Matters of GraceCreating an Ethical Code
One
of the many things that first drew me to Wicca was its simplicity, which
may surprise those of you who have just started studying and found the
endless lists of correspondences, deities, tools, and holidays that will
probably swim in your head for the first year or two of yoru practice.
Beneath all the trappings, however, the actual structure of Wicca is as
elegant as Nature itself; there are precious few rules, little dogma,
and most of the traditions we adhere to are open to interpretation and
personalization. I've said before that no two Wiccans practice exactly
the same Wicca. Each of us learns and develops a spirituality based on
our own experience and the call of the gods as we hear it. A lot of people attach a second rule to their tradition, the Threefold Law of Return, which states that whatever you do comes back to you threefold. If you're at all familiar with my work you know I feel the Threefold Law is utter bollocks-not because I don't believe in karma, but because I don't believe that the universe works so neatly. If you hit someone in the head, three people don't come along and hit you in the head. Putting a number on karmic return simply doesn't work in the real world. That doesn't mean we should throw out the idea of return altogether; it means simply that quantifying karma is imposing a limited and flawed structure upon the way the gods and the universe operate. In my own personal tradition, I believe very firmly that what you do returns to you, but very rarely in the same form and often on a much longer timeline than the movies and television shows about Witches would have us believe. In my worldview all of reality functions as a web of energy, interconnected by choices. When you do something to your own individual strand of the web you affect the whole--it's a metaphor that plays out quite beautifully in Nature. Each strand is vital to the stability and strength of the overall web, and when something, say a fly strikes the web, the whole thing vibrates and adjusts to the change. When you make a choice, all those connected to you are affected; we can never be 100% sure of all the consequences of our actions, because the web we're weaving is part of something infinite whose far edges we can never see. We have to make our choices based on the knowledge we have and the awareness that all is sacred, and our connection to Deity is obvious in our actions. Whatever view you take on reality, however you feel about the Law of Three and the Rede, at some point in your evolution as a Wiccan it would behoove you to develop a sort of ethical code for your own path. Most religions have some sort of similar code, ranging from the dozens of Kosher laws to the Ten Commandments. You may find the Wiccan Rede and the Law of Three are all you need to make ethical choices, and you may find them woefully incomplete. Wicca doesn't lend itself to absolutes, but I've found in my work that having some sort of code is essential, both to make you think about your beliefs and examine them thoroughly, and to help you make better choices. Most Western religions operate on rule-based ethics: thou shalt, thou shalt not, abortion is wrong, capital punishment is just, and so on. Rule-based ethics categorize our behavior in terms of moral and immoral, and often see the world in black and white terms that lead to a lot of guilt on the part of the practitioner. We're human; we screw up. Going off rule-based ethics is almost a guarantee that you'll break them, if only because the human spirit seems rebellious in nature. The
philosophy and spirit of Wicca works better, in my experience, with virtue-based
ethics. In virtue-based ethics we set goals to be a certain kind of person
rather than to follow a certain set of rules. Virtue ethics are less about
obedience than about growth. Also, while not universal by any means, virtues
tend to cross more cultural and dogmatic boundaries; religions may disagree
vehemently on a lot of specific issues, but most of us can agree that
virtues such as kindness, compassion, and responsibility are good things
to shoot for and ideas such as cruelty and dishonesty are not. Virtues
also show a good deal of optimism, as they are ideals we strive for that
reflect the potential we see in humanity. Just sticking to a set of rules
will most likely not inspire you to excellence--rules inspire obedience.
Obedience isn't a virtue Wiccans tend to celebrate. That in mind I drafted a series of ethical standards for myself--you could also call them virtues, truths, whatever speaks to you. I call mine Wiccan Graces. To create them, I sat down with pen and paper in hand and thought to myself, "What do I value? What virtues are important to me?" I looked at examples from other religions such as the Buddhist Eightfold Path and the Asatru Nine Noble Virtues, and made lists of as many such virtues as I could come up with. Then I considered each and narrowed the list to those that fit in with my view of the Divine and my hopes for my own growth. I copied this list into my Book of Shadows as a sort of pledge, which you can find in my first book if you want to see the whole thing. How you create your own is of course very personal, but as a starting point, below is a list of various virtues and graces from all sorts of traditions--some you will immediately see aren't really in keeping with Wicca, some may seem utterly pointless to you, some may seem like they're the same thing as others; regardless, they're meant as inspiration, and among them hopefully you will find a set of your own Graces to guide you as you walk your path. Choose a few to meditate on and explore. Acceptance
Copyright 2006 Dianne Sylvan. All rights reserved. |