I tell stories better through poetry, it’s true. But let me try to string my ideas in a different way: prosaic and common, in the manner that human persons are supposed to communicate. We’ll start in media res.
Scene: the last interfaith group meeting – or, admittedly, my last interfaith group meeting – in Holloway Hall, nondescript couches halfway between pink and brown, glaring white walls. A small group of girls, ones that you could find anywhere, in jeans and ponytails and Keds, except for one who is wearing a spangled scarf on her hair, dressed in some outlandish configuration of DayGlo and metallic fabric.
And there, with the hushed tones that proclaim this is a prayerful experience, the university chaplain presented a small wooden image of a wolf, a shocking orange with deep purple polkadots and zigzags. Next to it, she set another image: a neat white horse, patterned with red, gold and green flowerlike patterns reminiscent of Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs.
The second was a traditional Scandinavian form of folk art, probably acquired somewhere in the chaplain’s native Minnesota. The first was created by some Indian artisan in the same general area. The cultural images merged, she explained in her broad Midwestern accent. What she didn’t say: after the tribe’s forcible conversion to Lutheranism, the kind with weak coffee after a service of bad singing.
She asked the members of the group to think about the wolf, what it means to be different and trying to accommodate two different cultural worlds. The other girls – all Christian except for myself, with my scarf and my Dayglo – furrowed their sweet brows, fishing for moments in their lives when they just didn’t fit in.
Me? I laughed, and then tried to explain to these sugared girls, sweet as Splenda in weak church coffee. “I amthat polkadot wolf,” I said. “As a Pagan, I’ve always been that wolf. I am that wolf right now.” And I tried, in my halting and somewhat humorous way, to explain to these good girls with their pearly white teeth what it meant to be on the outside, to parlay with a world that didn’t want you in it unless you could adapt to their cultural norms.
After that, I had one of those sweetly dismissive messages from the university chaplain: Please don’t return to the interfaith group. From my understanding at the time, they were redefining interfaith as “Christian only.” Maybe they would accept a token Jew or Muslim, a Quaker or a Mormon, but not a Pagan.
You talk a great game about polkadot wolves, reverend.
It’s a funny story, and I laughed about it even at the time, although it stung because complete rejection always stings, even when you expect it. Truth be told, I felt for the university chaplain. I did an independent study with her, which forced this dedicated pastor to mentor a Pagan in a scene that would make Deirdre or Grainne proud. I had the distinct impression that she would have preferred a root canal during a Novocain shortage. But Christian and Midwestern concepts of womanhood as meek, comforting and accommodating left her little ability to refuse me, and so I haunted her office like some sort of weird ghost dressed in metallic silver.
We all know that I went on to get a doctorate in English, studying sci-fi and ecofeminism. But as an undergraduate, my passion was actually in religion, which was my minor. I was working with the chaplain on an independent study of eclecticism and traditionalism in Pagan thought. The goal was to be a 10-page paper. I wrote 50. We talked about the prospect of getting a graduate degree in the sociology of religion, like she herself did.
I probably should have turned that independent study into an official thesis, declared a dual major, any number of things.
I yearned to follow her footsteps. I have a head for hard questions, a need to dive deep into meanings and values. I swim in the sacred.
I truly wanted that graduate degree in religion, but I picked English instead because when you’re a polkadot wolf, some paths – well, a lot of paths — are closed to you.
Poking the Methodists
Recently, I ticked off a few friends by sharing a critique of the mechanisms of prayer (or spellwork, which is also what I was getting at, being Pagan). I won’t rehash it here and now. But a dear friend asked, essentially: Why do you protest so much?
Most people won’t say things directly, but I can read the thoughts in their pauses, in that sigh they barely conceal before speaking: Why do I ask these questions, critique the meanings behind ritual and action, the whys and wherefores – especially when it’s guaranteed to alienate?
During my undergraduate and graduate school years, I took the occasional class in my university’s theo school – a Methodist theo school. I loved these classes, although I’m sure my fellow students and professors didn’t quite see my presence as an unmitigated plus. I made class lively, sure, but really weird. I questioned bits of their thinking that it never occurred to them to question.
“Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater,” one professor sighed. I got this line a lot, and the sighs.
“But has anyone actually checked if there is a baby in the bathwater?” I countered.
The Methodists fascinated me because they were struggling with the patriarchal, unearthly underpinnings of their own faith – the part that said God was male and outside the world, and nature itself was just a mass of inert resources that the good lord provided us to use and abuse. They imagined a different sort of faith, something kinder and more grounded.
