As If it Were the Last

Yom Kippur was last week, and I found it trickier to integrate into my Pagan practice. While Rosh Hashanah has several lovely rituals that felt easy to respectfully adapt, Yom Kippur is literally 25 hours of fasting and asking God to put away the smitey stick for another year, which jars with my beliefs about sin and the sacred. Also, the Yom Kippur machzor is approximately 20 billion pages long and includes stuff like the men thanking God that they aren’t women. So I took a while to find my bearings with this holiest of Jewish holy days.

I remembered something Rabbi Anne Brener says in her incredible book Mourning and Mitzvah and dug out my copy. It took me a minute to find the quote, but it was well worth the search. Rabbi Brener writes:

On Yom Kippur, traditional Jews wear a kittel, the white garment in which they will one day be buried. They recite the Viddui, a prayer of confession similar to the one recited by a dying person during the last moments before death. During the period preceding Yom Kippur, Jews are expected to put things right between themselves and others, as if there would be no other opportunity for such repentance.

See, the idea is that during the Days of Awe, God records every living person’s fate for the year to come and then seals that fate on Yom Kippur. And while some say that sincere repentance on Yom Kippur might sway God to change your fate, others argue (it’s Judaism, folks; theological debate is pretty much the name of the game) that All Decisions Are Final, and that the reason to atone on Yom Kippur is that, if you’re fated to die in the coming year, you want to face that fate with as clear a conscience as possible. As I read Rabbi Brener’s words, my observance took a shape: how would I live if I knew this was my last year of life?

I also shifted the focus of my observances to allow self-compassion. I wanted most to acknowledge the harms I’ve caused myself, the Earth, and other living beings, made what amends are possible, and figure out how to do better from now on, rather than just keep focusing on what a terrible person I was for having messed up in the first place. This clashes somewhat with the traditional mood of Yom Kippur, but my therapist was proud. 😀

Tuesday evening I cast my circle and performed a very pared-down version of the evening service, tweaked to align with my naturalistic beliefs (all my Psalms, for instance, came from the incomparable Earth Psalms by Angela Magara [Z”L]). I wore as much white as I own (I don’t have a kittel, but making one is for sure on my to-do list now) and a fringed shawl that, while nothing like a tallis, fulfilled a similar role in keeping me focused on my obligations. I started Wednesday morning with a shortened version of the morning service and read the book of Jonah as instructed (anyone else think it has the weirdest ending?). Wednesday evening I undertook a short meditation where Spouse and I sat in a sterile medical office while a doctor told me that I had Madeupenitus and had, with or without treatment, exactly one year to live.

Then I opened a spreadsheet on my phone. Not the most sacred act, I know, but in no time flat I had 30+ items under “things I would do if I had a year to live.” Once the spreadsheet was filled in, I went outside to complete the (once again, highly abridged) Neilah, the service that closes the Yom Kippur observances, and to open my circle.

No, I didn’t fast; I didn’t feel right taking the day off from work, and I knew better than to try to put in a full workday while fasting. Maybe some year. We’ll see.

On Thursday, when I had more time and a bigger screen, I opened my spreadsheet and split the items in it into two columns: Do and Hold. That is, I want to do some of these things now, prognosis or no prognosis, while others will wait until that (heh) deadline is staring me in the face. Some people would say that if I would do something immediately if I knew I were dying, I should do it immediately now, but that isn’t always practical or desirable. For instance, if I knew today that I absolutely only had a year to live, I would buy a plot in one of our local green burial grounds. But I won’t do it without the prognosis, because I hope to live long enough that one of my preferred options – conservation burial or natural organic reduction (human composting) – has become legal and viable in my state. Don’t worry – my Do list has plenty to keep me busy in the year to come, whether I kick off before next Yom Kippur or not.

And there you have it: all the Yom Kippur that’s fit to print. While the actual ritual is still very much a work in progress, I feel confident saying that I will observe this holiday again in the years to come. Assuming my name’s in the Book of Life.

_{Image description: a brown shofar on a marble surface. Photo by slgckgc via flickr}

A Naturalistic Pagan Casts Their Harms on the Waters

Before my parents got married, they made a deal: they would raise daughters Christian (Mom’s faith) and sons Jewish (Dad’s). I have many feels about this, most of them cranky. I was AFAB, so I grew up Christian, and I felt like I wasn’t even supposed to notice Judaism, beyond lighting the chanukiah every year and having the odd dinner-table debate about how to milk a chicken.

Now that I’m no longer Christian or a daughter, I feel pulled to reconnect with that erased part of my ancestry. I have -0% interest in converting, but I’m slowly and cautiously integrating small bits of practice and culture when I feel I can do so in ways that respect both Judaism and my own beliefs and values.

The Days of Awe – the period spanning from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – feel especially resonant to me. I find something powerful in the idea of a time of year set aside for honestly and compassionately assessing myself, acknowledging my shortcomings and committing to doing better in the year ahead. I also experience it as mirroring a similar period of reflection between Fall Equinox and Samhain (a period that often encompasses the Days of Awe).

So both nights I lit a candle and recited a naturalistic Pagan version of the Rosh Hashanah blessing that would surely have raised many an ancestral eyebrow. Yesterday at lunch (couldn’t quite get my act together to do it Sunday) I ate apples with honey to bring more sweetness into my life. And yesterday after work I stood at my current favorite spot along Nahar HaMississippi and prayed my own tashlich, ridding myself of the immobilizing guilt of the year’s wrongdoings. I don’t have a shofar, but maybe next year I’ll honk my recorder a few times.

