Unitarian and Wiccan

But how can you be Unitarian and Wiccan?

It all depends if you think religion is about belief, values, or practice (or all three). Personally I believe in very similar ideas to many Unitarians with whom I have discussed theology (even Unitarian Christians). I believe that Jesus was a very special human being (along with Buddha, Gandhi, St Francis, Symmachus, and many other mystics and social activists). I believe that he carried the Divine spark, as each one of us do; perhaps his flame was a little brighter. I also believe that his values—of inclusivity, care, equality, community, and honouring diversity—were the most important thing about him, and that these values are what will save humanity from war, poverty and famine. So that’s why I am a Unitarian—I had a mystical encounter with him, and felt that his values were my values, and that Unitarianism puts those values into practice more effectively than many other forms of Christianity. At the same time I was reading a lot of liberation theology and queer Christian theology, all of which resonated strongly with me. I also believe (again in common with many Unitarians) that the Divine is in everything: the trees, the flowers, the Earth, you and me.

I am a Wiccan (and have been since 1991) because I believe that the Divine has one substance and many forms and faces, and I choose to honour it through Nature and through pagan mythology and the cycle of seasonal festivals. The values and beliefs of Wicca are also about inclusivity, tolerance, freedom and the wisdom of experience. Wicca honours both male and female forms of the Divine.

Both Unitarianism and Wicca celebrate being alive, present in this world and in this moment. Both agree that other religions are valid paths for those who choose them, and want to celebrate both individuality and community. And Unitarianism has included pagan elements since at least 1850, if not earlier (see The Larger View by Vernon Marshall).

Eurybia

EURYBIA was the goddess of the mastery of the seas. She seems to have presided over the external forces which influenced the main, including the rise of the constellations and seasonal weather, and the power of the winds. Her husband was the Titan Krios, who may have been associated with the constellation Aries, marker of the Greek new year. Her grandchildren all had power over the sea. They included the Anemoi (Winds), the Astra (Stars), Hekate (Witchraft), Selene (the Moon), Nike (Victory), Bia (Force), Kratos (Power), Zelos (Rivalry). Some of these represent human command of the seas : the winds for sailing, stars for navigation, and force, power and victory representing naval supremacy.

According to Hesiod's Theogony, Εὐρυβία had a heart of flint within her. She was the daughter of PONTOS (the Sea) & GAIA (the Earth). So if the sea makes love to the Earth, it erodes the rock, deposits it somewhere else, and makes chalk - which has a heart of flint. So I wonder if Eurybia was also a goddess of chalk? As someone who was born on the chalk, I find it very magical. Also Εὐρυβία is the grandmother of Hekate, goddess of witchcraft. I read somewhere recently that Doreen Valiente found chalk landscapes very conducive to magic.

As goddess of the sea and the winds, Eurybia is very closely allied to witchcraft, because witchcraft was often about the control of the winds; witches used to tie knots to bind or release the wind. And of course, the sea symbolises either the subconscious or the collective unconscious, the supernal mother.

I am the soundless, boundless bitter sea
Out of whose depths life wells eternally
ASTARTE, APHRODITE, ASHTORETH
Giver of life and bringer-in of death;
HERA of heaven, on earth, PERSEPHONE;
LEVANAH of the tides and HECATE
All these am I, and they are seen in me
I am the soundless, boundless, bitter sea
All tides are mine, and answer unto me.

~ Dion Fortune

a symbiotic relationship

What is our relationship with the deities? Some people serve them. Now, maybe I'm being cranky and difficult, but I am not at all sure about this. I will happily co-operate with someone who has the same values and agenda as I do, but not because they're a discarnate entity; rather because they have the same values and agenda as I do - which may mean I only co-operate with them on a temporary basis while the shared goal is being worked on.

I don't think I'm on an equal footing with the deities in their domain (the numinous, nebulous, eternal, non-local) - they graciously allow me to access their form of consciousness; and in return I allow them to access my local, focused, finite, time-based consciousness (in which they are not equal to me). So no, it's not equal in the sense of being the same, but it is on equal terms - they're better at some things than I am, and I'm better at somethings than they are. It's a symbiotic relationship.

