Excerpt:
Interpreting the Dream
Now we return to the dream of the chief and his wife I described above. For weeks I could make no sense at all of it. But after some more meditation and asking friends for help, I came up with this:The chief’s wife represents the First Nations spiritual paths. The chief, representing the surviving First Nations peoples, love her; and I do too, even though I am not married to her and never can be.
For all my life, I have been drawn to First Nations spirituality, but I am not a member of the First Nations. I may have some blood from them on my father’s side (there is a tradition that Pocahontas was among our ancestors, and certainly the Lillys were in southern Virginia at the right time) but not much. In the dream, I loved the chief’s wife, but could never consummate that love; in reality, I love the First Nations paths, but cannot walk them.
In the dream, the chief’s wife was shot and killed. In a similar way, First Nations spirituality has suffered terribly from the European occupation. But the wife was revived via the love that I and the chief shared for her. The interpretation of the dream is now clear: the spiritual paths of the First Nations can be revived if both First Nations peoples and Europeans love it enough. The love of just one or the other is not sufficient.
But even when she was reborn, she was still the chief’s wife, not mine. In the same way, if the traditions of the First Nations comes back into full flower, it will still be the path of the First Nations, not of the Europeans. But that doesn’t mean that the love is worthless or misguided. On the contrary — as long as the love is pure and not mixed with envy, it’s healthy, and necessary for the survival of those traditions.
And recalling the discussion above, it’s easy to see why. The First Nations paths are marked by reverence for ancestors, and Europeans simply do not have First Nations ancestors. It’s as simple as that. I have read more than once that this advice is frequently given by First Nations peoples to European-descended Americans who want to learn their ways: go back and learn about your own ancestors, learn your own old ways, and then we can talk. Even though it might seem easier to link in with the First Nations traditions, as weak as they are, than to try to go all the way back to a healthy pagan European religion — you just can’t do it.
Paths for Europeans
Many people in the Western world have lost contact with their ancestry — especially in the former colonies. We people of European descent live on stolen bloodstained holy land, far away from the ground our own ancestors hallowed.If we seek guidance from our ancestors, how do we reach them across the cold battlefields and empty oceans? And which ancestors do we choose? Will they all get into a huge, bloody, continent-spanning war, as Europeans were once wont to do? Do we have to try to synthesize their beliefs, as our genes are synthesized from theirs? Do we have to bring all their paths together into a broad highway, a One Great Truth?
No. But we must lift our heads, peer into the mist, and simply move, trusting that our steps will be guided. The holy ground we walk on is defiled with blood and treachery, but it is still holy ground. The ancestors buried under us are not calling us to paganism or Christianity or some hybrid Frankenstein-faith, but simply to hearken to their whispers of hearth, heart, and earth.
Jeff Lilly is a druid, linguist, father, and author of the blog Druid Journal, where he writes about meditation, relationship with Spirit, soulful fulfillment in scholarship and art, reconnecting the ancient with the modern, creating beauty, and healing the world. He lives in Pittsburgh with his partner Ali.
http://paganpacifism.com/2010/2-articles/c-social-justice/a-terrible-beauty-for-brad-will/
Excerpt:
A Terrible Beauty: For Brad Will
Starhawk, www.starhawk.org
It’s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community’s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most elaborate ritual our community, Reclaiming, creates throughout the year, with intricate altars, a full chorus, dancers, singers, acrobats doing aerial invocations, and a spiral that might include a thousand people. Into all this, we weave some deep magic, both personal and broader than personal, involving the mystery at the heart of our spirituality — death and regeneration.
Each year I take on different roles. Some years I lead the trance, other years I might simply invoke the spirits of the land or play the drum and leave the ‘bigger’ roles to others. This year my role seems to involve carrying a lot of heavy objects and buckets of sand, building altars and decorating the front of the house. Or not so much actually building and decorating, as providing the materials and suggestions for others to do the creative part.
