Well.
That went farther than expected.
We started this morning with what seemed like a fairly innocent question.
If we put the work of Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy beside one another, is there some common thread running through what they have been telling us about Paganism?
I expected an interesting comparison.
Perhaps a few shared themes.
Nature.
Identity.
Community.
Ritual.
History.
Instead, the floor gave way.
And down the rabbit hole we went.
Then into another.
And another.
Until what began as a question about scholarship became a much larger question about what Paganism actually asks of the people who live it.
So before we chase anything else, perhaps we should sit at the edge of the hole for a moment, brush the dirt off our clothes, and look back at where we have been.
The First Rabbit: Relationship
The first thing that emerged from those scholars was surprisingly simple.
The common thread did not appear to be a common theology.
Pagans do not agree enough for that.
We do not share one scripture.
We do not share one understanding of deity.
We do not share one account of what happens after death.
We do not share one ritual system, one history, one hierarchy or one authority.
And perhaps that has never been the centre anyway.
What kept appearing across all those different bodies of work was relationship.
Relationship with gods.
Relationship with ancestors.
Relationship with land.
Relationship with community.
Relationship with history.
Relationship with ritual.
Relationship with identity.
Relationship with memory.
And relationship with ourselves.
That gave us the first working thought of the day:
Perhaps Paganism is held together less by common belief than by common ways of entering into relationship.
Not identical relationships.
Not identical gods.
Not identical practices.
But the repeated movement outward from the isolated self toward something else.
Something older.
Something larger.
Something remembered.
Something living.
The Second Rabbit: Relationship Creates Responsibility
Of course that pleasant little idea lasted about five minutes before the next rabbit appeared.
Because relationship cannot simply be poetic language.
If I am truly in relationship with something, then my behaviour toward it matters.
If I say I honour the land, the question eventually becomes how I treat the land.
If I say I honour ancestors, the question becomes what I do with what I inherited from them.
If I say community matters, then community cannot only mean the parts I enjoy.
Someone still has to do the work.
Someone still has to welcome the newcomer.
Someone still has to clean up after the feast.
Someone still has to tend the fire when everyone else has gone to bed.
Barbara Jane Davy’s work on gifting, reciprocity and relationality helped push that question into clearer focus.
A relationship creates something between the parties involved.
Memory.
Expectation.
Responsibility.
And suddenly the ethical question was no longer:
What am I allowed to do?
It became:
What do I owe because I am connected?
That may have been the moment this stopped being merely an academic rabbit hole.
Because that question follows us home.
The Third Rabbit: What Happens When the Web Tears?
Then the obvious problem appeared.
Relationships break.
Trust fails.
Promises are broken.
Hospitality is abused.
Communities fail their members.
People betray one another.
Reciprocity becomes exploitation.
And suddenly an ethic of relationship needs an ethic for broken relationship.
That led us into frith, betrayal, restitution, boundaries, forgiveness and repair.
And perhaps the most important thing we found there was this:
Repair does not necessarily mean restoration.
Some relationships can be rebuilt.
Some cannot.
Some should not be.
Forgiveness is not trust.
Forgiveness is not reconciliation.
Forgiveness is not restored access.
And boundaries are not automatically failures of relationship.
Sometimes boundaries are how we protect the wider web from further harm.
That was an important turn.
Because relational spirituality can become dangerous if it quietly teaches people that maintaining connection is always more sacred than protecting themselves or others.
Sometimes the ethical act is rebuilding the bridge.
Sometimes the ethical act is admitting the bridge is gone.
The Fourth Rabbit: What Makes Something Sacred?
From broken relationships we wandered into sacredness.
If relationships create meaning, then perhaps sacredness is not merely something inherent in an object, place or tradition.
Perhaps sacredness also grows through relationship.
A clearing becomes sacred because people return.
Because ritual happens there.
Because names are spoken there.
Because ashes are scattered there.
Because vows are exchanged.
Because someone grieved beneath that tree.
Because someone made an offering beside that well every year until the path itself became memory.
Eventually geography becomes biography.
That led to another working thought:
Something may become sacred when relationship gives it meaning deep enough to create obligation.
That word again.
Obligation.
If something is sacred, ordinary entitlement begins to feel insufficient.
We approach differently.
We behave differently.
We recognize that the thing before us is not simply available for whatever use happens to be convenient.
And then we discovered something else.
Desecration and the end of sacredness are not necessarily the same thing.
A shrine can be violated and remain sacred.
A sacred place can be physically damaged while its meaning survives.
A community can disappear while its memory remains.
A place can stop being an active sacred home and still remain sacred in memory.
The fire can go out without proving it was never sacred.
The Fifth Rabbit: Ownership Is Not Stewardship
Then came the question that was probably waiting underneath everything else:
Who gets to decide what happens to sacred things?
That took us into ownership and stewardship.
And here we had to be very careful.
Because spirituality does not erase law.
If somebody owns land, they own the land.
Community attachment does not magically transfer the deed.
Years of ritual do not automatically create legal ownership.
Memories do not become property rights simply because they are powerful.
But neither does ownership answer every ethical question.
The deed may tell us who has the legal authority to decide.
It does not necessarily tell us what a wise or responsible decision looks like.
And so another distinction appeared:
Ownership asks who has the right to decide.
Stewardship asks what responsibilities should shape that decision.
Those are not enemies.
They are different questions.
A landowner can also be a steward.
