Thank you for welcoming me into your community. Happy almost May Day, and happy belated Earth Day! I am come to speak to you today about what Earth-based spiritualities have to teach, the wisdom contained within those traditions that you might wish to hear. First, I want to share with you some words by Susan Griffin:

"I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams were made from this earth, and this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us." (Susan Griffin)

So what do I mean when I say "Earthbased Spiritualities?" There are many definitions of that phrase; some mean it to include all of the religions that are not part of the big five "world" religions; especially the tribal religions, the local religions, the religions that are so much a part of a people's lives that there may be no separate word translatable as "religion," the religions of peoples who see spirit in all things, who speak to the ancestors, who honor the gods and goddesses of this place. These religions are important, and often overlooked or, when they are noticed, appropriated by members of the dominant culture who seek for authenticity, for another spiritual path than the one they grew up in. Today I will not be speaking of these ancient, usually unbroken or at least surviving traditions of indigenous peoples, though they have much to teach us, if we will listen. I have not the authority nor the permission to speak of these paths, though many would call them "earthbased."

What I will speak about today are what most people mean when they say "Earth-based spiritualities" -- the new religions and spiritual paths that have arisen in the past 50 years that take their inspiration from the ancient religions of Europe, and sometimes of the Near East and Egypt, creatively reconstructing the beliefs and practices of their ancestors.

For the last 30 years or so, some women and men in America primarily of European descent have been seeking for a spiritual connection that they did not find in the churches within which they were raised. I have called this search "Modern Mysticism," and I use it to refer to the New Age, the Western re-interpretations of Eastern beliefs, the rise of Penetcostal Chrisitanity, Feminist Spirituality, and the modern Neopagan movement, all of which have in common the search for an immediate experience of the divine, the sacred in the everyday, an individualized spirituality that may be tied to no one tradition, or may be composed of elements borrowed from many other traditions, tailor-made to fit onself. Sound familiar? Earthbased Spiritualities are part of this trend -- Neopaganism and the Goddess movement. The Neopagan movement is made up of the modern Witchcraft traditions and also the reconstructionist movements of various ethnic cultures. Neopagans are longing to connect with their roots, their own tribal history, the religions their ancestors followed when they were not so divorced from the earth, from the natural world, from the body, and from the wonder of the sacred. In our modern, often disconnected age, these folks look for connections -- to heritage, to ancestors, to nature, to the divine, to power that is not in a dominator model -- power with rather than power over, as Starhawk puts it. They look for magic, for a sense of the spiritual power in each of us and in the world. Neopaganism includes the branches of modern Witchcraft, such as the Gardnerians, the Alexandrians, the ecofeminist Reclaming tradition of Starhawk's, feminist Dianic Witchcraft, and many others. It also includes much of the Goddess movement, made up primarily of women who work with female images of the Divine, and who are found not only among Witchcraft and Neopagan communities but also within Christianity and Judaism. It also includes the various groups trying to re-create in the present-day the pre-Christian religions of the Old World, such as the many Druid organizations, Celtic spirituality groups, the various Norse heathen groups, ancient Egyptian religion, the religions of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient Canaan and Mesopotamia. To their practitioners, these religions give a sense of connection, a sense of identity, a sense of the possibility of finding other ways of living in the world than that of our American consumerist, dominator, disconnected culture.

Immanence of the Divine is perhaps one of the most important features of Neopaganism. If the Sacred is actually present, in a real way, in the natural world, in the Earth, in animal and plant life, in each human being, then our relationship to the world around us must change. We are not just interconnected -- all things are sacred, all things are places for us to experience the Divine. The Divine is not elsewhere, a transcendent being whom we must ascend from our lives, from the earth, to join. The Divine is here, now, all around us. The Sacred is within us, within all the Earth, within all the cosmos. Things are not just symbols of the Goddess -- they *are* the Goddess. An immanent religion emphasizes experience, embodied experience, physical actions and sensory cues that bring us into an awareness of the presence of the Sacred all around us. The Sacred is the web of life, and the web of life is divine.