And this year I’m calling the Dead. So I’ve been thinking a lot about death, and singing the song we will use to sing the Dead over into a place of renewal. Just before bed, I check my email, and I learn that a young man has died, shot to death in Oaxaca where he has gone to cover the teachers’ strike and the people’s insurrection for Indymedia. His name is Brad Will. I stare at his picture, trying to remember if I know him from all the demonstrations and mobilizations and meetings we have undoubtedly been at together.
In Miami, my friend Andy reminds me, after a wild ritual collaboration between the Pagan cluster and the black bloc, a young man stepped forward with a guitar and began singing Desert Rat’s song about Seattle, “When the Tear Gas Fills the Sky.” That was Brad — alive, singing, defiant. “I will wash the pepper from your face, and go with you to jail, And if you don’t make it through this fight, I swear I’ll tell your tale…”
I didn’t know him well, but I know so many like him — mostly but not all young, sitting in long meetings in warehouses or donning respirators to gut flood-ruined houses in New Orleans, standing shoulder to shoulder as the riot cops advance, or as the bulldozer moves forward to destroy a home in Gaza. Filing stories at midnight on electronic networks set up by young geniuses with duct tape and component parts in dusty, third world towns, eating cold pasta out of old yogurt tops and sleeping on floors. Hitching rides into war zones and crossing borders. It’s as if a whole cohort of souls had arrived on this planet imbued with the unquestioned faith that they were put here to somehow make a difference, to interfere with injustice, to witness, to change the world. Ragged, intemperate, opinionated, passionate, and above all, alive.
And now another one of the tribe is dead, shot down in Oaxaca where a five-month teachers’ strike became a full-blown insurrection, the kind that radicals dream of, with streets full of barricades and ordinary people rising up against a rigged election and a corrupt, dictatorial governor. It hasn’t been much reported in the U.S. papers. But Brad Will was there, with camera and computer, to be a set of eyes.
Now his eyes are closed, forever. I put his name on our list of the Dead. At the Spiral Dance, I see someone has set up a shrine to him on our North altar, where the dead are honored. I meet another activist friend there, who tells me how he remembers Brad: running into a barrage of sound bombs in a demonstration in some foreign city. “I couldn’t explain to people that they were harmless,” he’d said. “We didn’t speak the same language. So I had to show them.”
I didn’t know him well, but I know how it is to walk into a situation that is dangerous, even life-threatening, how it feels to weigh the risks, to accept them, to tell yourself that you can be at peace with any consequence, and then to walk out into the street in the firm if unconscious belief that you will be lucky that day, once again. I can only imagine how it feels when the bullets rip through flesh, and your severed spirit stares back at a broken body, and in a blaze of light a different journey begins.
We Pagans have no dogma, no official Book of the Dead to outline the soul’s journey. If we share any belief in common, it is simply this: that death is part of a cycle that includes regeneration and renewal. That just as the falling leaves decay to fertilize the roots of trees, each death feeds some rebirth.
Death transforms us. The tribe of world-changers has its list of martyrs — the short list of those who are known in the first world — Carlo Giuliani, Huang Hai Lee, Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall — and the much longer list of names in some other language — Spanish, indigenous, Arabic, and so many others — who die every day. And the world’s religions each have their concept of that transformation, for those whose death is somehow special, powerful and meaningful: martyrs, saints, boddhisatvas. We Pagans don’t like to glorify martyrs, but we know that ’sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred.’ In an instant, that ordinary comrade you remember singing at the fire or arguing at the meeting, someone you might have been charmed or irritated by or attracted to, or not, someone who showed no mark of doom or prescience of what was to come, becomes uplifted into another realm, part symbol, part victim, locus of our deepest love and rage.
William Butler Yeats expressed it best, writing about the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the friends he admired and the ones he disliked, shot by the British.
