It seems the best thing to start with in an ADF blog is what I expected when I first joined.
Honestly, I ignored far too many things far too often, and when I say "things", I mean the Internet. I mean web pages and mailing lists. All I really expected out of ADF was that Stone Creed Grove would put on good rituals, and I would come to them. I stalled when it came to the Dedicant Program, I’ll admit it – because I had read the Membership Guide and the Dedicant Manual and not any of the mailing lists, I was under the impression that I was “strongly encouraged” to pick one Hearth Culture and stick to it. Well, that was hard for me: in many ways, I’m a Celt at heart, and yet most of my experience had been with Norse culture. I got along very well with several Irish deity forms, but I was beholden only to Freyja (again, of Team Norse), and I still had a working relationship with Christ, a hold-over from my days as a Christian (though I had already told YHVH and pretty much all of his dogma to shove off).
Long story short (too late), I put off finishing my Dedicant Program because, in my limited and uninformed experience, I was unfit to dedicate to the principles of ADF: I was a cross-culture polytheist and animist who still dealt with non-Indo-European deity forms and had a large number of experiences the organization did not seem to publicly share.
Again. I should have read the mailing lists. Would have saved me a whole heap of problems and I probably would have finished the Dedicant Program before meeting Tony and the rest of the older SBGH crew. Instead I trudged along with it; not my finest moment.
One of the great things about ADF is the idea of orthopraxy. It means that an ADF group or ritual is more concerned with how a person worships than what a person believes (which is orthodoxy). Discovering that on an ADF webpage one day was like a breath of fresh air after living in a vacuum. It meant that working with both the Celtic and Norse was not only possible, but rather easy to accomplish. One did not even need to share the hearth culture of one’s grove!
Of course, I prefer it when the grove I work with does share my hearth culture; I am very pleased to be working with SBGH in this respect. Some things never change; one thing I’ve always wanted from ADF was community, and their grove-building and nurturing of working groups is key to this. It’s a long explanation for a short revelation, I know…
However, there’s more I’ve seen that’s worthwhile for me in ADF. The Core Order of Ritual, our liturgical outline, has always had a special place in my mind. In fact, the first Yule ritual I ever performed was a badly butchered conglomeration of a Stone Creed Grove Yule rite and the badly-hashed Wiccan principles my friend was trying to teach me at the time. Essentially, slap a four-quarters-drawing-the-circle beginning and end to the whole thing, and there you had it. So their liturgy was one thing I found to be worthwhile, even before I gave serious thought to ADF as an organization. That’s a long story, mind you.
As I continued in my pagan path, I started developing a strong appreciation for good scholarship in one’s paganism. My experiences in Columbus were less than pleasant, in some cases, with a Wiccan High Priest almost literally on every corner, and very few of them knowing a thing about what they were talking about. UPG didn’t run rampant in the area; it, like lore, was trampled underneath the feet of Ego. The more I saw or heard about Wiccans who read one book and were suddenly an expert on Magickal Studies, the more I started shying away from eclecticism and poor informational sources. ADF provided a wonderful change from that environment, at a time when working with the runes had brought me towards Norse Paganism, but the Asatru were likewise not fond of my eclectic ways and choice of deities.
So what do I hope to gain out of working with ADF in the future? I hope the organization continues to always value scholarship, but respect UPG, as well. After having helped found the Protogrove, I’ve discovered the joy of the ADF mailing lists and I hope to get a lot of information via the posts found there. I still expect community to be my biggest reason for being an ADF member, for without ADF, I’d still be Pagan, but perhaps not as wise or book-learned as I am now, which leads me to the fact that ADF provides a lot of good resources on the cultures they base their work on, which is a definite perk. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think ADF is in many ways the future of Neopaganism; an emphasis on lore, polytheism, animism, and scholarship, a focus on large group oriented services, and the flexibility to meet new needs as they come. My paganism is something I wish to pass down to children and grandchildren someday. I think that ADF has provided the best plan so far to see that dream come true.
-G