November, 2007 Supplemental Page~

Hand Cut-out Wreath

This hand cut out wreath is a great Christmas craft. Kids enjoy tracing and cutting out their hands and when the wreath is done they feel they've had a hand in the holiday decorating. Parental supervision is recommended. Difficulty: Easy

What you'll need:

∙      Green construction paper or felt

∙      Pen or pencil to trace hands

∙      Glue

∙      Glitter

∙      Sequins

∙      Ribbons

∙      Other decorations for finished project

How to make it:

∙      Trace child's open hand onto paper. (8-10 tracings for a small child)

∙      Cut out tracings.

∙      Glue tracings together at wrists with fingers pointed out.

∙      Decorate with glitter, sequins, ribbons.

∙      Write child's name, age, and date made on back.

www.kidsdomain.com

Pagan Leaders Elected to Interfaith Executive Positions

Circle Times: Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Continued . . . On October 22, 2007, Rev. Angie Buchanan was elected for a three-year term to the Office of Secretary for the Board of Directors of the Parliament and will also serve on the Executive Committee.

Rev. Buchanan was originally elected to the Board of Trustees for CPWR in 2003.  She was the first Pagan in the organization's history to hold that position. She went on to help host, and to present at the internationally attended Parliament event held in Barcelona, Spain in 2004.

Presenters at past Parliament events have included His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu.

Angie is also known for her religious freedom work as the Public Relations Director for Lady Liberty League and was part of the Veteran Pentacle Quest team.  Angie is an ordained minister for Wisconsin-based Circle Sanctuary, one of the oldest Wiccan/Pagan churches in the United States and which serves Pagans worldwide through publications, events, and other endeavors. Additionally, Angie is the Director of Gaia's Womb, an interfaith organization devoted to embracing women's spirituality.

In addition, Rev. Andras Corban-Arthen, serving as a member of the Parliament's Board of Trustees since 2006, was also elected to serve on the Executive Committee as a "Member at Large" at the same meeting this past weekend. Rev. Corban-Arthen brings many impressive credentials to the table as an active member of the international interfaith community.

Rev. Corban-Arthen was chosen to represent Pagan traditions at the United Nations Interfaith Conference in 1991, and was a speaker at the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1993, Chicago and 2004, Barcelona. In 1990, he was one of the organizers and celebrants of the interfaith ceremony that launched Boston's twentieth celebration of Earth Day, which drew 250,000 people.

Andras also serves on the Board of Directors for EarthSpirit Community in Massachusetts. EarthSpirit is a non-profit organization providing services to a  nationwide network of Pagans and others following an Earth-centered spiritual path. Andras currently serves on the Parliament's Board of Trustees and recently returned from Monterrey, Mexico where he was well-received as a presenter and representative of the Pagan traditions at the World Interreligious Encounter sponsored by CPWR as part of the International Forum of Cultures.

Both Rev. Buchanan and Rev. Corban-Arthen appreciate the opportunity to continue their service.

For more information on Circle Sanctuary go to: http://www.circlesanctuary.org   

For more information on Council for the Parliament of the World’s Religion go to http://www.cpwr.org

O.C. Witch Fights for Pentacle-Inscribed Tombstones

Continued . . . In 2008, she will help co-host a four day national conference on witchcraft near Yucaipa.

As a fully “out-of-the-broom-closet” witch, Conway says her job is to put a public face on Wicca, the Pagan faith she estimates up to 1,000 Orange County residents practice.

Tombstones seemed the perfect way to do just that. This past spring, a coalition of Wiccan organizations including Covenant of the Goddess, won the right to have the symbol of their faith – a pentacle – inscribed on government-issued tombstones and grave markers.

The decision by the Veteran’s Department to include the pentacle as one of 39 official faith emblems came after nearly a decade of repeated requests and three lawsuits by Wiccan groups. This summer, the Veterans Department issued the first pentacle tomb marker for Arlington National Cemetery.

For Conway, pentacle-bedecked graves are an overdue recognition of a long maligned religion. “We’re showing we’re not the monsters people have been led to believe we are,” Conway says.