And so one day you are someone with a job and a family and a neighborhood in which you and your kin have lived for generations — and a day later the waters rise and you are homeless, a refugee in a strange place dependent on the kindness of strangers. One day you are a mother filled with hopes and dreams and pride, and the next day you are bereft, with a gaping hole in your heart that can never be filled.
Yet we, the living, have some choice in how we respond to death, and what transformation we undergo. My mother, out of her grief, became a counselor, a therapist, an expert in loss and grieving. Cindy Sheehan, out of her grief for her son Casey, killed in Iraq, became a woman on fire, a modern prophet calling the powerful to justice, who galvanized the movement against the war. Mesha Monge-Irizarry, mother of Idriss Stelley who was shot dead in the Metreon by the San Francisco police, became an advocate for all the victims of police violence. Rachel Corrie’s parents took up the cause of justice for the people of Palestine. Grief can open the heart to courage and compassion; rage can move us to action. Out of loss comes regeneration: a terrible beauty is born.
A death like Brad’s calls us all to deeper levels of courage, to be eyes that refuse to shut in the face of oppression, voices that sing out for justice, hands that build a transformed world.
http://paganpacifism.com/category/1-pagan-pacifists/
http://paganpacifism.com/category/2-articles/d-personal-reflections/
Excerpt:
We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.
There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might have been a great hall of smooth marble pillars, impassive as gods holding up the infinite ceiling of the night sky. Whatever it was, it was grand and tall and sweeping in every confused direction, and we bumped and stumbled together, low and frightened and half-blind. I was panicked, terrified, my heart pounding in my gut and my ears and in the soles of my feet. And in my hands, slick with sweat and fear, I gripped a sword.
Read more
My mother-in-law warned me that boys are different from girls. “I never bought my boys guns,” she said, “but they’d chew their toast into the shape of a pistol.” Of course, I assumed that I would never have her problems. My boys would be perfect angels far more interested in Botticelli and Brahms than in bazookas. “Come read to us from the works of Emerson, Mother!” they would beg. “Can we please listen a little longer to the sonata?” Right. Not so much. Every day I listen to the sounds of starship battles and the clanging of imaginary swords. I hear the shrieks of the dying and the battle cries of enraged warriors on the great bloody battlefield of my living room sofa. What happened?
I was raised as a pacifist, and I am raising my children with the same values. We speak frankly and frequently about our concerns with interpersonal and international violence, and we challenge our children toward compassionate and creative problem-solving. Just this past week my son brought me great pride when he stood up, for the first time, to his great-grandparents’ thoughtless patriotism out of his concern for America’s involvement in the wars. I have made it very clear to my children that violence is unacceptable and that there is nothing honorable about warfare.
But I do not discourage my children from reading, talking about, or engaging in fantasy battles. Here’s why.
For both kids and grown-ups, play (whether in acting out roles or experimenting with metaphors and symbolic thought through art and language) is an essential human process allowing us mental space to experiment with emotions and situations we may face physically and psychologically. Literary and mythical descriptions of violence help us learn to identify and deal with aggression, sorrow, and betrayal. Examples include epic battles and martyrdom in classical and spiritual literature as well as within children’s literature. The utilization of these linguistic and artistic symbol forms should not be confused with the manifestation of these symbols. I would not want my kids to engage in actual sword fights against evil nor would I want them knocking over money changing tables and driving people out of temples. I would not want them to literally surrender their bodies for martyrdom, or to literally jump on a white horse to champion a lost cause, but I do want them to use this imagery to understand how one gathers up emotional energy for the “battles” they will inevitably face in life. I want them to use fantasy and play to practice with emotions involved in intellectual and emotional conflict. In this I think of my mother, a champion of survivors of sexual violence. On her office wall is a picture she drew as a child in which she made herself a knight with a sword ready to slay the dragon. My mother is a woman of peace, but she’s a fighter too. She carries the dragon-slayer within her.
