Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his ..read more

Pagans often argue about how to define who we are.  What are the boundaries--between Wicca and Witchcraft, between Heathens and Pagans, between polytheists, pantheists, and non-theists...  While I could do without the acrimony, we're a new as well as an old religious movement, so it makes sense that like any adolescent, we are fascinated by questions of identity. I will admit to preferring the Quaker approach to identity, though: rather than trying to create the definitive checklist of belief that make someone a "real Quaker," Friends typically share a body of testimonies and questi ..read more

I’ve been reading Greek philosophers.  I formed a neoplatonist book club recently with a couple of Pagan friends, and we’re reading Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries.  I’m plowing through it, chewing on some very dense prose as I try to take in and understand neoplatonist ideas about God and the Gods, time and eternity, body and mind and soul. I am aware of being very attached to some ideas about the soul.  It’s not all that different from the way Christians cling to their orthodoxy.  Christians (and that includes me when I was younger) will do a lot of mental gymnastics to m ..read more

Imagine an ice cream factory that fills an entire city block.  You have teaspoon.  You go in the front door and you have to run as fast as you can through the building to the back door and out onto the next street.  Along the way, you get to scrape your spoon across any tubs of ice cream you pass, licking the different flavors as you’re sprinting by, but those tastes are all the ice cream you get. That’s often what it’s like for me when I start reading in a new subject.  It’s what college was like.  It’s how it was when I first became Wiccan, and when I was doing his ..read more

Edward Hicks, The Peaceable Kingdom Since I began describing myself as a Quaker Pagan, I run into people who are suspicious of my claim to be both Quaker and Pagan. To these folks, Peter and I look like spiritual cheats, trying to sneak fifteen items through the clearly labeled Twelve Item Express Lane of a spiritual life. “Cafeteria spirituality,” I’ve heard it described, expressing the notion that my husband and I are picking and choosing only the tastiest morsels of either religion, like spoiled children loading our plates with desserts, but refusing to eat our vegetables. This i ..read more

I was out in the back yard a few weeks ago, and I looked up and saw the full moon, brilliant and sharp in a clear night sky.  Seeing it, I found myself quietly singing a song by the ritual performance group Mothertongue: "The Moon is high at the witching hour, Children come to this place of power; Our hands are raised to four directions, Spirit force is born again." I felt a wave of awareness of the magickal quality of its beauty, very like the feeling I once had of walking into a Benedictine monastery when I was a young man and feeling the Holy Spirit settling over my shoulders like a ..read more

Cat at Laurelin.  Peter Bishop, 2011. Welcome to the new, hopefully improved Quaker Pagan Reflections. Between leaving Patheos Pagan and this post, Peter has finished the last edit on his novel and begun to pitch it to agents, I have been in negotiations with Anne Newkirk Niven of Pagan Square to carry our blog starting this fall, we have redesigned our layout, and--oh yes! I have also retired from my work as a high school English teacher. It has been a summer like any other, in many ways: bike rides and trips to the beach, gardening and canning and time with friends. It has a ..read more

The Quick Version This will be our last post for the Patheos Pagan channel. We’ll keep writing, and you will always find us at Quakerpagan.org. Our archives will appear both here and also at Patheos, as is customary for their bloggers who leave that site. (We will not be transferring comments, so if you are looking for an old discussion after one of our posts, you will find it there.) For Those Who Want to Know: Why We Are Leaving Like a number of other Pagan bloggers, my husband and I were not happy with the most recent contract we Patheos offered us. Actually, I haven’t been hap ..read more

Our hemlock tree is dying. Seventy feet tall or more, its feathery top boughs filter the light below.  Its triple trunk, hard roots, and burnished needles dominate the yard.  It cradles the altar Peter shaped to fit its branches.   Hemlock Tree and Clouds. Cat Chapin-Bishop, 2015. We have celebrated Lammas beneath this tree, watched its branches snare the moon, and carefully skirted the faerie ring at its feet. World Tree, Tree of Life, stubborn, strong, it shelters hundred wild creatures. Our hemlock tree is sacred.   And it is dying, in spite of ..read more

I read poetry in the mornings. Or theology. Or I journal. Sometimes I meditate, occasionally I will put a prayer into words. It’s a daily spiritual practice, and it helps keep me grounded and centered and sane. It also draws me into thinking about the deepest levels of reality. I wonder about the relationship between human consciousness and the Divine. I read Plotinus and the Sefer Yetzirah and Erwin Schrödinger and I sit with their thoughts as I might sit staring into the heart of an intricate puzzle, working at it some with my mind but also just letting their insights soak into my unconscio ..read more