The battle for identity is one that Conway knows well. Born to a homeless woman at St. Joseph’s hospital in Orange, Conway says she was given up for adoption to a family from Huntington Beach.

Her new family were Catholics and Conway says she was attracted from an early age to the mystery and ritual of her adopted parents' faith. “I wanted to be a nun,” Conway recalls. “That was the closest thing I could think of to women who could dedicate themselves to God and their community.”

She was troubled however by the idea of original sin – the Christian notion that humans are born sinful – and she had a less spiritual attraction to “cheesy horror movies–Elvira and so forth.” That attraction led her to a bookstore in the Westminster mall and a $5 book about witchcraft.

It was a child’s fascination with magic as viewed through a television screen. But Conway soon found out “witchcraft is not like ‘Bewitched’ – although that would be awesome,” she says. “My house would be so much cleaner.”

Instead, Conway discovered what she describes as a nature religion in which both masculine and feminine divinities are worshiped, love is emphasized over sin, magic is possible and ‘spells’ take the form of “just real focused prayers,” Conway says. “You’re sending your will out in hope of a specific outcome.”

Conway always believed in the supernatural – she says she used to see objects moving in her house growing up – “but at 12 years old you don’t necessarily have the vocabulary or the comprehension to understand it.”

She did note that her strongly felt wishes tended to come true. Conway recounts the time she wished for a friend to appear among the throng of people during a trip to Disneyland. A half an hour later, he did. “That was interesting,” she says.

Later in life she says her faith made her sensitive to ghosts, who would walk through her yard or turn on lights in her house. “It got to the point when my blender would turn on when it was unplugged,” Conway says. “Magic – I believe in it.”

Her beliefs led her to tarot cards, astrology, crystals, as well as to Wiccan organizations like Covenant of the Goddess, one of several prominent Wicca and Pagan groups that advocated repeatedly for federal recognition of the pentacle emblem with the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Conway says that each application by Covenant of the Goddess for recognition of the pentacle foundered upon new and shifting rules issued by department staff. “They were giving us the runaround,” Conway says. “I’m not going to go off on conspiracy theories but it does seem a little strange.” In the meantime, arguably more obscure religious emblems – such as the circular “EK” of Eckankar, a faith founded in 1965 that espouses, among other things, “soul travel” were approved.

“It was religious prejudice that prevented putting it on the list,” says Selena Fox, the senior minister of Circle Sanctuary, a Wicca church that settled a successful lawsuit against the Veterans Department this past April. “None of the other symbols took a decade and three lawsuits to get this done.” Circle Sanctuary’s lawsuit – a continuation of a previous effort by Covenant of the Goddess and other groups – was not the only driver of what Fox calls “the pentacle quest.”

“Our soldiers were coming home and they weren’t able to have the pentacle put up as a religious symbol on their tombstone,” Conway says. “They served their time for their country – they should be allowed to have that freedom of religion they fought for.”

One such soldier was Army Reserve Sgt. Patrick Stewart, a wiccan from Nevada who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2005. In late 2006, officials in the state of Nevada lost patience with the federal government’s unwillingness to issue a pentacle tombstone to one of their fallen citizens. In December, the state of Nevada issued their own.

There are no pentacle tombstones yet in Orange County, although one can be seen in Riverside National Cemetery.

But Conway says the fight for recognition of their identity has united Wiccans – often reluctant to take a public stand about their controversial faith – around a cause. “It’s tough for (Wiccans) to find a way to work together,” Conway says. “But this was about prejudice and being treated like second class citizens or less because of our religious beliefs. There was absolutely no controversy.”
 

By Gwendolyn Driscoll, Reprinted from The Orange County Register, September 11, 2007 

Bring Back the Greek Gods

Continued . . . Zeus did not communicate directly with humankind. But his children -- Athena, Apollo and Dionysus -- played active roles in human life. Athena was the closest to Zeus of all the gods; without her aid, none of the great heroes could accomplish anything extraordinary. Apollo could tell mortals what the future had in store for them. Dionysus could alter human perception to make people see what's not really there. He was worshiped in antiquity as the god of the theater and of wine. Today, he would be the god of psychology.

