In a recent emailing, a list member invited anyone interested to her space to discuss community building, effectively. In her invitation, she listed her grievences towards the general pagan community, mainly lacking cohesion, anti-christian sentiment, gluttonous behaviour towards the body, and of course…promiscuous behaviour. At one point in time, I recall one of my instructors at school (a psychotherapist by trade) discussing how we tend to focus in on what we want to see, e.g. we’re buying x car and suddenly we start noticing x car on the road every day.

So it got me thinking on how much we might, as a macro-community, perpetuate these problems because we focus on them, and thus we always see them? I, personally, don’t believe these problems to be any greater in the pagan community than in the greater community, at large. I also think that it might be part of a greater conditioned POV from our society (can only speak from the American perspective), that says we much remain sexually puritanical in public, and the backlash against obesity vs. the acceptance of the body that many alternative religions espouse, and of late – the anti-smoking epidemic that forces to the fringe, those that choose to light up. There’s also this ideal of some in the alternative religion community, that snags the body is a temple philosophy from Buddhist teaching, but takes it to an almost puritanical extreme. One thing that I notice in the pagan community is the respect for individual choices. Meaning, respect for the individual’s choice to smoke/not smoke, drink/not drink, have various relationship set-ups, being healthy or having not-so-healthy habits, etc.

I understand the desire to create a micro-community that one can belong to, because we’re a tribal species. But there is a limit to the control of one, because it becomes its own entity and grows and expands. That is a problem in the greater community, due to some parts of it growing faster than others, and the problems caused when some aren’t ready to give that type of respect or control to individuals. I can appreciate the desire to create a community, to which we, as individuals, can belong. But when we focus on the issues we seek to fix, we ultimately set ourselves up for a downfall when the community grows and leaves us behind.