{"id":10778,"date":"2019-08-12T16:51:51","date_gmt":"2019-08-12T22:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10778"},"modified":"2019-08-13T16:59:43","modified_gmt":"2019-08-13T22:59:43","slug":"pagan-children-the-anglican-death-spiral","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10778","title":{"rendered":"Pagan Children & the Anglican Death Spiral"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Photo: The Very Reverend Jane Hedges rides the 55-foot high “helter-skelter” inside Norwich Cathedral in England.((While her official biography<\/a> says she was ordained a “deaconess” in 1980, she was elevated to “priest” in 1994. You can’t say “priestess” in the Anglican church \u2014 evidently the word makes them think of filmy skirts, tambourines, and sex.)) If you want a sort of objective correlative for the church’s health today, there it is, a downward spiral. (BBC)<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Be patient, I am coming at this the long away around.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was raised in the American Episcopal Church, part of the worldwide Anglican Communion<\/a>, at the time. When I walked into an Anglican church in Canada or in Jamaica (where we lived for a couple of years) and picked up a prayer book, it obvious we were all in the same family, so to speak. There was an Anglican joke that referenced the church’s strength in all the former British colonies in Africa: “The Africans pray, the Americans pay, and the British make the rules.”<\/p>\n

None of this is true anymore. In the United States, several different organizations compete for the allegiance of local Episcopal church parishes: the breakaway Anglican Church in North America,\u00a0 the Anglican Church in America, the Church of Nigeria, and The Episcopal Church, the original body. And there are more. It’s very complicated and not germane at this point, except to say that the total membership of The (original) Episcopal Church is cratering.<\/p>\n

In England, where the church was “established,” i.e., intertwined with the government as the official church of the nation, its piight is even worse, As columnist Rod Dreher (himself an Orthodox Christian) sneerlingly wrote, “Would the last Anglican left please remember to bring out the vestments? The Victoria & Albert Museum would no doubt like to preserve some evidence that there once was a thing called the Church of England<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

You can imagine his reaction to this article, in which clergy at a medieval cathedral defend their decision to (temporarily, they say) remove all the furnishings and replace them with amusement park rides and miniature golf:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Reverend Canon Andy Bryant, from Norwich Cathedral, said he could see why people would be surprised to see the helter-skelter.<\/p>\n

But in addition to showcasing the roof, he said it was “part of the cathedral’s mission to share the story of the Bible” and was a “creative and innovative way to do that”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t remember miniature golf (crazy golf) in the Bible, but maybe they are using a different translation.<\/p>\n

I have two takeaways from this story. <\/strong><\/p>\n

For one, it is obvious that a lot of the Anglicans have “lost their contacts,” as the ceremonial magicians say.((That is not the same as dropping a contact lens into the lavatory sink drain.)) In other words, their connection to their deity is not there anymore, there is no “juice,” and they are just trying to fill the void by social movements and entertainment.<\/p>\n

For the second, at least within the liturgical churches there is a lot of learning for children. Not the hellfire part, but the importance of symbolic art, the transformative power of music (especially when you are doing the long chants yourself), some knowledge of sacred theater, exposure to ritual ways of dealing with birth, sickness, death, and everything else, and even a little about meditation and sacred reading.<\/p>\n

I walked out the door myself at age 16. I was not mad at any one. No priest molested me or any of the altar boys that I knew about. I was not stewing about “adult hypocrisy” more than the average teenager might. I had just come to the conclusion that the church’s picture of the cosmos was not mine and that I could no longer accept its theology. So I spent the next five years as a “seeker” before someone showed Herself to me.<\/p>\n

Now if I had a dollar for every Pagan who has said in my hearing “We won’t ‘push our religion’ on our children,” I could pay my fare to the American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego next fall.<\/p>\n

What I would like to say is, “If you don’t put something in that space, what are they going to fill it with?<\/strong>”\u00a0 Digital nothings? People need forms for doing things. We need to be aware of other dimensions. I am no longer a Christian, but I do in retrospect thank the church for giving me a “vocabulary” of ritual and so forth \u2014 not the only<\/em> ways of doing ritual, but at least some<\/em> ways.<\/p>\n

