featherynscale (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
featherynscale) wrote2006-08-14 10:10 am
featherynscale) wrote2006-08-14 10:10 am
Weekend, with more religion than strictly necessary.
Survived Friday's sick with few lasting ill effects. I left work and went to go take a nap in the parking garage down by City Hall, which helped quite a bit. I think I may have been too hasty in blaming Ruby Tuesday for the sick, though, since when I got home, I discovered that the other folks in the house were also not well. So it's hard to say. Nonetheless, I will not be in a hurry to eat there again. Garcia effect, or something.
Friday night brought gaming and geekery, and ended early enough that we could get up Saturday morning and devote the day to being mostly responsible. Gaia's business meeting first thing, then Pagan Pride Day after. As previously mentioned, I really dislike Pagan Pride Day, so I was something of a bear about going, for which I should apologize to everyone I talked to Saturday morning. We did get to stop on the way for pho, though, which made most everything much better.
I discovered that it helps a lot to manage PPD without suffering if I don't pay a lot of attention to the event itself, and just hang out with the folks there. I seem to have problems listening to pagans talk about paganism for some reason, which I suspect is that most of the community is not able to both have something interesting about their practice that could be relevant to someone other than themselves *and* be able to speak clearly and coherently about it. Content + Form = Not Often Happening. Part of this is the nature of the beast -- pagan faiths are often so individualized that what is deeply meaningful to one practitioner is goofy or alarming to another. It's a hazard of constructing your own symbol set. Some of the folks who are doing some 'set path' sort of faith, recons or other more organized pagans, are sometimes a little better, but often they get so caught up in bashing or condescending to people that aren't practicing their particular thing that they also become difficult to listen to. So, while it's fully possible that this year's speakers were wonderful and compelling, I tried to pass on that part, and was happier for it.
Instead, I met some local and extra-local druids, avoided arguing about the historical accuracy of various aspects of ADF practice, flirted with various pagans of my acquaintance, encouraged said pagans to flirt with other people, played with dogs, got some henna done, and bought a tie-dyed top at the silent auction. Much better. Also, I tried to talk several people into coming to the Winter Bazaar. So that's productive.
Sunday, we got up early to go to the Greek Orthodox church down the road. You see, since we're all deeply involved in the whole 'doing public ritual' thing in our house, we decided that it was probably worthwhile to examine other faiths and how they presented services. We figured nearly everybody would be doing at least *something* that it was worthwhile to know about for the purposes of improving Gaia ritual. Either they'd be doing something really well that we might try to emulate, or doing something really poorly that we might try to avoid. So we've been trying to get in the habit of absorbing this stuff on a pretty regular basis.
Since we're geeks, we are keeping a list of twenty different religious services we could visit, and choosing where to go for the week by rolling a 20-sided die. Once we've been somewhere, we decide if they're worth going back to, and if they're not, we replace them on the list with something else. So it came to pass that this Sunday was Greek Orthodox. We'd been in the church once before (at a Greek Food Festival), and it is a lovely building, with lots of fabulous iconography, so we were excited to see what a service was like.
The short answer to that is "long, and with no interaction". They do Matins before the service, so we came in for that, and sat through one hour of prayers, and then two hours of service. It must have been obvious that we Did Not Know What Was Going On, because a number of people were very kind in helping us follow along. They do a standard liturgy for the service, which was mostly in English, with a choir who did hymns and responses in Greek (mostly -- there were some confusing bits where the priests spoke Greek, or the choir sang in English, and we couldn't figure out what guided that behavior). The liturgy for the Greek Orthodox Church is written so that the priest will speak, and then the congregation will respond, but for some reason, this particular church had chosen to have the choir chant all the responses, so that the congregation had nothing to do for the entire service, except for three bits -- they all recited the Creed, said the Lord's Prayer (in Greek and in English, which was pretty impressive considering that the congregation did not include a large number of ethnic Greek folks), and came up for Communion. During Communion, one of the choir members came over and said "We're just singing to fill time -- this part takes forever!". It was a lovely service, in a beautiful building, all highly ritualized, but we were struggling to stay focused in bits. As![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kittenpants said afterwards, "On the one hand, it's nice to know that we're not the only people in town that do a two hour service, but on the other, I don't think we need to go back there." I'm still working on distilling the lessons learned from the experience, and if there was anything at all that we could use.
