Free To Walk a Pagan Path: Practical Spirituality for Every Day by Alaric Albertsson

fathers,
    Wash away all that would impede me;
    diminish all that might pollute me.
    As the life-giving water flows over me,
    refresh and renew my spirit
    That I might through my actions give you due honor
    Throughout the coming day.
    Or instead of a spoken prayer, you may be inspired to
    greet the day with song. Do it! There is a reason why so
    many people like to sing as they shower. The design of a
    shower stall often gives an acoustic effect that enhances the
    human voice. There are many Pagan songs written by var-
    ious artists today. Your own song of praise could even be a
    secular song like “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” from Rod-
    gers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma . What matters is that the song expresses in some way your joy and gratitude for the
    new day.
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    If you have any talent for it at all, try creating your own
    words and melody for a song of praise. People do it all the
    time. That is where new Pagan songs come from.
    Transforming your daily shower into a ritual shower can
    enhance your personal Pagan practice, but this same con-
    cept—spiritual cleansing—can be extended to small rites of
    purification throughout the day. Wash your hands with a
    short prayer just before beginning any project. This is espe-
    cially appropriate for Pagans who follow a Hellenic path. Rit-
    ual cleansing and changing into clean clothing is traditional
    for Hellenic rituals of any kind (Burkert, page 55). Do you
    need to write a term paper? Wash your hands in a rite of
    purification before sitting down at the word processor. Pre-
    paring a meal? Wash off the miasma from your hands before
    you begin cutting and stirring.
    BLESSING THE MEAL
    Speaking of food, if you sit down to three square meals a day
    (and you should) you have three more opportunities to bring
    your spirituality into your daily life. Very often today people approach their food almost as an afterthought, with no real
    awareness of what they are eating, how it was prepared or
    where it came from. Later in this book we will look deeper
    into how you can reclaim your connection with the food that
    sustains you, but as a first step why not acknowledge each
    meal with gratitude?
    Who will you express your gratitude to, and how? A sim-
    ple verse will come more easily to the lips than a lengthy or
    extemporaneous prayer. You may prefer to say something
    thoughtful and very specific at a formal feast, such as the
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    American celebration of Thanksgiving, but for daily practice
    the prayer should be undemanding. It can be as uncompli-
    cated as the traditional Christian children’s prayer, “God is
    great, God is good, and we thank him for our food.”
    Indeed, this prayer can be readily adapted to polytheis-
    tic worship by changing the wording from singular to plural.
    “The gods are great, the gods are good, and we thank them
    for our food.”
    I use an adaptation of a prayer directed to the sun and
    the earth. My version addresses these as sentient beings: as
    Sunne, goddess of the sun, and Herthe, goddess of the earth.
    Herthe, who gives to us this food
    Sunne, who makes it ripe and good
    Sunne above, Herthe below
    My loving thanks to you I show
    Of course when I am out at a restaurant, I do not stand
    up, wave my arms in the air and loudly chant this prayer. In
    a public setting it is only civil to consider the sensibilities of others. I am not at all apologetic about my beliefs and practices (why should I be?), but those beliefs do not require me
    to act like an oaf. When a display of personal belief would
    be inconsiderate, every Pagan path has at least a few symbols
    that can be faintly traced on the table or over a dish before
    eating. Nobody will have due cause to take offense if your
    gesture is subtle. My preference is the symbol of Thunor’s
    hammer, marked like this:
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    An Irish Pagan might trace the image of a Brigid’s cross.
    A Wiccan can trace the pentagram. As with everything