The Shaken Path: A Christian Priest's Exploration of Modern Pagan Belief and Practice
272
The Shaken Path: A Christian Priest's Exploration of Modern Pagan Belief and Practice
272eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781785355219 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hunt, John Publishing |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Paul Cudby is the Bishop of Birmingham's Adviser for New Religious Movements, spending a lot of time conversing with Pagans. As a vicar he also speaks with Christians, writes about his beliefs, and preaches. Often these interactions become a theme for a paper or, in this case, a book on understanding Paganism from a Christian perspective, a book he has written because no one else seems to have done!
Read an Excerpt
The Shaken Path
A Christian Priest's Exploration of Modern Pagan Belief and Practice
By Paul Cudby
John Hunt Publishing Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Paul CudbyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78535-521-9
CHAPTER 1
What is Belief and What do Pagans Believe?
Introduction
Before we start getting into specifics about the different types of Paganism, we need to take a step backwards and think about belief and what it actually is. Pagan belief and Christian belief have a rather different feel about them, which can mean there are grounds for misunderstanding each other before we have even started. It's a little like the man who pulls up to someone in a car in the middle of nowhere to ask for directions only to be met with the phrase, 'Arrr, you don't want to be starting from here.' The reality is that, in practice, we are starting from two different places, so we need to go on a small excursion to understand what we mean by belief to begin with. Christians will often feel that they have a stronger foundation for their beliefs because they have a holy text, the Bible, whereas Pagans have no single source that they all depend on. The intriguing thing is that both parties look at the other's stance as being a weakness.
What is belief?
To illustrate what I mean about starting from different places:
It had been a delightful evening of rich and wide-ranging conversation, debate and sharing of stories. After meeting a Pagan couple, both of whom were also musicians, at a Moot they had invited Alison and me to share a meal in their caravan later that week. We had spent a lively evening talking about the different things we believed, listening to each others' stories and playing some songs together. The conversation finally turned to the differences in the ways we believe. 'You need to understand', he explained to me, 'that the focus in Christianity is on orthodoxy, whereas in Paganism it is orthopraxy.' I must have looked puzzled and so he explained what he meant: 'For Christians, you all worship in different ways in different denominations, but you all believe more or less the same thing – that's orthodoxy. But for us as Pagans, we may all perform the same ritual within the same circle, yet we can each believe something quite different within the same shared experience – that's orthopraxy.'
Christians tend to test what they believe against a sacred text. Pagans simply don't, and many of the most acute differences stem from this. The result is that, despite our many differences and denominations, Christianity tends to have far less diversity of belief because of the desire to be sure that what is being experienced spiritually has an explanation that has been tried, tested and certified as being genuine. In other words, with the exception of some of the more extreme Pentecostal movements, Christians tend towards being fearful of a new spiritual experience until they are sure it's not counterfeit. Pagans, on the other hand, relish new spiritual experiences and accept them at face value. I've lost count of the number of times that I've heard the phrase, 'It is what it is', from a Pagan. That is not to say that they have no fear, because many of the Pagans I've met have had troubling spiritual experiences too, and the older, wiser ones recognise that not all spiritual experiences are inherently helpful or good. But the clear distinction is that for a Pagan they decide for themselves what they think is happening whereas Christians tend to look to a higher authority, either a minister, something they've been taught in the past, or the Bible. Immediately, you can see that there is a tendency towards a hierarchical belief system within Christianity as opposed to a more free, maybe even anarchic, spirituality within Paganism. Each has their own drawbacks. Christians can tend towards a lack of maturity (and even a sense of fear) because they let someone else tell them what is right or wrong, whereas Pagans can move more swiftly to an outlook based on making up their own minds. The flip side of this is that the caution exercised by Christians should tend to keep them out of spiritual dangers, whereas an inexperienced Pagan could inadvertently find themself becoming a plaything of a malevolent spiritual entity, or simply having a naive belief that something entirely explicable in natural terms was some kind of spiritual experience. Given that experience is so important to Pagans, let us go a little further with this and see how much both experience and context shapes what we believe.
Belief and experience
The Oxford Dictionary defines belief as:
'... an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.'
For example, there are plenty of people who believe that our planet has been visited by aliens. There is no substantiated proof, but for them such visitation makes sense of the scant unproven evidence which exists. If we were to turn purely to religious beliefs then I would prefer to describe belief with my own definition:
Belief is the constructs that we develop with time in order to make sense of an experienced spiritual reality.