Some years before I wandered into the theo school, there was a famous Methodist conference centered around feminism, in which participants addressed God as Mother and Sophia. There was also apparently a ritual involving milk and honey, which we reenacted at the theo school; I remember it clearly because it was the first time I tried rice milk. (Thankfully, nondairy milks have improved vastly since then.)
That conference sparked charges of heresy (always fascinating!) and years of conversation afterward. My classes discussed it as well.
My review: If the church viewed the divine like this, in female terms, and made cakes for the Queen of Heaven, I would gladly, passionately be part of it. And that’s a problem, isn’t it? Because if this religion is meeting my needs and beliefs, it’s no longer Christian – and you know it, because I am the polkadot wolf.
Because the Christian story is both a male story and a human one, divested of nature. God is an angry father and his tortured son, occasionally a dove or a tongue of flame, but never, ever a woman or anything in the shape of a woman. It’s right there, in the words, and there is supposed to be nothing beyond those words. You’re just supposed to repeat those words, which were God’s mic-drop statement, at every service. You’re not supposed to write anything new, or innovate, or experience.
You’re supposed to be one body in the church, knit together as a whole, professing in unison the beliefs in the Nicene Creed. You can bring people in, but only if they consent to become part of the collective. Difference, of any sort, threatens that unified body.
And I think, for all my interest in religion, this is why none of the Methodists ever tried to convert me to their way of thinking, or build a bridge to me in any way. It’s why the university chaplain kicked me out of the interfaith group: to recognize that you have something in common, anything in common, with the other is profoundly threatening.
The heretical Methodist Goddess conference is really fascinating, because it shows that the women in this very conventional religious movement were truly yearning for a different vision of spirit, the divine, faith practice and what it could be. They certainly could have found most of what they were looking for under the broad umbrella of Paganism, in a culture that accepts difference of all varieties and is rooted deep within the Earth.
But doing so would mean leaving the unified body – and choosing to live outside the tribe. In a patriarchal culture, addressing God as Mother from the pulpit means becoming the polkadot wolf. And in the manner of wolves, it means being driven from civilization back into the woods, and occasionally hunted for bounty and bragging rights.
Because we define a tribe by marginalizing those outside it, no matter how nice we pretend to be. Paradoxically, there seems to be some sort of taboo in admitting this. I could put both hands on a Methodist’s head and forcibly turn them to face this fact, and they would still avert their eyes because it’s something they couldn’t admit to themselves: In order to maintain your power and privilege, you need to give up a differentkind of power and privilege, the kind that allows you to ask your own questions and find your own answers.
Otherwise, you know, they don’t let you become the university chaplain.
A pack of polkadot wolves
Pagans certainly aren’t exempt from tribal markers and groupthink, and the long list of co-religionists that I have pissed off through my lifetime certainly bears testament to this. On the plus side, we tend to be a proudly argumentative bunch; in fact, some folks argue that there’s no one Pagan movement at all, but a collection of loosely aligned religions.
I’m more of an umbrella type person, but I can appreciate the perspective of the anti-umbrellaists.
That being said, I am very wary of Pagan attempts to mimic Christian culture. Group-focused spellwork toward a political end (in this case, the “hex Putin” movement) seems uncomfortably close to Evangelical prayer-warriors, for example. So is the gatekeeping instinct, in which people try to shame and push out others with even relatively mild ritual or theological differences.
I also have a very mixed view of official, credentialed Pagan “clergy,” which is ironic, because I am technically in the clergy training program in a Druidic organization. (Will I ever complete it? Highly unlikely.) Sure, it would be nice to have “official” power in society, someone you can call and visit you in the hospital, that sort of thing. It would be awesome for an open Pagan to become a recognized religious scholar, or the university chaplain.
But … we’re not a top-down faith, for one; part of the charm is that anyone can connect with nature, Gods and spirits on their own. No one does this for you, and that’s the beauty of it; we’re all equal participants in the sacred, even if we have different roles in a grove or circle. Religion is something one does, not what we listen to half-bored in the pews.
The concept of clergy is a lot more social work-oriented than sacred-oriented, and would have been alien in the ancient world. This idea really owes its beginnings to the Reformation. Once you strip out all the ritual trappings – the central mystery – of Christianity, social work is pretty much what you’re left with. Frankly, I think an actual social worker would do a better job at social work than a priest or priestess, especially considering the complexity of the modern world.
There have been inroads in Paganism toward more conventional ideas of clergy, but I remain skeptical that the larger umbrella will go that direction, ultimately. Once you align a faith path – any faith path – with the mechanisms of power, the sacred gets stripped out. Paganism is a place where polkadotted wolves howl their questions, find their pack, or choose to dwell happily alone in the woods.
I’d hate to see us lose that.
White Cat Grove 
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