Tag: paganism

Featured, Holy Wild, Theology

Religious Branding

Alison Leigh Lilly

Are you a good ol' fashioned, All-American Pepsi kind of girl? Are you a fitness nut, chugging down Aquafina by the gallon, sipping your Ocean Spray grapefruit juice at breakfast, maybe indulging in a Lipton Diet Green Tea for lunch? Do you like the caffeine rush of Mountain Dew or AMP Energy to wake you up in the morning? Or maybe you're a bit of a hippie, chilling out with a SoBe or a Tazo? And how much does it matter to you that all these drinks are made by the same company? That's also the problem with branding. It's shallow. It's ephemeral. It's easy. It obscures not only the deep connections that we actually share with one another, but also the very real and more intricate diversity that is a part of any community no matter how apparently homogenous on the surface.

Holy Wild, Rite & Ritual

Worshipping Nature in the Digital Age

Alison Leigh Lilly

At the heart of my spiritual life rests the deep knowing that ritual is a way of listening to the Song of the World as it moves through the earth and the land, and engaging with that Song as something holy, wholly challenging and transformative. Shared ritual is when we accept the burden and blessing of being embodied beings of this dense, physical world that gives us life, and when allow ourselves to respond in kind, to speak back to the natural world with its energies and currents and wild mysteries. Ritual is not for our sake alone, but for the sake of the whole world. It is for the sake of the solitude and silence that surrounds us, that frightening shadow of void and absence that makes us who we are, makes us whole.

Featured, Holy Wild, praxis

Coming Out & Going Down

Alison Leigh Lilly

What has changed in my spiritual life has little to do with the labels I give it. Today I am a Pagan Druid, but that may change in the future as the words evolve in meaning and the community that embraces them shifts and turns about itself in an on-going conversation of creative group-identity formation. What has changed for me, most importantly, is not the name for my spiritual practice, but its depth. I've never really had to "come out" as Pagan to anyone, because my spiritual life is not really about fitting into boxes, or broom closets — it's about deepening. I deepen into my self and my work, through prayer and meditation, through poetry and story, through my time in the woods and my attention to the landscape.

Holy Wild, justice

Pagans and Nonprofits

Alison Leigh Lilly

I seem to be making a few gentle waves in that fine, dry wine I mentioned last week. My article, "Balancing Liberty and Law: Religious Nonprofits in America and Britain," published on Patheos.com last Thursday, was cited extensively today in an article in The Nonprofit Quarterly (and subsequently picked up by Jason Pitzl-Waters over at The Wild Hunt). NPQ reporter Rick Cohen writes: "Typically, debates about the tax treatment of faith-based organizations and of churches involve well-known and recognized religions - Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, etc. – and sometimes debates..."

Holy Wild, News & Announcements

Balancing Liberty and Law » Patheos.com

Alison Leigh Lilly

Just in time for Tax Day, I have a new article up over at Patheos.com's Pagan Portal on the balance of liberty and law, examining nonprofit tax status and government regulation of religious organizations in America and Britain: "In early October 2010, Paganism was making headlines worldwide. In the United Kingdom, The Druid Network (TDN) became the first ever Pagan religious organization to be granted charitable status by the Charity Commission of England and Wales—a move that, as major newspapers in both Britain and America reported, was tantamount to "officially recognizing" Druidry as a religion for the first time in thousands of years. The news was welcome and celebrated by many people in the Pagan communities of both countries, who viewed TDN's success ..."

Muse in Brief

Making Peace Out of Nothing At All » Pagan+Politics

Alison Leigh Lilly

In my latest article for Pagan+Politics, I explore the recent and fascinating scientific discoveries about the role that culture plays in the peacemaking and sociability of nonhuman primates: "For those of us whose religious practices are anchored in relationship with the earth and its many inhabitants, the scientific world has often seemed to lag behind in its recognition of the complexity and subtlety of nonhuman experience as we witness it on a regular basis. Studies revealing the intelligence and sensitivity of dolphins, elephants, corvine birds, honeybees and even trees and other plants, confirm what many of us have long known to be true..."

Holy Wild, story

Reinventing the Wheel

Alison Leigh Lilly

More to the point for me is this question: why is the ancient "wheel" better than the modern one? For me, there are obvious flaws in the modern "wheel," the approach that most contemporary religions take in answering the basic questions about life, the universe and everything. The most important and obvious flaw being their denigration of the earth and the natural world, or in many cases the mere fact that they haven't much to say on the matter. They feel like "square wheels," so to speak, that at best make for a bumpy, uncomfortable ride, and at worst get us stuck in ruts, our hard edges jammed firmly into the yielding earth and unable to move. And so I turn to ancient religions to learn how to soften those edges, refining the square into a smoother circle ...

Contemplation & Meditation, Featured, Holy Wild

Etymology of My Gods

Alison Leigh Lilly

That word for god — the breath, the gleaming — the shining days like great columns bearing up the sky, buttresses, rafters. Beams that in their falling, hold. I say the names of my deities, I feel the drop of each sound into silence. They gather on the long, bent grasses in the meadow and the field, *dewos-, the many that glisten in the coming dark. Amulets of sky, jewels of the daylight, coalescing in the movement of my breath, the lingering touch of the wind. They draw themselves, wavering, into the weight and gravity of form. I open the door, and the gods enter the dark interior of my being.

Holy Wild, praxis, Theology

Contemplations on Polytheism and Gods of the Land

Alison Leigh Lilly

When I began exploring polytheism, I began to understand that the monism underlying some Pagans' conception of Spirit did not jive with my experiences and observations. If I believed in the intimate relationship between the material, physical world and the spiritual world that was its home and source, it seemed unlikely that the embodied world could be so varied, mottled and marvelously complex if the nature of Spirit was a kind of homogenous, undifferentiated aether or spiritual soup. So the beginnings of my own polytheistic theology was this idea of the many-in-the-One, the "ecology of Spirit." This was an ecosystem of living and interrelated beings, some embodied in all the unique ways that embodiment brings, and some just as unique without the solid weight...