Let me give you an example from my own experience. The following took place when I was a new Christian, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. I had been on the receiving end of a conversion experience that had radically changed the direction I was taking in life, and had started attending a Church-based youth group that was able to provide me with some solid age-appropriate grounding in my new faith. I was also an altar server at a very middle of the road Church of England church. This episode took place a week after I had a sharp disagreement with the vicar who was absolutely convinced that angels, as supernatural beings, did not exist. It's important that you understand that context in terms of what happened next:
We are in the middle of the communion part of the service. The vicar is in the sanctuary area in the church, standing behind the altar. My position as a server during this part of the service is kneeling at a stall outside the sanctuary, off to one side. The vicar has just completed the Eucharistic prayer and we are all about to say the Lord's Prayer. Suddenly, and with no prompting, I feel wrapped in an incredibly intense love that feels like human love feels, but goes so much further than I can begin to describe. I am aware that I am loved absolutely and completely by God. The experience doesn't last for very long, about which, in one sense, I am glad because the intensity of feeling is so unbelievably powerful that I'm not sure for how long I could stand it. But then, with my eyes closed, I have a vision: two angels are coming down through the roof of the church to the altar, one following the other. The details have blurred with time, but it is absolutely clear to me what they are since they are large and a very pure white. Intriguingly, I can't see their faces – which just seem blank. Then, in an instant, the entire experience is over, but now I know for sure that the vicar was wrong – angels do exist.
I still believe this. That was the only true visionary experience of my life and although it was a long time ago, it left a lasting effect. However, the main reason for my telling this story is because it illustrates my definition of belief. What I felt was love and what I saw were two large bright white beings coming through the ceiling. What I believed about it was based on the context and the teachings of Christianity. The love that I felt, I believe, came from God. The beings, I believe, were angels. I have no evidence to support this, but it is consistent with the scriptures that I hold dear. However, it could be interpreted quite differently. In his book Pagans and Christians, Gus diZerega describes his own conversion experience to a Pagan path. In this context he has an encounter with 'the Lady', whom he interprets as the Goddess who comes to him with an absolutely overwhelming love. He experienced something similar to what I had felt, but his world view, and the context within which it all took place, led him to a different set of beliefs. We both had incredible and life-changing spiritual experiences, but we interpreted them quite differently because of the contexts within which they happened. It therefore follows that what we believe about a spiritual experience depends a lot on the context in which we live and the religious constructs that we have developed for ourselves or adopted from others with whom we have decided to share a religion. Where we differ, though, is that within Christianity, because it has a sacred text and a huge number of traditions that remain anchored to that text, the interpretation of a spiritual experience tends towards having an internal consistency. My interpretation of my vision as being of angels and of experiencing the love of God is internally consistent with the beliefs and experiences of Christians for two thousand years. For the modern Pagan, though, with the exception of Heathenism, there are few sacred texts and none held with the same regard as how Christians view the Bible, although there are plenty of traditions and stories. This means that a spiritual experience has far less to which it can be anchored and it is therefore likely to be interpreted within a much wider framework and, because no Pagan paths make a claim to exclusivity, each one is counted as valid.
The outcome of all this is that I suspect that diZeriga and I would look at each other's experiences and interpret them differently. I look at diZeriga's encounter with the Goddess and think to myself that, since I believe there is only one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that God has both masculine and feminine characteristics, diZeriga has experienced exactly the same God as I have, but he's interpreted it differently. I therefore interpret his Goddess encounter as being with the same God that I worship. I would imagine, though, that diZeriga would be unlikely to do the same reinterpretation exercise with my experience. If he follows the model that most Pagans I have met do, then he will quite happily accept that I encountered angels and that I was loved by God, but with the understanding that I was loved by one God, but not the same God as his Goddess.
I hope that these stories have illustrated the reason for this excursion into understanding the link between belief and experience. It is not a simple matter to say what Pagans believe because the foundations for their beliefs are totally different from that of Christianity since they are not anchored to a sacred text. What Pagans believe is far more dependent, therefore, on which Pagan you ask, what tradition they follow and their own individual context within which they have interpreted their spiritual experiences. Indeed, animated conversations sometimes arise amongst Pagans about what is actually 'Pagan' and whether a person or group truly qualifies. Furthermore, in this country you will usually find that Pagans have an eclectic gathering of traditions within their own personal path, especially near the beginning of their journey. With these things in mind then, let us ask the question:
What do Pagans believe?