Maybe this means I am not religious in the conventional sense - but I became a Pagan because I didn't agree with blind faith and subservience to the big bully in the sky, so I am not going to give this one up without a struggle.

Yes, I want the world to be a better place, with more peace and harmony, social and economic justice, and respect for the environment (by which I mean deep ecology) - but I am not at all sure that giving power to floaty entities (and most likely ending by having a priesthood that claims to speak for them) is the way to achieve these goals. Domination and submission games are for consenting adults in private.

So, I will happily co-operate with any entity (incarnate or discarnate) who wants peace, harmony, social and economic justice, and respect for the environment - but I will not serve.

Only connect

I engage in interfaith dialogue for a variety of reasons: partly because I want to help others to realise that Wicca and other Pagan traditions are valid spiritual paths and inform them about what we do, so that they realise we're not scary; partly because I want to learn about other faiths and respect their insights into the spiritual journey; and partly because I think interfaith dialogue promotes tolerance, understanding and harmony, and is the only way to resolve conflicts between different religions.

I do think, however, that the basis for interfaith dialogue has to be mutual respect, with no hidden or overt agenda of proselytising or evangelising. In listening to the other points of view in the dialogue, I should be open to them to the point of willingness to change my own position, but they shouldn't be trying to convert me. It's rather a paradox, but it's the only way to make it work.

Sometimes interfaith dialogue can be slow, and one is sometimes rebuffed by people who don't consider Paganism a "proper religion" - but patience is a virtue. It's precisely the people who are hostile to the ideas of interfaith and religious pluralism that most need to engage in interfaith dialogue; there's no point in "preaching to the converted", otherwise it just becomes a cosy little club. The whole point is to try to build a world where religions can co-exist peacefully, and if a whole tranche of religions fail to engage in interfaith dialogue, then the goal won't be achieved.

My position is that I would always encourage people to follow the spiritual path that is right for them. For me, the goal of the spiritual path is to transform the world by raising the consciousness of everyone; and whatever symbolism best represents that process for you - whatever speaks to your soul - is good. Only connect, as E M Forster said.

But I don't think that all denominations or all practices of all religions are equally valid; there are some really unpleasant practices and beliefs with disastrous consequences in many religions; but there is also good in all religions. Our task is to discern what is good, and work towards it together - offering constructive criticism rather than blame, and accepting criticism from others.

We now live in a globalised world where every religion has to rub shoulders with the others; we have to get along and learn from each other. No single religion will ever appeal to everyone in the world; each has different strengths and weaknesses, focusses on different issues, works in a different philosophical paradigm, and has different blind-spots. That's not to say that their truth claims are entirely irreconcilable, because they're not; just that diversity is a good and natural way for the human race to be.

This post is part of the interfaith synchroblog on interfaith dialogue.

List of participants

• J. R. Miller (Christian) of More Than Cake on A Christian Approach to Interfaith Dialogue


• Liz Dyer (Christian) of Grace Rules on Interreligious Dialogue: Risky Business


• Matt Stone (Christian) of Glocal Christianity on Is Interfaith Interfaith enough?


• Steve Hayes (Christian Orthodox) of Notes from underground on Interreligious dialogue and of Khanya on Matters arising


• Phil Wyman (Christian) of Square No More on A Christian Presenter at Pagan Pride!?


• Beth Patterson (Liberal Christian with Celtic undertones) of Virtual Tea House on Same Stove, Different Teapots


• Yvonne Aburrow (Wiccan Unitarian) of the dance of the elements on Only connect
  
  
• Jarred (Pagan/Vanic Witch) of The Musings of a Confused Man on Interfaith relationships
  
  
• Andii Bowsher (Christian) of Nouslife on More tea Wicca?
  

balance and cyclicity

An address given at Frenchay Chapel on 21 September 2008.

The Archangel Michael, whose feast day is associated with the Autumn Equinox, was a dragon-slayer. The dragon that he slew, according to the Book of Revelations, was the Adversary, the serpent from the Garden of Eden.

What a tangle of mythology is involved in this story! In the West, dragons are seen as ferocious fire-breathing beasts; in China, they live at the bottom of the sea and of wells, and bring rain and other blessings. And in other ancient stories, serpents are a symbol of wisdom. Indeed, the Gnostics saw the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a manifestation of Sophia, the personification of wisdom.

