Creating my own challenge meme

I appreciate the chance the 30 Days of… memes give me to write posts on things I may not have thought of, and I like having a challenge to write 30 times on a certain topic. You’ve probably noticed my reinvigorated blogging has been mostly 30 Days of Paganism posts.

However, those 30 Days of… challenges have their flaws, in my totally not humble opinion. The witch ones I’ve seen floating around, for example, have been pretty Wiccish in their nature — sometimes half the questions don’t even apply to me. (The 44 Days of Witchery one I did a while ago worked fine for when I did it, but if I did it today that might be different.) The questions on the 30 Days of Paganism one are technically fine, but the label of paganism is perhaps misapplied — paganism is a socio-political movement more than a religious one. All pagans don’t have shared beliefs about religion any more than all members of the Free Love movement did/do. Asking generic questions about religion and faith under the label of paganism sends mixed messages, in my opinion.

I’m still doing it, because I’m taking it as asking about my paganism — but that means my answer to the prompt “The future of paganism” or the questions that necessarily ask I factor in other pagans to the answer are going to be not what’s expected, probably. I think the challenge would be better if it were more clearly asking about a person’s personal expression of paganism — and came at things from more neutral territory.

Anyway. This post isn’t about complaining about those challenges; it’s more about talking about forming my own. I was inspired by reading about Merri-Todd’s challenge to write 31 hymns to Antinous — what if I did something similar for my own gods? Then, inspired by conversation today at the Otherfaith hangout, I took that further — what if I created 30 day hymn challenges with actual prompts, one list for each of the pantheons? Or each of the gods?

Obviously this would be a big job, but I’m willing to undertake it. And I have no idea where to start with writing a hymn, but I can make the attempt. My words don’t have to be perfect to be worthy.

So currently I’m working on thinking up a list of prompts for The Sacred Triad — there are three gods, so each gets 10 prompts. Kind of works out. Not sure how I’ll tackle prompt lists for the other gods/pantheons I worship, as I don’t think They’ll divide as easily — might need to change up the number of hymns written, or just do individual lists for each god.

No idea when this will be done, or when I’ll publish my posts on the prompts, but I’m pretty excited to do this. It feels like a good way to explore my relationships with my deities, as well as a way to share things with other pagans. Sometimes it can be hard to find the words to say in worship, and I know I find my copy of the Homeric Hymns very useful for my worship of the Hellenic gods. I don’t really have anything like that for the Sacred Triad, so I should create it — and maybe someone else will find it useful.

Anyway. I just wanted to talk a little bit about this idea that I’m going to be tackling, and hopefully soon. Tomorrow I have a 30 Days of Paganism post going up about my patrons, and then I’ll have another one up sometime in the beginning of the week (the first pantheon post).

~Morag