Unchecked charisma is an obvious problem, but not the only one. (And frankly, a lot of folks I respect have charisma! You, Macha, Oak, Pandora, just to name a few of many… It does not have to automatically equal narcissism.) Mistakes have been made by pumped up charisma and I’ve apologized for my part in some of the teaching teams that were whacked by it and unleashed Gods-know-what on some communities.

That said, the main problem I see is fallout that stems from way back in the early days when the rule was “take a class, student teach a class, teach a class.” The impulse to share as much power as broadly and quickly as possible was noble and incredibly misguided. *No One* got a chance to deepen. Period. Teachers were barely one step ahead of students and hadn’t really integrated or digested the work. (couple *that* with charisma!)

For a time, that may have not been so bad. But it was not sustainable.

And I noticed long ago another pernicious problem: some of us learn really well by example and osmosis. Other people do not. I learned that the hard way locally when I wanted to step down from the ritual planning cell and found that folks who’d been working on ritual for quite some time felt untrained and therefore abandoned by what I’ll call “our generation.” Wow. We (I) just expected they would learn like we did! But they were not the same type. They needed better skill sharing. But we were not taught to teach in that way, so it never occurred to us (I am saying we and us loosely, to name the early generations of Reclaiming).

In more recent years I think there have been attempts to correct this. But the early power sharing paradigm still holds sway even though it doesn’t work. The “ideal” is there, but is often not carried out because it does not really work. And so there comes unexamined and un-named heirarchy.

I hear feedback around this from priestesses all over the country. People not ready to teach want to teach and can’t understand why they should not. They are responding, I feel, to that part of Reclaiming culture that says “anyone can do whatever he or she wants”. Except when they can’t. And then there are problems.

These issues are one of the reasons I teach on my own now, besides having developed my own work. I teach with the help of everyone in the class’s experience, energy and knowledge of course. I want to truly share power, not just give it lip service. And that means showing other people real ways to develop power, not just saying they have it, when really, they have never been trained to wield it.

Developing personal power isn’t easy. Sharing it only comes after we have it. Just having co-teachers is not enough, though it was/is a good start.

Apologies for all the word salad in the preceding comment. I’m a bit sleep deprived, trying to get back into the habit of rising early for when my school year starts next week.

The bags under my eyes are even more noticeable than the typos and fnords in my writing…

Likewise, the critique Matt offers, that Reclaiming is divided into Teachers and Students, so eventually, anyone who wants to go deeper feels that they need to become a Teacher, is familiar, too. The reason the old joke, “Q: What do you call a fourth-degree Gardnerian? A: A Buddhist,” is funny is that we all can recognize the issue… our movement is new enough that we just haven’t developed enough identifiable deep wisdom yet. I think all the branches of Paganism are suffering from this, and I think most Pagan elders who are still working on deepening their own spirituality struggle to find ways to do that.

These issues are, of course, part of what I’m looking for among the Quakers. I keep wanting to chime in and say things like, “well, the way the _Quakers_ deal with difficult people is…” and so on, just as I used to chime in about all the wise and advanced things I saw Pagans doing. It’s not that there isn’t wisdom in both traditions, nor that I _don’t_ think that the Quakers have picked up a few tools I really want to steal–uh, emulate–in Pagan contexts. But I’m enough of a grownup now to know how much I don’t yet know, and to realize that I’m idealizing a group of people again! It’s making me slow down, and feel that I need to wait, think, and experience fully before I rush in with answers nobody may be asking me for! Still, I do hope that I–that we Pagans who’ve been around for long enough to have picked up both the strengths and the failings around us–have time to pick up and pass on at least a little more of what our communities need from us.

Macha talks a lot about culture change. I think I’m talking about working, not just in Reclaiming, but across the wider Pagan movement, about some serious changes that need to happen for us to keep growing in wisdom (as opposed to in numbers alone). But the patience needed for meaningful culture change is hard–hard for me, hard for Americans, and maybe especially hard for some of the charismatic types who make great pioneers in the early years of a movement.

It is a struggle, but even as an outsider to Reclaiming, one I am very glad to hear getting some light shed on it. Whether or not our individual institutions and traditions listen, evolve, and grow, I think there’s a lot of room for the Grownups to get together and share a little truth…

I think that this is key. And I also think that this is one of the reasons that we have such a glut of people who want to be teachers in Reclaiming–either you’re a teacher, or you’re a student. And after you’ve been a student for a while, you have no where else to go. Really, there aren’t any other roles for people who want to be healers, or musicians, or artists, or parents… And that means that we aren’t modeling the ways that folks can take on those roles in everyday life, either.

We have this grand idea that we are going to Change The World. And while that’s a noble goal, we have to start to see that we aren’t going to change the world at a single ritual, or at a single Witchcamp, or at a single protest. We have to look at our Big Magic in terms of hundreds (or thousands) of little, everyday actions: ways of living our own lives differently, of doing our jobs differently, of raising our children differently. And I think that future of Reclaiming is supporting that work. But for that to happen, we need more of Reclaiming than our customary paradigm, in which you are a Teacher or an Organizer or a Student. We need to lead the way for people to be so much more than that.

It seems to me that with the communications web that exists now - and did *not* exist twenty years ago - Reclaiming’s got a real chance to take a big step towards the anarchy it likes to talk about politically. RQ doesn’t exist in paper form anymore; it’s been obsoleted in paper form by the web. I’ve heard that Bay Area wouldn’t want to give up the name Reclaiming; if the trend toward federalism is reversed, and each community stands on its own, the discussion on naming disappears. Organizational sponsors? Do (as Macha has done) the networking Anne talks about; the Death and Dying workshop held in Philadelphia had nothing to do with Bay Area or Avalon or Feencamp - it was DelVal and SpiralHeart, with the camp community providing the 501(c)(3) cover.

Worse, there is the charisma problem: associating the younger communities with the older ones results in the older ones modeling some of the bad behaviors they’ve accumulated (and let me note that my own community just had its 14th camp, SH ain’t a spring chicken no more). The younger ones are apt to learn from this behavior. Again, removing a Name and allowing each community to stand or fall on its own - which, really, it’s going to do anyway - would reduce the chance of this sort of charismatic modeling.

Still, it helps to have an organizational sponsor to do some of the bigger things I like to do. It’s also really useful to have RQ and the Websites and listservs. I’d like to figure out how to make that sort of thing work well. So far, I’ve mainly been able to use it by taking advantage of my emerita status.