Celebrate!
In the July/Aug issue of Quest I invited people to share with me their ideas for summer holidays. Although it’s too late in the season to include for August, Tristin Mock wrote to me about the Sun Dance season in late June and July for the people of the Plains nations of the US and Canada. And the Rev. Richard Boeke, who lives in England, wrote to me about how they are honoring Hiroshima Day on Aug. 6th. In the links below you’ll find more about Hiroshima Day, as well as the pagan harvest festival of Lammas, and Janmashtami, which celebrates the birth of the Hindu god Krishna.
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We Honor… |
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| Margot Adler, a present-day Unitarian Universalist pagan who is well-known both for introducing many people to modern paganism through her book Drawing Down the Moon, and for her work as a radio journalist with National Public Radio.
Margot was raised in a sort-of-Jewish family where they didn’t have much of any religious practice. But when she was ten years old Margot went with her school class to the teacher’s sister’s house to celebrate May Day, picking flowers and singing medieval May Day songs as the sun rose. And she discovered that she loved ritual, and loved the sense of religious practice connected to the natural world. In seventh grade she studied the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, and decided that she wanted to be a goddess like Artemis or Athena, confident and powerful. As an adult she read nature writers and writers who talked about the connection between our religious understanding and how we treat the natural world, and she decided that what she really wanted was a religious practice that honored the earth and cared about ecology.
She started looking around for people who were following various kinds of pagan practices, and ended up getting a contract to research and write a book about earth-centered traditions. That book, Drawing Down the Moon, has been in print for nearly 30 years, and has helped countless people learn about the variety of earth-centered religious practices known as paganism. In addition to being a Wiccan (pagan) priestess, Margot Adler is also a member of the UU Church of All Souls in New York City.
In an article written for the UU World magazine she wrote:
I guess I chose UUism because I need to live in balance. I can do all those wonderful, earth-centered spiritual things: sing under the stars, drum for hours, create moving ceremonies for the changes of seasons or the passage of time in the lives of men and women. But I also need to be a worldly, down-to-earth person in a complicated world --someone who believes oppression is real, that tragedies happen, that chaos happens, that not everything is for a purpose. Unitarian Universalism gives me a place to be at home with some of my closest friends: my doubts. Of course, there are many rationalists within the earth-centered community, but somehow I feel more centered in this denomination. And I think, in turn, the Pagan community has brought to UUism the joy of ceremony, and a lot of creative and artistic ability that will leave the denomination with a richer liturgy and a bit more juice and mystery.
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Act!
August 6th is Hiroshima Day, the anniversary of the day in 1945, near the end of the Second World War, when the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing some 140,000 people. No one can say for sure whether this was a heroic action, which led to the end of the Second World War, and saved thousands or millions of lives, or whether it was a horrible choice to kill thousands and thousands of men, women and children who were not even fighting in the war. But we do know for sure that it was a tragic day when many, many innocent people died, and the world was introduced to a terrible force of destruction. So Hiroshima Day is a day to work for peace, and to mourn for people whose lives have been lost to war.
Making paper cranes is an activity that goes with Hiroshima day because of the story of Sadako. You can make paper cranes out of paper that you have written peace messages on, and then think of who you would like to give the cranes to. It could be friends or family members, but you could also send your peace cranes to the President or another member of the government. (Click here to find out addresses for US elected officials, from the President to state legislators.) You could write your hopes for peace on the crane itself, or send a note along with the crane saying what you hope the person receiving the crane will do to work for peace. |
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Nurturing Your Spirit
One way to celebrate the pagan harvest festival of Lammas is to bake bread. Baking bread is a spiritual practice for a lot of people. It involves patience, since you have to wait for the bread to rise, and kneading the bread is a repetitive, over and over, physical motion that many people find calming and meditative. Younger kids will need help, and even older kids should probably involve a grown-up in anything that uses an oven, but kids of all ages can definitely be a part of honoring the earth that feeds us by making home-made bread. Here’s a recipe for bread, with some pictures of kids in the process to go with it. And just in case you need a little more inspiration on the spiritual side of baking bread, here’s a poem which starts with the Hebrew (Jewish) blessing for bread to go with it:
Blessing the Bread
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam,
hamotzi lechem min ha'aretz.
Surely the earth
is heavy with this rhythm,
the stretch and pull of bread,
the folding in and folding in
across the palms, as if
the lines of my hands could chart
a map across the dough,
mold flour and water into
the crosshatchings of my life.
I do not believe in palmistry,
but I study my hands for promises
when no one is around.
I do not believe in magic.
But I probe the dough
for signs of life, willing
it to rise, to take shape,
to feed me. I do not believe
in palmistry, in magic, but
something happens in kneading
dough or massaging flesh;
an imprint of the hand remains
on the bodies we have touched.
This is the lifeline—
the etched path from hand
to grain to earth, the transmutation
of the elements through touch
marking the miracles
on which we unwillingly depend.
Praised be thou, eternal God,
who brings forth bread from the earth.
—by Lynn Ungar
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Principles in Practice
Our sixth UU principle talks about “the goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.” That certainly seems like a good principle to think about around Hiroshima Day. How do you think peace, freedom and justice for all people can happen? It is, after all, a pretty huge goal. It’s hard to imagine how any one individual can have much effect on creating peace, freedom and justice for billions of people. Here is a poem from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse with his idea of how to make peace:
If there is to be peace in the world,
There must be peace in the nations.
If there is to be peace in the nations,
There must be peace in the cities.
If there is to be peace in the cities,
There must be peace between neighbors.
If there is to be peace between neighbors,
There must be peace in the home.
If there is to be peace in the home,
There must be peace in the heart.
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