Holidays - Learning from Non-Pagan Celebrations

When I was staying at my family’s for the Easter holidays, I realized two things – one I talked about in my last post on gospel songs and paganism. The other is that we can learn a lot about each other by attending spiritual services of other faiths, and also enrich our own pagan practice.

My family has always been Christian, although not overtly so – my great-grandma would pray the rosary every week, but privately, and my gran also prays by herself each night. Since my dad passed on three years ago, however, my mum quite often attends services with my little brother (8) and me. As I don’t live at home anymore this usually this happens three to four times a year around the holidays, i.e. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and potentially the service held in summer at a local site in the mountains.

So today I’d like to talk about the last Easter service I went to and what I learned from it.

First of all, I find that attending a Christian mass once every so often is a good and easy way to remind me of the core tenets of Christianity. Not that I’d forget that Easter commemorates the occasion of Jesus rising from the dead, obviously. Instead, the sermon reminds me not only of what is celebrated, but also of what it means for believing Christians. For Easter, this would be a sense of hope pervading all aspects of their life, and a belief that they, too, will rise one day to be with their God. Hearing sermons like these and understanding what it is that Easter means for Christians helps me to see parallels to my own pagan faith. 

the altar of the church my mum attends

This brings me to my second point, i.e. that once I see that the sense of hope Christians feel at Easter is similar to the hope and joy I experience during the spring equinox ritual, I might be able to better explain to friends and relatives what it is that I celebrate and believe in. So when I can show that while I do not believe in Jesus, I do focus on hope and the good things in life (that is, not on courting the devil and eating little children), we might have some common ground – and if we cannot agree, maybe we can at least peacefully co-exist, knowing that the other’s beliefs are not too far from one’s own in a sense.

The third and main aspect that really struck me during this year’s Easter service is that in my own pagan practice, I really do miss the sense of community. On the one hand I’m quite happy to be a solitary practitioner, since my schedule is quite messy at the moment and I don’t think I could find time for a regular meet-up; and I also want to explore more of paganism in general before settling for a certain group’s way of doing things.

But on the other hand, I really do miss feeling a community spirit. In my mum’s church, the congregation gathers in a circle in front of the altar for the holy communion, and you can partake of both the wine and bread (my dad’s Catholic church, where I used to go to when I was young, only had the priest consume the wine, so this is a really interesting experience for me). After everyone has partaken of the bread and wine, you take your neighbour by the hand and the circle is blessed by the priest or priestess. This sharing of bread and wine, to me, is closer to Jesus’ original idea than the Catholic practice that I grew up with, and it also reminds me of the fact that you’re not alone, but celebrating your faith together with others. 

 

Also, I simply love singing with others to praise God. While I’m quite happy with my own singing voice, it just doesn’t compare to a whole church packed with people singing well-known gospels.

And finally, I miss having a proper ritual structure. I do like to experiment with how I do ritual. However, I find that once you have a set structure you can concentrate better on what the words and gestures mean to you personally instead of fretting about getting the next ritual step right. Also, a fixed structure gives me a sort of comfort, because no matter where you enter a church of a certain denomination, the structure will be the same (or very similar, at least) and you can feel instantly at home.

So how can I adapt the things I miss into my practice?

I talked about the gospel songs last week, so I’m not going to go into detail here. As to the community aspect, I’m planning on asking a Wiccan friend of mine if we could celebrate some of the sabbats together. While I’m not Wiccan myself, I guess our core beliefs are close enough for us to get a meaningful ritual structure that we could work with. Another friend has asked me whether I’d do a little pagan ceremony on our annual Walpurgisnacht trip up the local hill (Walpurgisnacht is the night between April 30^th and May 1^st, i.e. the German version of Bealtaine), so if all present are fine with it, I might share some bread and mead with the group.

And as to the ritual structure, I don’t have a perfect solution just yet, but since the structure I used for my spring equinox ritual worked really well, I might use it again for the next sabbats and see if I want to stick to it.

As a conclusion, joining my Christian relatives in church is a good way for me to see what they believe in and celebrate on their holy days, and it also gets me to reflect about the current state of my own faith and how I can make my celebrations be even more to my liking.

Do you have other thoughts about attending mass (or the services of other faiths, depending on what faith your relatives adhere to) together with your family? Do you do it at all, and if not, why? 

Blessed be,

Harzgeist

Gospel Songs in Paganism?

Today, I’d like to share with you an experience, or rather a realization, that I had while I was attending the Easter service together with my mum this year. The church she attends has quite a lot of songs that I enjoy, and I found I really loved singing along with the congregation.

I’ve also been a member of a gospel choir during my time in England, where I went twice a week – sometimes more often, when a concert was approaching – to sing songs praising God. But it only occurred to me during this Easter service that there hardly are any gospel songs that we can sing as pagans.

