The Problem of the Pagan “Us and Them”

April 30, 2012 By Teo Bishop 50 Comments

When I questioned the place of compassion in Pagan and Polytheist philosophy a couple of weeks back, I got an interesting response from one of my readers, “LaurelhurstLiberal”. She wrote,

“Now, about compassion: as a Heathen Reconstructionist, this is one of the big questions I’m still trying to puzzle out. Right now, it seems to me that a Heathen should be a good neighbor and a good citizen, but isn’t necessarily supposed to have capital-C Compassion for everybody in the world. There are people inside the gates that you particularly need to take care of, and those outside the gates should be helped, or at least not harmed, but not at the cost of those inside the gates. I think that’s difficult enough without trying for a saintly level of universal compassion.”

Steven T. Abell, storyteller and Patheos columnist, followed up on this idea in his post, Compassion in Cold Climates, by explaining in detail the ideas of Inangard and Utgard, or “Inside and Outside”, “Us and Them”.

I appreciate both L.L and Steven’s attempt at unpacking these ideas, but I have to come clean here and admit that I’m having a very difficult time with this way of thinking.

I have been “outside of the gates” on many occasions, and perhaps this is a part of why I have reservations about religious or cultural systems which place a value on reinforcing the boundaries of the group. Build a wall, and there will always be someone on the other side of the wall, be it women, gays, trans-folk among the gays, or Pagans. The list of those being othered is long, and it includes many of us. This list is added to every time a new “Us and Them” philosophy is created; or, for that matter, an old “Us and Them” is re-constructed. So, for me, the question is less about how to treat those on the outside of the wall, and more a question of whether the wall is even appropriate anymore.

I appreciate that inspiration comes to many Reconstructionists from exploring ancient cultural practices. I used to think Reconstructionism was very rigid, but author and Celtic Reconstructionist, Erynn Laurie, changed my mind during the 2012 Pantheacon Conference. Now I understand that searching for information about the ancients is a source of great inspiration for many of us. It can be the launching point for our spiritual practice, and I respect that. Truth be told, I look to the past for meaning as well.

But there’s still something about the reclaiming of an ancient “Us and Them” philosophy that rubs me the wrong way.

I wonder if strengthening our sense of separateness requires us to ignore other ways in which we are connected. If there was ever a case to be made for questioning models of thinking that reinforce our culturally constructed boundaries, it is the current ecological crisis. The air we breath, the water that falls from the sky — these things care nothing about our walls. They do not acknowledge our rationale for keeping some people in, and leaving others out. The Earth does not discriminate based on how we’ve chosen to group ourselves. We share our resources, we share this planet, and we share — contrary to what some politicians would say — the responsibility of her upkeep.

There is a connection between the personal and the global that doesn’t seem to be acknowledged within a binary, “Us and Them” worldview. There are never only two of us; there is always at least a third. We have evidence that our individual actions have far-reaching effects (see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch), and we have tools — namely, the internet — which provide evidence of a diverse, culturally eclectic and totally interdependent world outside of the cultural boundaries we create. We are undeniably interconnected.

Steven writes in his column,

“You can try to solve the world’s problems. You will fail. Or you can try to solve your own problems. You might succeed. You can work at various scales, but focus on things close at hand. The world will be better for it, as will your place in it.”

I like where he ends, and I wonder if it is more accurate to say that our personal problems are the world’s problems, and likewise the problems of the world belong to each of us. Working from this, can we ask whether or not our personal systems, religious or secular, are supporting an awareness of our interconnectedness, or are they reinforcing a philosophy of division?

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Where is the Source of Your Inspiration?

April 27, 2012 By Teo Bishop 2 Comments

This morning I woke, picked up the pen and paper on the hotel nightstand, and wrote down these words:

What is it to write from sleeping?

To write without ceasing. To hold back the need to edit, the impulse to correct. The penmanship is awful, but that does not matter. The only impulse is to write. The chance to create from a place of great stillness; the greatest stillness next to eternal sleep.

Write because there is a fire of great color burning in your heart. The heat is your cousin, your lover, your friend. The heat is a birthright, but the heat is disloyal. It vanishes if ignored. It will return, but you must coax it with kindness, and ritual, and sex. You must invite the fire back by making love to the essence of pleasure, pain, fear, and ecstasy.

Call back the fire like a lost child. Scream into the subdivision for your baby. She will come running to you. She will blaze through your manicured lawn and be a beacon of transformation.

Set fire to your heart!

I like the intangible. I try to hold onto it. I like the formless, and I too often try to pin it down. I ask a lot of questions. I always have. I asked about our concept of compassion, and it led to a follow-up piece by fellow Patheos writer, Steven T Abell. I asked questions about the point of our religions, and it led to some of the most amazing comments yet on Bishop in the Grove. These questions I ask of religion and spirituality are useful. Or they can be, at least. The first thought I put to paper this morning was a question: What is it to write from sleeping? I ask questions in order that I might begin to approach an answer. I don’t know the answers, but I can move toward them. This is how my mind works.

I admit that I have experienced the feeling of being sidetracked by my own inquiry. Questions can also be a tool for distraction. They can take the focus away from the doing of my something. In point of fact, after sitting down at my computer today and writing whatever flowed out of my mind for a solid five minutes, I began to deconstruct all of it and try to make it make sense. No longer was I writing; I was thinking about writing. There’s a tremendous difference between those two things…. just ask a Creative Writing major.

