Posts Tagged ‘question of the week’
But first, a story.
Let’s imagine that there is a dog who was rescued from an animal shelter somewhere in Quebec. Let’s call this dog GP, because he was a Great Pyraneese. Let’s say he was first taken to the shelter because he was found by emergency services at a home where he couldn’t receive the care he needed. Let’s also say that he had a kill order on his head because he had bitten someone. But as anyone who knows anything about dog behaviour will tell you (and I know very little about dog behaviour, but I’m living with two people who know a great deal indeed) this is a normal and natural thing for a dog to do when he is protecting his home from an intruder.
GP came to live here with us for a short time. We found him to be a loveable, happy, playful, and friendly animal. We saw no evidence of the problems of which we had been warned. We were only fostering him, not keeping him, so we had him for only a little more than a week until a new home had been found for him. I got to like him a lot, and at one time my partner and I volunteered to take him ourselves if another home could not be found. Later on, however, at his new home, he bit two other people in the space of a few days, and therefore he was put down.
We who had fostered him for even that short time were very upset when we heard he had bitten a human for a third time. The dog being described to us in the accounts of the biting simply wasn’t anything like the dog we knew and loved who we fostered: the behaviour was very different. That, however, is what fostering a dog often entails. If you agree to foster a rescued dog, you will be opening your home to a truamatised and psychologically damaged animal, who almost certainly has a variety of unpredictable anxieties and fears, and may panic or attack or cower in fear for no obvious reason. The animal may have come from a puppy mill, for instance, and thus have been treated with brutality, contempt, and neglect. But it will almost always give affection in return for affection, and will pull your heartstrings in every way.
So my question is: if you could save an animal’s life by fostering it in your home, until the rescue agencies can find a permanent home for it, would you do so? It can mean falling in love with an animal who is fearful and anxious and hard to predict and hard to handle, and may have to be put down anyway. You would be signing up for frustration and heartbreak and trouble and expense. Would you do it anyway?
“Let the animal shelters and humane societies take care of them”, you might say. But that might not be the way to actually save the animal’s life, nor the way to give it anything like a desirable quality of life. For instance, a few days ago Toronto Police laid criminal charges for animal cruelty on five directors of the Toronto Humane Society. The Toronto Humane Society had a no-kill policy. But the animals kept there were so badly diseased and malnourished that arguably putting them down would have been profoundly merciful. As the CBC report said, the building was “absolutely disease infested”, and “one officer recalled a cat whose skin came off in his hands when the officer lifted the cat up”.
I’ve been informed from reliable sources that other animal shelters which do have kill policies are so overwhelmed with dogs and cats that any animals that arrive there are put down within as little as three days. They simply do not have the funds, the space, the personnel, or the food, to house any more. Moreover, people often drop off their animals there for frivolous reasons: the dog isn’t a puppy anymore, or it barks too much, or is too much “trouble” to look after. We have so many disposable things in our consumer culture as it is: your shirt looses one button so you throw it out and get a new one. Your radio gets scratched and dented so you throw it out and buy a new one. Why now throw out your animals too? A friend described to me how she saw a man came to an animal shelter, dropped off a dog that was tied up in a plastic bag, and left it there, and drove off immediately. It is perhaps because of stories or experiences like these, that some animal rights activists become very militant and misanthropic, prepared to commit acts of civil disobedience, vandalism, and violence in the service of animal rescue.
(Or, while we are throwing out our shirts and radios and dogs, why not throw out people? You have one disagreement or argument with your newly wedded husband or wife, so you get a divorce. But I digress).
If you were to foster a rescued dog or cat in your home, you would almost certainly be saving its life, and also making space in a local shelter for another needy animal. So would you do it?
Wow, it’s been a long while since I posted a Question of the Week, hasn’t it?
Sorry about that. It seems that Sunday is no longer the most convenient day of the week for me to be doing this. I’ve also started on some of those big changes in my life that I’ve hinted at. I’m blogging to you now from the fine locality of Barrhaven, a suburb of Ottawa. I also finished Book the Fifth (which I suppose I should start calling by its proper title now).
Some of you noted that I was a guest blogger on The Wild Hunt, during the week that Jason was occupied with moving. My contribution, posted a few days ago, was entitled “Who are the Elders?” I received a number of kind comments to this post. Among them, a friend of mine drew my attention to a post on her own blog from a few months ago which seemed very relevant. Here’s a quote from it:
For many of us, there are no Elders where we live. The only Elders are the ones in the books we order online and pay high shipping costs to get, or on web pages we must look at using slow speed dail-up. And this makes these elders and teachers barely tangible.
Read the whole post here.
