Cakes for the Queen of Heaven
August 14, 2016
Unitarian Universalist Church of Duluth
Good morning. Thank you for inviting me here today. First I would like to share my story with you, and then a bit about my religious tradition at large.
I am a witch. I have always been a witch— even before I knew the words to claim it or that such a religion existed.
It is often said that no one converts to paganism: rather, you discover that what you’ve always believed in has a name.
All throughout my childhood, I wandered outside in the moonlight, gathered herbs, lit candles, and whispered to the Moon and the Lake.
This is the story of how I came to know myself spiritually, and how I have continued to deepen my faith and practice.
During my studies in college I developed a passion for studying religion. I love mythology, and found fascinating the way people all over the world interpret their reality; their place in the Universe and their understanding of how it all works. This image came to me: “God” as a beautiful multifaceted jewel, a different face each for every person on the planet. I realized that everyone has their own unique relationship with the Divine. In order to continue to study, I would have to learn as much as possible about as many people’s spiritual pathways as I could. And so my academic focus became experience-based, rather than textual or theological, and widely diverse.
By the time I finished my undergraduate degree in 2004, I was a finely tuned scholar of religion, but I didn’t have a faith of my own. I finally problematized that fact during my last month of school: sitting in the classroom surrounded by my fellow religious studies majors, I looked around and realized that each of them was there, in part, because of their own deeply held religious beliefs. And I had to ask myself, so why am I here?
I gave myself leave to explore anything that caught my eye. I read about Angels, Astral Projection, Psychics, Dreaming, Healing Touch—I took in the concepts that resonated and left those that didn’t.
A year after graduation, I traveled to Peru. By then, I had a basic grasp of “New-Age” mysticism. I went seeking a vision, or to find a shamanic teacher or something—I expected some sort of experiential catharsis of my new religious understanding.
Instead I found a name: Pachamama. It’s the Quechua word for the Earth as Goddess, and it was the first time I’d ever heard Her named. Over the course of a month I climbed canyons, mountains, and terraced fields seeking Her. Over and over again I sought to meet Her, to talkwith Her, but always it seemed that I failed. I found beauty and reverence, but not what I was conceiving of as “Her”: the Goddess.
Only after I returned home, to my own piece of Mama Earth, did I realize my misconception. The Goddess wasn’t absent, but rather so big that I could never find Her edges. She didn’t elude me, She surrounded me. From that moment on my relationship with the Earth changed, and I have felt Her with me ever since.
I built my first intentional altar, dedicated to the Earth goddess. I covered a glass plate with sand from the beach, and set stones from my journeys around a central pillar candle. I took it outside and I knelt by the edge of the Lake and I asked Her to bless it. From then on there has been some version of that altar in every bedroom I’ve lived in.
:aterhat year I moved to California looking for witches. I thought that I wouldn’t be able to find teachers of the sort that I hungered for in Duluth, and so when the opportunity came to head West I figured that if I was going to find such teachers anywhere, well, they would be in California.
Like in Peru, I looked so hard that I didn’t know what I had found until after I left. I was looking for big lessons, light switches into a room full of goddesses and ritual; what I found were small voices and relationships. I made friends with trees and stones; I learned to “hear” them and sit with them in companionship. I came to appreciate how healthy food is sustainable and life-giving, and how the rituals of preparing, serving, and consuming it are deeply significant. I learned how to pray, and I learned how to listen to Spirit.
I moved back home to become a mother, and I took up teaching.
It was at that time that I discovered the book Drawing Down the Moon, a massive ethnography of pagan practices written by the late, great Margot Adler. For the first time I encountered thealogy, experiences, and practices that looked like mine. I had never realized how large and how disparate and how beautiful the pagan community was, or quite honestly, that there even was one. It was while reading that book that I began to identify myself as a witch (if only to myself). Adler’s work also opened up the possibility of studying paganism as I had studied so many other religious traditions, academically, which I had never previously considered.
I began my practice of reiki: the Japanese healing art of opening oneself to cosmic light and love and channelling it to someone in need, with the understanding that the Divine will send the energy where the person needs it to go. Over the years I have expanded this practice, and it informs much of how I understand the unseen world to work, as well as my capacity to do work in the world.
I started keeping the seasonal celebrations called The Wheel of the Year, earth-based holidays drawn from pre-Christian European culture that mark the witch’s sacred cycles. (this is not necessarily a factual claim, but it is part of the mythology of my faith tradition).
I took up the art of divination, and learned how the Divine speaks in many different ways.
I also began to develop a spiritual relationship with my ancestors. Focusing on my four great-grandmothers, I light candles and make them offerings as part of my daily practice. Intentionally reestablishing this connection to the honored dead of my lineage has been deeply effective: they are loving and attentive spirits who not only support me, but who help me stay focused on my highest calling by reminding me of the preciousness of this embodied experience, and my duties to my family as simply one among so many who have come before.
I found so much beauty and joy and love in exploring and expressing my spirit.
That was when I realized I felt called to ministry. In working with students and in exploring my spirituality I came to realize that this is my passion, and who I want to be in the world: I am called to speak for the Earth; to serve as an example of how we who have lost our roots and our worldview of unity can reclaim them in service to our physical Mother. I am called to serve the Goddess, She Who Has So Many Names, of whom only one aspect is Her body the Earth; to bring the Goddess alive through my work in Her name is to bring balance to many of our cultural inequities. I am called to heal. I am called to hold space for the multiplicity of religion in the world. I am called to ignite other’s spirits to free themselves and grow into their full expression.
