As I sit at my desk this morning, enjoying my first sips of coffee and slowly becoming human again, I am thinking about just that: Coffee. I love coffee. I love the process of making it – be it in my Walmart special machine, my french press, or a friends Keurig. The method by which I come to have coffee doesn’t really matter, because in the end, I have a mug of steamy, rich, bean juice. Over the years I’ve learned these different ways of making it, and how to enrich my experience with it. I am a coffee drinker. It is part of my identity at this point. It has earned me friends and…not so friendly people. This simple drink has started wars and brokered treaties.
For some, a simple Mr. Coffee is all they need. Put the grounds in the basket, put the water in the tank, press a button, brew. Bam, coffee. For others, it’s a daily ritual of careful measurements and processes. Neither of these approaches to drinking coffee are wrong. Neither of them are right, either. They simply are what they are to the people drinking the end result. It’s all a matter of preference.
I think heathenry is like that, a little bit.
I am a heathen. I have not always been a heathen, just as I have not always been a coffee drinker. At some point in my life I started drinking coffee. I learned how to make it. How to drink it. I learned the ways that I preferred to drink it, and how others I care about prefer theirs (or don’t). At a different point in my life, I dedicated my life to the gods worshipped so long ago. Since then I have learned about them in greater detail, and the different ways in which they were honored millennia before I was even born. Some days, I want a simple approach to my faith- the Mr. Coffee approach, if you will. Some days that is not enough and I have to pull out my french press. I’m speaking metaphorically, here, so bear with me. In order to get the most enrichment out of my coffee and my beliefs, I have to do work. Grind the beans. Measure the water. Wait for it to steep. Press. Strain. Meditate. Read. Sit and wait.
We joke that heathenry is the religion with homework, right?
Why?
Why does it have homework? Because it isn’t mainstream? Because society doesn’t seem to have it interwoven into every aspect like other religions? We are not spoon-fed a relationship with our gods and ancestors. For most of us it doesn’t come intrinsically. It is learned and practiced and honed every day we wake up and choose to believe what we do. We must be active participants in our beliefs. The ones who came before, the ones we look to for information on how the heck to do this? For a lot of them, it was intrinsic. It was just what they believed. Just part of their lives. Part of who they were.
Unfortunately, that is not the case now. If we are to bring this old religion into today’s world we have to put in the work. Like coffee, if we want to get the most out of this, we have to grind the beans.
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