The Wild Goose Invitation: Our Affirmations

Last updated on: May 3, 2012 at 8:30 am by wildgoosefestival

The Wild Goose Invitation: Our Affirmations 2012-05-03T08:30:05-06:00 wildgoosefestival

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Beginnings can be messy – for one thing, it can be difficult to describe something until it has been fully formed. For another, if you’re building a festival whose identity depends on experimentation, questioning, and the imaginative creation of something new, you might be reluctant to close down the options of what it could look like. With that in mind, and with two months to go, here’s some thoughts on what might happen at Wild Goose 2012.

Wild Goose is a summer festival of justice, spirituality, music and art, taking place on a North Carolina farm from June 21st-24th 2012. You’re invited. You can get tickets here. If you want to know more, read on…

In the Celtic tradition, the Wild Goose is a metaphor for the unpredictable spirit of love, for some the Spirit embodied by Jesus careening through the land of the living. The wild goose gathers us along the edges of joy, justice,and art. Its rustling calls us to embody the love of God, neighbor and self, through annual gatherings and a way of caring for and being in the world.

The Wild Goose Festival emerged in the United States among people hoping to fuse spiritual practice, open-ended creativity, and action for justice in a festival setting. A generation alienated by self-centered and angry religion and politics,engaged in social justice, community-building and the creative arts, committed to dialogue across boundaries, is already seeking the Wild Goose. We are aware of the shadow side of religion but committed to its best visions. The people of the Wild Goose don’t divide the secular and the sacred. We sing hymns in the beer tent.

In high summer of 2011, 1700 of these folk showed up at a farm near Pittsboro, North Carolina for the first Wild Goose Festival. Over the Rhine, Michelle Shocked, Jennifer Knapp and David Wilcox rocked the moonstruck crowd. Dr Vincent Harding, who counseled and wrote speeches for Dr. Martin Luther King, spoke elder wisdom from the civil rights movement, while Tony Campolo talked about postmodernism and faith, Lynne Hybels weighed war and peace in the Middle East, and Fr Richard Rohr explored the spiritual dimensions of activism. Nelson and Joyce Johnson told stories of truth and reconciliation in their local city of Greensboro, where the KKK killed five of their friends in 1979. Peter Rollins engaged ideas of how to transform religious traditions in order to be faithful to them. T Bone Burnett and Callie Khouri wondered at artists more powerful than politicians. Workshops on militarism, racism, ecology, interfaith dialogue and human sexuality drew good-humored and intense discussions. And in that self-same beer tent, hundreds of voices breathed new life into old songs that had anchored their ancestors. You can see the lineup for the 2012 festival here.

We believe the festival is a sign of hope amid the current cultural, political, and national crises. We are convinced that common good solutions need a good common place to be born. Wild Goose can wing us toward clarity about what it means to be human, to love, and to bring peace. We want you with us–for an afternoon, a day, or the whole festival.

What the Wild Goose community believes is best discovered through shared experience. There is no litmus test beyond an open heart. There is no creed required beyond a willingness to meet respectfully across lines of difference, to share wisdom and listen to each other’s stories, and become more than the sum of our parts. We’re just getting started. The best way to discover what we’re about is to come to the festival. But if you’d like to read more about our aspirations, check out what some friends of ours in the UK have been doing for a few decades at Greenbelt; they inspire us and their commitments resonate with our own.

Ultimately, Wild Goose provides space for courageous, imaginative, and participative social justice work, creative expression, spiritual practice, and astonishing music.

We are called to embody a different kind of religious expression than has often dominated our institutions and culture. We believe that the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better; so we refuse to merely denounce the shadow of the tradition and abandon it. Instead, we humbly seek to both tear down and build up, walking a path that embodies love of God, neighbor, and self.

We dream of a movement where everyone is welcome to participate. We are intentionally building a space in which we invite everyone to value, respect and fully affirm people of any ethnicity, age, gender, gender expression, sexual identity, education, bodily condition, religious affiliation, or economic background, particularly the marginalized. We are committed to fair trade, gift exchange, ecological sanity and economic inclusion. We strive for high standards of mutual respect, non-hierarchical leadership, and participative planning.

We invite you to join us: June 21st-24th, at Shakori Hills, near Raleigh-Durham, NC. Get your tickets here.

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Todd Thomas, Art Director, Shares About Making Art at the Goose

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