And so that is why I’m here today. Within the next year I will graduate with the credentials held by most ministers of mainstream religious traditions, and the blessing of my peers and the Goddess as a priestess. I share my story with you as one of many experiences of the path of witchcraft in the world, and as a devotee of the living Goddess, that you gain a better understanding of who we and She are.
In addition to my story, there are tens of thousands of others. Technically, the religious tradition I’ve just shared with you falls under the heading of “Neo-Paganism”, a label fraught with difficulty but for lack of a better one still the one we use. See, neopaganism is really an umbrella term for a basically unlimited number of spiritual pathways that sort of share one or more of the following characteristics: they are earth-based, Goddess-oriented (or at least Goddess-inclusive), and polytheistic.
My personal definition of “pagan” as a modern religious identity comes from its use within the Christian context, where it basically (albeit pejoratively) just means: non-Christian. So to me, being pagan simply means following your own pathway to the Divine.
However, the rise of neopaganism as a quasi-coherent tradition in the last century has some definable form, and certainly has themes that are significant to explore, namely pluralism, ecology, and feminism. To speak on these points I draw on the work of my foremothers: Margot Adler, Starhawk, and Shirley Ann Ranck.
Pluralism is a term that means, beyond simple tolerance of difference, a recognition and welcoming of multiple expressions of reality.
“Neopaganism is a religious tradition that is inherently pluralistic, because of its significantly polytheistic worldview. In beginning to understand what polytheism means to modern pagans we must rid ourselves of a number of ideas about it— mainly, that it is an inferior way of perceiving that disappeared as religions “evolved” toward the idea of one god.
Polytheism is not in fact an un-evolved social-phycological expression, but rather one that is significantly more open. David Miller, professor of religion at Syracuse university characterized it thusly: “Polytheism is not only a social reality; it is also a philosophical condition. It is that reality experienced by men and women when Truth with a capital “T” cannot be articulated reflectively according to a single grammar, a single logic, or a single symbol system.
Theologian Ernst Troeltsch pointed out that a crucial part of any religion is the world view that supports it and is supported by it.” -Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon
The reality is that a strict monotheistic world view is no longer truly functional in our global or even multifaceted national community. It is too rigid and exclusionary. Margot Adler writes that “monotheism is a political and psychological ideology as well as a religious one, and the old economic lesson that one-crop economies generally fare poorly also applies to the spiritual realm.” That is, in order to be spiritually healthy as a human race, we need multiple expressions of spiritual understanding.
The second important characteristic of neopaganism is a re-cognition of ecological concerns as existing in the realm of the sacred. Theologically in the West, divinity has been drained out of nature. Trees and rocks and rivers are no longer considered to partake in the life-force of the Universe that enlivens humans and to a lesser degree animals. Ecologist Lynn White writes, “By destroying pagan animism, it became possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feeling of natural objects”.
Neopaganism recognizes the inherent divinity in the natural world, a viewpoint that requires a revisiting of the ethics even of “stewardship” of the Earth. Rather, it is an ecological ethical framework that insists on the sovereignty of Nature, and recognizes our interdependence within the ecosystem of the Earth. Many neopagans approach their religion from this standpoint: as a cosmological framework for their ecological concerns.
The third and last element of neopaganism I want to share with you today is sacred feminism. Though our Western culture is constantly evolving, there are still many places where archetypal masculinity is not balanced with the feminine. A major, and highly unchallenged arena where this is the case is within religion.
“The truth that we now know is that women definitely have a rich past, but we (and I say “we” here entirely inclusively of all genders) have been unaware of our female heritage because for many centuries major world religions have expressed primarily male experience and views of the world, and have ignored or suppressed female experience.
Much of neopagan practice and theology has arisen as we look to the pre-patriarchal religions of the ancient world. Before the advent of the major world religions as we know them, and for a long time after their birth, human beings of many cultures practiced Earth-centered, woman centered religions for millennia. Women have been particularly interested to learn that may of these very ancient religions revolved around a powerful Goddess who was expected to assure the health and prosperity of the people and of the earth.” -Rev. Shirley Ann Ranck, Cakes for the Queen of Heaven
What does this mean in the modern era? It means that we, all of us, have the gift of recognizing women, and feminine archetypes, as divine. It means the sacralization of women’s bodies, including the Earth. It means holding roles like mother and wife as sacred and powerful in their own right.
For me, my religious experience has been one of discovery through meditation, prayer, reading, and conversation. I have followed the path where it led, and it brought me here. I am a witch, a pagan, and a priestess, and I’m so honored to share my tradition with you today.
Starting in September I will be offering a class on the sacred feminine designed by Reverend Shirley Ann Ranck as a UU religious education course called Cakes for the Queen of Heaven. It will explore the elements of Goddess tradition that I have mentioned here today, and many others. I’m offering the class as part of my final coursework for my master’s degree, and so it is free of charge. In true neopagan tradition, while there is a framework and lesson plan, ultimately what we do in the course will be a co-creation of the needs and intentions of everyone who participates. I can’t wait to see what we make together!