I see a parallel here with my practice of religion. I often take myself out of the routine of my spiritual work, whatever that may look like at the time, and start to think about it. Reflection is useful, yes, but dissection can be quite violent. I may pick apart what I’m doing to the point where I’m no longer sure of what’s in front of me. My spirituality looks like a series of disparate paragraphs on the screen, with no cohesion, no order, and certainly no “flow.”

But then there are moments when I exhale, release this obsessive need for understanding, and experience the memory of a time when I did not care much about religion, its purpose, or its relevance. I did not seek out the divisions between us so that I might examine them, or deconstruct them. In that memory-me, I was an imaginative person; a man who was a child who was playful, and who sang melodies that had never been written. I remember the feeling — the location – of that inspiration, and then, all of a sudden, I step into a creative space. My mind is freed up from the inquiry, and something begins to flow through me again.

I like to think of inspiration occurring in a particular “place,” physically and bodily. I try to locate it, or to remember where I’d felt it last, if I feel uninspired. I try to remember where it was inside of me that an idea first showed itself. Was it behind my eyes? In my stomach? Or, did I hold it in my hand? Certainly, our inspirations can come from the physical world. Nature is a generous patron, and we are provided with all that we need to be inspired if we open our eyes wide enough. But, I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about charting a map of your insides, and looking for treasure. I’m talking about inspiration that originates somewhere inside of you, and that even feels like it may have originated from somewhere else altogether.

Have you felt that kind of inspiration?

I ask you – where is the source of your inspiration? Where do you find it? Have you every closed your eyes and been flooded by the imagines of the divine, the sacred, the profane, or the magical? Have you seen, in the stillness of your own being, a clear vision, and then brought that vision into the world?

If you are inclined to answer that you are “not a creative person,” I say hogwash. You are. We all are. We create in every moment of our lives. Put any dismissive thought aside for a moment, cock your head, and listen to the question again, sideways.

Where is the source of your inspiration?

 

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What is the Point of Your Religion?

April 17, 2012 By Teo Bishop 66 Comments

Last week I asked, “Where does compassion belong among Pagans and Polytheists?” Beneath this first question there is another, more relevant question; one that has been nagging at me for several days:

What is the point of your religion?

I think this is a valuable inquiry, and no one has asked me this just yet. Yesterday I enrolled at Marylhurst University, the first step in a course of study that I hope will one day lead to a Masters of Divinity. I trust that during that course of work someone would be inclined to ask this question.

Why do we do what we do? What does our tradition provide us in the way of making the world we live in, the communities we build, the people that we care for, better? More importantly, how does it inform our capacity to love, our ability to experience joy, or, for that matter, our willingness to stand with the full spectrum of human experience? Is our religion pacifying us, or challenging us to go deeper?

Many people responded to my post about compassion with the statement that they, too, felt this subject had been missing from conversations in their community, which leads me to wonder what people are talking about. I think about the Christians I’ve known, and the Christian communities that I’ve been a part of, and I remember countless times when the conversation would move toward a closer examination of the meaning of compassion, the power of our intentions, the relationship between our choices and the well-being of those around us. These conversations, as I remember them, were not laden with guilt, judgement or biblical references, and they had a kind of immediacy that I was electrifying to me. Our religion was, for us, a call to full presence in the world; being a Christian was a call to accountability to the world I was living in.

And now here I am, a Pagan, no longer a part of Christian community, still searching for that same sense of immediacy, that same urgent need to be present to the world and accountable to something larger than myself.

I can only conclude from all of this that there is some undercurrent of morality, or ethics, or a need for “right action” that is pulling at me, and that it matters little whether or not I call myself a Christian, a Pagan, or a Druid. There is something human about this quest. I heard the Dalai Lama on the radio today, and he said that first and foremost he was a human being. He said that, and I think that if someone who is as revered as him can recognize the value in placing ones humanity first and their cultural and religious framework second, then perhaps I should be willing to do so as well.

I feel like there has to be a greater purpose to our religious traditions than providing us with a sense of security, comfort, and personal or cultural validation. We get trapped in our identities, and we build walls around ourselves. I think we want clarity around whether we are Pagan, Polytheist, Christian, or some other such invention, in order to better insulate ourselves from one another. We want to be right, we fear being vulnerable, and we use our religions to protect ourselves.

But what if our religions encouraged us to reach outward, to seek commonalities, to see less distinction between human beings? What if our religions began with the premise that we were all connected, and that we were all worthy of respect, compassion, and love, and that we were each capable of providing those things to one another? What if there was a way to approach this kind of universality without any need to squabble about whose deity is best, who’s laws are true, and who’s cosmology is most relevant?

I wonder what that religion would look like.

My hope is that through the dialogue on this blog, and hopefully during my course of study at Marylhurst, that we might take a closer look at our human experiences, and in the process of doing so uncover something universal within our singularity; that we might dig into our own sacred subjectivity, and throw aside our need to be right. There is no reward in having all the answers; there is only value in learning how to ask better questions.

So with that, I begin.

What is the point of your religion? What tools does it provide to you? Does it equip you for defense or for outreach? Does it lead you to question, or does it encourage you to rest in your knowing?

I look forward to hearing your insights, your experiences, and your perspective!

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