Another reason I’ve learned not to fuss overly much about play that uses violent imagery is that it seems to help my male children deal with their anger. Our son is much larger than an average child so we have been particularly careful to train him to gentleness. We do not allow our kids to play with toy guns because we do not wish to support an industry that glorifies and institutionalizes violence. On the other hand, we don’t interrupt their play with guns and swords they make with sticks. It wouldn’t work even if we tried. Talk about a losing battle! Just as my mother-in-law warned, I have learned that a piece of partly eaten toast, a funny-shaped rock, an index finger or an upside down toy dinosaur all make excellent toy guns. What’s a pacifist mom to do? My boys are gentle as lambs yet they seem to gravitate toward this play.
I don’t worry because the men who are raising them also played at these games when they were children and are now pacifists and feminists. Also, in watching them “play-fight”, I see them engaged not in violence but in restraint. I see them practicing verbal negotiation, muscular and emotional control, and even a kind of cooperative choreography as they carry out their “battles”. They are learning how to withdraw and how to stop. They are learning how to control themselves. It takes a lot of effort to stage an epic sword fight complete with dramatic vocalizations and sound effects (what is it with boys and sound effects?!) in which no one gets hurt in the slightest.
I see this play at work with my older son and his little brother. The five year old has no fear of “fighting” with the thirteen year old. It is all a dance. The thirteen year old has great control. He learned it from rough housing and playing with the older men in our family. Indeed, when boys play with older, more powerful men, they are not just learning about power; they are learning how to refrain from using it. Long ago I read how important it is for male children, who will one day occupy powerful bodies, to learn restraint in the process of learning about their increasingly muscular and powerful bodies. Within a context of loving discipline and education, the adult demonstrates restraint in play and teaches the child the same. When they wrestle together, or play in sports and other physical competitions, the child is learning that body has power that is controllable. To quote Mr. Rogers, in his song about anger,”I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time!” Mr. Rogers believed that a child’s emotional intelligence is as important as his/her intellectual and physical achievements. A growing body is a strange evolving creature, a constantly new challenge for a child who must become familiar with its sensations, emotions, and powers so that s/he can use them responsibly as s/he matures.
That is the point of play. People who will one day have the power to hurt or kill smaller, weaker, more vulnerable beings, also need to have lots of practice understanding their bodies and emotions so they will not be tempted to do so. When anger overwhelms my children (as it does all human beings at some time) I hope they will naturally fall back on lessons learned in play and realize that that they have choices. They have restraint and intellect as well as strength and speed. I hope that within those inevitable moments of violent temptation, their bodies will recall lessons of self-discipline and control. I hope they will draw on the lessons of a thousand imaginary battles, and a multitude of heroic personifications of goodness overwhelming evil. I have faith that in those memories of epic childhood battles, both dramatic and comical, my sons will remember just what kind of men they are and recall themselves to peace.
It’s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community’s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most elaborate ritual our community, Reclaiming, creates throughout the year, with intricate altars, a full chorus, dancers, singers, acrobats doing aerial invocations, and a spiral that might include a thousand people. Into all this, we weave some deep magic, both personal and broader than personal, involving the mystery at the heart of our spirituality — death and regeneration.
Each year I take on different roles. Some years I lead the trance, other years I might simply invoke the spirits of the land or play the drum and leave the ‘bigger’ roles to others. This year my role seems to involve carrying a lot of heavy objects and buckets of sand, building altars and decorating the front of the house. Or not so much actually building and decorating, as providing the materials and suggestions for others to do the creative part.
And this year I’m calling the Dead. So I’ve been thinking a lot about death, and singing the song we will use to sing the Dead over into a place of renewal. Just before bed, I check my email, and I learn that a young man has died, shot to death in Oaxaca where he has gone to cover the teachers’ strike and the people’s insurrection for Indymedia. His name is Brad Will. I stare at his picture, trying to remember if I know him from all the demonstrations and mobilizations and meetings we have undoubtedly been at together.
