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[macnacailli]

The hospital is starting to get its presentations and displays ready for "Spiritual Care Awareness Week". For several years this has includes a series of small posters introducing a variety of world religions, including Wicca. The person who is reprinting the posters asked me if I wanted to re-do the Wicca poster to reflect paganism more broadly

Comments

[thewronghands]

That's awesome; go you. (And I would certainly call my path nature-honoring -- that's really central!)

[macnacailli]

Thanks for the encouragement.

I think a lot of recon pagans and ethnic pagans place importance on nature and our relationship with the divine in nature. I know it’s important to me.

But some folks seem to have taken an extreme stance that runs something like, "As I'm informed by a source-culture, I'm a cultural pagan. Culture and nature are in opposition (which is really an Enlightenment idea, with its roots in Christianity, Christian Platonism, and certain kinds of Gnosticism, and usually foreign to the very source-culture they claim to honour) so I'm not nature-honouring. Besides, gods forefend I should ever be confused with a pagan of any other stripe than my own.

[misslynx]

Yeah, there seems to be a tendency, especially among much of the NFP crowd, to assume that any emphasis whatsoever on nature in anyone's spirituality = fluffy nonsense from people whose idea of nature comes from Disney movies.

I'm sure part of that is a reaction to people who really do approach it in a fluffy way, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a large part of the current disdain for nature-based spirituality is more based on the fact that, if practiced in a serious and committed way, it requires actual work, beyond just reading books and surfing web sites. Too many of the self-professed Serious Pagans[TM] out there seem to be purely armchair practitioners, and dismissive of anyone who actually does anything, because clearly they are all Doing It Wrong.

[thewronghands]

They don't even have to do anything magical... I'd be happy if half of them would just start recycling or something. [rueful grin] ("But that's not in the lore! Sustainability is totally just your UPG..." [smite smite smite])

[macnacailli]

Of course if they really looked, sustainability is in the lore... no hunting deer and boar after Samhain, even if they stroll right past you, no letting your herd get to too large to feed, no peeing in the village water source, etc. Sure they were not as aware as we are know, but there did seem to be a trend toward acting on the knowledge at hand to maintain one's realm for future generations.

It makes me crazy how 'the lore' is acted upon rather selectively by some recons. Avoiding anything that might seem wiccan, neo-, or fluffy, seems to be put ahead of honouring the lore as we have it.
The best way to do that is just not practice... no live community, no ritual, no magic, no connecting with nature, others, or even non-intellectual sides of oneself. The choice itself is contra to the relationship values espoused by the very faiths we are supposedly reconstructing.
smite smite smite, indeed!

[macnacailli]

I agree.
I think not doing anything at all is *more wrong* than doing something - even something I might personally degree with, so long as it is done with reverence, respect and joy.
I know the gods often accepted my semi-informed offerings, with the grace of good relations receiving yet another ugly ashtray or finger painting from a child. As I knew more and the practiced more, they expected more. ...oops, I'm sure statements like that are forbidden since real relationship with anything other than my library card is fluffy.

[thewronghands]

If it weren't a nature religion, I'd be off doing something else. (Of course, this might be a chicken and egg thing. One of my major areas of study within CR is tree ogham, which is sort of necessarily interfacing with the natural world, and the deities that I connect most closely with tend to be similar.) And yeah, embracing the man versus nature divide for people interested in pre-Christian religions... buh? Quite.