Unitarian Universalist Pagans Observe Sabbat of Lammas

I am deeply cognizant of how ancient Jewish tradition is. It’s not as old as Egyptian culture or Mesopotamian religion but it certainly was birthed from the myths and legends of those awestruck Bronze Age polytheists.

And I’m always delighted to discover the similarities between the oral history of my forbears and that of other indigenous civilizations. For example, I recently learned that the creation story of the native Southern California Tongva (people of the earth) is a lot like the creation story in Torah (the Five Books of Moses). There’s the creation of form from nothingness, the dawning of duality from unity.

It’s like there’s a primitive mind we all share from which we derive parables and pictures we use to try and give order and meaning to life. (I’ve never read Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell but that sounds like the kind of thing they would say.)

I made the same connections when I met some other people of the earth, goddess-worshiping Pagans. Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS) is one of several affinity groups associated with the Unitarian Universalist Association, as is are Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Green Sanctuary covenants, to name a few. Unitarian Universalists describe their church as “creedless” or non-dogmatic and therefore open and accepting to all.

Karen Renee, of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City CUUPS group, got the idea to increase the size of the local UU Pagan covenant by inviting co-religionists from across the valley to join together.

“When I contacted ‘The Onion’ [Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society] and said I wanted to have an all-valley group, they said, ‘Oh great. That’s what we had in mind at the same time,’” Renee recalled, beaming. “It was just a wonderful coincidence.”

This new group’s first event was held on the eve of Lammas, a festival celebrating the middle of summer and the beginning of harvest season.

Like the Pagan Wheel of the Year, the Jewish calendar observes the waxing and waning of the moon, acknowledges planting, growing and harvesting and marks the lengthening and shortening of days.

“If you look at every Jewish holiday,” said Deborah Felice who hosted the barbecue in her Granada Hills yard, “it also corresponds to almost every Pagan holiday.”

The Jewish holiday Tu B’av, or the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Av, like Lammas, occurs during the hottest part of the summer, July or August in the Christian calendar. It marks the beginning of the grape harvest. The Talmud (the body of Jewish law), describes it as a day when unmarried girls would go out into the vineyards in white dresses and dance.

The Rev. Mike Young, known during his younger days in the Bay Area as “the hippie priest,” is the current interim minister at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City. Recently transplanted from Hawaii, he greeted me wearing a flowery Aloha shirt.

Reverend Young says Paganism has become popular in the last couple of decades “partly because of what the rest of Western religion has done to religion, to the point of really trivializing so much of an incredibly rich heritage, turning it into a set of ideological principles that you are supposed to convince yourself are true, whether they bear any connection to anything that comes out of your own life experience or not.”

He believes a drive for personally relevant religious experience is what inspires some folks to look back to ancient traditions that are grounded in nature and the experience of living in the natural world.

In the 1960s and 70s, he says, Unitarian Universalists who were involved in the feminist movement, responded to the patriarchal “vocabulary and imagery and symbols of religion in general” by looking for a tradition that spoke to the female experience and began “playing around” with the Pagan information that was beginning to emerge at the time.

The Pagans I met at the Lammas party come from diverse backgrounds and now practice Paganism in a variety of ways. One woman described her practice as eclectic while two others told me theirs is Dianic. They seem to derive their cosmology largely from what they can reconstruct of Iron Age Celtic worship. Celebrants joined in guided meditation, singing and burnt offering. Take a look at the video to sample the service.

The next scheduled CUUPS ceremony will be a women-only celebration of the autumn equinox, set to take place at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Studio City. As the group explains it:

Celebrate your personal Harvest with your sisters in the Dianic tradition as we honor the Earth Mother and prepare ourselves for the journey inward that is the upcoming season of the Crone. Included in this ritual will be an honoring of postmenopausal wombyn. At Equinox we honor half light/half dark, the balance in our lives and preparing for rest.

For more information, contact Karen Schmidt at info@uustudiocity.org

Download the movie