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Morning glory and mint growing together over an almost completely covered lawn chair.
A piece of our yard is the most peaceful of war zones, as morning glory and mint fight for dominance.

I had a beautiful weekend. On Friday evening, Silver Spiral had a belated Litha. It was a gorgeous ritual. In the power raising, the group was given a fairly simple poem to turn into a chant. It started as just rhythmic speaking, than acquired melody, then evolved into a call and response with a complex clapping rhythm.

On Saturday morning, I went to my weekly Tai Chi class. The instructor was emphasizing the importance of paying attention to the group's timing: pushing forward together, turning together, kicking together. Doing the Tai Chi set smoothly as a group requires paying attention to the people on all sides of you and matching your timing to theirs. It also means making constant tiny adjustments to your positioning, taking some smaller or larger steps here and there or nudging yourself forward or back in order to keep spacing even and keep the lines straight. You have your workout to do, but you are also part of the whole. Ideally everyone in that whole values both of those things so the whole works as one while the individuals also work and balance their bodies in the ways they need as individuals.

Silver Spiral's rituals are firmly grounding in consent culture practices. When it is "just family" at rituals, we often rely on our long-standing mutual understandings about consent and participation, but we sometimes use an explicit acknowledgment, especially when running a public ritual:

We stand here as empowered and free individuals. We are each able to make our own choices about coming to this circle, about staying in this circle, and about how to participate in the ritual. You may leave at any time and for any reason, return whenever you want, and sit out any activity. We ask of each other only that we don't interfere with the experience of other participants.

That isn't comprehensive, of course: we do ask more of participants than just not interfering with each other's experience. A ritual is a whole that is more than the sum of the individuals in it, but that requires that all participants put effort into it.

Friday's ritual's chant started as a slightly ragged spoken poem as we figured out the words. As we found our own individual ways, we also came together. Even as I slipped into a light trance, I could find ways to follow the group's shifting chant. I could find a place where my voice belonged and hear it contribute to the whole.

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Picture of three medical signs: radiology, nuclear medicine, and "caution: lasers".Due to some mysterious symptoms and random pain, I went from a very active person to being mostly house-bound very quickly in 2017. In the search for answers, I've been shot with lasers, radiation, electricity, ultrasound, magnetic resonance, and xrays... I should be a superhero by now.

I'm very lucky that my job let me work from home during the worst of my pain, but I couldn't hide my absence from the people in the office and had to be quite public about what was going on with my health. Being open about physical pain is still easier than talking about psychological pain or mental health concerns with all their stigmas, but it still made me feel vulnerable. Once I was able to return to the office, I took to smiling through everything again, though sometimes someone would catch me in a weak moment and their innocent inquiry of "how are you?"1 would get them more information than they'd expected.

Doing ritual with other people can be very vulnerable. Good (effective and ethical) ritual doesn't force intimacy, but opens the possibilities for participants to connect with each other, with their higher selves, with the powers of nature, and/or with deities2. But the road to get to that point is paved with vulnerability, often with potholes.

For the person who has written a ritual and is now leading it, there is the vulnerability of an artist presenting their work to the public, with the added pressure that the "audience" is participating in the art and if they don't fully buy in and participate, the art could fail. The work could be gorgeous and powerful, but might not work because the group isn't a good match for the theme, because people are distracted by problems in their lives, because the location wasn't suitable3, or because of a hundred other reasons that maybe the leader could have predicted or maybe they couldn't control. And all you can do as is plan as best you can, then take a deep breath and give your perfect little ritual4 over to the group.

There's also vulnerability in being a participant in a ritual. Agreeing to step into sacred space ideally means opening yourself to the experience someone else has designed for you, and even in a long-running group5, you can't be sure of exactly what that will mean. In a public ritual or within a new group, this will be magnified. And if you are asked to call a quarter or otherwise embody a role, you are public speaking (a very common fear) and ideally you are putting energy into that role. Being willing to call a quarter or deity, means taking on a responsibility, and using someone else's words and in public besides.

In my experience, the best rituals are ones where the person putting on the ritual has put heart and soul into their plan and maybe feels some fear in putting it out into the world6 and where the participants feel safe enough in the context of that ritual to say true things with conviction. Everyone involved has to agree to a certain amount of vulnerability for it to work.

