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    • Prairie Tidings (Church Blog)
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    • Little Druid on the Prairie (Rev. Lauren's Blog)
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Mountain Ancestors Grove, ADF

A Year of Contemplation

Our Duty to Learn (Day 188)

7/7/2019

 
Picture
Image by ludi from Pixabay

I often wonder, as a sort of interloper within the “pagan-intelligentsia” world, why so many of my polytheist-minded kinfolx focus so hard on remembering every verse, date, and minutiae of detail? Maybe it’s so they don’t have to focus on the weight of the story’s moral. It’s exhausting to try and have a religious-professional-to-congregant conversation when I’m focused on the moral (usually related to whatever personal details/troubles the other party is bringing to me) and they’re only interested in picking apart the LITERALLY inconsequential bits of the parable.

What’s this got to do with duty? Well, if our duty is to learn, what I’m pointing out above is one’s dereliction of duty. 

It takes vulnerability to learn, and willingness to put yourself in the place of the learner and not the knower (not to mention the HUGE amount of ego-surrendering it takes to perform our duty). It’s a scary place to be, for sure. This educational-vulnerability creates a lot of fear and concern within until we become used to the feeling. It’s allowing someone else to win, so that you can both win the ultimate “prize”, kinda like Dr. Strange did in the first Infinity Wars movie. 

Pagans, however, are not rock-star doctors or galactically powerful super wizards (whether they believe it or not), and were more likely than not picked on when they were younger, or in school, or when they went from homeschooling to public school, or whenever the occasion. People who have been picked on don’t want to be vulnerable anymore. They’ve already been vulnerable when they didn’t want to be. Vulnerability might mean something different to them. 

Now, as adults, they want to be strong. But, unlike Steve Rogers before he got dosed with the Super Soldier serum and the Vita-rays, they were never the kind of person to keep getting their ass kicked and keep returning over and over, for more… “I can do this all day.” In other words, they don’t know what to do with their “strength” (intelligence), so they bully others like they were bullied, albeit how the intelligentsia “bully”, thus keeping the cycle going on into eternity. 

If we’re so freakin’ “woke” and “smart”, why aren’t we doing things differently? Why aren’t we doing things better?

Learn to be better. It’s our job. It’s our duty. 

(See y’all tomorrow) 

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    About the Blog

    Awakening the desire to explore Stoicism, and how it relates to his existing beliefs, Rev. William committed to working through the text, The Daily Stoic, a year-long journey to awaken the Stoic mind. 
    How things are structured can be found in the first post. 

    About the Author

    Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, Rev. William attended Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where in 2007 he graduated with a degree in Religious Studies, minoring in Psychology. Currently residing in Longmont, CO, he is one of the Priests and founder of Mountain Ancestors Grove.  He spends his time playing mandolin (and some guitar), writing, engaging in LGBTQIA+ advocacy and education, community service, and sharing a larger vision of how a polytheist perspective can lead to greater human understanding, acceptance, and gods be good, peace. 

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