This report is designed to illustrate how each individual priest has chosen to fulfill their oath to love the land, honor the deities, serve the folk, and continue in their studies as best suits their individual vocations.
Time covered: January 1 2024 – December 31, 2024
Continue reading “Annual Clergy Report for 2024”As I continue working as a prison chaplain, I’ve found not only is it a deeply fulfilling part of my vocation, it is also allowing me to re-examine my own spirituality and add depth and subtlety to my understandings of the cosmos. I teach weekly using Rev. Dangler’s Dedicant Path Through the Wheel of the Year as a base, and recently we were discussing the virtue of perseverance. Beyond definitions, I like to ask them to think of a person (real or fictional, historical or modern, famous or not) who they believe embodies each virtue. For perseverance, it was thinking of who has the drive to continue towards their goals, even when the whole world seems to be conspiring against it. They acknowledged each other as fully embodying perseverance.
Continue reading “Perseverance is Making Sure You’re a Success Story, Not a Statistic”Yesterday was amazing. I had coordinated to bring three of my Grovemates, Joe, Jeff, and Mike to ORW as volunteers for Beltane. I wanted to make it kind of like a mini-festival day for the inmates. So we had a morning of workshops and then an afternoon ritual.
Continue reading “Beltane Behind Bars”It’s amazing how serendipitous life changes can really affect your spirituality and the ways that you interact with the world. Since becoming ordained in 2015 I’ve had an interest in pursuing professional chaplaincy, but as a minority religion there are even more barriers in place that there would be otherwise. Even then, I thought I’d like higher education or hospital chaplaincy, and was pretty sure that prison chaplaincy was not for me. But then this opportunity to work at the local women’s state prison fell into my lap, and I have found myself spirituality reinvigorated and deeply humbled in this work.
Continue reading ““Reflections on Prison Chaplaincy””I had the amazing opportunity to teach a class of Chaplaincy students doing CPE with OhioHealth this week. Their instructor had reached out to me to see if I could help give them some perspective on what types of things pagans belief, and what would help them in times of crisis. The talk went really well, the students were engaged and had good questions. Hopefully I get the opportunity to go back with each new cohort.
Here’s the outline that I sent along to the students:
Continue reading “Teaching Chaplains About Paganism”
Mist to Open. Mists to Bind. 