When I got started in my teens, the only “elder” I knew was a huckster and a fraud. When I left his circle, I didn’t have anyone at all for a few years. I read books, mostly borrowed from friends, and I participated in discussions on the internet. The internet was still text-only then. (Wow, that puts a date on me!)
I joined my first pagan group around the age of 20 or 21, and some of its members were already in their 40s. The use of the word Elder was not yet in vogue at that time, but that’s effectively what they were, and how we treated them. Or, at any rate, that is how I looked up to them, and still do. (Curious to know if any of them are reading this blog!) I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had pagan elders around me one way or another ever since then. That is effectively all my adult life.
But as Juniper pointed out, this isn’t everyone’s experience. Well, friends, instead of listening to me pontificate, let me ask all of you: What, if anything, should those who have no Elders do? Who should they turn to? If anyone? Although I characterise the Elder as a person whose path is largely a path of service, can Elders be expected to drive hours and hours to remote places to meet with individuals or small groups? (To say nothing of the economics involved: the cost of fuel, etc.) Also, and I think importantly, might the recent interest in pagan elders be inadvertantly alienating those who don’t have access to Elders?
Honestly, I’m not even sure how to phrase the question, let alone suggest an answer. But I do think this is an important matter, and that where I am at a loss, others might be able to help.
A very merry and magical Midsummer to all of you!
Yesterday was drizzly and miserable here in Elora (so I feel less bad about missing WiccanFest) but today is gloriously shiny and clear and warm and wonderful. I really ought to be outside, beating the bounds in my forest instead of sitting inside, blogging. But here’s a Q of the Week, for your consideration, after you return from beating the bounds in your own landscapes, of course.
Well June was Pagan Values Blogging Month, and as mentioned before I found myself a little disappointed by a lot of what I read. In her own contribution to the Pagan Values Blogging Month, Canadian Hedge Witch summed up exactly what I found so unsatisfying about so much of it:
The first thing I noticed reading all these blog posts, is a plethora of catch phrases and key words. Pagan values as pop culture?
Read the whole blog post here.
It seemed to me too that a lot of people’s blog posts about values was little more than a repetition of various cliches.
Good readers, please don’t get me wrong: I know and understand the value and the power of proverbs. I published 120 pagan wisdom-teachings in my fourth book, the result of an international folklore survey I conducted, along with philosophical commentary for most of them. Someone who offers advice using a traditional proverb brings to bear the whole power of his or her culture. And sometimes a cliche has its origins in an important insight. But that isn’t true all the time. In fact it can often be counter-productive, or even patronising and demeaning, to offer a cliche to someone who has experienced a serious upheval in his or her life.
For example: an article in last week’s Glob and Mule discusses the problems that can arise when offering a pop-culture cliche to someone who has just lost his job. It reads, in part:
Clichés – as frowned upon as they are – have become such fixtures in our everyday chatter that we fire them off without thinking. And that’s a problem when it comes to serious matters such as unemployment, career experts say. Something else may indeed “come down the pipe,” as job hunters hear from well-meaning friends and family, but such stock reassurances are often unhelpful and misguided, and, frankly, seem like a snub.
Read the whole article here.
Might this be explained by a desire to avoid facing real problems? If someone has a serious dilemma, or a serious emotional and spiritual conflict, might the cliche reply be a way for people to protect themselves from addressing the seriousness of the problem? Might it even be the case that the use of superficial catch-phrases is a sign of a superficial spirituality? As I pose these questions, let it be understood that I’m not speaking of any particular path or tradition. In fact I started thinking about this question after reading a passage from D. J. Hall, “Confessing the Faith: Christian Theology in a North American Context“, which I read on much-ado‘s LJ. Here’s a quote:
We are trying to answer all of our problems without exposing ourselves to them as real problems. There is not one crisis on our horizon — whether this means vast social problems such as poverty, unemployment, and racism or intensely personal problems such as the search for meaning, vocation, or personal integrity — that can be resolved unless we are prepared to go much further into the depths of the question than we are apparently able or willing to do… In other words, our optimism is defensive, and what it seeks to defend us from is truth.
A longer quote can be found here.
Well, friends, what do you think? Has religion and spirituality grown too superficial? Do we prefer to take an easy, sunny, uncontentious path, in order to avoid having to think seriously and deeply about things, and avoid facing serious and deep problems? I know there can be something profound in the thought that “we are children of the Goddess” (an idea which also appears in the Bible: see Romans 8:16 for instance) But I’m tired of hearing people tell me that when I describe certain problems in my life.
