I don’t get a lot of mail here as a part-time intern. So the letter I got in late October was a little surprising. But the message inside was even more surprising. It was earnest. An elder of our congregation had written to tell me how shocked, and somewhat dismayed, he had been when he heard me speak from this pulpit a couple of weeks prior. What was specifically shocking was that I shared I was a Pagan. Reading between the lines of his letter, I wondered what he was feeling beneath the shock. So I invited him to meet me for coffee here at church.
He graciously accepted my invitation, and we had a long, rich discussion about spirituality in this church. Shortly after we sat down on that snowy day, he shared that he had been reflecting more on what he had written, and what he hadn’t. Before he sent me his letter, he had shared it with a couple neighbors who go to First Unitarian, who were not surprised at all to hear that there was a Pagan in a Unitarian Universalist church, and this helped him put my sermon in context. When we met, we found so much in common between the two of us, a liberal Christian on the one hand, and a Pagan on the other. He shared that when he heard me describe my faith, he was taken back to his childhood church, full of missionaries telling of the “pagans” they converted abroad. But decades later, as he sat across from me, he challenged that memory and asked me, “When you say you’re a Pagan, what do you mean?”
What a wonderful question. Perhaps this morning you are also wondering “What’s this Pagan doing in my pulpit?!” And what does that mean? But I think there is a deeper question before us. As we explore the faiths that shape us and our neighbors over the next month, let’s consider this today:
“How does Paganism shape our Unitarian Universalist faith?”
But to start, what do I mean when I say I am a Pagan? Most fundamentally, it’s my acknowledgement that we inhabt a world full of livingness. This is a world full of agents, beings that shape the world around them, from viruses and bacteria, to rivers and trees, animals, ancestors, and other people, and even Gods, angels, and spirits. Everything in this world changes whatever it touches, and the changes ripple out. That’s livingness to me.
This what I mean when I say I’m a Pagan - and it’s just one way that Pagans make sense of our common self-understanding. Margot Adler, the journalist, author, and UU Pagan ancestor, once put it this way:
“While most Neo-Pagans disagree on almost everything…If you were to ask modern Pagans for the most important ideas that underlie the Pagan resurgence, you might well be led to three words: animism, pantheism, and most important - polytheism1.”
She was reflecting on a nationwide survey of Pagans in the United States which she conducted and wrote about. She noted both the great diversity within the movement, and also a uniting worldview that our world is full of multiplicity, and that centuries of a Western orientation to unity by uniformity and homogeneity has both political and spiritual consequences. This probably sounds familiar. Unitarian Universalists also greatly value pluralism and multiplicity, knowing that these are much needed corrections to the self-centeredness of our political and social world.
Paganism and Unitarian Universalism meet not only in conceptual overlap, but in the religious lives of many people, myself included. When I first found Paganism, years before I would find Unitarian Universalism, I was practicing on my own. I was a teenager in rural Iowa. I would pour over library books on Witchcraft and Paganism, and celebrate the turning seasons in the woods near my house, or in my bedroom. I wasn’t alone in the woods, of course, full of redcedar and black walnut, woodpeckers and wildflowers. But looking back, it seems difficult to be religious without other human company and guidance.
I had a deep sense of how interconnected our lives were with those of other beings. This is a common knowledge among Unitarian Universalists, whose Seventh Principle has been “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are all a part.” This became one of our principles amid a growing sense of ecological crisis, and as more and more Pagans found a home in our faith. A decade later in 1995, our General Assembly voted to recognize the contributions of Pagans in our faith by euphemistically adding “Earth Centered Traditions” as a Sixth Source2. Our faith could not deny that Pagans had and would continue to leave a lasting impression.
This was the Unitarian Universalism I found in my late adolescence. It seemed like I had found a spiritual home that could embrace me in all of my complexity: a still-closeted queer kid and a Pagan, still trying to figure out if there was anything to hold onto from my Catholic upbringing. I found a UU congregation when I went to college. Full of professors studying the human impact on our environment, this community resonated deeply with religious naturalism - finding the Ultimate in the world around us. I found many kindred spirits there, but few Pagans in a congregation that also had a deeply secular humanist bend.
It could be a lonely place at times, and incredibly nourishing at others. A favorite hymn of theirs became a favorite of mine as well. Included in “Singing the Journey,” our “teal hymnal”, Carolyn McDade speaks to a deep reverence for the natural world in her hymn Rising Green3, which our choir so beautifully shared with us. McDade wrote in reflection that:
“Earth shakes out a mantle of green—each blade of grass true to the integrity within, yet together with others is the rise of spring from winter’s urging…Our humanness, our rhythms and dreams, the faith which nurtures our ardent love and hope for life—all this we share with earth community, of which we are natural and connected beings4.”
