I've long believed that if you want a certain community to exist, it's your responsibility to show up and participate, to do the things that help make and maintain that community. In our particular Pagan community, I've led ritual, I've cooked, I've cleaned up after people, I've babysat, I've listened, and I've tried to be attentive to what was needed.
The problem is, for the last year or so, I've felt like this is not a community I want to be part of any longer. It's not a bad community; it's simply a community that isn't feeding my spiritual needs. What I want, desperately, is spiritual connection, a space to lean into the spiritual, a context in which I can do the spiritual pushing I need to do.
What this community has is wonderful people, a great space, and a very ad hoc tradition that we've more or less made up ourselves out of the traces of something more substantial. This isn't to say it doesn't work or that it has no value. It's that I know, I know, that there's something more out there and I long for that something more. I long to learn from teachers who have themselves been taught. I long for a set of practices that let me open myself to the Divine.
So I'm pulling away from the community as community and trying to keep the friends I've made in that community. I'm not sure, however, that it's going to work.
I had a fight on Saturday with E, one of my faery godfathers and someone I respect deeply. He's a community-builder; networking and creating institution are in his bones. He was trying to get me to attend a birthday dinner tomorrow night for someone in the community, someone I don't much like. The birthday boy is young and unformed, and after two or three years of spending time with him I've still not experienced any kind of meaningful relationship with him. I don't much like him, and I don't want to go, especially since I'm feeling increasingly like my time is small and precious and I want to be choosy about how I use that time. E's argument is that I owe it to the community to be a role model, to show up to the birthday boy's development. I don't think he can grasp where I'm coming from: that I don't feel ties to that community and don't feel I owe it anything and besides, I have done my share of mentoring clueless younguns and I decided years ago to stop.
Our fight has more to it than a disagreement about the place of community. It's also about my feeling like E is bulldozing me here and in other contexts. It's about me trying to set boundaries and feeling illegitimate about it. It's about my being disappointed in the spiritual community we have and feeling tragic about my spiritual prospects. But it's also about who we are in the community and what we'd like that community to be.
And I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that I don't want public community, not in my spiritual life.