Approaching the Season of Balance

Last updated on: February 28, 2014 at 11:42 am by Byron Ballard

Approaching the Season of Balance 2014-02-28T11:42:51-04:00 Byron Ballard

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With Imbolc and a polar vortex behind us, we are entering the early planting season here in the southern highlands of Appalachia. As we approach the Vernal Equinox–the quaint season of balance–I am acutely aware of the precarious balance in the human world, even as the natural world turns in its Wheel toward the start of the agricultural year.

As happens a couple of times a year, this cool UU church in a neighboring town has asked me to do the service for them around the Equinox. My title is “Whose Resurrection is it Anyway?” and I am researching dying-and-resurrecting Divines. There are many of them, of course. It is a common theme in the world’s mythologies. But as I’m researching (something I love to do), I am also reading the news feed on Facebook and listening to the BBC for the news.

Balance, it seems, is a tricky thing.

I am personally balancing my increasing frustration with the general state of the “environment” and the ecosystem degradation that my species is so adept at incurring with the report this morning of a student is a public school one county over who has been threatened and harassed for starting an Atheist club in her high school.

Sturm und drang.

And as I rail against a culture (my own) that would allow either of these things to happen, I am also balancing my fear and concern for friends who are undergoing treatment for cancer. As much as I can shake my fist at the behavior of “those Christian”, I am also sitting quietly at my home altar, adding my prayers to those of my non-Pagan colleagues who so deeply want our friends to be healed, to get better.

That is what interfaith does at its very best, friends. It creates a world where people on different spiritual paths form relationships, friendships that go past a lunch-time meeting. When one begins to form these alliances, it becomes harder to point the finger at entire religions and stereotype them as anything in particular.

The situation in the neighboring county is probably out of my sphere of influence. We are fairly self-sufficient and isolationist around here and my jumping into the fray would be seen as outside agitation–even though my Ancestors are buried in the offending county and it is the county right next door.

It is hard to strike the kind of balance that would have some sort of sustainability–certainly Nature rarely does it. Everything is moving, spinning, rising–especially this time of year. There is activity, there is work, there is rest…and the cycle begins again.

I am letting that be my model as I move forward–in both my life and my work. I strive less for the ephemeral concept of “balance” and instead focus on the work and the rest, and I deem both those things holy. I know that my interfaith relationships will become messy and complicated sometimes, and sometimes they will be clear as clean glass.

For that is the nature of the world and of these complicated humans who are making such a mess of it.

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