Spring Equinox

Spring Equinox is a festival of balance, as day and night are equal (but after this the days get longer). It’s also the time when the coming of Spring is really becoming apparent.

According to Bede, the ancient Germanic pagans honoured a goddess called Eostre or Ostara who was associated with hares and the Moon and eggs; however there is no reference to this goddess in any other text.

Although Spring Equinox is about the balance between darkness and light, with the light in the ascendancy, an important point about Pagan symbolism is that darkness is not seen as negative, but as a time of rest and renewal and refreshment before the return of daylight. Some people use darkness as a metaphor for ignorance and evil. That symbolism has no place in Pagan ritual.

In Wicca, darkness does not symbolise evil. The darkness is necessary for rest, growth, and regeneration. Death is not evil, but a necessary adjunct to life. If there was no death and dissolution, there could be no change or growth. The cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth is part of the interaction of the polarities. Suffering is also part of the process of growth; just as a tree is shaped by the wind, we are shaped by our experiences. It is only by experiencing suffering that we acquire sufficient depth to know the fullness of joy. It is then that the full light of consciousness dawns in us, and we achieve mystical communion with the divine.

Spring Equinox can be celebrated by a tug-of-war between two teams representing the darkness and the light, or by Easter-egg hunts, or by painting eggs.

Visualisation

Visualisation is a practice used by many Pagans to explore and transform the inner self. It is derived from the Kabbalistic practice of pathworking (visualising the pathways on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life). Visualising can develop the imagination and be relaxing and gently energising.

Here's an example of a visualisation:

The sea shell (by Yvonne Aburrow)
Start from a high tower in an upper room. Descend ten steps. Walk down the hill on which the tower stands, along a track down to a round cove, where rocky outcrops enclose a calm stretch of water and a smooth slope of sand, and a stream runs down the beach to the sea. Walk to the edge of the sea (you can paddle or dive in, whatever you like) and find something which is meant for you under the water (could be a shell or a pebble, or whatever). When you are ready, return to the shore.

Now it is time to return back up the slope, through the fields to the door by which you entered. Retrace your steps up to the door, open it and close it behind you. You can lock it if you want. Then climb back up the steps, and return to the space in which you are sitting.

(This visualisation is good for preceding a story-in-the-round or other storytelling activity, as it symbolises accessing the subconscious.)

Other ideas for visualisations

• Some of the meditations and prayers available from the Unitarian Universalist Worship Web
• Pagan themes: the eight festivals, the four elements, stories from mythology
• Stories and poems from other spiritual traditions, especially Sufism and Taoism
• Some of the parables of Jesus would make excellent visualisations (e.g. the pearl of great price, the mustard seed, the parable of the seeds)
• Themes from Jungian psychology – e.g. different archetypes

Safe visualisation practice

• Create sacred space – light a chalice, say a prayer, create a sacred circle, or whatever you feel is appropriate
• Do not visualise yourself leaving your body
• If you do any inner work with the emotions, have a trusted friend or group who can pick up the pieces if it becomes distressing
• Eat afterwards in order to ground yourself
• If you open your chakras, close them again (all except for the crown and base)
• It’s best to use simple visualisations that can be memorised, rather than using a tape. If you buy tapes, first listen to them all the way through without visualising to check you are happy with them.
• Work out what the purpose of your visualisation is before you start.
• Don’t take part if you feel uncomfortable with the person leading the visualisation – your instinct is probably correct.

Centring prayer

Many people do not believe in a personal God or in miraculous interventions, so we find it difficult to pray. But prayer is not just about asking for things. It can be contemplative. It can be about communing silently with the universe, or self-examination, or holding loved ones in your thoughts, or increasing mindfulness.

Centring prayer is a spiritual practice that was developed by Christians in response to interfaith dialogue with Buddhists.

The practice involves choosing a word that expresses a positive quality of the Divine (whatever you conceive that to be), such as love, peace, joy, silence, creativity.

Take a moment to decide what this quality means for you; now hold the word, or an image that represents it for you, in your mind and in your heart. Just focus on that concept; don’t worry if your mind drifts off – don’t follow the train of thought, just bring your mind gently back to the concept.

As you breathe in and out, you can say the word silently to yourself, trying to experience the quality it describes.

Ideally, the prayer will reach the point where you are not engaged in their thoughts as they arrive on your stream of consciousness.

Loving kindness meditation

Many Buddhist traditions practice Metta Bhavana, or loving kindness meditation. (Metta means loving-kindness.)

The way I do it is as follows.

The meditation is in several stages (the classic version has five). At each stage I silently recite a mantra, linked to the breath. The first line is said on the inbreath, the second on the outbreath, and so on.