Or, are there any pop-culture cliches and catch-phrases which you think really are philosophically powerful, and are not given their proper due? Which ones? And can you explain what they really mean, without falling back on more cliches?
The week that wraps around the end of March and the beginning of April this year had rather a lot of well-publicised mass murders in the United States.
Sat 4 April: Father is suspected of shooting dead his five children, then himself, near Seattle
Sat 4 April: Gunman kills three policemen in Pittsburgh before being wounded and captured
Fri 3 April: Gunman kills 13 people at an immigration centre in Binghamton, New York state, then apparently shoots himself
Sun 29 March: Gunman kills seven elderly residents and a nurse at a nursing home in Carthage, North Carolina, then is shot and wounded himself
Sun 29 March: Man kills five relatives and himself in Santa Clara, California.
On 16th April, USA Today published a feature article describing the real motives behind the Columbine High School massacre, which are easier to discern now that the shooters’ personal diaries are being made public. It turns out that the cause was not violent video games, nor a desire for media attention, nor bullying nor harrassment. Rather, their minds were dominated by rather more straightforward dispositions: paranoia and suicidal depression (in the case of Dylan Kiebold) and misanthropy, superiority, and narcissism (in the case of Eric Harris).
But in today’s question, I’m less interested in motivations and explanations. I’m more interested in prevention and healing. And while an explanation may be useful in the crafting of preventative measures, I’m also interested in what, if anything, principles of earth-based spirituality could contribute to prevention and healing. Are ideas like the beauty of the earth, the reliability of intuition as a source of knowledge, the stories and the presence of the gods, and so on, able to help such people become better human beings? Are any of our wisdom-teachings, such as “The Earth is our mother, we must take care of her”, or “We are a circle within a circle”, or “All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals”, capable of preventing such people from appearing in the first place?
This is a much more serious question than it may seem at first, and it requires a serious answer. For a purpose like this, “visualising white light” and tapping the meridian points will not be good enough. I’m sure that if Jim Adkisson had Tarot card readers among his friends, or was receiving Reiki treatments for minor health ailments, he probably still would have shot nine people in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, killing two of them. His suicide letter makes it clear that he was motivated by political hatred, as well as a sense of personal hopelessness. It might be added that he was certainly “doing his will”, which the Thelemites teach is the whole of the Law.
One way to approach the question might be like this. Christians present such people (well, everyone really) with the “good news” of Christ’s saving grace. Muslims present the Seven Pillars of Islam and other teachings of God communicated to humanity by the Prophet. Hindus offer the global and cosmic unity of the Atman, thus showing that in killing another he kills a piece of himself. Buddhists perscribe substituting compassion in the place of attachment. These ideas are presented confidently, seriously, with impressive conviction, and often in the face of extraordinary danger. What do we offer? What, if anything, can pagans helpfully say to the Timothy McVeigh‘s of the world? What, if anything, could we helpfully do for them, or with them?
A short one this week, since I am in Elora, the village where I grew up, visiting my family for Easter sunday dinner. Since there may well be as many as 30 people visiting today (siblings, nieces, nephews, in-laws, and so on), I am led to think about family relations, and about relationships in general.
In The Spiral Dance Starhawk wrote, “The primary principle of magic is connection”. In her theory of spiritually-motivated political action, she regarded power exercised with other people as non-oppressive and non-domineering (in contrast to power exercised over people). Similarly, Carol Christ wrote in Why Women Need the Goddess that when the Will must be exercised in concert with others, only then is it properly spiritual.
Today’s question concerns spiritually significant relationships. As I sit in the living-room with my cup of tea, surrounded by by brothers and sisters and my parents, arguing about politics, religion, sports, literature, history, and the way of the world, while at the same time turning the points of disagreement into in-jokes that only we understand, it occurs to me that there is more to family relationships than the mere fact of shared genetic heritage. How is it with your family? What do you do together when you gather on holiday occasions like Easter, by which you know yourselves to be a family?
I know, of course, that even this friendly question may generate controversy. Many of my friends (including readers of this LJ) have disclosed to me that their childhoods were full of misery: their parents were abusive and domineering, and the whole set of relationships deeply dysfunctional. For many people, the notion of family conjures memories of sadness, rejection, trauma, and fear. (Ever notice that when people describe the traumas they suffered as children at the hands of abusive parents, they lock their gaze with yours, point their finger in your face, and role-play the part of the abusive parent whilst casting you in the role of the traumatised child they once were?)
