Heathen Mysticism Blogging Month

Unfortunately, I missed International Pagan Values Blogging Month; the timing was just not good for me, having just started a new full-time job at the end of May. I very well may come up with a post or two in the future about my own values (from a Wodenist perspective in particular–which should be interesting ), but probably not in time to have it count in terms of the aforementioned effort.

However, my friend Svartesol has declared July to be Heathen Mysticism Blogging Month, and I fully intend to participate in that here. For those of my readers who are Heathen and have a blog or site of your own, I strongly encourage you to do the same–especially if your own mystical path doesn’t fit neatly in with the practices of either the conservative mainstream or the loudest group of radical outsiders. This is a subject that’s notoriously difficult to discuss both because it’s usually controversial and also because mystical experiences are, by their very nature, hard to translate into words and impossible to measure by any widely accepted objective standards.

And yet, I personally believe that discussing this facet of our religious lives is of the utmost importance. Mystical experience is, in many ways, the life’s blood of a religion; even people who consider themselves mostly “cement-heads” and non-mystical have often had a flash or two of otherworldly contact that fuels their entire devotional lives from that point onward. For those of us who constantly and intentionally cultivate such experiences, it is our duty–at least, I believe so–to share our reflections on them, as well as our methods for inviting them into our lives, with others to whatever extent we feel comfortable and able. Whether or not people choose to believe that our experiences are factually “true” is not the point; the point is that even those who are skeptical may be inspired to seek such experiences themselves, or at least come away with a greater understanding that we are not all loonies or dangerous people, and that while mysticism is not always necessary to a religious practice it can be a positive part of one. Fostering this understanding helps newcomers to our faith, it helps outsiders who would like to gain a fuller picture of what we do, it helps our co-religionists who are not necessarily full-blown mystics but might like to bring some more aspects of mysticism into their practice, and most of all it helps us, by reducing the prejudice and misconceptions we are faced with in our various communities.

So, stay tuned!