VOCATIONAL STATEMENT

Answer the following questions about why you desire to become an ADF Priest. This essay should be between 500 and 1,000 words.

1. Why do you want to be a Priest, and what is your plan for making that goal happen?
2. Why do you want to be an ADF Priest in particular?
3. What does being a Priest mean to you in the cultural context of your Hearth Culture?

The calling to priesthood has been something I've felt for a long time. As a young teenager my family and church friends encouraged me to consider training for ministry, but eight years of school, which the church I grew up in requires for ordination, seemed an impossibly long time to spend in school! In retrospect I'm extremely glad I did not wind up ordained in that church, with its biblical literalism, rejection of science and tragically misguided approaches to sexuality, particularly homosexuality, and to women's issues. Far from going away when I escaped that religious environment, however, the feeling that I was being drawn to serve only intensified. My undergraduate education was originally aimed at preparing me for a seminary program and eventual priesthood in the Episcopal Church, with the hopes of eventually teaching at a seminary in addition to sacerdotal duties. The idea of seminary studies still appeal to me and I am keeping an eye on the developments at Cherry Hill Seminary with great interest. In the meantime I intend to turn my attention to ADF's training program, which I believe remains the most comprehensive and respectable program for Pagan clergy today, to prepare myself to take up the work of ritual, sacrifice, teaching and, yes, mundane scutwork that ADF requires to keep realizing its vision.

Having completed the Dedicant Path, my plan for becoming a Priest is twofold. First, I will complete the requisite courses to qualify for consecration as a Dedicant Priest in ADF. This part of my plan is the easy one: as a non-traditional undergraduate, it wasn't for nothing that I won my school's Linda Bowen Santoro Award for “unusual motivation and dedication in the pursuit of an undergraduate degree”! It's the second part that's going to take much more effort for me: the hands-on work that awaits me as Grove Organizer of my local protogrove. Both the organizational problem-solving and the ritual planning and execution involved in creating an environment that helps my grovemates connect to the Kindreds will be invaluable training for life as clergy, while forcing me to step out of my comfort zone and make priesthood real and concrete, simultaneously earth-bound and otherworld-aimed, just like our religion itself.

Why ADF in particular? There are several reasons. First, and most simply, our Druidry—ár ndraíocht féin— is my path. I love our symbols and cosmology and have made them my own. Second, I appreciate the vision of our organization; our religion fills a void between reconstructionist Paganism and eclecticism, allowing the creation of a modern neo-Druidism that respects and honors the past without becoming enslaved to it. Third, I think our training system is easily the most comprehensive available to modern Pagans, and turns out priests who are well-prepared for service — and I'd very much like to find myself among such a body of clergy.

In the context of my hearth culture, or at least the Roman part of it, priests were of several types but served essentially two functions: to ensure that the rites were conducted regularly, faithfully and correctly, and to serve the needs of particular gods and goddesses. In our modern day, the body of ADF clergy encompasses both these functions among others. ADF requires its groves to offer public rites on the eight high festivals, and our priests have a particular duty to ensure that these happen and are done correctly. In our context this means making sure that the rituals we offer to the public follow the Core Order of Ritual and affirms our shared cosmology. In addition, our priests and priestesses perform the Unity Rites on behalf of ADF as a whole, much as Roman priests performed rites on behalf of the civic body. Our Kindreds and especially our various grove Patrons also need attention and the Priesthood can ensure that we're upholding our half of the *ghosti relationship that sustains our universe.

Return to the main menu