Answering this is more difficult than you might imagine and, to be honest, the rest of this book is about engaging with this question. What I want to do here is simply provide a foundation on which to build and perhaps one of the first things we need to establish is that Paganism should not be classed as a New Age religion, even though in a few places we can see some crossovers. There is a degree of antipathy amongst many Pagans towards New Age belief, with the latter often derided as 'Fluffy New Agers'. New Age beliefs tend to be an amalgam of various eastern religions and philosophies tied to various popular psychologies all to do with personal growth, (although they might appropriate Pagan titles if it makes a particular therapy more marketable). Pagan beliefs are far more earthy, being tied to the gods and spirits of this land and its plant and animal inhabitants, (with the exception of Heathenism where the balance is shifted more towards the Nordic deities), and the seasons of the year. Paganism is, by and large, an earth-based group of religions which recognise both the beauty and the cruelty of the planet and lives as close to the land as personal circumstances will allow. Indeed the word 'Pagan' comes from the Latin paganus meaning 'Country Person', coming to be used as a term of abuse applied by Romans to the simple country folk as opposed to the more refined city-dweller. It's also worth noting that I make no distinction here between Pagan and Neo-Pagan. I think this is an artificial label since, even if a good deal of what is being ritually practised now is new, the philosophies on which they draw and the stories which are foundational are old. (I have also used a capital letter throughout for Paganism since this is a mark of respect, just as I would with Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam. Pagan authors refer to Christianity not christianity and I wish simply to afford them the same courtesy.)
Here, then, is my definition:
A Pagan is someone whose experiences in the natural world have led them to believe that the world is spiritually alive and diverse, and that through ritual or meditation, both solo and in a group, that world and its inhabitants can be accessed in order to grow personally and spiritually, and to offer help to others in need.
So far so good, except that this definition barely scratches the surface (hence the need for a book!)
The first thing you notice about it is that I don't mention gods in it, but refer simply to the idea of spiritual diversity. This is because if you ask any group of Pagans what gods they believe in you will get a multitude of different answers:
We stood in his shop chatting away jovially. He had told me the story of the healing that he had received through a Pagan ritual. So I asked him who he believed in. He laughed and said, 'I'm a polyatheist. I've believed in all the gods at one time or another, but now I don't believe in any of them!' Yet when I pushed him a little more in this he said, rather more sombrely, that he believed there was one supreme and unapproachable power behind all the expressions of deity.
So at one end of the spectrum you may find Pagans who are atheist, believing that all the gods are simply Jungian archetypes of the self, or, in other words, that each deity is simply a part of yourself that the ritual you are using is allowing you to access and interact with. Some, such as the gentleman above, will go further than this and imagine that there is some kind of inaccessible supreme spiritual power behind this. Progressing from that position, there are others who believe that there is indeed one power which on its own is inaccessible, or only barely accessible, but that the deities which these Pagans honour are the accessible faces of the one Great Spirit. This kind of pseudo-monotheism seems broadly consistent with some aspects of modern Hinduism.
Other Pagans believe that there is no single power but all the gods are exactly that – individual gods with whom one can interact. Some will recognise a hierarchy within their gods, for example amongst Heathens, but for others this is not the case. Regarding the United Kingdom and Ireland, however, and putting Heathenism to one side for reasons that will become clear in Chapter 7, the position that seems to be the most commonly held is a duotheistic one which is that there is a Goddess and a God whose relationship is expressed through the changing seasons of the year. This position is shared by most Wiccans and also, though perhaps to a lesser extent, by many Druids (who are just as likely to be poly-, or monotheists) and I will explore it in far more detail in the chapter concerning Wicca.
One final belief worth considering about deity, is pantheism, because it seems to weave in and out of all of the above, although, as with all Pagan beliefs, it is by no means universal. Pantheism literally translates as 'Everything is God'. For the pantheist, they view themselves, and indeed the whole universal order, as part of God. There are many variations on this definition, but it seems to be a particular characteristic that informs a lot of modern Paganism.
This diversity can be observed at any Pagan informal gathering (called a 'Moot') that usually seem to take place in pubs. This is entirely acceptable to those present. No one is told that what they believe is incorrect. This is in contrast, and perhaps in reaction, to what most Christians find within their own church where there may be a diversity of experiences, but they will all be centred on a belief in the one God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This may lead to a discussion of the different Christian experiences in an attempt to understand who has the correct interpretation of what took place. For most Pagans, though, it is rare to ask if something is correct. They are far more likely to question whether the experience was a helpful one to the individual. This difference is a vital one for Christians seeking to understand Pagans. Christians generally want to be sure that they are believing all the right things and are correct in their belief. Pagans are rarely remotely concerned about this. For them, if the experience was helpful in personal and/or corporate growth, then it was worth having, regardless of the different ways in which it could be interpreted.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Shaken Path by Paul Cudby. Copyright © 2016 Paul Cudby. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements, xiv,Preface The Rt. Revd. David Urquhart, Lord Bishop of Birmingham, 1,
Introduction, 3,
Chapter 1: What is Belief and What do Pagans Believe?, 13,
Chapter 2: Why Are People Drawn to Paganism?, 27,
Chapter 3: Wicca and Witchcraft, 37,
Chapter 4: Druidry, 81,
Chapter 5: Animism and Panpsychism, 127,
Chapter 6: Shamanism, 170,
Chapter 7: Heathenism, 215,
Chapter 8: Becoming What We Were Created to Be and the Role of Forest Church, 235,
Postscript: Silent burning, 248,