Completing the Dedicant Path study was
a true milestone. I performed the Dedicant Oath ritual that I had
written, taking nearly an hour, with Lynda helping out on the
meditation and the omen. I had written a good part of the essay ahead
of time, because it concerned the preparation I'd done and didn't
need to wait. After I was done, I revised it and added the material
about how the actual ritual had gone. Then I gave the whole document
one more quick read-through and final tweaking, and submitted it.
(You can read the full submission here.)
Religion and I have always been uneasy
companions. On the one hand, I am fascinated by it and strongly drawn
to it; on the other hand, I have a sharp skeptical streak and a
resistance to being expected to conform.
Like most Americans, my religious
upbringing was Christian. I drifted out of it in my late teens and
20s – the time when my parents decided they had done all they could
to instill it in me and that it was time for me to make my own
choices – and into an agnostic humanism. I was still curious about
religion though, just thinking I had not found the right one for me.
At some point in my teens, the claims of Christianity to hold the
exclusive truth started to be troubling – mainly because it seemed
inexplicable that God would trust the one true faith to a single
tribe of nomads and let it develop and evolve over more than 2,000
years within that tribe before going global. (And hell. Hell is hard
to swallow.)
So I visited a group of Baha'i, took
advantage of my job as a newspaper reporter intern to interview
Reform Jews and Mennonites. I read about Buddhism and other Eastern
traditions. All of it was interesting, none of it felt right for me.
In my late 20s, following my father's
death by a year or so, I went back to the Methodist Church. I stayed
back in for a few years, but for a variety of reasons, bounced out
again. Then came years of having no particular religion again. Then I
found ADF in 2008, then let my membership lapse while I tried the
Episcopal Church and then … ADF again in 2011. But even then, working on the DP, I had moments of wondering whether I was on the right path.
During that time, after the Episcopals and before my return to ADF, I became involved with
the Unitarian Universalists, becoming a member of a nearby
congregation. UU provides a really supportive environment for
practicing religious principles while remaining uncommitted to
particular religious beliefs. It's good for seekers, in its own right
as its own religious tradition, and also as a component of a larger
search for truth and meaning. I am still in that as well.
I'm not sure I can explain all the
fluctuation, except that the faith of my youth has had a surprisingly
strong hold on me. It is surprising because I grew up in a fairly
liberal United Methodist congregation, and had my doubts about it
from an early point. The stereotype is that some strands of
Christianity, the Roman Catholics in particular, indoctrinate their
youth so fully and completely that they will never shake Catholicism
as long as they live, no matter how hard they rebel or how far they
run. The UMC does not do that – church for me was an hour a week,
and for some of my youth another two hours at youth group on
Wednesday nights, but the youth group was more social than religious.
Yet even with that comparatively minor
amount of indoctrination, Christianity has always had a hold. So you
can imagine that making an oath pledging loyalty to the gods and
goddesses was no minor thing.
And that is where the Dedicant Program
shows its strength. When I started it, more than a year and a half
ago, I assumed it would be mostly rote. Read a book, write a report,
check. Think about a virtue or a high day, write a couple hundred
words on it, check.
It turned out to so not be like that.
Maybe it is for some people, I don't
know. Certainly it would be possible to go through the motions, apart
from the mental discipline requirement, and create a submission that
will pass muster. But it was not like that for me. The DP, and my
awareness that the endpoint would be either this oath or leaving it
unfinished if I could not make that oath in good conscience,
compelled me to put serious thought into what my religious path
should be. I read well beyond the requirements, and tried to be
diligent about seeking the gods to find whether they were there and
beneficent.
I did not try to rush through to finish
in a year, the minimum time possible. Instead, I worked on it a bit
at a time, trying to really think through the issues being raised. I
considered the virtues from various points of view. I tried to
research the high days across multiple cultures. I wrote my essay on
the kindred closer to the end of the process than the beginning so
that I could speak from some experience.
At the end, I found that I was
completely comfortable taking the oath and meaning it. I am hopeful
that my submission will pass, but if it does get kicked back with a
request to take another try at one or more of the requirements, I
will do that without complaint. My one piece of advice to anyone else
on the dedicant path is: take it seriously.
I think it is one of those things where
what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. If you
respect it and approach it as a growth opportunity rather than a
chore, you will be rewarded.
It was interesting to read about your journey. Thanks for sharing it. I've seen a number of people who go back and forth between Christianity and Druidry. It seems to me that it's possible to honor both paths.
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