Shared pain is lessened; shared joy, increased - and both require an open heart to share and to hear. I may have been pushed into vulnerability at work, but it has been a blessing. In talking about my health liminality, others have felt comfortable coming to me to sympathize because of their own health struggles. I had no idea how many people in my daily life were waiting for answers or had a diagnosed chronic condition to manage, but none of us are alone - none of us feel as alone - if we are willing to share.

Pagans are often proudly independent people. But creating healthy communities and strong Circles requires a certain amount of openness to each other, and we will have to find ways to be strong and vulnerable at the same time, at least when together. The magic lives in the vulnerability shared.

1


Chairs set up around an altar.

There's an ideal image of a witches' coven in ritual: A group in matching robes standing around an altar in the moonlight. The altar would be laid with a lovely cloth and be bright with candles with incense smoke curling around simple, beautiful, matching tools. The coven's hands are held high and they are ready to chant and dance and work magic. It's an image seen on many Pagan books and magazines. It's an image I was trying to recreate in the first rituals I did... often to the detriment of the ritual's content and focus.

Over time, I've moved towards focusing on substance over style in my rituals, and the practical needs of my spiritual community has overridden any desire to have our rites look like a magazine cover. Robes went first; we simply didn't have the desire to all get any sort of special clothing. Next to go was the moonlight; rituals, even ones centered around the moon, sometimes had to be in the afternoon or right after work. Incense was given up due to allergies. Most recently, we've given up standing and dancing, at least temporarily. At this year's Lammas ritual, out of the six people who were able to attend, three were unable to stand without pain and one had her tiny baby with her.

Over the course of adapting rituals to the needs of a group with mobility issues, we've learned a few helpful things:

- I've found that both the group energy and the mechanics of the ritual work best if everyone's on the same level: all standing, or all seated in chairs, or all seated on the floor. We try to have chairs that are roughly the same height. If we're sitting on the floor, an altar that is very low or even just a cloth right on the floor is important so people can see each other and what's happening.

- If the ritual is going to include holding hands or passing items, it is important to place the chairs close enough together and to choose an altar small enough to fit in the centre, rather than having an altar that's too big and having people too far apart.

- Getting in and out of a circle of chairs can be awkward, so circle casting is best either done from a stationary position or by walking around the inside of the circle of people if there's enough room. When planning, be aware that chairs take up more room than standing people, so your room will fill up very quickly.

- If possible, encourage people to sit up straight and at the edge of their chair to keep energy and physical attention on the ritual.

- Cross-calling the quarters: The person calling East sits in the West, therefore facing East, and so on. I saw a group use this technique when doing very large outdoor rituals because it made it easier for the whole group to hear, but it is also really effective in a group where people can't easily turn to face the quarter being called.

- Dancing might be out, but a lot of other energy raising techniques work just as well in a seated ritual: drumming and chanting, meditations and visualizations, etc. If more movement seems required, there are lots of options with a bit of creativity: clapping, stomping feet, passing items around, and hand and arm gestures.

At Lammas, we made for a very different looking circle than that Wiccan 101 book cover: jeans and t-shirts, sitting in kitchen chairs in a ring around an altar covered with a sarong and cluttered with a diverse collection of tools and a bottle of cinnamon whiskey. But the magic was undeniable.


Red Beltane flower This week, I attended an online conference for my day job. One of the themes was community building. I mentioned that my mantra for community building for my spiritual community is "work together, eat together, pray together" and I noted that you'd probably need an alternative to "pray" for a secular community. One of the other people suggested "grow together", harkening back to an earlier conversation comparing creating community to growing a garden. "Grow together" made me groan out loud. Luckily, being an online conference, no one heard that and I could compose a reasonable response.

There are two reasons I didn't like "grow together". The first - the one I gave in response at the conference - was that it is a result of community, not a way to create community. The second, unstated reason, was that I don't like metaphors.

Metaphors are useful when trying to explain abstract concepts in more concrete terms. Creating a community is just like growing a garden... until you actually want to get down to doing either one. If you want to do either, eventually you have to stop talking in pretty abstracts and make an action plan.

