Celestial Celebrations

Sylvia Wheeler

Celestial Celebrations Circle is the official CUUPS (Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans) group with First UU Church of San Antonio. We celebrate all 8 Sabats (Holy Days). In months when there is no Ritual, we sponsor a Labyrinth Walk on the west side of our Sanctuary with drum circle. The Labyrinth became a joint project of Celestial Celebrations Circle members. It is available for whomever wishes to walk it - whenever they want to make the journey through it. Thanks to the highway lights across the access road, there is always light for walking the path & the constant highway drone becomes white noise.

Since our last posting, Celestial Celebrations Circle (CCC) has held 3 Rituals. We have replaced the May Labyrinth Walk with a Gender Diversity Ritual (more about that later).

Picking up where we left off with the last posting, we had the Spring Equinox Ritual, which is also called Ostara. Spring Equinox is an astronomical event. Its name defines what it is ... equi or equal + nox or night. Actually, it is equal night & day - or - 12 hours light + 12 hours dark. Our Intention for this Ritual was: Leaving the shell of Winter, we enter into Spring. We gather today to celebrate a time of balance between the darkness and the light, a time to renew the balance in our personal lives, and a time to celebrate the return of Spring and the renewal of all life. May we find our balance in this time our personal renewal and the blessings of new growth. Our Working this time was: 'Running the Pentacle' . This consisted of using the five Elements of Nature - Spirit, Air, Fire, Water, Earth - as a meditation for each point of the Pentacle. Upon finishing the meditation, we did a Spiral Dance, which is a movement exercise where all participants join hands & walk slowly in a spiral of two lines facing each other while greeting the participant in front of you with your eyes. After this, we closed the Ritual.

Our next Ritual was Beltane. This is an ancient agricultural gathering on high ground where each community would light a 'Bel - Fire' to show other communities that they were ready for the planting season - or - rebirth, new growth. It can have varying overtones of human sexuality to represent the 'rebirth, new growth' of the planting season. If the agricultural people had partiers, they were in charge of this time. More recently, it has become May Day in many countries. This is the day to celebrate all workers. Our Intention for this Ritual was: To enhance our magical community so we can each name our desires and magically manifest those desires into the universe by raising them on the maypole and then burning them in the Bel - Fire. This is one Ritual which is mostly the same every year. We erect a May Pole & all who wish to participate weave ribbons around the pole. This year was very magical as the weaving of the ribbons was extremely even & made a beautiful pattern. After this, we go back to our circle & light our own Bel - Fire - although we did not have any other communities with whom to share it. Then we proceed to jump the Bel - Fire. This is a tradition of 'jumping the fire' with your beloved - or - someone you care about.

Now, we come to our newest Ritual celebration - Welcome to People of All Genders. We at CCC want to make sure that our participants understand that you come to Ritual as you truly are, hopefully without facade. As with last year (our first time for this celebration), we had participants who were emotionally moved to find a spirituality which included their way of being in the world. Our Intention for this Ritual was: To experience an earth-based ceremony, to facilitate our understanding of the elements. We call the elements to be our allies.

We called a plethora of Deities. To use the terms - Gods & Goddesses - is *way to limiting*. We must imagine & bring forth a much more all-encompassing language for the Circle. Our Working for this Ritual, once again, centered on the Pentacle, as mentioned above. But this time, there were 5 tables set up in pentacle shape for each participant to individually visit & consider how each Element related to their spirituality. After all were finished with their rounds, the Ritual was closed. According to the comments which were left in our book, many of the participants had never before had a group experience of this sort. We considered this a huge success. Among the participants were a mother and daughter experiencing this together who are not congregants, along with 2 others who are, also, unaffiliated.