Gay Spirituality

Our grove is celebrating Imbolg this Saturday.   One tradition we have is that we take turns facilitating the ritual for each sabbat.  It’s my turn to facilitate this one.  I’ve been working on developing my ritual for the sabbat and I have to admit, I was a bit stumped at first.

I started to think about what Imbolg typically represents.  Usually celebrated on February 2, Imbolg was a time in which new beginnings were celebrated.  Some believe that the word Imbolg comes from a Celtic word meaning “ewe’s milk”.  During this time, the ewes would be lactating in preparation to give birth in the early spring.  It was also celebrated as Brigid’s Day.  As such it became a “fire festival” in which the fires of the hearth were celebrated.  This has also traditionally been a time to divine the weather which is where the tradition of Ground Hog’s Day comes from.

Our guest speaker for this year’s Between the Worlds is Rich Wandell.  We selected Rich due to his involvement in activism in New York City and to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.  This has been a trying year for the GLBT community.  We’ve made some steps forward towards equality and had some big setbacks like the approval of Proposition 8 in California.  We decided that we really needed to renew an interest in activism among our community and that we needed to bring up some of the spiritual aspects of activism–of working together from the heart.

As I was thinking about this, I came up with my idea for Imbolg.  In many ways, GLBT people have suffered a long winter.  It’s time to divine the weather and see when this winter will come to an end, when we’ll enjoy the equality we deserve.  But more than passively looking towards the end of the discrimination and inequality, we need to encourage the sun to gather its strength.  We need to rekindle the hearth fires of community and the spirit of activism.  This Imbolg, our grove is going to symbolically “light a fire under our asses”.

I’m still fine tuning the ritual and I’ll post the outline and text of it after Imbolg, but I’m thinking that we’ll light candles and name those causes that we still need to fight for: a cure for AIDS, non-discrimination in employment, marriage equality, the ability to adopt, etc.  As we light candles and name these things we’ll visualize the fire of the spirit of activism catching in our community and bringing strength and passion into our community.  We’ll visualize our community working together.  Then we’ll go around the circle and each person will name one thing that they’ll do before the next sabbat to make this happen.

Imbolg is the perfect time to recommit as a community to working together for equality.  The traditional associations of this time of year fit perfectly with the idea of rekindling our activist spirits.  Won’t you join us and light a fire of activism in your community?

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