Our Earthbased religions are usually Mystery religions -- the mysteries cannot be told, not because we are hiding something, but because a Mystery must be experienced. If it could be spoken about or explained, it would not be a Mystery. The Mysteries give rise to poetry, to art, to the ecstatic perception of the cosmos. But the Mysteries must be experienced to be known. Our rituals are experiential -- you cannot "watch" them, you cannot read about them. To really "get" the ritual, you must experience it, go through it.

I came to this path through my feminism. I found the Goddess, and She helped me find new ways of experiencing myself as a woman, of being in the world, of interacting with nature, than I had found in my previous explorations of New Age and other forms of individualized spirituality. The Goddess movement made me "come to my senses" in my spiritual path, giving me an embodied religion, a sense of the sacred within the physical, and the sensual side of the Numinous.

Most Neopagans would willing embrace the 7 principles of the Unitarian Universalist Church -- they share the progressive thinking, the commitment to social justice, to the environment, to the rights of the individual, and the acceptance of individuals' unique spiritual paths. Many Neopagans have found happy homes in UU congregations, and I'm sure you know the CUUPS, which provides fellowship and rituals for Neopagans within the UU fold. So -- what do Earthbased spiritualities have to teach us? I believe part of the wisdom of these traditions is how we perceive the sacred through the physical, the sensual -- through the bodymind. It is to "come to our senses" -- to know ourselves as cyclical, physical beings, to feel ourselves and to feel the Earthbody go through the dance of the seasons, to honor non-linear time by participating in the Earthbody's cycles, to use the body to apprehend the Sacred, to know our bodies as sacred and the natural world as sacred.

The Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the Protestant Christian traditions, has grave suspicions of the body and the physical. The body (and so the world) is seen as problematic at best -- something to be transcended, tamed, disciplined -- and evil at worst -- the occasion of sin, the devil's playground. We split the mind from the body, spirit from the body, we talk about the body as if it were a possession or a garment, rather than an intrinsic part of ourselves. We compartmentalize the mind and body, and this makes it easier to compartmentalize man and woman, black and white, business and ethics. The dangers of religions that emphasis transcendence is that the body and so by extension the earth, the senses, the natural world, and usually women, are devalued. The flesh is at best the temporary and not very satisfactory housing for the spirit. Even the Eastern religions stress that this world is illusion, that we must transcend the body and seek to escape this world. Earthbased spiritualities do not seek to escape from our bodies or the world -- we're not on our way to anywhere else. We are here, fully, gloriously, our feet firmly planted in the mud. We honor the mind as well as the body, the spirit as well as the material, the dark as well as the light, not separating them into opposites of which only one is good. We speak of the bodymind. We speak of the Earthbody, and as ourselves as part of Gaia's body. The pleasures and pains of the body are accepted not as punishments or trials or obstacles, but as deep ways of knowing and being in the world. "All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals," says the Goddess in one of our well known prayers. We use our senses, our bodies, to connect with the Sacred and to understand and touch the Earthbody. Yes, many people, especially wonderful folks like you in the Unitarian Church, strongly believe in supporting the Earth, stopping pollution, recycling, etc., but think how these ideas might change or shift or deepen somehow if instead of intellectual concepts, they emerged our of our felt, lived experience of the Earth not just as our home but as the body of the Divine?

