[Pagan since the late \u201980s, Cat Chapin-Bishop has also been Quaker since 2001. Cat is the primary author at the Quaker Pagan Reflections<\/a> blog, as well as the former Chair of Cherry Hill Seminary<\/a>\u2019s Pastoral Counseling Department, and her writing has appeared in Laura Wildman\u2019s Celebrating the Pagan Soul<\/a>, The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies<\/a>, the Covenant of the Goddess newsletter, and at No Unsacred Place<\/a>. ]<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Pagans are the best of spiritual communities; Pagans are the worst of spiritual communities.<\/p>\n Flashback to a room lit by candles and gently wrapped in incense and the braided sound of chanting.\u00a0 The light gleams on the warm colors of skin and the wood, steel, silver, and terracotta of the altar and its tools.\u00a0 My Wiccan coven holds me close on the night when I first draw down the moon, and their trust in me and in our gods buoys me up as I move through waves of anxiety (\u201cWhat if this doesn\u2019t work?\u201d) until finally, She is there, and when I open my eyes, I am not the only one looking out.\u00a0 Together, the Goddess and I see my coven-mates through my eyes, and we see them as beautiful beyond reckoning, as if they are each limned in gold.\u00a0 They are perfect.\u00a0 We look out at them, and We know who they are, and We love them with a depth and joy I can never describe to you, unless you have felt it for yourself.<\/p>\n Flash forward to another night, only a few years later.\u00a0 Tension is in the room, fear-stink and adrenaline.\u00a0 The small Pagan church to which we belong is meeting for business, and we are tearing one another to pieces.\u00a0 Some are spurring conflict on, some are cringing away.\u00a0 There are a dozen different versions of self-proclaimed Holy Truth in the room, doing their best to rip one another\u2019s eyes out.\u00a0 And no one is listening to the gods at all\u2014only to the frantic drumbeats of anger, or fear, or disgust being pounded out by our own hearts.\u00a0 No one seems to remember: We are beautiful.\u00a0 We are perfect.\u00a0 We are part of the Holy.<\/p>\n How can we be so good at knowing and loving one another when we are in ritual space, and so bad at preserving that knowledge and that love when we leave it?\u00a0 Is there a way we can be spiritual community to one another outside as well as inside of the sacred circle or grove?<\/p>\n Yes, it can be done.\u00a0 We can do business together, while still remembering what it is like to be beloved and loving children of our gods.<\/p>\n This past fall, I was lucky enough to be invited by a friend in one of my Pagan communities to assist the group in moving forward after a period of destructive conflict.\u00a0 Individually, most of these men and women were kind, generous, and gifted members of their Pagan communities, but together, they had been creating some very unpleasant politics.\u00a0 Battle lines had become entrenched, some members had left in anger or in disgust, and what had been an annual experience of powerful ritual and fellowship was becoming a cause of dread and resentment.\u00a0 My friend, who was in charge of this year\u2019s retreat, was starting to feel a lot like a mom trapped in a van full of angry, squabbling children on a cross-country trip.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve been there; I know you have.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all seen promising spiritual groups get bogged down in self-righteousness and rage, pettiness and fear.<\/p>\n At the retreat, I was given a chance to share a few tools from the Quaker toolkit.\u00a0 I got a chance to offer a workshop on something I call spiritual accompaniment.\u00a0 (Quakers call it something else\u2015eldering\u2015but that word has a completely different connotation than it does in Pagan circles.)<\/p>\n One of the mistakes I see Pagans making, as a group, is that we confuse talking a lot with getting a lot done.\u00a0 There is a kind of centering into the spiritual heart of a community that can be completely silent and yet is so deep that it helps to center everyone in the room.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have a Pagan vocabulary for this yet, but I have certainly seen Pagans who have a gift for it.\u00a0 But where Quakers celebrate this kind of gift, among Pagans it is almost always invisible.<\/p>\n Quakers who travel as speakers or event leaders almost always have a traveling companion with them, on the stage or in the front row, silently holding them in the Light.\u00a0 The companion focuses on keeping that speaker rooted in Spirit even while the presenter herself is focused outward on the crowd.\u00a0 At large gatherings, you will see a row of the most seasoned Friends sitting unobtrusively behind the clerk\u2019s table, holding the entire group, clerks and all, in silent prayer.