Religious leaders around the world react to the tragic Orlando shooting. Japan's native religion Shinto expands from the Land of the Rising Sun. And we take a look at the United States Congress' sole Hindu member. It's Faithful Friday, our weekly segment on faiths and religious communities from around the world! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
PaganSquare
PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
I remember in May happily telling a friend that I no longer had drama in my life. Then, Memorial Day weekend, one of my best friends, a man I have loved for 23 years, dropped a drama-bomb on me that shattered my heart. A week later, he texted me that he was killing himself, and I scrambled to get him help. Before I could recover from either, a young singer was murdered by a psycho with a gun after her concert, and a few days later 49 people were murdered and 53 injured in the deadliest mass shooting since Wounded Knee, in an Orlando club, 11 miles from my house.
In the days following the Pulse mass shooting, I got in the habit of checking Facebook and other websites first thing when I woke every day, looking to see which of my friends had lost friends and family, and offering love and support to each who had. I also made a point to share as much beauty as I saw, and to soak it in myself; the loving tributes pouring in from around the world, the hours-long lines of people in my community donating blood, the businesses supporting each other, the heroic stories of some of those lost, stories of people taking care of each other in the wake of the tragedy. Orlando United. Orlando Strong. Pray For Orlando.
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Self-care is a necessity. Thank you so much for sharing this!
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Thank you, Arwen!
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Thank you so much for this beautifully written piece about your own healthy response to overwhelming tragedy - I hope your example
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Thank you, Lizann! Blessed be!
(image: Two hands in black and white cupping the bloom of a deep red rose)
I had tentatively started a post on the Roman months of May and June being filled with rose festivals and how the adornment of roses and violets marked both life and death in the Roman world during the months of May through mid-July. I was mentally filling this essay with how we could all stop to honor our Beloved Dead in the summer with roses and all the historical bits I could yank out of my tumbling, sometimes foggy mind.
And then on June 12th, while I drank my coffee, the news filtered in that there had been a mass shooting in Orlando.
I am going to delay the next article in the series "Blurring the Lines of Community" for an obvious reason.
The LGBT community has been deeply wounded. That community has been the inspiration of many of the things we have been trying to do over the years in the Pagan Community. I have often held up the LGBT Community as an example of what can be accomplished by a repressed, suppressed, and marginalized community. Same sex marriage is now the law of the land. Battles over equal rights continue, but the LGBT Community has done an amazing job over the last few decades of moving the discussion from one of pure hate and complete lack of understanding to an emerging view in America that their members are simply other members of the larger community. There is still far to go, but the LGBT inspiration has had a massive impact on the Pagan Community and how we are now attempting to become more accepted by the legal system and American society as a whole. There would be no "Pagan Pride Day" if it weren't for the LGBT Community blazing a trail for us.