I like "work, eat, pray" for my spiritual family, but there are lots of other actions that could be considered crucial to community building, depending on the community: celebrate together, sweat together, sing together, play together, learn together... but since a Pagan community isn't a garden, we don't grow together; since it isn't a web or a blanket, we don't weave together; and since it isn't a ship, we don't sail or row together.

For Silver Spiral, "work together" means pulling invasive weeds in a local park, making giant batches of perogies, serving on community organizations, and painting walls in each other's homes and businesses. "Eat together" means preparing meals as a group, all contributing to our amazing potlucks, and enjoying fantastic conversations over food. "Pray together" means sharing sacred space, thinking of each other, and writing and rehearsing rituals for the larger community. These are real actions that lead to deeper friendships, good memories, positive associations, and, ultimately, that elusive feeling of community. No abstractions needed.


A view from below of a branching tree Last weekend, my spiritual family gathered around a dinner table to talk theology and eat and drink. It was the first Silver Spiral Pagan Symposium, as inspired by this post in "Under the Ancient Oaks".

The Symposium was doubling as my birthday party, so my partner and I had hired a chef as a special luxury for all of us. As fun as the potluck aspect sounded, for this occasion, we wanted it to be as little work as possible for everyone, especially since it was all planned for a Friday night. Besides overnight stuff for those staying over, the only thing our guests were asked to bring was a theology or philosophy question.

We came in our all beautiful chaos, most straight from work through truly awful traffic. Altogether, the Symposium was made up of most of the local Silver Spiral members and one from out of town, spouses from various spiritual backgrounds, three young kids, and a puppy who is in training to be a seeing eye dog. We came out of the pouring rain with overnight bags and toddlers in tow. Almost all of us were later arriving than we'd planned to be, we almost forgot to set the table, and we'd poured a first round of drinks and started nibbling on the appetizers before the last guests made it in. Throughout the multi-course dinner, there were breaks for the chef to tell us about the next course, for taking the dog out, to deal with children arguing, for baby bedtime, and for taking medications. Our conversations split and wandered from deep theology to community gossip to mundane things and back. We only poured two offerings. We didn't get to most people's questions. At one point, I was in full rant mode about something - cultural appropriation, Pagan fundamentalism, something else? - when I saw the chef step towards the dining room holding a cake with lit candles, see that it didn't look like quite the moment and start turning around. I was the only one facing that direction, so I interrupted myself by laughing and waving my birthday cake into the room.

It wasn't what John described in his post: an orderly dinner with each course proceeded by an offering and a question and an evening of thoughtful, focused, adult conversation. But what it was was beautiful: the extended Pagan family in all its glory, ending with sipping a truly perfect mead at around 2 am.

In the midst of all that, we did have some great theology discussions. Silver Spiral had a head start on those because our previous discussions had covered a lot of basics about what each of us believe, so we could dig directly into more specific topics such as why make offerings, the politics of being a nature religion on unceded First Nations territory, where we think we really are when in a sacred circle or ritual space, anthrocentricism, what makes a good leader in Paganism... We took good advantage of what we did know about each other, but we also drew on the different backgrounds of our non-member guests, such as a Unitarian and someone with an intense science background (who also told us about the sweetening effect of artichokes), which enriched the conversation further. We all brought open minds, which was most important.

It's not something we will do every month or even every quarter - too much rich food, too much wine, and too little sleep, especially for the parents of small children - but we will do it again. The most important part of our symposium was definitely the people, but great food and wine does facilitate conversation and some guidelines about the topics helps guide the group. Attempting to exert too much control over an evening like this would meant missing out on the magic of a full family experience. The only thing I would have changed is putting it on a Saturday night or starting a little later so people didn't have to rush as much.

Our evening may not have been "productive", but it was spiritually nourishing and a lot of fun. I did learn some really interesting things about my friends' beliefs and got some food for thought (that will probably show up in this blog soon). I highly recommend putting together your own version of the modern Pagan symposium.

Series to date:
Our big questions - part 1
Our big questions - part 2
Our big questions - part 3: Ritual structure 2.0
Our big questions – part 4: Circling from awkward to graceful (and back)
Our big questions - part 5: Hacking our religion

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A cat with a pen and a noteboook I don't care what you believe so much as how you behave and what you do; my Paganism is one of orthopraxy. My rituals are not based on beliefs but on what works to create feelings of connection and meaningful spiritual experiences for participants. I consider rituals to be spiritual art. I'm mostly OK with how pretentious that sounds.