A community can have genuine moral attachment without owning the land.
A person can love a sacred place without being entitled to control it.
An owner can possess legal authority without every possible use of that authority being ethically identical.
And somewhere in that tension sits the difference between possession and care.
The Firekeeper
By the end of all this, one image kept returning.
The firekeeper.
I think perhaps that image gathers most of today’s rabbit warren into one place.
A firekeeper has authority.
Someone needs to tend the fire.
Someone decides when another log is needed.
Someone watches the sparks.
Someone protects the people around it.
Someone makes sure the fire does not escape into the forest.
But the firekeeper does not own the fire in every meaningful sense of the word.
They did not invent flame.
They do not own the warmth received by everyone sitting around it.
They do not own the stories told beside it.
They do not own the memories people take home.
The firekeeper’s authority makes sense because it is tied to responsibility.
Without responsibility, authority becomes merely control.
Perhaps that is true of more than fires.
Perhaps it is true of elders.
Priests.
Teachers.
Landowners.
Organizers.
Tradition bearers.
Community leaders.
Anyone entrusted with something larger than themselves.
And This Is Where the Scholars Matter
We should come back to the people who helped us enter this warren in the first place.
Shelley Rabinovitch helped document the enormous diversity of modern Paganism and took questions of Pagan ethics seriously.
Marion Bowman showed why lived and vernacular religion matters, and why we should pay attention to what people actually do with religion rather than only what official definitions say.
Marisol Charbonneau showed Paganism taking shape within actual cultural, linguistic and social environments rather than existing as some floating universal abstraction.
Martin Lepage showed people negotiating identity, gender and belonging within contemporary Pagan ritual and community.
Dodie Graham McKay documented Canadian Pagan community from the ground: festivals, people, sacred spaces, labour, memory and what happens when a place accumulates years of meaning.
Barbara Jane Davy gave us particularly useful language for relationship, reciprocity, gifting, ancestry, ecology and the ethical web that can emerge from those connections.
They did not collectively write today’s conclusions.
We should not put our words into their mouths.
But they gave us maps.
Partial maps.
Maps of different sections of the forest.
And because those maps exist, we were able to lay them beside one another and notice something larger.
That is part of the value of scholarship.
It does not necessarily hand us the answer.
Sometimes it simply lets us ask a better question.
So What Did We Actually Find Today?
Perhaps something like this.
Paganism may not be most clearly understood by asking what every Pagan believes.
There may be no answer to that question.
But we can ask how Paganism is lived.
And again and again, it appears through relationships.
Those relationships create meaning.
Meaning creates responsibility.
Responsibility creates ethics.
When relationships break, ethics requires us to think about accountability, repair and boundaries.
When relationships deepen, they may produce what we call sacredness.
When sacred things come under human control, sacredness raises questions of stewardship.
And stewardship eventually forces us to think beyond ourselves.
What did we inherit?
What are we doing with it?
What will we leave behind?
That may be the whole warren in three questions.
What did I receive?
How am I tending it?
What will remain when I am gone?
Maybe Paganism Is Less About Having and More About Tending
That is where I find myself tonight.
Perhaps Paganism is not primarily something we possess.
Not my gods.
My land.
My ancestors.
My tradition.
My community.
My sacred place.
Perhaps all those possessive words are useful grammar and dangerous philosophy.
Maybe the better image is tending.
I tend a relationship with the gods.
I tend memory of the ancestors.
I tend the land beneath my feet.
I tend the community I participate in.
I tend the traditions I inherited.
I tend the stories I tell.
I tend the promises I make.
I tend the boundaries that keep relationships healthy.
I tend the fire.
And I know that one day somebody else will be sitting beside it.
Or they will not.
Some fires should continue.
Some should be allowed to go out.
Some traditions deserve preservation.
Some need pruning.
Some relationships deserve repair.
Some endings deserve respect.
Some inherited things should be passed forward.
Some should end with us.
Stewardship is knowing the difference as best we can.
For Today, That Is Far Enough
There are more rabbits out there.
There always will be.
Legacy is sitting somewhere ahead of us.
So are ancestors.
So is the question of what future Pagans will think of the religious world we are creating for them right now.
Those rabbits can wait.
For today, I think we have travelled far enough.
We began by asking what six scholars might collectively tell us about Paganism.
We ended somewhere much more personal.
Relationship.
Responsibility.
Accountability.
Sacredness.
Stewardship.
Perhaps those are not separate subjects after all.
Perhaps they are simply different points along the same thread.
A thread running through gods and land, ancestors and community, memory and obligation, past and future.
A thread reminding us that nothing we touch remains entirely untouched by us.
And that we, in turn, do not leave our relationships unchanged.
Maybe that is why the image of roots keeps following us.
Beneath the forest floor, nothing looks particularly organized.
Roots cross.
Separate.
Meet again.
Dead things become soil.
Living things feed one another.
Some trees fall.
Others grow into the opening.
No single tree owns the forest.
Yet every tree changes it.
Perhaps we are not terribly different.
We arrive.
We inherit.
We take.
We give.
We damage.
We repair.
We remember.
We forget.
We build things that may outlive us.
We leave behind things other people will eventually have to deal with.
And for a little while, we get to stand beside the fire.
Maybe the question was never whether the fire belonged to us.
Maybe the question was always:
What did we do while it was ours to tend?
That seems like a good place to leave today’s rabbits.
At least until one of them sticks its head out again.
Godspeed.