In Miami, my friend Andy reminds me, after a wild ritual collaboration between the Pagan cluster and the black bloc, a young man stepped forward with a guitar and began singing Desert Rat’s song about Seattle, “When the Tear Gas Fills the Sky.” That was Brad — alive, singing, defiant. “I will wash the pepper from your face, and go with you to jail, And if you don’t make it through this fight, I swear I’ll tell your tale…”
I didn’t know him well, but I know so many like him — mostly but not all young, sitting in long meetings in warehouses or donning respirators to gut flood-ruined houses in New Orleans, standing shoulder to shoulder as the riot cops advance, or as the bulldozer moves forward to destroy a home in Gaza. Filing stories at midnight on electronic networks set up by young geniuses with duct tape and component parts in dusty, third world towns, eating cold pasta out of old yogurt tops and sleeping on floors. Hitching rides into war zones and crossing borders. It’s as if a whole cohort of souls had arrived on this planet imbued with the unquestioned faith that they were put here to somehow make a difference, to interfere with injustice, to witness, to change the world. Ragged, intemperate, opinionated, passionate, and above all, alive.
And now another one of the tribe is dead, shot down in Oaxaca where a five-month teachers’ strike became a full-blown insurrection, the kind that radicals dream of, with streets full of barricades and ordinary people rising up against a rigged election and a corrupt, dictatorial governor. It hasn’t been much reported in the U.S. papers. But Brad Will was there, with camera and computer, to be a set of eyes.
Now his eyes are closed, forever. I put his name on our list of the Dead. At the Spiral Dance, I see someone has set up a shrine to him on our North altar, where the dead are honored. I meet another activist friend there, who tells me how he remembers Brad: running into a barrage of sound bombs in a demonstration in some foreign city. “I couldn’t explain to people that they were harmless,” he’d said. “We didn’t speak the same language. So I had to show them.”
I didn’t know him well, but I know how it is to walk into a situation that is dangerous, even life-threatening, how it feels to weigh the risks, to accept them, to tell yourself that you can be at peace with any consequence, and then to walk out into the street in the firm if unconscious belief that you will be lucky that day, once again. I can only imagine how it feels when the bullets rip through flesh, and your severed spirit stares back at a broken body, and in a blaze of light a different journey begins.
We Pagans have no dogma, no official Book of the Dead to outline the soul’s journey. If we share any belief in common, it is simply this: that death is part of a cycle that includes regeneration and renewal. That just as the falling leaves decay to fertilize the roots of trees, each death feeds some rebirth.
Death transforms us. The tribe of world-changers has its list of martyrs — the short list of those who are known in the first world — Carlo Giuliani, Huang Hai Lee, Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall — and the much longer list of names in some other language — Spanish, indigenous, Arabic, and so many others — who die every day. And the world’s religions each have their concept of that transformation, for those whose death is somehow special, powerful and meaningful: martyrs, saints, boddhisatvas. We Pagans don’t like to glorify martyrs, but we know that ’sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred.’ In an instant, that ordinary comrade you remember singing at the fire or arguing at the meeting, someone you might have been charmed or irritated by or attracted to, or not, someone who showed no mark of doom or prescience of what was to come, becomes uplifted into another realm, part symbol, part victim, locus of our deepest love and rage.
William Butler Yeats expressed it best, writing about the Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916, the friends he admired and the ones he disliked, shot by the British.
“Being certain that they and IAnd death transforms the living. When someone close to us dies, we become someone else. When my father died when I was just five years old; my mother was transformed from a beloved wife to a grieving widow. I changed, overnight, from a blessed, fortunate child to someone set apart, marked by a tragedy, missing something deeply important that other children had.
But lived where motley is worn,
All changed, changed utterly,
A terrible beauty is born…”
And so one day you are someone with a job and a family and a neighborhood in which you and your kin have lived for generations — and a day later the waters rise and you are homeless, a refugee in a strange place dependent on the kindness of strangers. One day you are a mother filled with hopes and dreams and pride, and the next day you are bereft, with a gaping hole in your heart that can never be filled.