My spiritual family, the Silver Spiral Collective, is a happily motley crew of mixed Pagan beliefs and personal practices. Some of us have training in a variety of traditions and some are entirely self-trained. Our little Collective is almost 17 years old now, and some of had been practicing together for a couple of years before that. We've missed very few Sabbats in all those years, so we've probably done more than 125 rituals together as Silver Spiral1. We've got a huge archive of rituals in our memories (and, luckily, on our shared Google Drive).

We have talked belief before and found some common ground, but it is practice that brings us together. We want to practice better, connect more, and reach for deeper and more meaningful experiences together. To that end, we have always been a group that likes to play with the usual rules. We deconstruct, reconstruct, hack, and experiment, so some of those 125-ish rituals have been successful and some have been flops. But up until now, we have each been left to do our own analysis of what has worked and what wasn't (I've done some of my analysis on this blog). In the spirit of open source religion, we got together to hack our religion.

Here's how we did it: everyone chose a favourite ritual and answered a set of questions about it in advance:

1. Without looking at the full script, what do you remember most about the ritual? What stood out in terms of activities, senses, words, etc.?

2. Thinking of what stood out, how did it make you feel during the ritual? Why?

3. If you have the whole ritual script, were there things in there that you had forgotten about? How did they contribute to the ritual, or how did they interfere?

4. What made the ritual as a whole successful for you? Consider theme, environment/atmosphere, activities, pacing, leadership, etc. Also consider the influence of your preferences for certain times of year or holidays.

5. What other activities or rituals have felt similar to you (whether from Silver Spiral rituals or elsewhere)?

One afternoon, we gathered around a kitchen table with laptops and tablets and our answers on a shared Google doc. Technology is a wonderful thing - one member participated via Skype so she didn't share her cold, and we could all assist with taking notes - but there is something magical about face-to-face (besides the snacks, though we do have truly great snacks). In less than 3 hours, we accomplished more than we could have in weeks of email discussion.

We had a plan and a process going into the discussion: a person would talk a bit about their chosen ritual and their answers to the questions, then we discussed it as a group. Our only stated rule was to focus on the positive: talk about what works for you rather than what doesn't. Unspoken, but known from our past discussions, was to own your own opinions, to not assume agreement, to approach with curiosity, and to be kind and respectful.

Despite these understandings, there could have been hurt feelings and offended beliefs. Online and with strangers, this topic would have had a good chance of deteriorating into name calling, but our discussion was productive all the way through. A member pointed out that this might be partially because we came together as a group because we liked each other and then we built a practice around that, rather than being pushed together by shared beliefs. So it is right there in our origins: orthopraxy over orthodoxy and practice over faith.

That's me in the circle
That's me at the altar
Hacking my religion...

Series to date:
Our big questions - part 1
Our big questions - part 2
Our big questions - part 3: ritual structure 2.0
Our big questions – part 4: circling from awkward to graceful (and back)

3


Cherry blossoms in full bloom on a rainy day

I listen to a lot of storytelling podcasts, so I'm afraid I don't remember where I heard the story, but someone was talking about a horribly embarrassing situation and how one young person responded: "Awkward." The storyteller, an older man, expressed admiration for a generation for whom the major value scale is graceful versus awkward, instead of appropriate versus inappropriate or right versus wrong1.

When you are trying something new, there is often a period during which things don't work well. Whether it is that your limbs won't seem to do the right things while doing a new exercise or sport, or whether it is running into your partner repeatedly while trying to make dinner together for the first time, or whether it is circling with a new ritual group, there will be missed cues, confusion, and overall awkwardness. You will lack smoothness, flow, grace. And that's normal when something is new.

When it comes to a ritual group or structure, I am wondering when to drop something that isn't fitting in as smoothly as you might want. Right now, there a couple of places where Silver Spiral has to pause to consult each other about the order of things in our new ritual structure, such as: ground, cast, then quarters; or cast, quarters, then ground? And sometimes the grounding meditation gets skipped accidentally. As I see it, we have a choice to drop that part of our new structure, revise that part in some way to try to make it easier to remember, or push the group to memorize it. Which one we go with may demand on how much awkwardness we're willing to tolerate, or even welcome.

