Goddessing: A Goddess / Pagan Blog

Temple or sanctuary? Two sides of a coin I keep tossing and tossing in my spiritual life. I've spent a lot of time with what are clearly temple groups and programs, though none have yet manifested a bricks and mortar temple.

I'm both fascinated with the idea of, and worried about the reality of, a temple community. Appealing: the idea of living and working in a spirit-focused, self-sustaining community. Worrisome: the human track-record for handling institutional power.

A year ago I had a temple dream, one of those dreams so visceral that the line between waking and dreaming reality is quite thin. In the dream, I was walking through the warehouse/barn behind my house (and of course, there is no such building), getting ready to go into the house for a weekend spirituality intensive, when I saw the warehouse in a fresh light and realized "Everything we need to create a temple is right here." That meant "right here" inside this huge warehouse, but it referred more specifically to "right here" at the tips of our fingers: I was looking at my hands at the moment of realization.

I'm an everything is possible kind of a Sagittarian, so on waking I realized the truth of that dream (nonexistent backyard warehouse notwithstanding): All the resources needed for temple-building are within our reach. Many scenarios came to mind over the next few weeks -- practical steps a community of folks could take to make a temple happen.

So powerful was the dream and the visions that followed it that I organized a series of discussions in my community(s) and explored both the idea of a priestess-organized, priestess-centered temple (with the potential for services/space available to many flavors of gendered mysteries -- men's mysteries, women's mysteries, polarity-based mysteries, transgendered mysteries) and the idea of a temple organized and facilitated by the broader pagan community (again, with possibilities for all pagan faith groups to serve the temple and use its spaces in group-only and community-wide rites).

We had several meetings with good discussion and some fine visioning, but our discrete and disparate ideas, and I think heavy doses of can't-do (or at least, can't-do-it-that-way), eventually spelled the end of our discussions and visioning.

What's moved my thoughts around to this topic today is this snippet from the BBC's Pagan temples page:


I live in a truly beautiful spot of heaven on earth, and this has been a particularly beautiful season, with a cool and rainy spring lasting through June; waves of Virginia bluebells on the hill behind the house in March, followed by a cheery swarm of swamp buttercups and then a thick spread of wild geraniums in the little thicket on the east side of the house, between us and the lake; after six years of only three trillium, several outbreaks of them here and there -- must have been the rain; the ever-widening, mystical community of mayapples; the sweet-scented lilies of the valley at the foot of the oaks; the English cottage garden we put in last year with its bloodroot and pulmonaria, its evening primrose and lilies, its forget-me-nots, yarrow and soon-to-bloom beebalm, its promise of purple coneflowers to come and sedums for color in the fall; the gentle harebells, proud liatris, vivid spider wort; the new and glorious rose-garden-in-the-round in the front yard.

As I listen to the birds this morning and sit with windows open and a sweet breeze traveling through my study, I contemplate an afternoon swim in the lake and experience another shift in my temple-vs-sanctuary mindscape: Of course there is no warehouse/barn in the backyard in which to build a temple. There is, however, an informal, though well-tended, nature sanctuary all around me. I feel how deeply satisfied and profoundly happy my (primarily) Celtic DNA is to be living in this bowl of oak trees, on this little quiet street, on the edge of this small, out-of-the-way village, in this remnant of mixed hardwood forest, with this lake and the delightful mix of cultivated and wild beauty all around me.

Where I live? It's a sanctuary. Maybe that's temple enough.

Permalink posted by Sage -- 11:29 AM.

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