Of course, being Christian, all their focus was on the vertical axis \u2014 God up there, us down here. There was no significant “horizontal” engagement with the other-than-human world, aside from an occasional Blessing of the (domestic) Animals. Everything was put here for us to use, as described in Genesis. (The “stewardship” teaching is just watered-down domination.)<\/p>\n

It delights me to see adult Pagans involving children in ritual and other “horizontal” engagements, giving them ways to think about relationships with other beings and ways to mark life’s changes. Memories made with the body and witch actions last longer than words and doctrines.<\/p>\n

I am taking this quote from John Beckett’s blog out of context, but it fits. The topic is “sacrifice.”<\/a><\/p>\n

Letting perfectly good food sit on an ancestor shrine was so foreign to my kids when our family began ancestor offerings. It smacked against their overculture, their appetites, their unawareness that physical objects are envelopes of intent. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If the parents are Wiccan, for example, will the kids be Wiccan? Who knows? But at least they will have a vocabulary for the sacred dimensions of life.<\/p>\n

Miniature golf they can learn on their own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo: The Very Reverend Jane Hedges rides the 55-foot high “helter-skelter” inside Norwich Cathedral in England.((While her official biography says she was ordained a “deaconess” in 1980, she was elevated to “priest” in 1994. You can’t say “priestess” in the Anglican church \u2014 evidently the word makes them think of filmy skirts, tambourines, and sex.)) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[68,150,24,21,6],"class_list":["post-10778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-animism","tag-childhood","tag-christianity","tag-england","tag-wicca"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2NQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1692,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1692","url_meta":{"origin":10778,"position":0},"title":"Anglican Priest Decides Pagans are ‘Connected’","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Via The Wild Hunt, a story of another Anglican priest with an attraction to Druidism. I'm actually a priest of the Church of England \u2013 but with a difference. Though I'm still in \"holy orders\", I now work full time as a magician, writer and retreat leader. I've been described\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":296,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=296","url_meta":{"origin":10778,"position":1},"title":"Can you be a Druid\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 30, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Can you be a Druid and an Episcopalian? The controversy over \"Pagan\" elements on an official Episcopal Church Web site and the husband-and-wife clergy connected with them continues to bubble. Christianity Today's blog has their bishop's statement: the situation is \"extremely serious,\" but there is no rush to the stake,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5670,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5670","url_meta":{"origin":10778,"position":2},"title":"Is the Church of England Desperate or Just Confused about Paganism?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"With the obvious news peg of summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, the Telegraph reports on a rather odd initiative from the Church of England. The article begins, The church is training ministers to create \u201ca pagan church where Christianity [is] very much in the centre\u201d to attract spiritual believers. Ministers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":178,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=178","url_meta":{"origin":10778,"position":3},"title":"\"Bless that pet\" Ship of\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 3, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Bless that pet\" Ship of Fools, the (mostly Anglican) Christian humor e-zine, collects humorous captions of liturgical pet-blessing under this introduction: \"Animals used to get sacrificed by priests, but in these liberal times, they get blessed up instead.\" And speaking of Anglicans, this blog, by a female Episcopal seminarian, gives\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3662,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3662","url_meta":{"origin":10778,"position":4},"title":"Asperger’s or Just Garage-Band Religion?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 31, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"My friends who are scholars of new religious movements (NRMs)\u00a0 theorize about how NRMs develop or do not, become accepted or do not, assimilate or do not. Some engage in a \"scholarship of advocacy,\" defending in various fora the human right to start one's own religion without being labeled a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1109,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1109","url_meta":{"origin":10778,"position":5},"title":"It’s Been Linked with the Darkness!","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 9, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Confront your misgivings! Join the Rev. Peter Owen-Jones, Anglican priest, into this journey into the deepest heart of darkness -- among some ordinary-seeming Australian Witches.\"I'm aware of certain objects, quite frankly, that have always disturbed me.\"A giggle-worthy proof that pith-helmet anthropology of religion lives on. Will the Rev. Owen-Jones go\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Australia\"","block_context":{"text":"Australia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=australia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10778"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10796,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10778\/revisions\/10796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}