Anyone for dvoeverie?

An interesting phenomenon has been quietly gathering for a number of years now: QuakerPagans, PaganQuakers, and UU Pagans. As a Pagan who is currently in the process of joining the Unitarians (whilst remaining very much in love with Wicca and Paganism), I find this phenomenon of “dual faith” very interesting (so interesting that I wrote an essay on it for my MA course). In Russia, the dual practice of Paganism and Orthodox Christianity was known as dvoeverie (double-mindedness) and it was assumed that people were practising the two faiths alongside each other without much thought as to how they would fit together. However, I think contemporary dual-faith practitioners are doing something very different - they are attempting a synthesis, bridging the apparent divide between monotheism and polytheism, and perhaps striving to find some larger or deeper truth than can be found in the paradigm of one religious tradition. Of course, it's easier to be a dual-faith practitioner if one or both of your traditions is universalist (or at least not exclusivist) and/or non-creedal.

Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon is very much reflected in the blogosphere. The Great Waters blog is a meeting place for Quaker Pagans; their initial press release says:

Can one be a Quaker and a Pagan at the same time? Members of the Religious Society of Friends who experience the Divine through Nature not only say "yes," but are organizing nationally for the first time - at Great Waters Pagan Friends Gathering.

And of course our very own editor, Cat, has been a Quaker since 2001 (and a Pagan for 25+ years). She has a series of posts about this, collectively entitled Spiritual Identity and Membership Series: Part 1: Quakerpagan or Paganquaker - Part 2: Membership and Identity - Part 3: Marshall Massey Replies; another interesting post in the same vein is Lloyd Lee Wilson, Herne, and the Sea of Limitless Light.

Other Quaker Pagan bloggers include QuakerWitch and Rainbow Ruminations (somewhere on the path between Quaking and Paganing).

The phenomenon of QuakerPagans is part of a larger one of Quaker Universalists - Quakers who believe that all religions are valid paths to the Divine.

Among Unitarian Universalists, "being a Pagan is an adorable eccentricity" according to ChaliceChick. Paganism has been a strand in UU thinking for a couple of decades now, but it is likely to be assimilated into existing thinking, according to Transient and Permanent:

Newly available theologies, such as Neo-paganism or Buddhism, may be adopted, but they are assimilated to an established core UU identity, expanding one’s personal identity and understanding without fundamentally re-shaping it.

And of course the Belief-O-Matic quiz shows how much overlap there is between all these liberal religious traditions. I took it too - note how my top eleven results are traditions that accept other traditions as valid. Mindykim took it and came out as a Pagan Jewish Quaker. The Hearty Heretic had similar results.

Jewel of the Goddess has been exploring Sufism alongside her Pagan path, and dealing with the wounds caused by her Christian past (I can resonate with that one):

So, when you go deeper, you have to deal with the wounding. I have been going through a process of readdressing God and working on forgiveness for many things, many of which are frankly the result of freewill and my work in this life. I have been unloading the term Lord so it can be there as a empowering word in my magical vocabulary, not something that has dominion over me as a button connected to a wound. And I have been giving myself grace to be not perfect, compassion when I am there and having a hard time with this process and engaging in repentance. See, I still get the hives when I use that term, and I may not get to use it. However, the definition of repentance is merely the willingness to be different when shit isn't working and it is in opposition to my True Will. I realize that our conversations with the Monotheistic bunch isn't as far as away from our own path that we would like. They are not the same, but in fact we are in the same boat, on the same stream and are in fact heading the same direction.

It's difficult sometimes coming up against Christian language, especially Western Christian language. I have great difficulty with "repentance" but metanoia has no barbs for me; similarly, I dislike the word mercy but have no difficulty with eleison. I eventually decided the Mysteries of Orthodoxy were not for me, but I'm glad I had a look around; it was a healing experience that I needed to go through to clean out the poison from the bottom of my psyche. It was rather like that scene in Dune where Jessica drinks the poisonous water of life and transmutes it. Hey, I've always wanted to be a Bene Gesserit.

Meanwhile, I produced a rather naughty post comparing various religions to different types of software. And Waking the Midnight Sun suggests what Christianity can learn from traditional Paganisms:

I will propose that all of these denominations exist because (there’s that magick word, because) they are actually all worshipping different entities. “Ecstatic, snake-handler Jesus” is not the same entity/energy as “Prosperity and a Better Stock Portfolio Jesus” is not the same as the “Military Jesus” is definitely not the same as the “Quaker Jesus” or the “Christian Science Jesus”. These are different energy frequencies that meet the need of different communities of individuals that are compatible with them. The disfunction part comes when these groups believe they are all worshipping the same thing simply because they are all using the same name: Jesus. ... A thousand Jesi: they ain’t all the same guy. What if that was acknowledged and accepted? People could start to align themselves more harmoniously with the Jesus that works for them rather than trying to fit into a peg that doesn’t fit or trying to get others to do so in a belligerent, coercive or violent way.

There seems to be a lot of crossover between different faith traditions; perhaps some kind of new spirituality is emerging, as commentators such as Paul Heelas have been saying for a while.

Certainly this wonderful post at Manifold Oneness gives a hint of the benefits of dvoeverie and syncretism:

The Divine Essence is spread through all creation, directly approachable in that creation and in the Names and Forms of an infinite array of God/dess(e)s. Teachers and books and fellow travelers--and even the Most Holy Names and Forms of God/dess(e)s--are all gateways, vessels, means of conveyance. You can approach the Infinite Godhead directly and expect comprehensible, workable answers immediately--but only if you engage with the process and trust the answers you're given without regard for convention or your own expectations.

Om mani padme hum.