There's freedom in a ritual structure you know so well that you don't have to continuously think about what comes next. It allows you to be present in each moment instead of second guessing your next move. It allows everyone to do their part gracefully and contribute equally. However, one of the theories about the usefulness of ritual is that it engages and focuses our conscious mind, allowing our sub-conscious to do the magic, so if the ritual is so rote that we can do it without thought, our conscious can be distracted by other things and we are no longer fully in the ritual. I have said some of the same prayer or bits of liturgy so often that I can get to the end and only then realize that I've said the whole thing without a bit of thought or intention.

Though we may want to cultivate the grace that comes with a familiar structure well-run, there's also value in a bit of awkwardness. Putting moments into our ritual structure that require concentration or thought seems like it could help us not just run through it mindlessly; it prevents us from ever having it down pat. Maybe we need things to stay just a little awkward, a little challenging to remember, just to keep us fully engaged.

Series to date:
Our big questions - part 1
Our big questions - part 2
Our big questions - part 3: ritual structure 2.0

2


mythumbnailHaving decided that we wanted a ritual structure of our own and that we wanted to use our own words instead of those of other traditions as much as possible, my spiritual family, the Silver Spiral Collective, set out to revamp how we do what we do.

We started out on our email list. We set up an email thread for each part of the ritual: cleansing the space and welcoming participants, casting and cutting the circle, grounding, calling and thanking the elements/quarters, invoking and thanking deity, and blessing the food and drink. Everyone who wanted to contributed to each thread with their own writing from past rituals or new pieces of writing designed just for this. There was some discussion and variations suggested, but for the most part, writing was simply posted without comment in preparation for our in-person discussion night.

Just before the discussion night, I copied and pasted the ideas from each thread into a single document, sorted by ritual component and stripped of author's names. When we gathered together, we each had a copy of this document and a pen. We also came equipped with some understanding of each others beliefs from our previous discussion nights, a history of working together (some of us have been circling together for over 16 years), and an openness and lack of ego.

This could have been a very difficult process without that last part. I take pride in my rituals and I usually like my own writing; I assume this is the same for most people who write group rituals. Unless you believe that you are channeling the ritual directly from the divine, it is your work and by presenting to a group in a religious context, you are saying that it is worthy of being part of their spirituality. You have to believe that you have something to offer in order to put on a ritual. If even one person had come into our discussion night wanting to push their words on the group, it probably would have been a much less productive and satisfying evening, but everyone came in with open minds. Though I had sometimes forgotten who the author of each piece was, in the cases where I did remember, it was never the author who spoke up that that was their favourite; someone else always had to speak for it.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts at scheduling, not everyone was able to make it to the discussion. Luckily, the people who write the most rituals for the Collective were all able to attend, and it was agreed that nothing would be set in stone; whatever we came up with would be subject to everyone's approval and that feedback and re-writing was expected as we used the structure in upcoming rituals.

We did each ritual component separately, working through the ritual in order. First, one person would read all of the pieces of writing for that section out loud. Then we would gradually eliminate some of the options as being too specific to the ritual they were originally written for, too difficult to recite smoothly or too long for our purpose, or not quite matching the beliefs of the group. This was done very gently, with lots of "I love this, but..." and I know my feelings weren't hurt when my words got struck off some lists very early. When we were left with fewer options, we dissected them and what we liked about each one, then started combining bits from each in different combinations until we found something that was both pleasing to our ears and to our spirits. Sometimes the end result was almost exactly one of the original pieces of writing, sometimes it was a combination of multiple pieces, and sometimes we almost ended up writing something entirely new together. We spent a lot of time reading the drafts out loud over and over again, teasing out how a single word added or eliminated changed the rhythm or the meaning.

