Pagans at YMG!

Simon Beard wrote this piece and emailed it to me. Unfortunately I missed it at the time. Apologies to Simon.

A group of us Quaker pagans met during Thursday lunchtime to celebrate
the harvest season and call on the spirits of abundance to bless
Yearly Meeting Gathering and the many projects and friendships it
produces. We performed a ritual that united Quaker silence with Pagan
elements honoring the life cycles of the year, the unique nature of
the environment we are meeting with and that god and goddess within us
all. After calling in the four quarters of the year and their
associated elements we invoked the goddess of the harvest and the
spirit of abundance before offering a time of Quaker silence for them
to speak to us. The ritual then continued with some chanting, the
sharing of a Lamas loaf and a guided meditation walk to take in the
changing environment around us as the world bursts forth into
fruitfulness and harvest.

Numbers where kept intentionally low due to the experimental nature of
the event, but all agreed that it came off well despite, or perhaps
because of, the abundant rain we had both before, during and after the
event. Next year we hope to organise a more substantial event, drawing
on what we have learned this year that will offer all friends an
opportunity to bring together what is best about the Quaker and Pagan
traditions.

I should add that I consider myself to be both a Christian and a
Pagan, but mostly a Quaker. I believe that the two offer contrasting
and complementary views about the nature of the divine, one
emphasizing gods masculinity and transcendent nature, and the other
god’s femininity, or balance, and god’s immanence in the world around
us. I wander how unique that makes me?

On second thoughts, I’m a Quaker, aren’t we all supposed to be this complicated

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