\u00a0 These people contribute little outwardly, except perhaps for a visible model of stillness and calm.\u00a0 They may not even be following the flow of discussion, but afterward they remember clearly the effort and exertion that went into trying to hold every person present in connection with the common roots of the community.\u00a0 I have heard Quaker elders describe gripping the edges of their chair with both hands to pull the group into a more grounded state.\u00a0 Their language sounds very much like that of Pagan energy workers.<\/p>\n This kind of listening-in (or \u201cholding space\u201d as one Pagan called it this year) is not voiceless passivity, nor is it the \u201cactive listening\u201d of apprentice psychotherapists.\u00a0 It\u2019s not manipulative or goal-directed energy working.\u00a0 Rather, its purpose is to listen into the community\u2019s relationship with its gods, to help us find those connections that brought us together to begin with.\u00a0 (Religion: religare<\/em>: to bind together.)<\/p>\n In our workshop, we began with memories of times we had felt that connection.\u00a0 What was it like to be with our community and our gods, in a way that deepens our relationship with both?\u00a0 We paired off, one person attempting to stay rooted and spiritually open enough to help draw out their partner, then trading places.\u00a0 The depth of memory was matched by the depth of listening, and people found themselves re-experiencing something powerful and precious.\u00a0 From there, we worked at holding that sense of depth, of openness and respect, in something that was like grounding and also like prayer.<\/p>\n I explained the idea of spiritual accompaniment and offered openings to those who were interested in helping to hold the community\u2019s meetings in that way.<\/p>\n We set up benches for our volunteer cadre of \u201celders,\u201d where they could be seen and where others could join if so moved.\u00a0 We sat just outside the confidential meeting of the board, unable to hear a syllable of the meeting, but holding the group steadily, for over an hour.\u00a0 The next day, we sat in shifts through the set-up for the larger open meeting for community concerns, and continued through the final meeting for business.\u00a0 There were perhaps a dozen of us doing this at various times.\u00a0 Our work was to hold our people in the Light: The Light of stars seen through the branches of trees, of candle flames, of firelight reflecting off glasses of mead passed between friends.<\/p>\n The intimacy of the work was remarkable.\u00a0 Quakers can be very reserved, and it can take a long time to get to know most of them.\u00a0 Pagans seem more extroverted even in our silences.\u00a0 One man whom I\u2019d never met before had such a deep gift for this kind of work that sitting beside him was like leaning back on a soft pillow; I felt the strength of his compassion like the warmth of a banked fire, hour after hour.<\/p>\n Did it help?<\/p>\n Well, the conflicts that had riven the gathering did not spontaneously resolve in a single weekend.\u00a0 None of us (that I\u2019m aware of) achieved satori<\/em>.\u00a0 But the meeting for business this year was not a blood sport.\u00a0 We talked as if we cared about one another.\u00a0 And most people present seemed to feel there had been something useful going on in all that quiet.<\/p>\n If Pagans do develop some tools of our own for keeping the spiritual<\/em> in our spiritual communities, even in the heart of conflict and everyday concerns, I think we will be one step closer to being what I\u2019ve heard some Pagans call \u201ca full-service religion.\u201d\u00a0 More importantly, I think we will retain more of our Pagan elders, people who might otherwise succumb to spiritual staleness or cynicism.\u00a0 We can hold onto the experience of joyful communion, with each other and with the gods.<\/p>\n For myself, I believe that Pagan spirituality can deepen for us over a lifetime, through conflict as well as celebration in our communities.\u00a0 But we can only do it by reminding ourselves that we are, in fact, spiritual communities, always, every minute.\u00a0 Whether we are in ritual or resting, feasting or thrashing out a tough business agenda, we need to remember our gods.\u00a0 And we need to remember ourselves:\u00a0 Perfect.\u00a0 Beautiful.\u00a0 Limned with gold.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Pagan since the late \u201980s, Cat Chapin-Bishop has also been Quaker since 2001. Cat is the primary author at the Quaker Pagan Reflections blog, as well as the former Chair of Cherry Hill Seminary\u2019s Pastoral Counseling Department, and her writing has appeared in Laura Wildman\u2019s Celebrating the Pagan Soul, The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neopaganism","category-paganism","category-religion","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n