New Year's Resolutions
January 1, 2004

There's a lot that changes in three years -- that's approximately how long I've considered myself Pagan. And keeping my religion in synch with my life is something that requires some tuning every now and again. Unfortunately, that becomes harder and harder as I get busier and busier. This year, as part of my New Year's resolutions, I'm looking back and seeing what I've learned about myself while being Pagan and evaluating what I want to focus on in the coming year.

Lesson 1: I'm a winter Pagan. Not that I don't do anything religious in the summer, but rather, I'm mostly dormant then. It's in the winter that I turn introspective and start meditating and praying again. I'm not sure why, exactly, but I know that it's true. Every year, around early October, I start looking inward and using my altar. And, every year, Imbolc marks when I start slowing down and forgetting to tend to my spiritual side. This is something that's caused a fair amount of guilt on my part -- and yet I've realized that, for me, this is part of my natural cycle.

Lesson 2: Being religious is an activity that requires a staggering amount of unstructured alone time. Until I stop worrying about what needs to be done for work, what I'm doing for dinner, or when my next activity is coming up, I can't think deeply about religion. Structuring time for meditation and prayer is helpful, but frequently just becomes "upkeep time" -- not time where I can advance and reconsider my important religious ideas. It's important to have both types of time.

Lesson 3: Losing touch with the Pagan community means that I no longer have a place to toss around ideas and explore what I believe. My Unitarian Universalist church serves a weekly need of giving me a time and a place to think about religion, but since so many in my church seem to be secular humanists, I don't feel as if I can have deep religious discussions in the same way as I can with other Pagans. Other Pagans and I tend to share a greater amount of religious language and belief. Not always on the particulars, but there's something - although darned difficult to put a finger on exactly what - that I share with other Pagans that I do not share with other religious folk.

New Year's resolutions are frequently maligned as unrealistic goals that people set and then promptly break. I think, though, that properly done, they're actually just a formalization of intentions that a person has. In fact, I recently did a ritual to specifically formalize what my New Year's resolutions were. Were I a magic-practicing Pagan, I might have cast a spell using them.

That said, my goals for next year as follows:

1. Schedule time for thinking about religous ideas. I've actually already started work on this resolution -- I've joined a new program in my UU church called the "Worship Associates" program. Although I haven't attended my first meeting yet, it seems that Worship Associates help brainstorm ideas for services, research background information for the sermons, and are involved in the creation of the service structure. It's a year-long program, so it might help keep me involved in religious ideas throughout the usually dry summer period. And because I'll be expected to do research for service ideas, I hope to have a steady diet of reading and synthesizing religious information. Although I tend to read religious material throughout much of the year, not writing about it or talking about it with others frequently means that it doesn't stick as well as I'd like.
2. Return to The Cauldron and other religious forums where I used to hang out and discuss ideas. I miss having a community to kick religious ideas around in. After my intensely religious year of 2002, I needed to withdraw a bit and not focus on religion quite as strongly as I had previously. That withdrawl period has ended, though, and it's time for me to become involved in the community again.
3. Find time to retreat to someplace remote to spend time on my own thinking, meditating and praying. One of the things I've wanted to do for several years now is to go on a yoga retreat, since yoga is something I've frequently found to be quite spiritual.

As much as I'd like to make it one of my resolutions to keep this site updated, I don't know that I'll be able to commit the neccessary time to do so. My hope, of course, is that writing will naturally fall out of some of my other goals. We'll see whether that's true or not -- keep checking this space to see if that's happened.