On Losing a Friend

This is a blog that has been wanting to be written for a while now. I'm not sure that it's appropriate as "pastoral blog," as it is about a personal quandry in which I have found myself. Yet, it addresses an issue that I think may be faced by many of those who follow Brigid in the Desert as well as any other Interspiritual, Pagan, Christopagan, or even Progressive Christian individual. It's about the nature of friendship and the struggle when someone we consider a friend judges us and finds us wanting.

As you may have guessed, I think I've lost a friend. This is a person I met in my "mundane" life; that is, outside of the religious path I have been following. There is no "outside" of my spiritual life. My spirituality is all that I am and is reflected in most everthing I do, especially my writing. Those who have been close to me or who have followed along as Brigid in the Desert has been developing know I have struggled a bit with my religious identity. They know that I spent a long time attempting to balance my perception of the expectation of others in regard to religion with the spiritual reality that resonates within me.

Those who have been with me all along know I am a follower of the teachings of Jesus.They know I am also one who honors the Divine Feminine. They know I am a Panentheist, that I believe that God is in everything. They know I am also a Polytheist in that I believe that all concepts of deity are culturally derived and represent God in ways that meet the needs of the people. They know that I am a practitioner of magick, that I believe that prayers and spells are both forms of energy work. They know I am also a bit of a Jungian, finding the various personifications of God to be useful archetypes of the various aspects of the human psyche. I'm not a psychologist by any means, nor am I an academic theologian or a philosopher. I am a believer in a greater force that pulls us towards our better selves. In that, I can be considered a process theologian. I believe that the stories of the gods and goddessess of all peoples tell a piece of the Truth. They reveal the relationship that the people in a given culture has had with God, with one another, and with the others they have encountered throughout history. This includes the stories in the Hebrew Bible. This includes the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. This includes the stories written as letters and included in the Christian New Testament. This also includes the letters, codexes, and scrolls that are not included in the Bible. Yes, it also includes the tales handed down through The Mabinogion of the Welsh people and the stories written down as the Prose Edda by the Christian writer Snorri Sturluson and the Poetic Edda of the Codex Regius, written down by an Icelandic Christian priest. In fact, it includes the many tales of many peoples, from the Sumerian/Mesopotamian Gilgamesh to the Sanskrit Vedas to the Native American tales of Grandmother Spider and Coyote. It includes the tales and teachings of Buddha. I believe that human history is the unfolding revelation of the relationship of humanity to one another and to an ineffable yet somehow relational God.

Those who have been close to me understand that this is my spiritual identity. I am a priest in an interspiritual denomination of Christianity because my spiritual identity fits with the religious identity of this denomination. Since finding the UAIC and being ordained, I have not hidden my spirituality. In fact, I have reached out to others who find themselves no longer fitting into the boxes they have been trying to squeeze into, spiritually speaking. I've written poetry and prose inspired by my spiritual experiences, my walk in the Craft, and my connection to various deities across a mythological spectrum. I have shared some of this work at public readings, where many people have an opportunity to hear what I have to say. Yet, this friend of mine must have misunderstood me. We met for tea and a good chin wag many a time, and we discussed God and Jesus. I knew that my friend believed differently than I, yet I was able to connect with them and felt that they had with me as well. When I published my collection of short stories about individuals healed by Jesus, this friend encouraged me and ordered copies. Perhaps I should have realized that we hadn't understood each other as well as I thought.

A few months ago my friend asked to be added to the Brigid's Arrow newsletter mailing list, so I added them. For those who aren't on the list, I will just say that the newsletter deals with various topics appropriate to the time of year from different cultural and religious perspectives. For example, an issue in the spring may have a story about Easter and the resurrection of Jesus, a story about Eostara, and a story about the traditions of springtime in various cultures. I try to write the articles in a manner that includes those who believe, for instance, in a literal physical resurrection and those who believe that it is a metaphor for spiritual rebirth. A winter issue will deal with both Christmas and Yule, the winter solstice. You get the drift, I'm sure.

One day I received a message from my friend telling me that they no longer read the newsletter and that they were concerned for my soul. I haven't heard anything else from them. I have not responded, either. I don't know exactly what to say. It is my heartfelt belief that the state of my soul is a concern between myself and God. I took the person off the mailing list, of course. I'm not trying to be contrary. I think there could have been conversation around the issues that bothered them. In fact, that is the point of the newsletter, of the meetings, and of the discussion page on Facebook. I am not a teacher, I'm a facilitator. I think we all grow more with exploration and discussion.