Yet we, the living, have some choice in how we respond to death, and what transformation we undergo. My mother, out of her grief, became a counselor, a therapist, an expert in loss and grieving. Cindy Sheehan, out of her grief for her son Casey, killed in Iraq, became a woman on fire, a modern prophet calling the powerful to justice, who galvanized the movement against the war. Mesha Monge-Irizarry, mother of Idriss Stelley who was shot dead in the Metreon by the San Francisco police, became an advocate for all the victims of police violence. Rachel Corrie’s parents took up the cause of justice for the people of Palestine. Grief can open the heart to courage and compassion; rage can move us to action. Out of loss comes regeneration: a terrible beauty is born.
A death like Brad’s calls us all to deeper levels of courage, to be eyes that refuse to shut in the face of oppression, voices that sing out for justice, hands that build a transformed world.
Starhawk, committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or coauthor of eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred Thing, and the award-winning Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising. Her latest is her first book for children: The Last Wild Witch. She is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work. Her web site is www.starhawk.org.
Copyright (c) October 31, 2006 by Starhawk. All rights reserved. This copyright protects Starhawk’s right to future publication of her work. Readers are invited to visit the web site: www.starhawk.org.
http://paganpacifism.com/category/1-pagan-pacifists/
http://paganpacifism.com/category/2-articles/d-personal-reflections/
Excerpt:
Dreaming the Blue Sword: A Vision of Nonviolence
Alison Shaffer, Meadowsweet & MyrrhWe were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.
There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might have been a great hall of smooth marble pillars, impassive as gods holding up the infinite ceiling of the night sky. Whatever it was, it was grand and tall and sweeping in every confused direction, and we bumped and stumbled together, low and frightened and half-blind. I was panicked, terrified, my heart pounding in my gut and my ears and in the soles of my feet. And in my hands, slick with sweat and fear, I gripped a sword.
Read more
A Pistol Made of Toast
Hystery, Plainly Pagan: A Quaker JournalMy mother-in-law warned me that boys are different from girls. “I never bought my boys guns,” she said, “but they’d chew their toast into the shape of a pistol.” Of course, I assumed that I would never have her problems. My boys would be perfect angels far more interested in Botticelli and Brahms than in bazookas. “Come read to us from the works of Emerson, Mother!” they would beg. “Can we please listen a little longer to the sonata?” Right. Not so much. Every day I listen to the sounds of starship battles and the clanging of imaginary swords. I hear the shrieks of the dying and the battle cries of enraged warriors on the great bloody battlefield of my living room sofa. What happened?
I was raised as a pacifist, and I am raising my children with the same values. We speak frankly and frequently about our concerns with interpersonal and international violence, and we challenge our children toward compassionate and creative problem-solving. Just this past week my son brought me great pride when he stood up, for the first time, to his great-grandparents’ thoughtless patriotism out of his concern for America’s involvement in the wars. I have made it very clear to my children that violence is unacceptable and that there is nothing honorable about warfare.
But I do not discourage my children from reading, talking about, or engaging in fantasy battles. Here’s why.
For both kids and grown-ups, play (whether in acting out roles or experimenting with metaphors and symbolic thought through art and language) is an essential human process allowing us mental space to experiment with emotions and situations we may face physically and psychologically. Literary and mythical descriptions of violence help us learn to identify and deal with aggression, sorrow, and betrayal. Examples include epic battles and martyrdom in classical and spiritual literature as well as within children’s literature. The utilization of these linguistic and artistic symbol forms should not be confused with the manifestation of these symbols. I would not want my kids to engage in actual sword fights against evil nor would I want them knocking over money changing tables and driving people out of temples. I would not want them to literally surrender their bodies for martyrdom, or to literally jump on a white horse to champion a lost cause, but I do want them to use this imagery to understand how one gathers up emotional energy for the “battles” they will inevitably face in life. I want them to use fantasy and play to practice with emotions involved in intellectual and emotional conflict. In this I think of my mother, a champion of survivors of sexual violence. On her office wall is a picture she drew as a child in which she made herself a knight with a sword ready to slay the dragon. My mother is a woman of peace, but she’s a fighter too. She carries the dragon-slayer within her.
