches. Not that there's anything wrong with being a witch. Even the U.S. armed services recognize Wicca as a valid religion. Again, that was a term co-opted by the church to vilify matriarchal religions and subjugate women. Witches in indigenous European culture were most likely the healers and spiritual leaders in their communities. Obviously it served the Christian church to discredit their authority.
Paganism is on the rise in the United States. Some studies show that it is the fastest growing religion in America. That's a hard claim to make, because paganism is very hard to track. There is no central, denominational authority governing paganism. (The Covenant of UU Pagans aside.) Some pagans gather together is small groups, or covens, of no more than 12 people, to worship together. Probably the vast majority practice their spirituality alone. The reason for solitary practice is at least three-fold. First, there's the fear of publicly identifying as pagan. Others find deep meaning in quiet, private reflection. Still others may long for a group experience, but have found no groups that fit their very individual beliefs or the groups they find have rituals that aren't a good fit. For example, I have been to a number of pagan ceremonies, but I don’t believe in witchcraft, so their rituals didn’t do it for me; I wasn’t raised Native American, so those rituals are not mine; and on and on. Pagan beliefs are very individualistic, based on self-knowledge, much like Gnosticism moved the spirit in some primitive Christians. (Also stamped out by what became the official church, because once again, "knowledgeable" people were people who believed what the church said they should believe.)
One thing that most (but not all) pagans seek is a sense of balanced spirituality. One reason that paganism has grown greatly since the 1950's is the women's movement. Tired of being subjected to patriarchal systems in religion, women started seeking ways to participate more fully in the church. Some chose ministry paths, working within the existing structures. But others started exploring a more radical belief in the Goddess, the feminine to balance out the masculinity in Western culture. That is why many pagans will say that they follow the Goddess. Believing in the Goddess does not deny that there is a God, but the emphasis is shifted from warring Sky God to nurturing Earth Mother. Many Goddess worshipers even have their own version of the Trinity: Maiden/Mother/Crone.
This is not to claim that all pagans are Goddess worshipers. Many pagans actively worship both a God and a Goddess, realizing that over-reliance on a female deity can be just as myopic as over-reliance on a male deity. Getting back to an earlier point I made, one does not have to even believe in a dualistic God and Goddess, or even a pantheon of Gods or spirits. I consider myself both pagan and Unitarian, that is, one Spirit that encompasses everything. Again, that does not negate the existence of other Gods or even faerie-creatures, it is just to say that I believe there is One (capital "O" in One) that is over all—hence, I am not a Trinitarian, but a Unitarian. By this interpretation, we can each be Unitarians and Trinitarians or pantheistic if we so chose, believing in many Gods and Spirits the way that Catholics can believe in saints.
There is only one thing that seems to unite all of paganism, and that is a reverence for nature. The ecology movement has reminded people of the need to reconnect with nature on a deep, spiritual level. There is precious little in Western culture that encourages us to live as the natural beings science has proved us to be. The Bible taught us that we are to overcome nature, we are to bend nature to our will. The industrial revolution celebrated man's triumph over nature by harnessing nature's powers as our own, to suit only our species' sustainability. We see time a linear, progress only moves forward. Electricity has negated our internal body clocks which want us to rise and sleep by the sun and moon. Fossil fuels have made humanity immune to the cycles of the seasons. We are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. We have fresh produce all year long due to being able to ship it between climates overnight.
But we enjoy modernity at a deep price. Our water is polluted, our air carries contaminates. Plant, animal, and insect species are dying as global warming quickly shifts habitat. Even anti-bacterial soaps carry the risk of lowering our immunity to germs in our environment. For centuries we have lived our lives apart from nature, but now the rent is coming due.
What is a spiritual response to such a reality? Lao-Tzu knew thousands of years ago, when he wrote
The return to the Tao is peaceful;
It is the flow of nature,
An eternal decay and renewal.
Accepting this brings enlightenment,
Ignoring this brings misery.
Chief Seattle knew a hundred years ago, when he said that the earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth. Joni Mitchell knew forty years ago, when she wrote that we are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.
The New Testament claims Jesus even overcame the most fundamental natural rhythm, that of death. In Christianity, there is no cycle of life and death. Jesus is not renewed by natural means, such as having a child, but by supernatural means, apart from this physical world, available only in the heavens. To whom is this option available? Only the believers, those whom the Christian church deems as intelligent enough to pick this unnatural path.
The Universalist in me rejects that only those who buy into the Western Sky God of Yahweh/Christ/Allah are eligible for everlasting life. The ecologist in me celebrates that life after death includes composting, even of human remains. Is there anything more glorious than knowing that my bodily remains could fertilize a tree that could provide sustenance for generations of my offspring? Now that's a resurrection tale I can get behind. That is a story of hope that looks to the future yet still lives in the physical world. A narrative that honors my ancestors and the cycles of nature. It appeals to my reason. It sings to my soul.
There are probably very few of us in this room that have not found inspiration and comfort in nature. Of course we have also found pain in nature. From the personal deaths of loved ones to the communal disaster that is Katrina, we know that following a pagan path also opens us up to pain and suffering. Paganism does not promise Good News 24-7, 365 days a year. But following the pagan path also does not set us up for disappointment when painful natural events occur. One of the most disturbing things I witnessed in seminary was watching my Christian classmates struggle with their beliefs. They'd always been taught that God was Love, and yet there is obviously so much suffering in the world. How can Jesus be love and God be so heartless all at once? It really was painful to watch some of them wrestle with this dichotomy. The pagan path, on the other and, teaches that God is Goddess, both are love and hate, both are good and bad, that you can't have anything without its opposite. Balance is necessary in the natural world, and balance is necessary in the spiritual realm.
So I have finally come out of the closet and proclaimed myself a Pagan. I love this finite life of mine. I love this blue planet that births us and feeds us and puts us to rest. The earth does not belong to me, I belong to the earth. Blessed be!
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