Much time has passed since I received that message. The friend is still my "friend" on my personal Facebook. Sometimes, I see their posts and "like" or "love" them, but I never comment. I can't help but wonder if they were ever really a friend. Or, perhaps it is I who have fallen short, for perhaps I was not as honest as I thought. If I had been, they would have know me better.

Have you ever found yourself pondering your friendships? What does it mean, to be a friend?

Contemplation on Crosses

[An earlier version of the following was first posted in a course called Spirituality and Sensuality: Sacred Objects in Religious Life, which I took from Hamilton College through Edx.  The professor was S. Brent Plate, author of A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses]


When I was assigned the task of seeking out crosses for a class project, I chose to avoid taking a photo of a cross with obvious religious connotations.  So, I took a walk around my yard where I found a number of examples.  The one I like best was the fence post pictured below. The fence is built of a mixture of old lumber and tree branches to give it a sort of rustic look. The post is a tree branch, juxtaposed against the weathered two by fours of the fence itself. Along the fence grows a grape vine that we planted a couple of years ago.

In South America, there are a number of "pecked" cross petroglyphs situated in an apparently deliberate pattern. These are called "pecked" because they have been hand-pecked or carved into stone. The crosses themselves are of equal length lines that cross in the middle. The axis of each cross points toward important centers of the pre-conquest Mesoamerican culture of the area. The crosses represent the quadripartite (quartered) division of the universe of the Mayan people. According to Anthony F. Aveni and Horst Hartung in their paper "The Cross Petroglyph: An Ancient Mesoamerican Astronomical and Calendrical Symbol,"  these crosses served both religious and scientific purposes. Most of these crosses are carved into rock outside, with very few inside buildings or on floors. Many of the crosses are sort of superimposed over circles, thought to represent the cosmos, with the lines possibly being directional. More information on these artifacts can be found in the M. Nicholas Caretta and Achim Lelgemann paper entitled "Cross Circles: A Case of Northern Mexico."

My fence and the Mayan pecked crosses could not be more different. Mine is temporary in the scheme of things, while the pecked crosses have been around for a very long time. My fence will be decomposed and the grape vines long gone before the Mayan crosses disappear.

The pecked crosses served the high purpose of understanding the universe, through both science and religious ceremony. The Mayan people, like most tribal peoples, did not have a separate idea of these things; rather, all of existence was inextricably woven together. We built our fence to keep our Pomeranians in the yard, though it has since become the grape trellis.

When we decided to use the combination of old wood and tree branches, we were thinking about aesthetics. We like the old "farmhouse" look on our little quarter acre of desert oasis. So, I think of the fence and the grape vine as something lovely that makes me happy. Yet, here it is: a cross upon which grapes will grow. I find an interesting symbolism in this. Jesus described himself as the vine. Wine represents communion with him and with others who follow him. The new green leaves of the grape vine and the tiny flowers that adorn it (though they can't be seen on the picture) represent new life, as does the story of his resurrection after dying upon a cross.

Why the cross as a sacred symbol? Not because Jesus died on one - so did many thousands of others.  In Christianity, it is not the cross itself that give believers hope; rather it is the emptiness of that cross that gives hope. The sacredness of the cross is not unique to Christianity. Crosses have been sacred to religions across the ages including ancient Egyptian, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Norse traditions.

I have a theory about the universal archetype of the cross. It's pretty simple and possibly crazy, but here goes:

A cross is a horizontal line crossed by a perpendicular line. The horizontal line represents our lives here on earth - let us say, our path. The perpendicular line is the axis mundi that Mircea Eliade wrote about in his classic text The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion - the center of the sacred and the path to higher consciousness/heaven/God/Goddess/whatever. We go along our path until something happens to us that awakens us to the possibility of a higher state of being. It calls us to sacrifice something. It could be painful, devastating loss, even death, or it could simply be something challenging; whatever it is, we must give something up in order to grow. That's the point at which sacrifice occurs, if we so choose.

If we choose the way of sacrifice, we may go on in our lives, walking the horizontal path, but our lives will never be the same. We will be compelled to continue to seek the sacred, the high path, the center of our world. This cannot be taken literally. This cannot be grasped and held on to. It is a deep, usually subconscious awareness. We seek directions to the divine (or higher consciousness, higher knowledge - it can be called many things). The cross is, perhaps, the simplest map to finding it.

(c) April 2015