So, let me phrase the question this way. What relationship, or set of relationships, constitutes the most spiritually significant relationships in your life? Is it with your friends and neighbours? Is it the people you regularly circle with? If you are a teacher, is it your students? If you are a musician or a performing artist of some kind, is it your audience? Perhaps one of your significant relationships is more animist in nature. It might be with the flowers and herbs in your garden, the trees in your local park, your pet dog or cat, or your artist materials and working tools. I have a friend who is a blacksmith, and he told me that as a blacksmith the most important relationship is with the fire of his forge. What makes your most spiritually important relationship, well, spiritual?
I think I will go ponder these questions while walking in what I like to call “my forest” for a while. It’s been a few months since I’ve walked the land where the spiritual powers that I’m committed to first revealed themselves to me. See you later!
And now, a slightly more lighthearted question, after the heavy and vigorously debated themes of the last few Q’s of the Week.
I presume that everyone knows the story of Hansel and Gretel, from the Brothers Grimm? If not, here’s the text itself from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And here is a few words about Jacob and Wilhelm themselves.
Well, when I was a child the portrayal of the witch in this story used to really frighten me. This was a woman who ate people, after all! And then, a few months ago, when I bought a really beautiful illustrated edition of the Brothers Grimm and began to read them again as an adult, it occurred to me that the story of Little Red Riding Hood was not about the wrongness of disobeying parents or of venturing into strange places alone, or trusting strangers. It was actually about the vice of food-gluttony. So, my question for this week concerns adult themes in children’s storytelling.
In the tale of Hansel and Gretel, everybody is starving. Their parents are so hungry they are contemplating abandoning the children so that they don’t have to share food with them. (That part of the story was excised from the first english-language editions.) The children use flint fragments to make a trail for themselves. But one day, there are no flint scraps left, so they use breadcrumbs (food!) instead. When that trail trail was eaten by birds, the children get lost and they wind up at the doorstep of a house literally made of food – gingerbread and candy – and inhabited by a witch who eats people! Cannibalism is probably the most anti-social of all vices: it refuses to acknowledge the personhood of the other person, and instead sees the other person as that which can gratify the most basic of self-centered needs – the need to eat.
This, of course, is only one example. The story of Sleeping Beauty is really about vanity. Jack and the Beanstalk is about greed. Rumplestiltskin is about deceit and lies. Snow White is about envy. All the major ‘food groups’ on the menu of vice are represented here. One also finds gratuitous violence and graphic sexuality. Think of what the wolf did to the grandmother in the story of Little Red Riding Hood – and of what the woodcutter did to the wolf. Think of what the the spindle of a spinning wheel that ‘pricked’ Sleeping Beauty really is.
Have you a favourite story that you remember from when you were a child? What does it mean to you now?
A recent article on Witchvox.com asked, “Where have all the Gardners and Crowleys gone?” (Full article here, and author Juniper’s home page here.) The more general question that the author was asking, it seems to me, was: Where are all the innovators, the trailblazers, the elders? Why do we no longer have people of the intellectual and imaginative calibre of the pagan ‘big names’ of the early to mid 20th century?
Her answer to that question was twofold. For one, she claimed that pagans treat their elders and innovators rather badly; and two, the innovators themselves quickly become jaded as the fruits of their life-long labour goes disrespected or forgotten. A third answer was also implied in this sentence: “Because we buy white-lighter, easy-to-read, fluffy little books when we should be buying the books Chapters and Barnes and Noble refuse to sell.“. Well, as a writer of books that are certainly not fluff and white light, you can imagine this caught my attention right away.
So my question for this week concerns the innovators in our movement, and how we treat them. Is Juniper correct when she says that the community itself, because of a predisposition to exploit and disrespect such people, tends to prevent them from emerging? Or, in your experience is there an emerging culture which recognises, benefits from, and respects such people? Who do you turn to when you need advice, or help, or information about your path, or even just a kind word once in a while? What qualities do they embody which makes you want to turn to those people, and not others?
Are there people today who are doing the kind of trail-blazing, innovative work that people like Gardner and Crowley once did? Another way to put this question, as my friend Susan Hurrell put it, “what living pagan author would you pay $100+ to hear lecture for 2 hours?”* For that matter, what living author of any spiritual tradition would you pay $100 to hear?
I will post my own list in a few days.
*You don’t have to include me on your list. I already know that I’m still a small time writer, and much of what I write about these days is only tangentially related to paganism anyway.
Today is International Women’s Day.
So, the question of the week, naturally, is, What (if anything) are you doing for it?
In her often-quoted 1979 essay “Why Women Need the Goddess“, Carol Christ said:
Religious symbol systems focused around the exclusively male images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be fully legitimate or wholly beneficent…The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as beneficent and independant power.