And that was my Rosh Hashanah observance. Most of my Jewish relatives might’ve looked askance at it, but it felt right to me. In the days to come I hope to review and revise one or more of my end-of-life documents, look for ways to “re-up” my social and environmental activism, and spend as much time as possible in contemplation and experience of awe and humility.

Shana tova 5783! Here’s to a sweet year on this sacred Earth. Blessed be.

_{Image description: 8 apple wedges on a blue plate. A jar of honey is just visible on the table behind the plate. Photo by the author.}

This turn of the Wheel: a review

With Lammas 2021 behind us, I’ve completed my yearlong experiment in minimalist rituals. How did it go? How do I want to proceed?

tl;dr version: I loved it. I want to keep doing it. I need to make several decisions about how I’m going forward, but I feel I’ve prepared the ground well for those decisions and whatever grows from them. That’s the short version. Read on for the loooong version.

Wheel of the Year with Earth by Bart Everson via Flickr

Lammas 2021: Autonomy

Bread is one of the the most fascinating human creations. It’s part science and part alchemy. It connects us to Earth, which gives us the wonders of grain, water, and yeast, and to millennia of ancestors who have fed themselves, their families, and their communities through this incredible process. Also, it’s delicious. So Lammas – literally a holiday for bread – is a big deal around here.

Of course there’s more to it than, “Yay bread!” (Although… “Yay bread!”) Lammas begins the harvest, when folks start to reap the fruits of careful sowing and tending. As a white person in the urban US, I have the privilege of year-round access to grocery stores and restaurants. I’m in little danger of starving to death even if my own personal harvest (mulberries. so many mulberries) isn’t enough to see me through the winter. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I feel so much power in the reminder that, even if we feel disconnected from the land, we depend on it, and the people who tend it, for the food we need to live. Also, like any good postmodern neo-Pagan, I’m a sucker for a good harvest metaphor. I also feel a communal aspect in Lammas, related to the fact that, for many years, our Reclaiming community’s Lammas celebrations began early that morning, with many of us gathering in a community-member’s kitchen to bake bread for the afternoon’s ritual.

All of this is why Leora and I began our Lammas ritual this year by making skillet biscuit bread and mulberry quick jam (so. many. mulberries). While our cauldrons bubbled on the fire and filled our house with irresistible smells, we checked in with some tarot cards to see where we are and where we want to focus for this next segment of the Wheel. Then, in keeping with the day’s “autonomy” aspect, we parted ways for individual time doing whatever felt sacred to each of us in the moment. I don’t know how Leora spent their time (though I think wood burning tools came into play), but I spent mine lying on the ground in the backyard, doing death meditations and feeling my body dissolve into the body of the Earth. We ended by reconvening and – you guessed it – eating delicious bread and jam. (Seriously. If you like bread or fruit compote, try these recipes. So tasty and sooooo easy!)

Our Lammas altar

It was exactly the kind of ritual I love: logistically uncomplicated but so spiritually fulfilling. I missed the large community aspects of past Lammases, but in our community of two we celebrated both the autonomy and the interdependence that make our lives possible. We examined what we’re harvesting in our lives (besides mulberries). And we created space for spiritual practices that held meaning for us, not just whatever the ritual outline dictated came next.

Also: yay, bread!

Summer Solstice 2021: Reverence

As has been the case for many of our rituals in this turn of the Wheel, this one had a lot of adjustment and adaptation. This raises an interesting question for me as a religious person in this 21st century, especially since my religion is rooted in the cycles and processes of Earth Itself: if circumstances (by which I mostly mean the weather) don’t favor the ritual I had planned at the time I’d planned it, do I postpone the ritual until more favorable circumstances arrive, or do I adapt the ritual to the circumstances? The former gets me the ritual I envisioned, with the spiritual impact I was hoping for. But the latter reminds me that I may be my own spiritual authority, but I’m rooted in the interdependent communion of all things, and I’m far from the authority of that. Pagan plans and Earth laughs, to mess up the old adage.

So, with temperatures unexpectedly (though not unwelcomely) tumbling after weeks in the mid- to high-90s F, dinner outside in the small but precious ecosystem of our yard turned into dinner by the open back windows, well bundled against the chill. The ritual’s basic structure stayed the same: dinner in sacred space, fully immersed in the nature that we are and are in, with no screened devices.

It was harder than it sounds. Leora and I have multiple identification apps on our phones. We struggled against the impulse to dive for them at the first note of birdcall, the first wave of an unfamiliar leaf, the first wisp of white. We desire to know, to sort into boxes labeled “house sparrow,” “creeping bellflower,” “altocumulus.” This desire is ancient within us, hearkening back to when our wellbeing depended on knowing whether an animal was friend or foe, a plant food or poison, a cloud a signal of drought or flood. Even without that necessity, sometimes it’s just cool to know what other lives I share my space with: what bird makes that mournful cry in the later afternoon? what’s that plant taking over that part of the yard?

But for me, when curiosity replaces necessity, the identification can sometimes disconnect. I gain “mourning dove” and lose the shiver of that haunting coo. I gain “wild geranium” and lose the particular delicacy and hue of each blossom. At those times, I have to put away my field guides and ID apps and be with and in all this incredible life. Present. Reverent.

After dinner, we did a three-card tarot reading. It was my first time looking at a deck since December. I think it’ll be a long time, if ever, before I bring the cards back into my personal practice. But as a way for Leora and me to look at our lives now and our path forward together, it’s pretty fun.

The ritual wasn’t what I had planned. It was what it needed to be. That is part of the Mystery.

Blessed be.

Photo by David Clode via Unsplash