There was a lot that was rich today in our meeting for worship, and I am tempted to try to transliterate it all onto the page of this blog. But I don’t think I could capture the life of the messages, and that’s not really what I think I need to write about tonight, anyway. Instead, I want to write about something that rose for me that was entirely personal: an encounter with the god with arms. Liz Opp at... Read more

My last two posts were a personal reflection on some of the ways that trying to live my spiritual life true to the experiences I’ve had over the past seven years may have changed who I am in very basic ways. When I began writing them, I didn’t yet see the ways these posts dovetailed with the topic of my guest blog at The Wild Hunt. Now, though, they seem intimately connected: when we approach our spiritual lives as lived... Read more

(Continued from Part 1 of 2) So, from the moment I felt the first stirrings of the Spirit of Peace within me, my easygoing relationship to polytheism was under threat. It would all, from a Pagan point of view, have been so much easier if I had only been called by, say, Pugsley the Peace God. No problems accepting a Quaker Pagan whose god was one among the many! But it is not Pugsley I follow, and that does complicate... Read more

Sometimes, as I’m posting yet another reflection on yet another interaction with the world of Quakers, I’ll ask myself, “What’s so Pagan about Quaker Pagan Reflections?” Once or twice, doing some completely unrelated thing–folding my socks, for instance, or making soup–I’ll hear a tiny voice saying, “You’re a Quaker.” As in, unhyphenated, plain ol’, stop-being-so-bloody-precious-about-it, Quaker-style Quaker. Regular readers may have noticed that I drop the “G” word around here with some regularity. God–as a word, at least, capitalized and... Read more

To the many Pagans who said supportive things about my last post–thank you. Your kindness was much appreciated. That said, this one is going to be a pretty Quaker-centric post–I don’t want you to think your support wasn’t important, though, so I’m mentioning it first. If, to strain a metaphor I used in my last post, the Quaker family had put me out on the street, it would be difficult to explain the many supportive comments I received.I wrote that... Read more

I have mixed feelings about the article Are the Quakers Going Pagan? that recently ran online. I’ve especially been challenged by the discussion which has followed the article, especially among Friends. Evangelical Quaker Bruce Butler’s blog post A Firm and Loving “No” is probably the best example of what I mean. Cause, I gotta say, while I’m hearing the Friend’s “firm,” I’m not really feelin’ the “love.” I think I harbored some secret, painful wishes that, however heretical and perhaps... Read more

A few months ago, I had the chance to speak at length to religion-writer Matthew Streib. The article he wrote, “Pagans Find a Sometimes Uneasy Home Among Quakers“, has just appeared on the Modern Reformation website. Others whose work or interviews contributed to the article include Stasa Morgan-Appel, Carl McColman, and Marshall Massey, all of whom might be familiar to readers of this blog. For more on the “small but growing movement of Quakers who also identify as pagan,” see... Read more

I was always a “rational use of force” gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force–by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another–was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies. (I really liked that version of... Read more

OK. This one’s going to be a bit notional. Here goes: I’ve been challenged by A. Venefica of Symbolic Meanings and Mahud of Between Old and New Moons to participate in their mythology synchroblog on duality. You might think that would be an easy task, for a Pagan trained in two traditions of Wicca. After all, Wicca is known (sometimes a bit sneeringly) among other Pagans for its duotheism. The Mysteries of Wicca are expressed in terms of duality, and... Read more