The very fact that I am writing this entry for Pagan Values Month--June, in case you missed it--is a testimony to the importance of relationships in Paganism. Despite the fact that we are now eleven days into the month of July, I can't bear to let Pax down. Not only is Pax a kind and generous-spirited Pagan writer, not only did he invite me to participate this year, but he has become a friend, although we have never (yet) met in person. We have that so-important thing in my religious life: a relationship.
So this one's for you, Pax--but also for the spirit of Paganism, that I think lives in our need to form and honor powerful relationships in the world.
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My husband Peter, a biology teacher, has a classroom full of odd and interesting animals: a turtle, a gecko, two hamsters, and a ball python. Next year, he's planning to get finches, to help him illustrate his annual evolution talks, and the references to the Galapagos Islands, and all the varietie…
I remember when I first learned that war was wrong.
I was nineteen years old, in love for the first time, sexual for the first time, holding my lover in my arms. I looked at his body, long, smooth, and perfect lying next to me, and I knew that it was Holy. This body I knew so well, that could bring us both so much pleasure, was sacred for that, yes--but also because it was whole, and it was living and it was inherently a thing of beauty and goodness.
And war, it followed immediately, which could shatter that beauty in an instant, was a blasphemy.
All I needed to understand that war is a blasphemy was to love one human being in the flesh, as an adult.
The peace testimony is different; my peace testimony took many more years to come to me. But I have known from the age of nineteen that war is a blasphemy.
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Yesterday, I was in my kitchen making pickles. What with boiling kettles of water and processing pounds of vegetables and brine, making pickles …