Obviously, there are quite a lot of songs with a pagan theme, often written and sung by pagan artists. For example, I do love the work of Damh the Bard; his rendition of the Raggle Taggle Gypsy never fails to make me smile, and his The Spirit of Albion gives me goosebumps quite often.

However, apart from a song by Kellianna called I Walk with the Goddess there is hardly a truly pagan song I know that comes close to gospels like, say, Elvis Presley’s rendition of Working on the Building that I could use during ritual. 

The fact is that I love music, so naturally I would like to use music to celebrate my gods. While chants can be very powerful when used in ritual, I’m looking for gospel-like songs that were written for the praise of our gods and that you can sing along to. For me, there’s a certain challenge in getting the key and difficult bits in a gospel right, so I’d like to be able to give a well-sung song as an offering, so to speak.

However, I don’t feel that using existing Christian gospels and changing the lyrics is appropriate, in a way. I do appreciate the efforts by e.g. the German Asatru-Ring Frankfurt, who have quite an extensive library oflyrics – either Christian-themed songs changed to fit pagan rituals, like their Yule songs, or modern pop songs changed to incorporate pagan and Heathen ideas. For example, there is quite a nice Heathen version of Dolly Parton’s Jolene titled Wotan (Heart of You), directed at Odin. My problem is, however, that you’d have to find an instrumental version of these songs to use them during ritual (as much as I like Mrs Parton, I don’t want her to sing about Jolene when I try to devote a song to Odin – and if I don’t have musical accompaniment, I go terribly off key, and no God wants to hear that, believe me).

I also tried to change the lyrics of a song I learned in the gospel choir (it’s called He Reigns; a version of my choir performing it can be found here).

While I managed to get as far as

“Our God is an awesome God, 

He reigns from Asgard above”

the next line that says “with wisdom, power and love” wouldn’t quite fit my view of Odin (wisdom, yes – love, not so much); and besides, “Asgard” wouldn’t quite go into the metre anyway.

So essentially, what I really miss at the moment are gospel-like songs that are pagan-themed – or at least neutral enough for me to use them during ritual. Are you familiar with any songs that I might enjoy?

Blessed be,

Harzgeist

Church – Leaving or Staying?

A couple weeks ago, a dear friend of mine told me that she had finally decided to leave the church. She has been a practicing Wiccan for several years now and she feels that finally, it is the right time to leave behind Christianity for good and enter a phase of her life in which she will be openly pagan. For her, this is a very important step. A mutual friend is organizing a “leave the church” party for her to commemorate this rite of passage. 

This got me thinking about why I am still officially a member of the Catholic church and if I shouldn’t leave the church behind with her. After all, about 15,000 people from the diocese that my city belongs to have decided to leave the church in 2010. So why shouldn’t I be one of them?

To be honest, I have more than enough reasons to leave:
First, I simply do not believe in the Christian god, so there’s no real point of me in belonging to a church that praises Him. After all, I’d also leave other clubs when I don’t agree anymore with their tenets.
Second, I don’t agree with how the Catholic church especially handles some issues, for example the participation of women in the service or celibacy. Don’t get me wrong here, I have nothing against people who decide that they want to lead a celibate life; I just don’t feel it’s right to make it obligatory for every priest, especially when the numbers of those who want to take their vows are plummeting.
And third, I’m reluctant to finance said institution by paying church taxes, since the largest amount of the money is not used for charitable causes, but for the priests’ salary.

However, while I admire my friend as well as the 15,000 others for doing what feels right to them and for not caring what society will think about it, I still feel reluctant to leave the church.
For one, I don’t have to pay said taxes yet, as I’m still a student. So my stance on the issue might well change when I’m entering the working life at some point in the future.

And more importantly for me, as much as I disagree with Catholicism, it is the faith in which I was born and raised, so in a way it formed who I am today. Moreover, I’m wondering if I would actually benefit from leaving. After all, since Paganism isn’t a recognized religion in Germany, I doubt that I could put “Celtic Reconstructionist” or even “pagan” on my passport where it says “religious affiliation” (and I wonder if that would be a wise choice anyway, as some application forms, e.g. the one that assigns you a place for your teacher’s training, still require you to enter your religion).

And finally, Catholicism is my family’s faith. My dad was a more or less devout person, and my great-grandma used to pray for our family every night. In this sense, Catholicism is still our family faith, and I feel that as a member of my family, it is important to honour this even if I don’t belong to the faith any longer. In a way, this is what honouring your ancestors means for me: not just to honour the rites of our pagan ancestors, but also – and more importantly – to honour those of my family who have just passed on, as well as the rites of my elders.

So how do you handle this? Are you still part of a Christian church, or have you left long ago? And what are your reasons for leaving or staying?