It is important for us in our often alienated, patriarchal culture to know our bodies as sacred. Men and women are taught implicitly if not explicitly that our bodies are, well, if not downright evil, then suspect, a trap for the mind or spirit. We are told through the media, through ideas implicit in our postChristian culture, that our bodies are impure, never right, never good enough, that our changing bodies are wrong, that death is abnormal, that ageing in our bodies is a crime. If you look at small children, they are at home in their bodies. They think their bodies are just fine, and they inhabit them fully and joyously. But our culture works on that. Men are taught that they must not feel all through their bodies, but must live mostly in the mind -- and give their bodies free reign only in sports or sex -- hence the huge importance of these two pursuits in male culture -- the only places men are allowed to fully feel their bodyminds. It is even more important for women to know their bodies as sacred. Women's bodies have been the screen on which we have projected so many of our worst fears -- of death, of pleasure, of ageing, of being cyclical, of being irrational, of being messy, of being too intertwined with another person. Our culture does not trust interdependence -- we are all enjoined to be the lone cowboy. It is revolutionary for women and men to feel all of themselves, their bodyminds, to be sacred. In ritual, pracitioners of Earthbased spiritualities use our bodies -- we see, we smell, we touch, we move, we hear, we make sound, we gesture, we dance, we taste -- we reach the Divine by means of the body, through the senses.

Starhawk says the Goddess is her metaphor for this web of life, for the life force that pulses through all things. She, as do I, chooses to name this sacred force Goddess, because it is important to change the way we conceive of Deity, because it is time that women and men related to a divine female. Women have been so strongly associated, usually in a negative way, with the body, with nature, with all that is messy, particular, sensual, physical, cyclical, and changeable. We claim this as sacred. We speak of the Goddess' body, of her physical features, and this reminds us that our own bodies are sacred. We speak of her cycles, of the changes she goes through, and this reminds us that the divine is not a fixed, unchanging eternal being, but a process, like ourselves, and not only the eternal, the fixed and unchanging is holy, but also process, change, cycles that go round and return. Death and decay are holy. They are not something to be feared, to be avoided, denied or saved from, but an intimate part of our process, the messy, beautiful, cycle of life and death.

So we meet together, we do rituals honoring the Earthbody, honoring the Sacred, imaging the Sacred as female or invoking male holy figures that are not omnipotent, not punitive, but embedded in the natural world. By doing this we challenge ourselves to break out of old ways of thinking and acting. Carol P. Christ says that if we do away with an old symbol system but do not replace it with something else, in times of trouble and turmoil we will revert to the familiar forms of the old system, with all the alienating ideas they contain. We who practice Earthbased spiritualities may not agree on the nature of the Divine, may not all be trained in the same tradition, but we agree to work with a common symbol system in order to make meaning in the world. We let those symbols speak to us, not only intellectually, but viscerally, emotionally, through story and ritual and song and dance. We experience them. And by doing so, we come to know in a different way. Rather than discuss doctrine, we drum together. Instead of arguing the nature of divinity, we prefer to experience the Sacred in ritual. We disagree, we talk, we form new groups if we don't like the way our old one practices -- but as we are not a monotheistic tradition, we do not see difference and diversity as the end of unity. There is always room for another expression of the Divine, for another group and its ways, for a new ritual format.

Moreover, we who celebrate Earthbased religions are in a relationship with the Sacred. We do this, as do many religions, through prayer, through praise, but primarily we do it through ritual, through physical behaviors. It is in ritual that we know we are in touch with, are involved with, are in relationship with the Sacred. I have friends who believe the Sacred to be discrete entities, I have friends who believe the Sacred is the life force within all things, I have friends who believe the Sacred is a metaphor to speak about our connection to the Earthbody -- all these are valid ways of talking about the Sacred. But whatever we believe, we experience the Sacred in ritual. We make contact with that numinous force, that transforming agent that differentiates a ritual from either an empty ceremony or a party. Sometimes we must go through ceremonies, and parties are always good to have. But it is the presence of the Sacred, the experience of the Sacred through our bodies, that makes it a ritual.