Another reason I’ve learned not to fuss overly much about play that uses violent imagery is that it seems to help my male children deal with their anger. Our son is much larger than an average child so we have been particularly careful to train him to gentleness. We do not allow our kids to play with toy guns because we do not wish to support an industry that glorifies and institutionalizes violence. On the other hand, we don’t interrupt their play with guns and swords they make with sticks. It wouldn’t work even if we tried. Talk about a losing battle! Just as my mother-in-law warned, I have learned that a piece of partly eaten toast, a funny-shaped rock, an index finger or an upside down toy dinosaur all make excellent toy guns. What’s a pacifist mom to do? My boys are gentle as lambs yet they seem to gravitate toward this play.
I don’t worry because the men who are raising them also played at these games when they were children and are now pacifists and feminists. Also, in watching them “play-fight”, I see them engaged not in violence but in restraint. I see them practicing verbal negotiation, muscular and emotional control, and even a kind of cooperative choreography as they carry out their “battles”. They are learning how to withdraw and how to stop. They are learning how to control themselves. It takes a lot of effort to stage an epic sword fight complete with dramatic vocalizations and sound effects (what is it with boys and sound effects?!) in which no one gets hurt in the slightest.
I see this play at work with my older son and his little brother. The five year old has no fear of “fighting” with the thirteen year old. It is all a dance. The thirteen year old has great control. He learned it from rough housing and playing with the older men in our family. Indeed, when boys play with older, more powerful men, they are not just learning about power; they are learning how to refrain from using it. Long ago I read how important it is for male children, who will one day occupy powerful bodies, to learn restraint in the process of learning about their increasingly muscular and powerful bodies. Within a context of loving discipline and education, the adult demonstrates restraint in play and teaches the child the same. When they wrestle together, or play in sports and other physical competitions, the child is learning that body has power that is controllable. To quote Mr. Rogers, in his song about anger,”I can stop when I want to. Can stop when I wish. I can stop, stop, stop any time!” Mr. Rogers believed that a child’s emotional intelligence is as important as his/her intellectual and physical achievements. A growing body is a strange evolving creature, a constantly new challenge for a child who must become familiar with its sensations, emotions, and powers so that s/he can use them responsibly as s/he matures.
That is the point of play. People who will one day have the power to hurt or kill smaller, weaker, more vulnerable beings, also need to have lots of practice understanding their bodies and emotions so they will not be tempted to do so. When anger overwhelms my children (as it does all human beings at some time) I hope they will naturally fall back on lessons learned in play and realize that that they have choices. They have restraint and intellect as well as strength and speed. I hope that within those inevitable moments of violent temptation, their bodies will recall lessons of self-discipline and control. I hope they will draw on the lessons of a thousand imaginary battles, and a multitude of heroic personifications of goodness overwhelming evil. I have faith that in those memories of epic childhood battles, both dramatic and comical, my sons will remember just what kind of men they are and recall themselves to peace.
HysteryStar Trek book to keep her place in her Harry Potter book. is a spiritual eco-feminist with an intellectual tendency toward non-theism. Also a stay-at-home parent and a green homemaker with a Ph.D. in women’s studies in religion, she teaches history courses at a community college and gives historical presentations in nineteenth-century costume. Very much like Superman, no one can identify her when she removes her glasses. Finally, she is a nerd, the kind of nerd who actually used a
This essay was originally published as: “A Pistol Made of Toast”, Plainly Pagan: A Quaker Journal, 10 June 2010.
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