Following all that, Gaia ran a class on Sustainable Living, which was full of good information, and which gave me a lot of good ideas. It did sort of peg me out on the sitting-around-meter, though. It suddenly became very important to Go For A Walk With The Dog.
Friday night brought gaming and geekery, and ended early enough that we could get up Saturday morning and devote the day to being mostly responsible. Gaia's business meeting first thing, then Pagan Pride Day after. As previously mentioned, I really dislike Pagan Pride Day, so I was something of a bear about going, for which I should apologize to everyone I talked to Saturday morning. We did get to stop on the way for pho, though, which made most everything much better.
I discovered that it helps a lot to manage PPD without suffering if I don't pay a lot of attention to the event itself, and just hang out with the folks there. I seem to have problems listening to pagans talk about paganism for some reason, which I suspect is that most of the community is not able to both have something interesting about their practice that could be relevant to someone other than themselves *and* be able to speak clearly and coherently about it. Content + Form = Not Often Happening. Part of this is the nature of the beast -- pagan faiths are often so individualized that what is deeply meaningful to one practitioner is goofy or alarming to another. It's a hazard of constructing your own symbol set. Some of the folks who are doing some 'set path' sort of faith, recons or other more organized pagans, are sometimes a little better, but often they get so caught up in bashing or condescending to people that aren't practicing their particular thing that they also become difficult to listen to. So, while it's fully possible that this year's speakers were wonderful and compelling, I tried to pass on that part, and was happier for it.
Instead, I met some local and extra-local druids, avoided arguing about the historical accuracy of various aspects of ADF practice, flirted with various pagans of my acquaintance, encouraged said pagans to flirt with other people, played with dogs, got some henna done, and bought a tie-dyed top at the silent auction. Much better. Also, I tried to talk several people into coming to the Winter Bazaar. So that's productive.
Sunday, we got up early to go to the Greek Orthodox church down the road. You see, since we're all deeply involved in the whole 'doing public ritual' thing in our house, we decided that it was probably worthwhile to examine other faiths and how they presented services. We figured nearly everybody would be doing at least *something* that it was worthwhile to know about for the purposes of improving Gaia ritual. Either they'd be doing something really well that we might try to emulate, or doing something really poorly that we might try to avoid. So we've been trying to get in the habit of absorbing this stuff on a pretty regular basis.
Since we're geeks, we are keeping a list of twenty different religious services we could visit, and choosing where to go for the week by rolling a 20-sided die. Once we've been somewhere, we decide if they're worth going back to, and if they're not, we replace them on the list with something else. So it came to pass that this Sunday was Greek Orthodox. We'd been in the church once before (at a Greek Food Festival), and it is a lovely building, with lots of fabulous iconography, so we were excited to see what a service was like.
The short answer to that is "long, and with no interaction". They do Matins before the service, so we came in for that, and sat through one hour of prayers, and then two hours of service. It must have been obvious that we Did Not Know What Was Going On, because a number of people were very kind in helping us follow along. They do a standard liturgy for the service, which was mostly in English, with a choir who did hymns and responses in Greek (mostly -- there were some confusing bits where the priests spoke Greek, or the choir sang in English, and we couldn't figure out what guided that behavior). The liturgy for the Greek Orthodox Church is written so that the priest will speak, and then the congregation will respond, but for some reason, this particular church had chosen to have the choir chant all the responses, so that the congregation had nothing to do for the entire service, except for three bits -- they all recited the Creed, said the Lord's Prayer (in Greek and in English, which was pretty impressive considering that the congregation did not include a large number of ethnic Greek folks), and came up for Communion. During Communion, one of the choir members came over and said "We're just singing to fill time -- this part takes forever!". It was a lovely service, in a beautiful building, all highly ritualized, but we were struggling to stay focused in bits. As
kittenpants said afterwards, "On the one hand, it's nice to know that we're not the only people in town that do a two hour service, but on the other, I don't think we need to go back there." I'm still working on distilling the lessons learned from the experience, and if there was anything at all that we could use. Following all that, Gaia ran a class on Sustainable Living, which was full of good information, and which gave me a lot of good ideas. It did sort of peg me out on the sitting-around-meter, though. It suddenly became very important to Go For A Walk With The Dog.