The Fellowship of the Sacred Grove meets in sacred space to find our way to the mystical Grove in the inner worlds where we have encountered the Lord and Lady and experienced awe and reverence in Their Presence. The Bhakti Wiccan Tradition encompasses the ritual structure, liturgy, and shared understanding that guide our return, again and again, to experience this Mystery.
Over the years we have shared this experience with wider groups through teaching cooperative meditation workshops and offering ritual at gatherings, festivals, and home-based classes.
The Book of Shadows on this site is intended to preserve and share what we have learned and continue expanding the intimate web of the Grove.
This intimate web is part of a much larger web that includes other circles, groves, and clans following other Traditions or developing their own. We share in the interest of joy and community.
That web connects with even wider webs, where we are a church within a community or communities. And in that context, we have needs and responsibilities, just as those communities have needs that we may be able to meet and resources on which we depend — not the least of which is the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion, right to assemble, and right to speak and hear the truth.
This opens a large question as to what role is a church expected to fill in a community?
Expectations vary, given the wide variety to size, history, cultures, financial endowment, teachings, and traditions in the many religious organizations of our time and place. Among those organizations, we are very small, unfamiliar, limited financially, and outside their assumptions.
As a church — or as churches — we have possibilities:
- We can stand as examples that “people like us” can be OK — decent humans, if a bit weird.
- We can help individual people in need.
- We can help our children and others who look to us to develop helping skills and emergency response skills.
- We can work with other spiritually-minded groups to address larger needs.
- We can explore our individual and our group connections to help people seeking their own best sacred space and connections to find their way home.
- We can remain alert and responsive to things going awry.
Sacred Grove has:
- Provided credentialed chaplains to the County Chaplain Corps, the local hospital chaplaincy, Rising Sun Outreach Ministry and its ordained clergy;
- Provided Religious Marriage Celebrants who performed legal weddings;
- Conducted workshops and public ritual at festivals and gatherings;
- Conducted presentations as requested to schools, churches, and businesses;
- Assisted individuals in need find access to local, state, and national social services, including qualifying as disabled for Medicare and Medicaid purposes;
- Sheltered individuals temporarily until they could find housing;
- Provided telephone support to individuals in crisis;
- [to be continued]