Perhaps more than anything else in our faith, this hymn most reverently expresses our relationship with the natural world. A relationship that we feel before we intellectualize, deeply moving and always in motion. It is not explicitly Pagan, and it is one of the most Pagan things I have ever heard or sung. It is a hymn to an extremely personal experience of interdependence: recognizing ourselves in the roots and sap of an oak, feeling the moon pull the tides as if it was pulling on something deep within us. “Our faith settles deep in the earth, rising green to bring a new day5,” she writes. And our faith, rooted in interdependence, greets the rising green of this earth. We know we are deeply connected to it.
Our value of interdependence is what connects many Pagans to our faith, however they practice. The way I have practiced Paganism has changed greatly over the years. I have worshiped in the woods on my own, made ritual with friends in college, and found a community to practice with at my home congregation in Iowa. Interdependence has been a thread woven throughout my many practices. Today, it shows up in my devotional relationship with the Goddess Demeter, the old Greek Goddess of growth and agriculture. A relationship which centers around baking a weekly loaf of bread. Often, as I am kneading the dough, I meditate on all of the hands the grain passes through to become the bread in my hands. Just as we did in our meditation this morning, I consider all of the ways that we are interconnected, and dependent on one another.
This is where I find Demeter, present at sowing, heaping, and threshing6, present in the hands of all the people who do these things. The Orphic Hymn to Demeter, our reading this morning, is my central meditation with Demeter, reflecting all the ways I meet her in my life. I meet her in growth and blooming, in every flower. I meet her in the many ways I am connected with everyone else who touches the web that turns grain into flour into bread. The transformation inherent in this is something I also value, both in my Pagan practice, and in Unitarian Universalism.
Few things express transformation as clearly as bread. Not only in how its materials change from seedlings to grain to flour, but in the very act of bread-baking itself. I feed the starter I care for, add flour and water, and watch these simple things grow into something different, the dough I shape into a loaf. It is a simple, powerful experience, and I am grateful to help create our world in this small way each week. It also leads me to see how transformation moves throughout our world. Bread rises, seasons change, tulips and crocuses rise green from the brown earth. Our communities change as people die and come into life, as some people leave and new people join.
Our very Living Tradition recognizes that change is a beautiful, and sometimes painful, fact of life, and we lean into that. We change our orders of service, the hymns we sing, our bylaws, our missions and visions to reflect that our needs change as our world changes. I am grateful to be part of a tradition that values transformation so much it challenges itself to redefine its values in each generation. When our faith’s leaders reincarnated the Seven Principles over the last couple of years, they made our value of transformation explicit, in a way that the Principles hadn’t quite. My heart sang when I saw how others chose to uplift and center this value.
These values of Interdependence and Transformation are the place of overlap between our Unitarian Universalist faith and my Pagan practice. These two guides in my life point to the ways our world changes on grand scales and in small ways. They both say that this fact should be valued and celebrated. These two guides value and celebrate the profound fact that what we do and how we live impacts the world around us. What resonates for me in Paganism shows up again in Unitarian Universalism.
This is how I will answer the question I posed earlier. Our faith has opened itself to be a home for Pagans alongside many others. It changes us when we encounter and practice with people of many different worldviews. And our presence in this faith changes it as well. Pagan religion is participatory religion, and shapes how I invite you to participate in prayer and meditation. I find immense value in these shared moments of practice. From what many of you share with me, I can tell that you do, too.
But as we close this hour, how will you find your Unitarian Universalist faith shaped by Paganism? I invite you to look at the world changing around you. The Equinox happened earlier this week, and our part of the earth continues to turn its face toward the Sun. Tulips and crocuses are waking up, the leaves on trees and bushes are coming back. Birdsong comes back, and so do seasonal allergies as the world wakes up from winter. It’s such an honor to witness and participate in many of these changes. Even as they aggravate our sinuses.
Look also at how the wider world and its systems are changing. Where do we see beauty in the changes of our climate crisis? Where is the holiness in our political and economic systems eating themselves alive and everything else they touch? The beauty, the holiness, is not in these changes out of our certain control, but the changes we make in response to them. We change our actions: writing more letters, making more phone-calls, joining more protests. Checking in with each other more. Welcoming the beauty in this world where we can find it. There is holiness in creating changes large and small, in co-creating this world. There is holiness in caring for our interconnections. Spring reminds us of the changes that hold us all, and the change that we bring into the world. How will you approach these differently now?
May we greet the rising green of our lives, in all these ways and more.
1. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America - Completely Revised and Updated (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 22.
2. Jerrie Kishbaugh Hildebrand and Shirley Ann Ranck, “Introduction,” in Pagan and Earth Centered Voices in Unitarian Universalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), xiii.
3. Carolyn McDade, “Rising Green,” in Singing the Journey: A Supplement to Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 2005), #1068.
4. Unitarian Universalist Association, "Singing the Journey Song Information", accessed December 13, 2025, https://www.uua.org/worship/music/hymnals/journey/song-information
5. McDade.
6. Orphic Hymn 40. To Eleusinian Demeter, 5, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).