Reflections

This past year was surprisingly busy. I say surprising because it didn’t feel busy at the time, but reading the archives of the blogs I keep, a lot has been done.

Here, I’ll reflect mostly upon what we as a House have done.

Last year, in January, we sent support to the girls who found themselves in the middle of a lawsuit for the simple and friendly act of giving cookies to a neighbor. Cookies are an important symbol for us, and one of our holiest days is dedicated to cookies. How could we not support these girls?

hardly had we completed that task than we were confronted with poor Terry Shiavo’s case. That spurred us to consider the theology and spiritual considerations of living wills, when life ends, and ethical decisions concerning life.

That led us to more considerations on words as weapons and how we, as Numenists, would handle hostile words and how to defuse verbal hostility.

We attended the online Rockridge Spiritual Conference and contributed information about us in specific and some forms of Paganism in general, leading us to consider why we chose to be Pagans and not Buddhists or Asatruar.

That of course, led into thoughts about what comprises adulthood, and how it is distinguished from childhood and teenhood. We explored mile markers and developed markers that would help us be better parents and better community members.

We played at the OU Medieval Faire (where I broke a hand), and I acquired Itzl.

We codified our concepts of marriage and family and wrote them down to teach and share.

We participated in the local National day of Prayer as proud Pagans.

I completed the outline for a book on urban magic and spirituality and have begun the lengthy process of testing and proofing my theories and suppositions -and collecting lots more data.

We partifcipated in our Eat Local Program (not hard to do when we were already advocating local community support for farmers, ranchers, and other food-related businesses). We published our guidelines for teachers and apprentices.

We followed the Indiana case about the judge ordering a Pagan couple to not expose their child to their own religion – adn cheered when the judge’s decision was overturned.

We began work on a book for the Numenous Child.

We explored the information offered in the Newsweek religious POll of August 23rd.

And we were deeply involved in the rescue and support efforts of Katrina. We brought food and water to the coast, and took a Katrina survivor as a housemate. We were active in exploring what went wrong so we could formulate ways of preventing the wrongs from happening again, and developed further disaster strategies not just for ourselves, but for our neighbors and local community. Through this, we codified our list of Spiritual nad Physical Acts of benevolence as a further enhancement of our Bounty Ministry.

We completed the re-write of our basic book on Numenism and published it.

We celebrated all of our many holy days and quite a few fun secular ones, including Halloween and Christmas.

We held our annual charity review meeting to see where we as a group were in our adherence to our charitable beliefs and felt we were emptying our cornucopia too fast. We brainstormed ways to refill our cornucopia so we could have more to share.

As our final act of the old year, we decided to start what we hope will become a new tradition: Souper Sunday!

As for our plans for the coming year? That will be discussed in our next meeting. I’ll post about it when we’re done.

Soon, I’ll consider what I personally have done this past year and post it. Some of it will be inextricably mixed with what we did as a House, and that’s only proper, as I have been the House Elder, and have just this past year become a full Numenist Elder. The difference is in training and age. In a House, the person with the most experience in Numenism is the House Elder – and that person can be quite young. To be a Numenist Elder requires at least 30 years of study and testing and work. Since we don’t allow anyone under age 25 to begin studying for Eldership, none of our Elders are under age 55, and most are over 60.