Following the Way of Jesus in Heathen Christianity

How do those following Heathen Christianity understand following the Way of Jesus?

The Way is our guiding star:
to open ourselves to prayer,
practice mercy,
challenge oppression,
make peace,
and crave compassionate justice.

While following the Way, we dance with other divinities and travelers that we encounter, being together for as long as our paths intertwine.

We embrace both skepticism and wonder as we wrestle with ideas about Jesus' nature and our relationship to the holy. We share ideals, knowing we will struggle and need one another’s care.

Jesus was an oppressed Jewish person under Roman imperial power in a time of upheaval and rebellion. He prayed for comfort, inspiration, and resolve. He was at home amongst sex workers, outcasts, and those who lived hard. His life wasn’t neutral; it embodied solidarity with the oppressed and marginalized.

The myths and legends of Jesus offer different understandings of incarnation and his relationship with the God he calls Abba. In these stories, we encounter Jesus embodying sacred presence by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, and challenging corrupt leaders. We encounter a God who desires a deep relationship with us and the world.

Jesus' sacred presence didn’t end at his execution. In the legends, he went into the underworld to be with the departed, rose from the dead, and ascended to the heavens. These stories show that in suffering, despair, and torment, the divine is always seeking us. In prayer, we can connect with that presence.

Some take these stories literally, some as myths to live by; many are still seeking and changing. Our gatherings hold those tensions with care.

This is the Way we follow.

Jesus’ life and teachings call us into presence, solidarity, and care for one another and the world.

We follow through prayer, mutual aid, reaching out to our neighbors, protesting, and advocating for a more loving world.

Brigid, The Open Hearth, and Heathen Christianity

What role does Brigid play in Heathen Christianity?

Brigid is a figure of myth and legend, shrouded in the mists of time. We glimpse her through myths preserved and altered by monks, wild goddesses tamed through legacies of colonization and suppression, kept thriving through oral stories that couldn’t be buried. Across these disparate traditions, active dreaming helps us find her.

Brigid, Goddess.

Brigid, Saint.

A goddess of the forge, healing, and poetry. Strength, compassion, inspiration.

Sometimes three sisters sharing a name, sometimes one Goddess.

In Christianity, a saint. A Healer. A Peacemaker.

Tradition ties Brigid of Kildare to Druids and Christians.

Brigid is a keeper of thresholds; tradition says she was born at daybreak, on a doorway’s threshold, as her mother crossed it. She was born in the middle, in the in-between, in the both/and.

She stands between worlds and binaries.

In many people’s spiritual imaginations, the Goddess and the Saint become one.

We honor both figures, see the connections between them, and treat them as one Brigid who takes many guises. A figure whose divinity predates Christianity, whose holiness is honored by Christians, and whose purposes align deeply with the Way.

One legend of Brigid is especially central to our mission.

A king refused Brigid land for her ministry; eventually, he told her she could have as much land as her cloak could cover.

Brigid accepted his terms.

She spread out her cloak, and it began to grow. Wider and wider.

Until it spread across his property.

The powerful humbled to serve those in need.

At the Chapel of the Open Hearth we tend our flame in Brigid's honor for creation, comfort, and inspiration. Ours is a deeply Brigidine Christianity. Not everyone who practices Heathen Christianity must be devoted to Brigid or seek her patronage.

We Christian heathens try to bridge worlds and break down binaries.

We treat poetry and sacred imagination as pathways into prophecy.

And we keep stretching the mantle of our care, making it wider and wider, so that ever more people might find shelter beneath it.

Dancing with Divinities and Pluralistic Christianity

Chapel of the Open Hearth practices Heathen Christianity, dances with divinities we encounter in the wilds, and is not monotheistic.

Psalm 82 portrays God standing in an assembly of gods and calling them to account for unjust judgment. Those who refuse to defend the poor, the orphaned, and the oppressed are told that they will die like mortals.

For Heathen Christianity, this tests divine authority. Power alone does not make a god worthy of sacred relationship. We seek the living, liberating gods, the divinities committed to compassionate justice, collective liberation, and the abundant flourishing of Creation.

Chief among the powers falsely granted sacred status is the god manufactured by White Christian Nationalists and by the imperial religion that preceded them. This idol has been used to justify horrific sins that shake the foundations: genocide, enslavement, Queer persecution, witch hunts, and countless other atrocities.

If that God ever was, it is now dust and ashes. No living divinity is found at empire’s altar.