In the course of discussing opening procedures for rituals, we did stumble upon an odd little thing: not all of us agreed about the purpose of something we'd been doing as part of our rituals for years! When writing the original Silver Spiral ritual structure, Teresa and I had incorporated a meditation taken from a different tradition. We'd been guests in that tradition's rituals a couple of times and enjoyed the meditation. In discussing what to replace it with, we discovered that Teresa thought of the meditation as a personal grounding exercise to encourage each individual to be completely present, while I had always thought of it as a uniting meditation meant to bring everyone's energy and states of mind together. It was a revelation to find out that the meditation we'd been doing together for probably a decade or more meant such different things to each of us and yet worked for both of us anyway. A quick poll of the rest of the group found that the group was split about 50/50. As a group, we wrote a short meditation that incorporated elements of both, but with an emphasis on the individual grounding aspect because our re-written circle casting already had a number of uniting elements.

By the end of the evening, we had a working draft: Silver Spiral Ritual Structure 2.0. We used it in several rituals and after each one, we checked in with each other about how it was working. There were several weaknesses that we could only see once the structure was being used. For example, our circle cutting procedure was too short and felt perfunctory in version 2.0, and then was too long and drawn out in version 2.1. Our 2.2 version might be just right, but it will need to be tried at least one more time before we know for sure. As well, we have decided that we want to include a more formal procedure for our offerings to deity during our food and drink portion of the ritual. This is an interesting development, actually, because we had no such procedure in ritual structure 1.0; offerings were made somewhat casually after everything had been passed around and some of whatever was left was set aside or was simply left in the goblet or dish to be taken outside after. But during the trial runs of 2.0 and 2.1, the idea of a dedicated offering bowl and a planned way of making offerings was suggested and seemed to be universally agreed to; it seems like an idea whose time has come for us. I added an offering to our 2014 Imbolc ritual, which was the first to use ritual structure 2.2, and now we will discuss and refine that.

The process of developing a ritual structure that is satisfying to everyone has highlighted the things we all have in common (though individually we may all call different powers at the quarters at different times, we all agree on the elements as one good option) and the places where we diverge (the order in which the elements are thanked: same as when calling or reversed?). Sometimes seeking consensus means watering down everything to the lowest common denominator, so I was watching for that tendency going into the discussion night, but I don't feel that that's what happened. Those of us who prefer more elaborate calls and invocations definitely had to compromise some in the spirit of making everything adaptable to a variety of ritual themes and easy to remember, but I feel that we did keep things flexible enough to allow for precision in calling when desired. In the end, we built a suitable container for more challenging ritual content; a way to gracefully get into the same mental and spiritual space together and to deliberately bring ourselves back out. It was what we were seeking when we kicked off this process with some questions about what we believe.

I doubt we'll ever be done and have a final and forever ritual structure. In fact, I hope we keep evolving it to meet the needs of new members and our future selves. I expect there will be Silver Spiral Ritual Structure 2.4 and 2.5... and maybe 3.0 one day. And maybe "our big questions" parts 4 through 10 or more; there's always more to discuss and learn about each other and ourselves.

Series to date:
Our big questions - part 1
Our big questions - part 2
Our big questions - part 4: circling from awkward to graceful (and back)

2


mythumbnailAs discussed in "Our big questions - part 1", my spiritual family, the Silver Spiral Collective, has been having a series of formal conversations about faith and spirituality. It started with one conversation about each of our personal beliefs and practices, which led us realize that we wanted to have more conversations and start revising our ritual structure to better match our beliefs and needs as a community. Our second round of questions, therefore, focused on our ritual needs:

Do we want/need a standard ritual structure?

Do what extent can/should we deviate from the standard ritual structure?

If we decide to keep a standard ritual structure, are some parts mandatory or are all parts optional?

If we decide to keep a standard ritual structure, is the one we're using working?

How do you write/design a ritual?

As with the first time, the questions were posted to our email list in advance. I also posted a copy of our ritual structure at the time, annotated with comments on why we had the rules we had and making sure everything was properly attributed. We'd been using minor variations on the same structure for probably 10 years, so it was good to remind ourselves of why we made certain choices and to make sure our newer members knew where we got bits of our liturgy1.

This conversation was less personal than the last one and therefore went a lot faster, though we did use the same general structure to allow everyone time to speak. At the end of the evening, we did have a consensus that we liked having a ritual structure and that we thought we could improve on our current one. We were especially interested in replacing some of the words we were using from other traditions with our own words.