So why is a being of light slaying the dragon? To find out, we need to look at the evolution of another dragon-slaying story, that of St George. In the earliest version of the story, George tamed the dragon and led it into the city by the golden girdle of the maiden who was to have been sacrificed to it.

If we see the dragon as a symbol of the beast within all of us, we can see that it is better to tame it and harness its energies for good, not to try to kill it (for it will assuredly resurface somewhere else, when we were least expecting it). We need to balance the energies within ourselves.
So why did the story evolve into one where the dragon was killed? Because the dragon was seen as the untamed power of nature, which must be subdued wherever it was found – in women or in the wilderness.

In China, meanwhile, they saw life as the balance of opposites – yin and yang, night and day, life and death, eternally cycling around each other in the great dance of existence. Hence dragons were the dynamic energy of the elements, bringing rain and growth. They were part of the dynamic equilibrium of nature. Equilibrium means “equal freedom” – freedom to move, to grow and to change; freedom of choice.

This dynamic balance of opposites can also be seen in the dance of the seasons – “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted”. The wheel of the year turns; falling in the autumn, rising in the spring. As it falls in the autumn, and the nights draw in, we turn inward, towards home, and hearth, and spiritual things; baking, and making jam and wine; creative projects.

It also means that, instead of being harsh with ourselves when we get things wrong, we need to forgive ourselves; as Mary Oliver writes in Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Many religious traditions call upon their followers to empty themselves and allow the Divine to fill them. This sounds to me like a painful process. Rather, I think the work of spirituality is to relax, to find the inner stillness and space that is already there. All we have to do is to remember who we really are; to reconnect with the ebb and flow of the cycles of life. Everything is cyclical – the seasons, the tides, the orbits of the planets – why not human life? But it is not just a ceaseless round of the same old things, repeated ad nauseam. Everything changes; everything is always becoming something else; nothing is ever lost.

In Judaism, the Autumn Equinox is the birthday of the world. According to the Jewish website “Tel Shemesh”:

Rosh haShanah, in Jewish legend, is the anniversary of the day on which God created humans and animals—the beginning of the world. God creates humanity out of the dust of the earth, and out of God’s own spirit. Of humans, it says that “God created the human in God’s own image, in the image of God God created the human, male and female God created them.” Adam and Eve are born on Rosh Hashanah, as is the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. The first of the year falls on a day that reminds us that the Divine is within us and all beings. We blow the shofar, the ram’s horn, to signal the thunderous impact of this Presence on our lives, and we engage in memory—considering all that we have done during the year, seeking to make right where we have erred, seeking to become whole where we have been in turmoil, seeking to make ourselves new. It is a time of conception in all its forms. There is a tradition that the Jewish year has a “mother”—Rosh haShanah, the 1st of Tishrei—and a “father,” the 1st of Nisan (both are new years according to the Jewish calendar). If Rosh haShanah is the mother, then the shofar is the womb through which our spirits pass on the way to redemption. The ram’s horn represents the power of the Shekhinah to be hollow, to be a vessel for creation. Yet the shofar also reminds us of the ayil (ram) who sounds like El (God)—the masculine forces of the Divine. The liturgy of Rosh haShanah focuses on avinu malkeinu—our father, our king, the stern but loving father of Jewish tradition. We cast bread into bodies of water in the ritual called tashlich (throwing away), to cast away those behaviors we no longer want or need. Yet we can balance this image with the phrase in the Rosh haShanah liturgy: “hayom harat olam”—today is the birthday of the world, or more accurately, today is the pregnancy of the world. On Rosh Hashanah our world becomes pregnant with God, and God is pregnant with us. It is a time of mutual awareness and understanding. It is the time when we enter the inner world, the world of the womb, in order to be reborn into change.

Joseph Campbell wrote about the journey of the hero, who descends into the underworld, confronts his deepest fears, and returns to the everyday world bringing back a blessing for humanity. This story appears in a thousand different forms: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Jonah and the Whale, Jesus dying and being resurrected, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the plot of just about any film you can think of; they all conform to this pattern. We are all heroes on our own journeys, bringing back wisdom from the depths for the benefit of humanity.

for a given value of...

