Begin Living Our Faith
By Goði Rognvald
Often we are asked by people how they should start learning and what they should do in their lives to practice our faith. They wonder how to put their ideals into action. Below is a list of things you can start doing immediately to begin your journey.
1) Develop or mend familial ties with your immediate and distant relatives/family.
2) Study and become familiar with your familial history.
3) Study and become familiar with the lore and customs of your ancestors.
4) If you are young, find a person devoted to our traditional faith that can be a mentor; someone that you can learn from, bounce ideas off of, and can respect. This person should be of honorable character with a sincere devotion to our ways.
5) Spiritually connect to your ancestors and the gods of our folk by learning and developing rituals and practices that reestablish and reconnect you to them. This may be a daily meditation or a memorial in the simplest fashions and also as your knowledge in our ways increases by performing blot in the proper prescribed ways.
6) Build your clan. Find a good woman or man to marry that you can build a family with. Raise your children with morals and instill in them the knowledge of our way by example.
7) Find community. Seek others that are doing the same as you. If there are none, teach your friends and family. Hold study groups, attend or plan events for blóts and community gatherings. Alternatively, if there are no groups local to you and you are not sure how to build a group relocate to regions where communities are developed that you can become a part of.
8) Avoid things which morally or physically cause harm to you, your family, and the folk around you.
9) Remember it's faith, family, folk. These concentric circles are important. You must be true to yourself first before you can ever be true to your family or folk. Being true to yourself means having proper knowledge in our ways and a conviction to live by our precepts actively. If you can not be true to yourself in regard to your faith, you can never be true to your family or folk.
These are the precepts for taking right action in our faith.