May you be happy
May you be well
May you be safe
  and free from injury
May you be filled
  with loving kindness.

This is a shortened version of the full mantra, and therefore easier to remember.

The first stage of the meditation is to wish yourself loving kindness (so the mantra is "May I be be happy, may I be well..." etc).

The second stage is to wish loving kindness to someone you love.

The third stage is to wish it for someone you like.

The third stage is to wish it to someone you are neutral towards.

The fourth stage is to wish it to someone you dislike, or who has hurt you. (Don't start this one by trying the most difficult person in your life, as it can be quite painful - start small and work upwards.)

The fifth stage is to wish loving kindness to a small group such as your immediate circle of friends (or you can imagine the previous four people together in a group).

The sixth stage is to wish loving kindness to your immediate community (place of work, spiritual community or neighbourhood). At this stage I send loving kindness to Wiccans and Unitarians everywhere.

The seventh stage is to wish loving kindness to everyone on the planet.

The eighth stage is to wish it to all sentient beings.

The benefits of this meditation are manifold. It is very calming and soothing; it allows you to focus on your breath, and relax into feelings of loving kindness and safety; it helps you to feel connected to all beings, and to expand your imaginative sympathy to encompass them; and it helps you to overcome negative feelings towards people you dislike, which can really improve your relationship with them, and help you to forgive them. It also has beneficial effects on the brain, as it has been shown to reduce the "fight or flight" instinct in situations where it is not needed.

Missing pages

The timely launch of a new campaign to mark the shared history and heritage of Jews and Muslims and in particular the contribution Muslim communities made to sheltering Jews during the Holocaust.

Scarlett Epstein, who was 14 at the time of the Shoah, writes: There were 200 Jews in Albania before the war and over 2,000 Jews after the war. This clearly shows that Albania became a safe haven for Jews during WWII because the Albanian Muslims, under their code of Besa, risked their own lives to help Jewish refugees survive the Holocaust. I hope this will provide a model to be emulated by present and future generations and thereby ensure a better world for all.

Spiritual soldiers...

The US Army is facing questions over a "spiritual fitness" portion of a mandatory questionnaire, with some atheists calling it "invidious and not inclusive" of soldiers who are nonbelievers.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation learned in December that soldiers were being asked to respond to statements such as "I am a spiritual person" and "I believe there is a purpose for my life."

It makes you wonder where they get their ideas from...

Agora

Agora appears on the surface to be a routine sword and sandals epic but as Roger Ebert points out is actually a film of ideas centred around the tragic, true story of Hypatia a female philosopher in late Roman Alexandria who fell foul of the Christian mob.

The ascendant Christians are convincingly portrayed as fundamentalists, but the faults too of the civilised “pagan” world are also evident. The film implies the response of the mob springs from their experience of slavery and poverty, their ignorance worn almost as a badge of pride in contrast to the hypocrisy of those who enslaved them.

A caption at the end of the film states it took humankind another 1200 years to build upon Hypatia's work. It leaves one meditating upon what was lost – certainly the habit is to see the period between the fall of the Rome and the Renaissance as the “dark” ages, a huge step backwards. But I’m not so sure.

I wonder if civilisations really reach a kind of comfort zone. Hypatia's work may well have added to mathematics, but would it have resulted in the internal combustion engine? The Chinese broke up their massive ships, said to have reached Africa and Australia, in the second century BC because they were concerned they ran contrary to the Tao. Technology did not necessarily equal progress for either Romans or Chinese – it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. They were quite happy where they were, thank you.

Christianity may have led to ultimately greater scientific and philosophical understanding in part because of its lack of ease.

We tend to forget how incredibly revolutionary Christianity was – how it shifted conscience from the ethical to the spiritual realm. In his Byzantium series, John Julius Norwich identifies as a turning point the Emperor who crawled to the Coliseum praying for forgiveness for some despicable act. It didn’t stop further wickedness of course, but it transformed the perception of it.

Man's dreams too. Christian utopianism can be found in many of the triumphs and tragedies of the modern world – the French Revolution, Marxism, the European Union are all examples attempts to build a kind of heaven upon earth, even as their architects invariably deny any association with the religious tradition that provided its impulse.

We mourn the loss of the Classical World, but it wasn’t all sunshine. If it had not moved forward in its first thousand years, there is little reason to suggest it would in its second.

The irony is that it was not a Reason but faith-based culture – one that transformed God in to human form – that may have created the conditions for the extraordinary developments of the last few centuries.

Perhaps we should not be surprised therefore that the single glaring inaccuracy of Agora is it was not a Christian mob but actually Julius Caesar who, albeit inadvertently, appears to have burned the contents of the Great Library.

Centuries later the Christians did indeed storm the building, but the books had long since gone up in smoke.