![\"Weaving\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/857\/2015\/08\/weaving-225x300.jpg\")
<\/a>From time to time, people write to us at Gaia Community from CUUPS groups or UU congregations to ask us about our ritualist training program.\u00a0 As a teacher in that program, I\u2019ve shared our curriculum, led some workshops, and had some lovely conversations with people on the subject.\u00a0 But the fact is, our training program can\u2019t train your ritual facilitators to know what you need them to know and do what you need them to do.\u00a0 It\u2019s been written and refined over the years to teach people how to lead ritual at Gaia Community, to tend to the unique relationships and process we\u2019ve built.\u00a0 Every Pagan group has different needs, different ideas about ritual, different relationships in place, and so it makes sense to me that every group wishing to train priests or priestesses or ritualists or facilitators or whatever it is that your group calls its ritual leaders might want to develop their own program. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nTo that end, I\u2019ve been working on the idea of a meta-training program: a series of discussions, questions, and ideas to consider for groups that want a training program.\u00a0 It\u2019s smaller than a book, but bigger than a blog post, so I hope that I can present it here in a series of posts.\u00a0 I don\u2019t put this forward as the one true right and only way, but rather some interesting possibilities that may be used, discarded, modified, or taken as a springboard for other discussions.\u00a0 These points should be useful to help build a program from scratch, or to modify an existing course (say, if you have a copy of our curriculum, or if you are using a text like Isaac Bonewits\u2019 \u201cRites of Worship\u201d or Shauna Aura Knight\u2019s \u201cRitual Facilitation\u201d).<\/p>\n
When I talk to people about building a training program for their public ritual group, I usually start with the basics, and I\u2019ll start there in this post as well. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n- \n
What is the mission or purpose of your group?\u00a0 You don\u2019t need a formal, corporate-like mission statement in order to answer this question, just for all of your leadership to be more or less on the same page when it comes to the question of why you exist.\u00a0 Is your purpose to celebrate the Sabbats and turn the wheel of the year?\u00a0 To educate the public about Pagan faiths?\u00a0 To honor a particular deity or set of deities?\u00a0 To connect Pagan people to one another?\u00a0 Your purpose may (and probably does) encompass more than one simple goal.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t have a clear answer for your group on this point, it might be something to work on together.\u00a0 Your ritual work should help you achieve your purpose, or at least not interfere with your purpose, and new ritual leaders should probably know and be clear about what that purpose is.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n- \n
Similarly, what are your group\u2019s virtues or values?\u00a0 Are you working from the Seven UU Principles, the Nine Noble Virtues of Asatru, the Nine Virtues of ADF druidry, the Wiccan rede and the virtues laid out in the Charge of the Goddess, or any other particular set of values?\u00a0 Does your group have its own self-generated list of principles?\u00a0 These are things your ritual leaders should know about and be able to put into practice.\u00a0 These virtues and values can provide an ethical support for your ritual work.\u00a0 Not only do they tell you what sort of thing will not be appropriate in ritual, but also they can serve as excellent seeds from which to develop ritual.\u00a0 How can you create a ritual that teaches or strengthens this particular virtue or set of values?<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n- \n
Who does your group serve, or, to whom is it responsible?\u00a0 The gods?\u00a0 A particular deity or pantheon?\u00a0 The natural world?\u00a0 The ancestors?\u00a0 The people who attend?\u00a0 The wider Pagan community?\u00a0 Your neighborhood or city?\u00a0 Future generations?\u00a0 Again, your group probably has a responsibility to several different groups or individuals.\u00a0 This also should probably inform your ritual design; a group that feels a responsibility to the Earth or the natural world should probably teach its ritual leaders to avoid using disposable ritual items, for example.\u00a0 A group who feels responsible to humanity as a whole may orient its rituals around social justice work rather than (or in addition to) worship or magical work.\u00a0 A group who serves a particular pantheon of deities and no others will teach the style and structure of ritual appropriate to that pantheon, whereas a group who serves \u201cthe gods\u201d as a whole may have a different style and structure in mind.\u00a0 And your group\u2019s areas of responsibility may change.\u00a0 For example, on the question of serving deities or powers, Gaia Community is generally eclectic, and as likely to honor one deity as another, so long as building a relationship with that deity doesn\u2019t bring us into conflict with our values.\u00a0 This eclecticism informs our usual ritual style, which is inspired by Wicca.\u00a0 However, each year, we choose a specific patron deity for the year.\u00a0 Rituals dedicated to honoring and communicating with that deity may have a structure that is suitable to the deity in question \u2013 this year we are honoring Brigid, so we will likely have a lot of rituals inspired by druidic tradition rather than our usual neo-wiccan style.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n- \n
Among the people in your group, what faiths and beliefs are represented?\u00a0 The nature of UU Paganism seems to be a great diversity of belief, so it\u2019s very possible that a UU Pagan group will have the opportunity for a lot of interfaith work just within its own membership.\u00a0 One of the discussions we have early in the process of Gaia\u2019s ritualist training is on the specific beliefs of every member of the class and the instructors.\u00a0 This almost always yields results consistent with the old Pagan adage that if you ask any number of Pagans a question, you\u2019ll get twice as many different answers as people.\u00a0 This understanding carries over into ritual design; everything we do in ritual has to leave space for different beliefs about deity, magic, and basically everything else.\u00a0 We can\u2019t maintain any sort of orthodoxy, but we strive for orthopraxy, all participants performing the same or similar ritual actions and getting some good result from them, while maintaining their own beliefs about the meaning of those practices.\u00a0 If you\u2019re in a group like this, your ritual leadership training may need to include the art of giving permission for your participants to experience the ritual in their own way, and encouraging them to support one another\u2019s work, even when it looks different.\u00a0 On the other hand, this may not be an issue in your group.\u00a0 If you\u2019re organized for a particular faith or tradition, you are more free in your ritual work to assume that everyone in attendance will have similar beliefs.\u00a0 Your ritual leadership training may instead need to work on the art of clearly communicating the imagery and focus of each ritual action so that all your participants are working together to create a single clear ritual experience and amplify each other\u2019s work.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Answering these four questions for your group can start to provide content for your ritualist training or development program.\u00a0 If your ritual leaders can get this information about the group, and have the opportunity to think through and discuss what that information means, they\u2019ll have a clearer idea of what they\u2019re trying to accomplish in their ritual design and facilitation.\u00a0 In my next post, I\u2019ll talk about clarifying further what your group wants from its rituals and ritual facilitators, and then later, about developing relevant skills and knowledge to actually get there.\u00a0 I hope you\u2019ll stay with me.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If every Pagan group has different needs, different ideas about ritual, different relationships in place, how do you create a viable training program that can be widely used?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,221,20,5],"class_list":["post-916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-paganism","tag-ritual","tag-spiritual-practice","tag-unitarian-universalism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>From time to time, people write to us at Gaia Community from CUUPS groups or UU congregations to ask us about our ritualist training program.\u00a0 As a teacher in that program, I\u2019ve shared our curriculum, led some workshops, and had some lovely conversations with people on the subject.\u00a0 But the fact is, our training program can\u2019t train your ritual facilitators to know what you need them to know and do what you need them to do.\u00a0 It\u2019s been written and refined over the years to teach people how to lead ritual at Gaia Community, to tend to the unique relationships and process we\u2019ve built.\u00a0 Every Pagan group has different needs, different ideas about ritual, different relationships in place, and so it makes sense to me that every group wishing to train priests or priestesses or ritualists or facilitators or whatever it is that your group calls its ritual leaders might want to develop their own program. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n