Explaining Solstice

Today I got an email asking me to explain why pagans celebrate the solstice.  My fellow classmate was hoping to have me write something up for our seminary's monthly journal.  I find it hard to remember that so many people know so little about pagan practices.  Even though Winter Solstice is included as a sign of interfaith recognition, it seems that a lot of people know very little about what this holiday has meant to human beings for tens of thousands of years.  I obviously can't speak for all of them.  I can't even speak for modern day pagans.  But I reworked something else I had written previously to reflect the beliefs of my tradition and offered this up (along with the recipe in last year's blog entry).

Labels and Mixed Faith Spirituality

In the beginning of his book, "Living Buddha, Living Christ", Thich Nhat Hahn says, "To me, religious life is life.  We human beings can be nourished by the best values of many traditions.  When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result."  As a man well known for his deep and lifelong commitment to peace, this is clearly a very foundational belief for Nhat Hahn.

Mindfulness

I've been thinking a lot about mindfulness.  This subject comes up a lot in the Dharma talks in "Going Home", though I imagine that mindfulness will be a prevalent subject throughout my Buddhist reading.  Based on the way Thich Nhat Hanh explains it, I understand mindfulness to be about bringing your full attention and awareness to a specific thing, often to the presence of something in the actual moment.  It's about being able to focus on the details of the present moment and to stay with these thoughts instead of sliding into memories from the past or projections of the future.

Living in the Now

Today is June 4th and I am putting on socks because my feet are cold.  It's summer in Berkeley and while the sun is shining and the birds are singing, there have been strong winds today and the temp has dropped to the high 50's this evening.

This might not seem like a big deal to you, but after living in New York for the first time last year, the idea of being cold enough to put on extra clothes in June is almost ludicrous.  Not twelve months ago I remember being hotter than I have ever been, surviving the humidity of a New York summer living pressed up against my air conditioning unit. This fat girl from California was simply not built for humidity and New York City let me know it.

A Life that I Love

For a long time now I have believed that the things we are attracted to - the attributes in the people we admire, the traits they have which make us envious, and little physical characteristics or personality quirks that we think are smart or sexy or charming - give us insight into who we truly want to be.  I believe that the attraction, that emotional reaction that says, "Wow, why don't I have that?" is really, "Oh, so that's what I am supposed to look like."  It's not always clean and simple.  Sometimes we get confused about what it is exactly that attracts us.  Sometimes it's not the culture or the traditions but the experience of being connected to your history or the experience of feeling rooted and a sense of belonging.  It may not be her thinness that you envy but her sense of style and the comfort she has in her own skin.  Regardless, I find that this rule I have about attraction is true for me in all sorts of ways.

Elemental Energy: A Collection of Thoughts

Last week I had the opportunity to lead a group of Christians in song.  We were having a workshop on leading music in worship spaces and each participant was asked to choose a hymn or other appropriate piece of music and then teach it to the group.  I was really excited about this opportunity because I love to sing.  The songs and chants in a pagan space are some of the most magickal and meaningful aspects of craft for me.  So I took a lot of time contemplating different chants to share.  I wanted to engage the fellow students and to share with them something about pagan musical traditions, but I didn't want to take them too far outside of their comfort zone or that would alienate them.  Despite the radical inclusion that I feel from my fellow students, they are not very familiar with pagan traditions.  I settled on this one:

The Pagan Eucharist??

Would it surprise you to know that many pagan traditions have an aspect to our rituals that is very much like the Eucharist?  For the pagans out there, have you ever considered how similar Cakes and Ale is both symbolically and physically to the tradition of Christian Communion?  In yet another installment of my current seminary inspired series, "Hey!  We do that!  Wait, you do that too??", I figured it was time to talk about the Eucharist.

Marcia McFee's Four Patterns of Worship Energy

Pulling from the world of kinesiology, Marcia McFee has developed a system for talking about the different kinds of energy that we experience in worship services.  Broken down into four categories - Thrust, Shape, Swing, and Hang - we can get a feeling for how different services are structured and why different kinds of religious experiences feel right to one person but wrong to another.

You say Savior, I say Sun King

I live in a row of old apartment buildings in Astoria, NY.  Just across the East River of Manhattan, my Queens apartment is relatively affordable and spacious.  The buildings butt up directly to one another, creating a corridor down our street and a continuous line of rooftops.  It was up on my roof (four stories up) where I had my winter solstice ritual this morning.