The Rev Dr Incitatus writes:

I think Stephen's new approach is better, in which he simply asks whether it's worth worshipping God, rather than trying to address whether God exists at all. The former question is far more straightforward, independent of the ambiguity of the term "God", and thus amenable to empirical assessment, imho: clearly, it really isn't terribly important to worship him, because it makes no tangible difference to the lives of people whether they do or do not.

Whether it's worth worshipping depends on what you mean by "God" and what you mean by "worship".

If by worship you mean "assign ultimate worth to" (as opposed to the opposite end of the worship spectrum, "abase yourself before") then worship is something we all do when we decide on our values. We do it when we fall in love, stand enraptured before the beauty of Nature or are awed by the exciting knowledge about to be revealed by the Large Hadron Collider.

If by "God" (I prefer the gender-neutral term "Divine") you mean the wonder and mystery of being alive, the beauty of the white Moon among the stars, the magnificence of galaxies, and the beauty of Nature, then yes, it's worth worshipping (in the sense of assigning ultimate worth to). It's also worth communing with, meditating on, writing poetry about, and exploring empirically. But is there any point trying to reclaim the words "god" or "divine" to mean all that? Not, in my opinion, if you mean something supernatural, ontologically transcendent, and of pure essence. I think the term Tao describes it much better; it means the way, and thus implies constant movement and change, and it is immanent in the universe, or even an emergent property of it. If the divine/deities/genii loci is/are (as I propose) the emergent consciousness of complex systems, why shouldn't the Universe have consciousness? (Teehee, I said this to a major proponent of emergent complexity; I think he was a bit horrified that I was using his theory like that - but I reminded him that I was only proposing a hypothesis, at which he was somewhat mollified.) There's no particular reason why walking bags mostly made of water suspended from a calciferous internal structure should have consciousness, so why not other complex systems?

If by "God" you mean the alleged authoritarian in the sky with the big stick, then the answer is definitely no, especially if the worship is of the self-abasement variety.

Transcendence

There are two forms of transcendence; ontological and epistemological. Ontological transcendence being the idea that some world of ideal Platonic forms or divine essence exists beyond the world (I reject this) and epistemological transcendence being the idea that transcendence can be experienced in collectivity - the experience of coinherence, for example, or the moment of identification of the Beloved with the world ("Thou art that"). I imagine that A N Whitehead (and most Pagans) would have no problem with epistemological transcendence, which is entirely consistent with the immanence of the divine. For me, the transcendent quality I experience in the contemplation of Nature is in identifying with it, not in the idea that it points to some ideal Platonic form.  I sometimes experience Nature transfigured (though not all the time) but I believe the transfiguration is in my perception of it (as in Blake's assertion that if the doors of perception were cleaned, everything would appear as it is, infinite) not in the breaking through of Divine essence.

I am interested in Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the Omega Point but he regards the world as being drawn towards the Omega Point by a complex consciousness residing in the future, which seems unnecessarily elaborate.

The Pagan version of cosmic consciousness is Oberon Zell-Ravenheart's Gaia Thesis, formulated in his book Theagenesis (1970).  This simply posits that the Earth, as a complex system, has consciousness (maybe as an emergent property).  It predates the better-known Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock by four years; and Lovelock and Zell actually corresponded on the subject in the 1970s.

In the Tao Te Ching, the Ten Thousand Things are born of the Tao, and include everything - there is no artificial distinction between good and bad.

The Valley Spirit never dies
It is named the Mysterious Female.
And the doorway of the Mysterious Female
Is the base from which Heaven and Earth sprang.
It is there within us all the while;
Draw upon it as you will, it never runs dry.

They also return to the Tao, because it is in their nature to do so:

In Tao the only motion is returning;
The only useful quality, weakness.
For though all creatures under heaven are the products of Being,
Being itself is the product of Not-being.

Note that "Not-being" is probably not the same as "divine essence"; in Buddhism, the distinction is between being and not-being, rather than between essence and energy/existence.  I would imagine the same was true of Taoism.