Christian Paganism

For today’s post I’d like to address quite a controversial topic: that of Christian Paganism, i.e. people who feel connected to or practice both a form of Christianity as well as a form of paganism.
While I have quite a strong opinion on the topic myself, I by no means want to offend anyone, especially those who actually practice Christian Paganism. Instead, I’m very interested in others’ opinions.

Looking at the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary; as a linguist, this is where I turn for definitions), we find that paganism means:
“A religion other than one of the main religions of the world; spec. a non-Christian or pre-Christian religion, esp. considered as ancient or primitive. Also: the religious beliefs and practices of such a religion; the state or condition of non-Christian people; heathenism.”
Add to this my own understanding of paganism, i.e. belief in multiple gods (not necessarily of a polytheistic nature) and concepts of magic or such diverse ones as blood offerings (which, I know, you don’t have to practice to be pagan).
For me, this sounds very different from – and quite contradictory to – the Christian concept of monotheism and the acceptance of Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. So my question is how these two different belief systems can go together at all.

From a CR perspective that is mainly informed by Alexei Kondratiev’s work, I can actually see a way of how this could be accomplished. For once, Kondratiev saw himself as a Christian despite writing about topics that are distinctly pagan in nature. And apart from this personal perspective, Freeman (2001: 203) quotes poems from Irish monks and hermits in the early Irish church, which express a deep love and one-ness of nature; these sentiments for me make up part of my pagan practice.

“Glen of the sleek brown round-faced otters
that are pleasant and active in fishing;
many are the white-winged stately swans,
and salmon breeding along the rocky brink.”

One could also argue that Christianity, especially in Ireland, builds on existing belief structures; compare, for example, a story in which St Patrick turns into a deer to escape capture (Freeman 2001: 74). A better example, perhaps, can be found in Brighid, who lives on as a Christian saint with quite the same attributes as her pagan counterpart: at least in Scotland, both reigned over fire and art, as well as the birth of spring (Freeman 2011: 55). Here, it would be interesting to see whether worshipping the saints does not indeed come close to a form of polytheistic practice. 

Also in other countries, old customs live on next to (but at times contrary to) Christian ideology; just take the maypole as a fertility symbol, or the well-known fact that many religions have a saviour or son of the light born at or around the time of the Winter Solstice.

However, if we follow the Bible, God does not seem to want His followers worship other gods beside Him. I have to stress here that I’m currently reading the Bible, but have only progressed as far as Deuteronomy. Yet what I’ve read so far speaks very strongly for a certain position (but if you’re more informed than I am, please feel free to point out flaws in my argumentation!).

The Bible indeed seems to acknowledge the existence of other gods, as stressed in Exodus: “Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods? who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15: 11). However, the Judeo-Christian God doesn’t seem to like these other gods much, as He stresses that “thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20: 3), and says: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20: 5).

And in a later passage, the existence of other gods is negated: “Unto you it was shown, that you might know that the LORD he is God; there is none else besides him” (Deuteronomy 4: 35). Hence, when Jesus is asked which commandments one should keep, the one pertaining to other gods is not among the ones He names – He just refers to commandments like ‘thou shalt not murder,’ (Matthew 19: 16) which any morally sound person should follow, be they Christian or not.

So in my understanding, if you accept the whole Bible as true (for you), then being a pagan at the same time does not seem to be possible.

And there are other areas apart from worship of other gods where I see difficulties.

First, there’s the Bible’s attitude towards divination, witchcraft etc. I don’t have to quote the famous passage for you to understand my point.

Also, the brand of Catholicism I was raised in postulated quite a different relationship of humans and God, since the priest acted as a negotiator between God and the congregation to the extend that we weren’t even allowed to partake of the wine during Mass. But then again I guess you could put this down to my town’s priest and simply different requirements, so to speak, of the Christian and pagan god(s). 

And finally, I wonder how the concept of original sin (as well as the fact that Jesus died for our sins) and the concept of going to hell can be integrated into a pagan perspective. I’ll leave out the concept of Satan here since I know quite a lot of Christians myself who don’t have a strict concept of the devil.

To finish this off, I’d really like to know if one of you either is a Christian Pagan or knows someone who practices it. How does it work out for your personal practice, and also for your relationship(s) with those of either faith? Which ritual formats do you use? And how does the perspective of two (at least in my point of view) fairly different religions inform your relationship towards deity?

Also, if you think that the concept is not for you, at all, I’d like to know your reasons why.

Blessed be,
Harzgeist

Sources:
The Bible. King James version.
Freeman, Mara. 2001. Kindling the Celtic Spirit. New York: HarperCollins.
poem originally in: Jackson, Kenneth. 1951. A Celtic Miscellany. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
for Kondratiev’s views, see e.g. Kondratiev, Alexei. 2003. The Apple Branch. A Path to Celtic Ritual. New York: Kensington.