We will dance among the divine assembly, with Brigid, with the goddesses and gods, and with all those committed to liberation.

The Way of Jesus leads us into that blessed plurality

Heathen Christianity or Celtic?

Heathen has been used to demonize us for who we’ve loved, the hierarchies we challenged, the abusers we’ve named, and the sources of inspiration we’ve found. We reclaim it in defiant celebration, blunting its sting when weaponized.

Celtic Christian traditions shape us. The triquetra is part of our logo. Brigid is our patron. Modern Celtic Christian writers helped us find healing within Christianity. The songs, prayers, and stories we have been taught echo in our hearts. We are grateful.

There has been too much rupture in our inheritance for us to claim an unbroken Celtic Christian lineage. Those of us with Irish and Scottish ancestry identify with Celtic diasporas and wrestle with how our ancestors assimilated into dominant white culture in the United States. We feel the loss of languages, stories, and traditions; the distance from ancestral lands; and the absence of relationships with living communities. We lack the relationships through which to explore our questions about the tradition responsibly.

Within this rupture, we have found our way to the wild places—to the heath.

Here, we cherish the wisdom, inspiration, and succor we encounter. These wilds are not empty; they are alive with peoples, histories, resistance, and survival. Here we hear a resounding call to resist oppression.

As Christian Heathens, we do not claim to be reconstructing an ancestral tradition. We tend a living faith grounded in the Way of Jesus that dances with Celtic traditions, myth, dream, the divinities we encounter, and the places we inhabit. We ask where that faith calls us today, discerning it by its fruits of love, mercy, compassion, accountability, solidarity, and liberation.

We owe so much to Celtic traditions, and the faith we are practicing is Heathen Christianity.

Why Reclaim Heathen in Heathen Christianity

At Chapel of the Open Hearth, we are intentionally reclaiming the word Heathen.

Historically, Heathen was a name Christians gave to those who stood outside the boundaries of Christian belonging. Over time, it also came to mean uncivilized, immoral, or dangerous.
Wrong. That’s the way I’ve heard it used.
I’ve been called a heathen for being queer, spending time with witches, playing Dungeons & Dragons, and going to punk shows.

Heathen.
Devil worshipper.
Disgrace.

I’ve heard it and so much worse, mostly from the church. Many of us have been named and shamed in the same ways.

Even after finding progressive Christian churches, much of that hurt remains. I can feel myself shutting down when I enter those spaces. I sit in the pews and squirm. The pressure to conform to respectability hits me almost as soon as I walk through the door.

I want to button my shirt.
Keep quiet.
Say nothing that might rock the boat.
Be as “normal” as possible.

All the weirdness and freeness I love about myself, and about my community, begins to wither. I know I’m not alone in this.

Heathen Christianity may sound like a contradiction between Christian and non-Christian worlds. But where those worlds bump against each other, the Christian and the Heathen, that is where we play. That is where we build bridges.

To call ourselves Heathen is to say that you do not have to become smaller, quieter, or more respectable to enter sacred community.

We celebrate the weirdness.
The queerness.
The witchiness.
You can bring your songs, your loves, your spiritual practices, and the other gods you travel with into this church, and be celebrated.

From the wild places and the heath, we are called.

Our use of Heathen is distinct from, and does not claim to represent, contemporary Germanic and Norse Heathenry. We respect those traditions and the people devoted to them. Some among us honor Odin, Thor, and other divinities.

Heathen Christianity is intentionally syncretic, bringing the Way of Jesus into relationship with the people, practices, myths, and divinities the church has denigrated. We reclaim Heathen because none of us should have to abandon what is wild, wondrous, or sacred within us to find a spiritual home.

What the church tried to suppress, we nourish and help flourish.

What is Heathen Christianity

The Chapel of the Open Hearth practices a Heathen Christianity. But what does it mean to be a Christian-Heathen?

We are dedicated to following the Way of Jesus, a path rooted in prayer and the love of God. We follow it by caring for creation, standing with the oppressed, and offering heartfelt hospitality to outcasts, misfits, and wanderers.

This path leads us into wild places and toward the margins. There, we encounter a vibrant world that no single doctrine can fully contain.

We meet that world with humility: learning from others, honoring the wisdom of different traditions, and dancing with the divinities we encounter. We remain open to our own transformation. We celebrate whenever we share in the fruits of compassion, mercy, justice, abundant flourishing, and collective liberation.

This does not draw us away from the Way. It teaches us to follow the Way alongside new companions, with humility and respect, for as long as our paths overlap.