On ritual, responsibility, and consecration

It’s been quiet around these parts for a good while, but it’s not for a lack of activity in my real life. Rather the opposite: I’ve been buried under a pile of responsibilities and activities both secular and religious, and writing that has no clear deadline or penalty (read: this blog) has gotten put to the wayside. Of course, there is in fact a penalty: I begin to feel like I have a well bottled up in me, and as if I’m betraying promises I made to the gods when I first started this site. And so, segue, I’m here to write about running ritual and the difficult but worthwhile responsibility it brings, centered around my first time running a ritual at this past Winter Solstice.

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Something to try: toward the priesthood

Last week I went to see a duo of short plays written by graduate and undergraduate students at the university where I work. The first play, a one-woman show written and performed by a friend, was enjoyable: by turns funny, sobering, and zany. It was also unguardedly honest, even amid its artfulness — I’d expect no less from Sam, a writer of creative nonfiction, but this is worth noting, if only for the way it primed me for the second act. During the intermission, the writer-performers of the second play asked the audience to come forward and write, each on our own brightly-colored construction paper star, something we’d like to try. I wrote “being a priest.”