My question for this week – and I mean this question with honest curiosity – concerns female power: political, economic, social, personal, spiritual. Is female power just the same as any kind of power, but that it happens to be wielded by women? Is it the case that the whole Goddess movement has a mainly political point, namely, the shifting of power into the hands of women, and the symbol of the Goddess is only a political device intended to achieve that result? Upon reading Carol Christ’s essay, that is the impression that I get, at least in the first few pages. Or, is there something distinct and different about female power? Does power wielded by women do different things, or aim for different purposes? Is it exercised in a distinct kind of way? CC’s essay says that power in a Goddess-centered context is “exercised in harmony with the energies and wills of other beings“. This suggests that female power is more collaborative and cooperative. Is she right? Is there something distinctly “female” about cooperation?
Or, is it really obvious from these questions that I haven’t studied much feminist thought, and that I’m asking entirely the wrong questions about female power?
And now it’s time for a tougher question.
Many religious people of the Abrahamic tradition (which means Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) claim that the belief in God is important because such belief is necessary to produce a healthy, peaceful, just, law-abiding, and even economically prosperous society. It is further claimed that the absence of religious belief will contribute strongly to social dysfunction. This is an idea with deep roots especially in America. For example, Benjamin Franklin stated that “religion will be a powerful regulator of our actions, give us peace and tranquility within our minds, and render us benevolent, useful, and beneficial to others.” The national mythology of America has from the beginning included the idea that America is an “exceptional” society, a “shining city on the hill” which serves as an example to the world of what a Godly, peaceful and prosperous society is like.
Today, organisations like the Discovery Institute work to undermine confidence in Darwinian evolution science, and to promote creationism and intelligent design, precisely because of the hypothesis that overt religiosity is socially beneficial, and that a secular society will degenerate into chaos. Indeed the social benefits of faith are sometimes taken as evidence for the existence of God, when other forms of scientific evidence are unavailable or doubtful. Numerous surveys also show that many people in America believe that religiosity is necessary for peace and prosperity in society.
However, at this time I have been able to find only one professional sociology essay which puts this hypothesis to the test: “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies” by Gregory Paul, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, 2005. in this essay, the author compares the rate of belief in God to several indicators of social health, such as the rates of murders, youth crime, STD infections, teenage pregnancies, and abortions. What he found was exactly the opposite of what the religious conservatives would expect: he found that the higher the rate of religiosity in a prosperous democratic country, the higher the rate of social dysfunction. Here is a quote:
Although they are by no means utopias, the populations of secular democracies are clearly able to govern themselves and maintain societal cohesion. Indeed, the data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to acheiving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developed democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator. The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience social disaster is therefore refuted.
Read the whole essay here. A similar conclusion was also reached in a book-length treatment by Phil Zukerman, which was discussed in a recent edition of the New York Times.
My question is: Given this statistical correlation between religious belief and social dysfunction, would Pagans be any better than Christians, Jews, or Muslims at delivering a peaceful and healthy society? Even if judged by our own standards? I must admit, I have my doubts.
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote the following about temples, in a collection of essays entitled “Figuring the Sacred”:
What is most remarkable about the phenomenology of the sacred is that it can be described as a manner of inhabiting space and time. Thus we speak of sacred space to indicate the fact that space is not homogeneous but delimited—templum—and oriented around the “midpoint” of the sacred space. Innumerable figures, such as the circle, the square, the cross, the labyrinth, and the mandala, have the same spatialising power with respect to the sacred, thanks to the relations these figures establish between the center and its dimensions, horizons, intersections, and so on. All these phenomena and the related phenomena by which the passage from profane to sacred space is signified—thresholds, gates, bridges, pathways, ladders, ropes, and so on—attest to an inscription of the sacred on a level of experience beneath that of language.
My question today concerns sacred architecture. And before you say we shouldn’t build temples at all, but should worship our gods (or whatever) in our homes, or in fields and natural settings, or wherever you happen to be, think about the needs in the mind that temples can satisfy. We’ve been building temples for thousands of years now. Christian churches and cathedrals are built to meet specific social, political, and psychological needs: they replicate temples described in the Bible, such as the Temple of Solomon, or the New Jerusalem described in the book of Revelation. They are meant to give the seeker a taste of the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet long before Christianity, there were magnificent temples dedicated to numerous gods, goddesses, powers, heroes, and ideas, all over the world.
If you could design and build a temple, what would it look like? What would the landscape around it be like? Would it be designed to resemble the Central Mountain, or the World Tree? Or, would it resemble a cave, a woman’s birth canal? Would it replicate a temple of the ancient world, now in ruins? Is there an existing temple that is a favourite of yours?
Illustration of a Romano-Celtic temple, circa 2nd century C.E.