A Merry Meet in D.C.
Blessing on Samhain at the Jefferson Memorial
By Isaac Bonewits

Photograph by John Wallin
Greenbelt Interfaith News

We stand here in a nexus of some of the most powerful positive and negative psychic energy in America. This is a place of enormous spiritual power. We can tap into that power if we do so carefully. So I'd like to ask each of you to close your eyes for a moment and feel your feet upon the ground – or, to be more precise, the concrete. But the concrete isn't that thick. There is earth underneath this concrete – it may be in pain, but it's there.

I'd like you to close your eyes, listen to your heart beat for a moment, find your spiritual center – wherever that may be in your aura – and watch that flickering flame for just a moment. Let that flame of spirit and of the love that we have for the gods and goddesses and for our holy Mother Earth, let that flame grow within you, filling your body with warmth, letting your aura glow and reach out. Feel your feet putting roots down through the concrete, down through the cracks, into our holy Mother Earth. Let your body and your spirit become rooted to the Earth, drinking in her warmth and her strength and her nourishment. Let all tension, worry, animosity, and fear drain away from you into the Earth to become compost for her growth and her healing. Become a tree rooted in the ground, growing on the surface of the Mother. Let your body and your spirit and your aura be filled with her strength and her love.

And lift your arms to the sky, putting out branches into the air and reaching through those clouds to the light from the stars that shine whether we can see them or not. Let the warmth from the Earth and the warmth from the stars above mix and mingle within you, circulating through your body, strengthening you, calling you, healing you. And as you stand upon the Earth with your roots and your branches, feel those roots and branches intermingling with those of the others who are here, mortal and immortal. Let us become a living grove of spirit. Reach to one another in love and joy and trust on this occasion when we have joined together to worship the gods and to honor the blessed dead.

Isaac Bonewits is a Neopagan priest and has written extensively on Paganism. He is the founder of the Aquarian Anti-Defamation League, a civil liberties organization for members of minority belief systems, and is the creator of the Advanced Bonewits' Cult Danger Evaluation Frame, a tool designed to help law enforcement agents measure the dangerousness of any group.

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