Personal Spiritual Practice

Personal Spiritual Practice:

While I have only in the last year and a half been a part of ADF, I have been on a Heathen path for somewhat longer.  Thus, my personal spiritual practice has been coming to a balance between the two, and while I am definitely still on a journey, things are slowly coming together into a set of practices that I both enjoy and find spiritually fulfilling.

At the beginning of my time around ADF people, I was still very much Heathen Only.  I felt odd attending ADF rituals where other deities were being honored and the Core Order felt very woo-woo.  It is an unscientific word, to be sure, but the best fit I can think of for how it felt.  It didn’t help that most of my male Heathen friends called me a fluffy hippy bunny for even considering joining ADF.

But the people of Cedarsong Grove not only made me feel welcome, they let me be me.  In the areas where I brought experience, they let me share it and honored it.  In the areas I was uncomfortable, they didn’t push me.  And, perhaps most importantly, in the areas that drew me to ADF, they taught me and shared their own wealth of knowledge with me.  I gained friends with the association with ADF, but I gained so much more.

As I stated in one of the high day attendance sections, having grown up Catholic, I was used to heavy ritual and meaning in my worship.  Heathens often take ascetics in blot to the other extreme.  It wasn’t enough.  There was no music, no poetry, no dancing and singing.  While some Heathen groups embrace those things, I have rarely seen it incorporated into ritual outside of Trothmoot.  It was missing for me, and ADF gave me a place to add it back.

Because of my work schedule, I couldn’t often attend Cedarsongs events, and so ADF has been in many ways a solitary path with a touchstone of friends.  While that isn’t the preference I have, as I prefer group work, it has worked well enough for me to find a level of comfort here that in some ways isn’t dissimilar to the catholic church.  The Core Order, once the bane of my existence for its woo-wooness, now gives me a certain comfort in knowing that I can worship with the grove in my new home area and not have to feel completely out of my depth.

I still struggle to find the perfect balance in my personal practice between keeping things as close to the archeological record for the AS and Norse kins (depending on the ritual), and using the Core Order with its parts that are clearly a-historical.  In my private practice, I don’t always do it.  In fact, I rarely do.  However, as I look to the future and to building a grove here in my new home (the closest one is more than 2 hours away), knowing that the organization and the Order is there to support me in planning group ritual gives me hope.

Lastly, while a part of me struggled initially to embrace a study of cultures and pantheons other than the one I’d sworn oaths to, on this side of the DP, I will say that the studies strengthened my beliefs in the Norse gods.  Understanding the other cultures often brought a spark of understanding to something I had read in a saga that made something else click in a way that focusing only on one cultural view made me miss.  It’s the argument about having to take liberal arts courses in college.  You would think I would have recognized that sooner, but alas….