prayers

Last week I drove into Atlanta to visit a pagan group that I've known about for a while now and never gotten around to. It's kind of an interesting group; not precisely Celtic Reconstructionist, but it's as close as pagan groups generally go. Anyway, I'm thinking I may go back. Happily for me, I was there for a discussion group, which is of course my natural habitat. We talked about prayer and the pagan theology of prayer.

It always kind of surprises me when people talk about prayer as "too churchy" to be pagan. I think of it as unchurchy, the opposite of church, I guess because I grew up in a Protestant church where there was very little group or common prayer such as you have in Catholic or Episcopal churches. There are periods for silent prayer, and usually a long pastoral prayer to listen to, and fairly often there's a short litany or a few lines alternated between leader and congregation. At best, you recite the Lord's Prayer once all together. But because I didn't grow up with the word "prayer" associated with a whole catalog of formal, set prayers for recitation, I don't particularly think of prayer as a ritual event, but rather something you take time to sit down and do whenever you need or want to -- actually, the mechanism by which you filter the experiences of worship into the rest of your life.

Actually, my interest in set prayers comes out of my paganism, not my Christian background. The whole concept of sacred poetry, filidecht in Irish, is that inspiration is refined and intensified by a relatively rigorous and formal poetic structure. I'm personally a little bit ambivalent about the structural issue: I understand the way that the discipline and practice of it is a whole art of its own, but on the other hand I feel like there's something really inappropriate about being self-consciously archaic with your religion, and that the real usefulness of tradition is as a model, but that what we should be trying to write is excellent poetry, and the modern sense of what "excellent poetry" means is necessarily different than the archaic sense. So anyway, when I write prayers, I try to make them as poetic as possible, but in the more naturalistic style of contemporary poetry. This is either a brilliant merging of old and new, or one of those compromises that negates the entire point of both. I'm not sure.

I'm actually not an excellent poet, nor even a particularly good one. But it's fun, and a learning experience, and I like using the prayers I've written; they're obviously a better expression of my beliefs than something someone else has written might be, and that whole personal element is really helpful to me. When you pray words that you've put time and thought and effort into designing specifically for a particular deity, it reinforces the intimacy of the connection between you.

All disclaimers in place, then, here are a few of my favorite prayers, written at various times between, I believe, the spring of 2000 and now.

( To Nuada )

( To Brighid )

( A Cycle of Prayers for the Household )

( Sun Prayer for the Horse Goddess )

( To Frigg )

everybody needs a porpoise

So here's what I'm doing with this journal:

1. Trying to keep up with the perpetual goal of figuring out where all my stories are at any given time. The Gatefiction site is still Your Best Source on the Web for any fanfic I've written under my own name, but there are a couple of crucial things that aren't there, and some screwed-up formatting that makes some of the better stuff illegible. For whatever reason, I can't seem to update that site by ftp anymore. Until I get that problem solved, I'm going to short-circut it by pasting the unreadable stories into this joural, so they can at least be linked to somewhere. There's also the Ghosti Affair, and it goes a little something like this: I wrote a very, very long due South futurefic for a zine a couple of years ago, and it's not anywhere on the web. Some people would very much like for it to be. Some people have been making threats. Guys, the only copy *I* have of Ghosti is the one in my contributor's copy of the zine. It was originally written on a disk that went bad, and then rewritten at lightning speed to deadline on the hard-drive of a laptop that doesn't work anymore. I've been working on just up and retyping the whole thing, but it's taking me a while. When I'm done, I'll put it here, too, and then someday maybe figure out what to do about ftp.

2. Keeping records of my progress through the ADF Dedicant's program and other sundry pagan activities. I was toying with the idea of doing this in my Main Journal, but something about it seemed jarring to me. It's not that I'm never *ever* serious in the other journal, it's just that there's such a high level of squee and gossip and silliness that -- you know how, on an album, some things just fit thematically and some things don't? Like that. So this rather more serious material I'm importing over here.