Zeus, the ruler of the gods, retained his power by using his intelligence along with superior force. Unlike his father (whom he deposed), he did not keep all the power for himself but granted rights and privileges to other gods. He was not an autocratic ruler but listened to, and was often persuaded by, the other gods.

Openness to discussion and inquiry is a distinguishing feature of Greek theology. It suggests that collective decisions often lead to a better outcome. Respect for a diversity of viewpoints informs the cooperative system of government the Athenians called democracy.

Unlike the monotheistic traditions, Greco-Roman polytheism was multicultural. The Greeks and Romans did not share the narrow view of the ancient Hebrews that a divinity could only be masculine. Like many other ancient peoples in the eastern Mediterranean, the Greeks recognized female divinities, and they attributed to goddesses almost all of the powers held by the male gods.

The world, as the Greek philosopher Thales wrote, is full of gods, and all deserve respect and honor. Such a generous understanding of the nature of divinity allowed the ancient Greeks and Romans to accept and respect other people's gods and to admire (rather than despise) other nations for their own notions of piety. If the Greeks were in close contact with a particular nation, they gave the foreign gods names of their own gods: the Egyptian goddess Isis was Demeter, Horus was Apollo, and so on. Thus they incorporated other people's gods into their pantheon.

What they did not approve of was atheism, by which they meant refusal to believe in the existence of any gods at all. One reason many Athenians resented Socrates was that he claimed a divinity spoke with him privately, but he could not name it. Similarly, when Christians denied the existence of any gods other than their own, the Romans suspected political or seditious motives and persecuted them as enemies of the state.

The existence of many different gods also offers a more plausible account than monotheism of the presence of evil and confusion in the world. A mortal may have had the support of one god but incur the enmity of another, who could attack when the patron god was away. The goddess Hera hated the hero Heracles and sent the goddess Madness to make him kill his wife and children. Heracles' father, Zeus, did nothing to stop her, although he did in the end make Heracles immortal.

But in the monotheistic traditions, in which God is omnipresent and always good, mortals must take the blame for whatever goes wrong, even though God permits evil to exist in the world he created. In the Old Testament, God takes away Job's family and his wealth but restores him to prosperity after Job acknowledges God's power.

The god of the Hebrews created the Earth for the benefit of humankind. But as the Greeks saw it, the gods made life hard for humans, didn't seek to improve the human condition and allowed people to suffer and die. As a palliative, the gods could offer only to see that great achievement was memorialized. There was no hope of redemption, no promise of a happy life or rewards after death. If things did go wrong, as they inevitably did, humans had to seek comfort not from the gods but from other humans.

The separation between humankind and the gods made it possible for humans to complain to the gods without the guilt or fear of reprisal the deity of the Old Testament inspired. Mortals were free to speculate about the character and intentions of the gods. By allowing mortals to ask hard questions, Greek theology encouraged them to learn, to seek all the possible causes of events. Philosophy -- that characteristically Greek invention -- had its roots in such theological inquiry. As did science.

Paradoxically, the main advantage of ancient Greek religion lies in this ability to recognize and accept human fallibility. Mortals cannot suppose that they have all the answers. The people most likely to know what to do are prophets directly inspired by a god. Yet prophets inevitably meet resistance, because people hear only what they wish to hear, whether or not it is true. Mortals are particularly prone to error at the moments when they think they know what they are doing. The gods are fully aware of this human weakness. If they choose to communicate with mortals, they tend to do so only indirectly, by signs and portents, which mortals often misinterpret.

Ancient Greek religion gives an account of the world that in many respects is more plausible than that offered by the monotheistic traditions. Greek theology openly discourages blind confidence based on unrealistic hopes that everything will work out in the end. Such healthy skepticism about human intelligence and achievements has never been needed more than it is today.

Mary Lefkowitz is professor emerita at Wellesley College and the author of "Greek Gods, Human Lives" and the forthcoming "History Lesson."

By Mary Lefkowitz, Reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, October 23, 2007