Where we did have a bit more variation in opinion was in how strict to be about our ritual structure. Some of us are more interested in seeing about how much depth could be achieved in rituals by sticking very strictly to a structure, and some of us are more interested in deconstructing ritual and in experimenting with how the container affects the contents. We decided to be very strict about using the structure while we were still in development (realizing that this was going to be a process that would probably require revisions as we tried it in practice) and for some time - a year, probably - after, and then we would open it up to one-off changes as required by the ritual. We did decide on a general rule that we wouldn't change the structure just for the sake of messing with it; all changes would be with purpose.

The next step was going to be working on the ritual structure itself, which was clearly going to require a night of its own. We set a date and went back to our email list to prepare for the next step. That'll be part 3 in this ongoing series.

Series to date:
Our big questions - part 1
Our big questions - part 3: ritual structure 2.0
Our big questions - part 4: circling from awkward to graceful (and back)

3


mythumbnailAt the Gathering for Life on Earth 2012, Robyn, Richard, and I ended up having a number of wonderful conversations with various members of the Pagan community and amongst ourselves, leading us towards the notion that it was time for our spiritual family, the Silver Spiral Collective, to have some more conversations about beliefs and spiritual needs. We'd had these conversations before, but the discussions had been informal, had not always included all members, and had not been happening recently, which meant that we didn't always know where everyone's spiritual evolution was taking them. We also had more relatively new members at the time, which meant that we were definitely due for a planned and organized sit-down.

The Silver Spiral Collective has always been a work in progress. We formed in 1998 because we were all Pagans of a similar age, in similar life stages, with similar enough beliefs to enjoy circling together. After forming a group, we gradually created rules about our rituals (must include a power raising, no junk food for the sacred feast, etc.), which evolved into an optional ritual structure, and is still changing to this day into a new ritual structure that has been created out of where we are now as individuals and a group.

We started this round by gathering questions from all the members. Everyone was invited to contribute their questions in advance to the email list we're all on. With fewer than a dozen members and some questions that overlapped significantly, this resulted in a good number of questions covering a lot of areas, but not an overwhelming number. I took all the questions, re-organize them into an order that made thematic sense, then re-posted the list to everyone at least a week before the event so everyone could prepare their answers in whatever way felt comfortable to them. Some of us came to the discussion nights with answers that were virtually essays, some came with notes, and some just spoke from the heart in the moment, but I think everyone found it useful to know what the questions were in advance.

The second thing we considered was how to make sure everyone spoke on every topic. We have some introverts and some extroverts in our group, so it is easy for some to sit back and not contribute while others dominate the conversation. We decided to go with "an authoritarian imposition of rules to ensure the democratic distribution of the conversation" (a paraphrase of Robyn's great turn of phrase). We started each round with one person reading the question out, then we went clockwise around the circle, each answering the question without interruption. We didn't allow for questions or discussions between answers, but simply allowed each person their own monologue. We ended up not having to set time limits on individual's answers, as everyone was very careful to keep their answers on track and not allow themselves to ramble, but a timer was an option we were holding in reserve. At the end of each round, we had a period of open discussion to ask each other for more information and to compare and contrast our opinions. When that conversation would start to get off topic or would simply lose steam, the person who answered first on the previous round would read the next question and the person to their left would answer first, and so on.

Here are the questions from our first discussion night that gave us the most interesting and thought-provoking answers, in my opinion:

On the colour triangle described in the article Pagan Deism: Three Views, where do you place yourself?

What is an essential part of ritual for you (like what has to be included for it to feel right)?

Do you practice religious/spiritual things in your own time?

What does the creation of sacred space look like for you?

What is a successful Silver Spiral ritual for you (what do you want to get out of our group's rituals)?

How do you feel about our current level of "ritual standardization"?

I highly recommend that everyone read the "Pagan Deism" article before a discussion like this. The answers to that first question were particular enlightening for us, as we discovered that most of us had some "yellow" component to our individual beliefs, and many thought they were the only one.

Following the discussion night, I felt closer to my fellow members of Silver Spiral and felt like I could design better rituals and could share deeper spiritual experiences with the group. Not too much later, we scheduled a second conversation, as we all came up with even more questions for each other. Later posts will cover the subsequent questions and the evolution of our ritual format.

Series to date:
Our big questions - part 2
Our big questions - part 3: ritual structure 2.0
Our big questions - part 4: circling from awkward to graceful (and back)



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