{"id":2541,"date":"2014-06-26T17:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T23:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/?p=2541"},"modified":"2014-06-23T19:20:54","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T01:20:54","slug":"lessons-from-a-first-ritual","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2014\/06\/lessons-from-a-first-ritual.html","title":{"rendered":"Lessons From a First Ritual"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>Every so often I get an e-mail that says \u201cI\u2019ve been asked to lead the next ritual for my CUUPS group (or coven or grove or other group).\u00a0 Where do I start???\u201d<\/p>\n

I usually refer people to this post on A Pagan Ritual Outline<\/a> and this post on Common Ritual Errors and How to Avoid Them<\/a>.\u00a0 But as I mentioned last week<\/a>, I think it may be helpful to talk about what happened the first time I led a public ritual.<\/p>\n

After almost ten years of solitary practice, I went to my first Pagan circle at Denton CUUPS<\/a> for Imbolc 2003.\u00a0 At Ostara I joined the group and became its oldest member, a distinction I would not hold for long.\u00a0 Shortly after Beltane, whoever was scheduled to lead Summer Solstice decided they couldn\u2019t do it and someone else said \u201chey John \u2013 why don\u2019t you lead a Druid ritual?\u201d\u00a0 I had planned to ease into full participation, but the group was quite small at the time (we had eight members, if I\u2019m remembering correctly) and if I didn\u2019t do it, it wasn\u2019t certain it would get done.<\/p>\n

Besides, I\u2019ve always loved ritual \u2013 there was no way I was turning down the opportunity to write and lead a ritual on my own.\u00a0 So I said yes.<\/p>\n

I had no Druid training (I didn\u2019t begin the OBOD coursework till 2004) and the books on Druidry I had read dealt primarily with the historical Druids.\u00a0 I had read The Book of Druidry<\/a><\/em> by OBOD founder Ross Nichols and found it impenetrably dense (it made much more sense when I re-read it after<\/em> finishing the OBOD coursework).\u00a0 But I remembered the favorite saying of my 9th<\/sup> grade history teacher:\u00a0 \u201cit\u2019s not how much you know, it\u2019s if you know where to find what you need.\u201d<\/p>\n

So armed with a cool new search engine with a funny name (Google was new to me, anyway), I started looking for information on Druid rituals.<\/p>\n

I found plenty.\u00a0 I found Isaac Bonewits\u2019 website<\/a>.\u00a0 From Isaac I found the ADF site<\/a>, and from ADF I found the sites of several groves with extensive ritual collections.\u00a0 I found the OBOD website<\/a>.\u00a0 I found a few Druid groups in other traditions that had rituals online.<\/p>\n

Isaac\u2019s site was the most helpful.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think he had any ritual scripts on it, but he had a couple essays on ritual theory that I studied carefully.\u00a0 Much of that material would make its way into his book Neopagan Rites<\/a><\/em>, which is at the top of my list of recommendations for books on ritual.<\/p>\n

I started saving the scripts I liked.\u00a0 I had only attended a handful of rituals by then, but it was still pretty easy to weed out the bad ones:\u00a0 the ones that had no clear intent, or no clear means of working its intent, or that were obviously cobbled together from multiple traditions with no commonalities\u2026 plus those whose spelling, grammar, and formatting indicated they weren\u2019t put together by a careful ritualist.\u00a0 I think I had about 50 pages of \u201cgood stuff\u201d to work with.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of May, it struck me that Summer Solstice was getting close and all I had was a stack of other people\u2019s rituals.\u00a0 Some of them were written for locations with features we didn\u2019t have.\u00a0 Some of them had parts for a dozen people or more \u2013 I knew I\u2019d be lucky to get five or six people to take a part.\u00a0 I knew I couldn\u2019t just take one of them and use it as is.<\/p>\n

Somewhere around Memorial Day I had a moment of panic.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t do this, I wasn\u2019t ready to do this, I hadn\u2019t been trained to do this, and I was a fool to think I could ever lead a religious rite in public.\u00a0 I rehearsed the phone call to our events coordinator:\u00a0 I would apologize for taking on something I couldn\u2019t do and promise to support her any way I could with whatever she wanted to do instead.<\/p>\n

I never made the call.\u00a0 Desire reminded me that I really wanted to do this.\u00a0 Reason \u2013 combined with a bit of vanity \u2013 convinced me that I could do this.<\/p>\n

I started with Isaac\u2019s outline.\u00a0 I filled it in with the best of the rituals I had found on the internet.\u00a0 I wrote a few segments myself, then reworked the wording to give it all one voice.<\/p>\n

I wrangled commitments from four other members, so I divided the ritual into five parts, one of which was non-speaking (\u201cI\u2019ll drum, but I\u2019m not speaking\u201d).\u00a0 I located all the stuff we\u2019d need.\u00a0 Nobody had a bell, but Cathy found an old hand bell in an antique store in McKinney \u2013 we still use it occasionally.\u00a0 I even persuaded everyone to rehearse the week before.<\/p>\n

And then Summer Solstice arrived, and we performed the ritual.\u00a0 From my personal journal, written a couple days afterwards:<\/p>\n

The Druid ceremony on Saturday night went well.\u00a0 Not perfectly, but well.\u00a0 Going in, I said my biggest fear was that nothing would happen, and my second biggest fear was that something would really<\/em> happen.\u00a0 I got indications that the Gates opened and closed, and that the Waters really were charged.\u00a0 I was a little uncertain of myself, and I was a little rushed\u2026 but in the end, I think it worked.\u00a0 Cheryl\u2019s rune reading went well, and the implication was that this group is coming up on a huge opportunity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I looked back on the script as I wrote this post.\u00a0 It holds up very well \u2013 as you would expect, given that so much of it was borrowed from experts.\u00a0 If I was doing that ritual again I\u2019d reword a few of the segments, and I\u2019d like to divide it up among more leaders.\u00a0 But if I had to do it again as is, I would.<\/p>\n

I see the impact that ritual had on our current standard liturgy.\u00a0 We always have a clearly defined opening.\u00a0 We still use the Tree Meditation, although the wording has changed over the years.\u00a0 We still make offerings to the Gods, ancestors, and spirits.\u00a0 The group was largely Wiccan and Wiccan-influenced at the time \u2013 these were significant changes, but they were accepted because they worked.<\/p>\n

The most important thing I learned from this ritual, though, was that while education is great and training is great and putting effort into learning up front is good and necessary, sometimes you just have to dive in and figure it out as you go.\u00a0 If you wait till you\u2019re sure you\u2019re ready, you can find yourself waiting forever.<\/p>\n

May all your rituals be blessed!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wasn\u2019t ready to lead a public ritual when I was asked to do it for the first time. Desire, reason, and the wisdom of my 9th grade history teacher helped me do it well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":2542,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[293,946,947,71,124,4,5,25],"class_list":["post-2541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ritual","tag-adf","tag-cuups","tag-druidry","tag-isaac-bonewits","tag-obod","tag-pagan","tag-paganism","tag-ritual-2"],"yoast_head":"\nLessons From a First Ritual<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I wasn\u2019t ready to lead a public ritual when I was asked to do it for the first time. 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