[I know many people in various spiritual communities, including the New Age movement, and even Neopaganism, who are more comfortable working with the elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, abstract concepts of actual tangible things, than with the Sacred in the form of a Deity/Deities. They are often very uncomfortable with anthropomorphic Deity, or even a suggestion that the Sacred has a form of any kind. However, I want to suggest the benefits of working with images of personified Deity/ies, the Sacred expressing itself through or inhabiting a human-style image or symbol, though some might call this limiting or be uncomfortable with this idea: relating to the Sacred in personified image, that has a physical form or body of some kind, helps keep us grounded -- makes the sacred literally embodied, makes us remember that matter is infused with spirit, and that spirit is part of matter, helps us to see our own physical body and those of all beings around us as sacred, helps us undertake a relationship with the Sacred.] We don't just think about the web of life, we sing to it, we dance with it, we listen to it, we reciprocate and interact with it. And when we do ritual together we use the body, we use our senses, our physical sensual selves, to perceive the Sacred, and to perceive our connection with all that is. By doing this, we strengthen our own awareness of the Holy, our own awareness of unity, of the Numinous, of our place in the world.

I'm not used to talking about these things so much. In my religious tradition, we do not have sermons -- we do together. So I would like to ask you to have an embodied experience together, to do a small ritual. Please stand, if you are able. Take the hands of those next to you. Breathe deeply into your belly. In, out. In , out. And as you breathe, feel roots sprouting from the base of your spine. As you breathe in, out, these roots travel downward, with each breath. Through your thighs, your legs, your feet. Through the floor, the concrete, the earth beneath this building. With each breath, down through the dirt and rocks, down, down, till you reach the molten center of the Earth Herself. Now as you breathe in and out, feel the hot energy of the Earth rise in your roots, rising higher with each breath, up through the rocks, through the dirt, through the clay, through the cement. Up through your feet, up your calves, your knees, your thighs, your pelvis. With each breath draw that fiery earth energy up along your spine, up to your shoulders. Feel it move out along your arms, and flow out to the hands of the people next to you. With each breath feel that hot energy move up your neck, through your head, till it bursts out the top of your head like branches of a tree, reaching up. Feel some of those branches sweep back down to touch the ground, returning the energy to the Earth. With each breath feel the energy come up, out and down, making a circuit, making a circle. Feel the energy leap from hand to hand, from branch to branch as we make a circle horizontally as well as vertically. Making circles with each breath.

Now feel sound start to build up from your core. Start to hum with your mouths closed. Feel your lips buzz with the sound. Feel your belly fill with air and push it out. Listen to the sound you are making. Listen to the sound we all are making as one. Slowly, as you feel it, let the sound rise in pitch. When we feel we want to, we will make the sound "MA," a universal "mother" sound, using this sound vibration to raise some energy from ourselves and the world around us. Listen to each other, feel how we are one unit as we do this. When the energy peaks, I will lead us in a blessing.

Take your hands and place them on your forehead. We will call on the Sacred, on the Source of Life/Goddess/God/the Web of Life, however you wish to think of it, for a blessing. Draw a symbol sacred to you. Say "Blessed be my brain, that I may conceive of the Sacred and of my own power." "Blessed be my eyes, that I may see Your beauty and my own." "Blessed be my mouth that I might always speak my truth." If you are a woman: "Blessed be my breasts, formed in strength and beauty, that I may nourish myself and those I love," or if you are a man: "Blessed be my arms, formed in strength and beauty, that I may support and hold myself as well as others." "Blessed be my sex, that I may create what I chose to create, and that I may know pleasure." "Blessed be my legs and feet, that I may dance and walk upon my path." "Blessed be my hands that I may do Your work in the world." "Bless me, for I am sacred." Look to your neighbors to each side. Look in their eyes, touch them and say to one another, "I bless you, you are sacred." Now breathe! Blessed be.

Thank you for walking on this journey with me!

"We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature." -- Susan Griffin

I am indebted to the works of Charlene Spretnak, Carol P. Christ, and Starhawk in influencing my thinking about this subject., in particular Spretnak's "States of Grace," Christ's "Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality," and Starhawk's "Dreaming the Dark." The self-blessing is adapted from the self-blessings learned from both Z Budapest and Ruth Barrett.

"We know ourselves to be made from this earth . . ."