Excerpt: Bridging the Gap: Working Within the Dynamics of Pagan Groups and Society

Chapter 1: Why Politics and Community?

Navigating through life can be complicated. Demands on our time from family, mundane jobs, covens, mentoring and teaching make time management complicated at best and like juggling raw eggs on the worst of days. One slip and it feels like there is goopy, slippery egg all over your feet, making it harder to stay on your toes.

There is a certain amount of skill that is required to effectively balance the multiple roles of Pagans and Witches everywhere. Unlike other groups or religions, the Pagan community requires a lot of energy and effort from those involved. All communities need energy to sustain them, and many, especially religious groups, have structures and resources in place to help promote and maintain balance. Within Paganism we have few resources and little structure to fall back on when we find that community is falling short.  This requires us to put in a different level of elbow grease than other communities require of their members.  If you put a good number of people together to create a grassroots structure with no solid outline to work from, you would have what amounts to today’s Pagan community. It is not uncommon to experience disorganization, lack of trust, gossip and backbiting, and devaluing of the contributions of other community members.

This is a beginning step to understanding politics, how it works in the Pagan community and how we can better use our skills to create something lasting and beneficial for everyone.  In order to effectively do this we must also take a look at ourselves from an in-depth perspective to make sure we are giving the best we can to any group or community.  When we add energy to that of our fellow Wiccans, Witches and Pagans, we are responsible for what is manifested, and in turn we should be working with integrity and be prepared to deal with whatever comes our way to the best of our ability.  Assessing ethical and moral codes allows each of us to figure out how we would like to progress into the next phase of existence.  Ethics change as the layers to our lives change and grow.  What might be one’s value set today could be completely different a year later, depending on what the person has been through prior to reevaluation.

One of the things I learned from my first coven experience is the ability to use my judgment and make more informed decisions based on my personal assessment of situations.  This is something I did daily at work but had a tendency to relinquish my power to others in my spiritual life. Of course, this was a testament to my perspective on my own self-worth at the time, and that was hard to face as I continued to grow in the Craft.  Trusting myself before others and asking the questions I really need to know instead of relying on second party information and interpretations helped change the course of my personal ethics over the span of a year or more.  This lesson falls under ethics and values because it is what has enabled me to be as trustworthy and honest as I can today.