Blessed Be

Why I Became a Pagan

When they ask to see your gods your book of prayers show them lines drawn delicately with veins on the underside of a bird's wing tell them you believe in giant sycamores mottled and stark against a winter sky and in nights so frozen stars crack open spilling streams of molten ice to earth and tell them how you drank the holy wine of honeysuckle on a warm spring day and of the softness of your mother who never taught you death was life's reward but who believed in the earth and the sun and a million, million light years of being.           -- JL Stanley

When I share my religion, I am often met with skepticism or redicule bred from ignorance. Some dismiss it as merely an attempt to follow a fad and fit in with the "alternative" crowd. Others think that it has something to do with "women's lib." Perhaps the worst of the doubts is members of other religions thinking that I am "misguided" and attempt to turn me back to what they deem the right path.

During my junoir year of college, I converted to Wicca, a pagan religion based on shamanic traditions. The religion has no set dogma aside from the Wiccan Rede: As ye harm none, do as ye will. It allows freedom to be or do whatever you wish as long as you don't hurt someone. Magick (the archaic spelling is used to distinguish natural magic from Hollywood and stage magic) comes into play, but you have to heavily weigh the consequences, lest you violate the Rede. Another major law that ties into the Rede, but is not universally accepted among all Traditions (Wiccan sects), is the Law of Three: Anything you send out comes back to you threefold. This is based on the concept of karma, that both bad and good energies come back to you. You could say that it's karma on steroids. There is more to this religion, but explaining all the details is beyond the scope of this essay.

My family is Protestant Christian. However, my parents, despite a few brief periods in my childhood, neither encouraged nor discouraged church because they were from different donominations (Baptist and Methodist). My mother taught me the basics of being a good Christian, but largely left me to my own devices spiritually.

When I didn't fit in among my childhood peers, I turned to my religious teachings for solace. I was comforted to know that many of the prophets were not universally accepted among their peers. It helped me to resolve to just be myself.

When I received my driver's license, I decided to attend church regularly. I went to Helena United Methodist Church, where my paternal grandparents attended. A week before my seventeenth birthday, I was baptized and accepted as a member. I immersed myself into church activities like the youth group, the choir, pot luck dinners, and holiday decorating. I felt like I belonged.

I was so excited about the Word that I tried to convert others. I trolled Internet "alternative" groups and dogmatically tried to convince them to choose the "right" way. I was deservedly flamed for it. I encouraged my brother and parents to attend, but they only attended sparingly.

It was this same enthusiasm that caused me to question the same teachings that brought me so much joy. In my senoir year of high school, I reached out to Ricky. For a year and a half, I endured lies, emotional abuse and isolation at the hands of this person. Oddly enough, I didn't turn to anyone, even my congregation, for support. Even when he bossed me around in church, I silently endured it.

For a long time, I wondered why I fell for Ricky so easily. Many women in the Bible fought some personal crusade. I saw Ricky as my crusade. If I could change him into a caring, considerate person, then I was a good Christian. But all my work was for naught and took its toll on both my physical and emotional health.

After I finally found the courage to leave him, Ricky spread rumors about me around his school, where I couldn't refute them. Among the ones that got around to me were that he broke up with me because I was too demanding, I turned out to be a lesbian and that I threatened to hire hitmen to attack him. He even told these lies to my taekwondo instructor and members of my congregation. When he came to church, his pathetic looks of grief filled me with guilt. This feeling increased after he was called to the hospital for surgery. Part of me thought I was being selfish for leaving him when he wanted me with him the most.

In almost every chat I had with a member of my congregation, the subject would turn to Ricky. S/he would give me a report on how miserable he was without me or an account of his unkempt appearance and pathetic behavoir. It was as if they were accusing me of his slide into depravity. Of course, my congregation was largely ignorant about the misery he put me through, but it did not give them the right to try to re-establish a friendship between myself and Ricky when I didn't one.

If I was to heal my wounded spirit, I needed to get away from things that reminded me of Ricky. So I took a hiatus from church. During this time, I met a young man that was the anti-thesis to Ricky: Chris Ingersoll. I met Chris over the Internet via our mutual hobby of E-wrestling. We became fast friends and started working on a storyline between our characters. As our characters grew closer, so did we. When he graduated from collge, Chris did not know what to do with his degree, so I suggested working in North Carolina where the work in his field was plentiful. He took me up on the suggestion, coming down on my birthday to both meet me and investigate a job opportunity and living arrangements. We have been together ever since.

It has been nothing short of amazing how I struck upon that one in a million chance of finding love from so far away. However, the ironic thing about my relationship with Chris is that he is atheist. I found it hard to believe that someone did not believe in any diety or worship anything. I was taught that atheists were sinners whose lives were a mess. However, Chris has a good head on his shoulders and cares deeply for those around him. He has never rediculed me for my beliefs though they deferred radically from his own. By the same token, I respected his beliefs and didn't try to "save" him like I did Ricky.

Chris has helped me through a lot of things, namely the death of my parent's marraige. After Chris moved, my father left my mother. Being the witness to his own parents' divorce, he was able to guide me along my emotional roller coaster.

I'm not sure what the reasons were for my parents' splitting up, but it doesn't matter anymore. What matters is that the shouting matches, melodrama and deceit left me emotionally ravaged, no matter how brave I pretended to be. The Bible instructed me to honor my father and mother, but it didn't tell me what to do when I wanted to kill my father for making my mother cry or slap my mother for pining over him. My ideal of "happily ever after" drifted away and I hated them both for it. I felt uneasy about getting close to Chris because I was scared I would end up the same way as my mother. Most importantly, I missed my daddy and wanted him to come home. I wanted to forget this ever happened to our family. I wanted to be five years old again, when Mommy let me help take care of my brother and Daddy was my hero. Then I would realize that I could never have those days back and I would despair all over again.

To make matters worse, my paternal grandmother, Jean Dunn, developed lymphatic cancer. My father stayed with her, so the transition of him not living with us was not very sudden. Jean ultimately died, after a long battle against her body. She was a remarkable woman, as I found out from her friends at the funeral, and I regret not knowing her any better than I did. Ironically, Jean was a devout Christian, but her death is what turned me away from Christianity.

It was at the wake for Jean's funeral. I had not been to church for a long while, but I saw some of my congregation was there. One of them talked to me for a while and I told her about Chris. She said that I should bring him to church. When I mentioned that he's atheist in response, she said, "Well, we'll just have to fix that, won't we?" I was not really offended, but the comment bothered me. Why did Chris's choice have to be "fixed?" How could his choice to be atheist be a character flaw?

While brooding over this, I recalled a previous incident at the Durham Rescue Mission where I was talking with a fellow volunteer. As the conversation turned to guys and religion, I again mentioned that Chris was atheist, to which she replied, "That's not good." I had to disagree with her, albeit unopenly. Unlike some of my fellow Christians, Chris has accepted me for all my faults and notions. He would accept me even if I covered my body in tattoos, dyed my hair banana yellow and traipsed around in a bright green bridal gown. Chris is not the hellspawn that Christianity portrays him.

All these experiences contradictory to my teachings led me to research and re-evaluate my religion. I discovered that though Christianity has inspired some of the greatest acts of love (help centers, shelters, youth programs, blood/food/clothing drives, funds to help others), it has also inspired the greatest acts of hate due to its inherent predjudice. Because Christians could not agree with Muslims on how to worship God/Allah, the world witnessed nine of the bloodiest wars in history (all of which, I will add, the Christians lost). Christians, in their misogynist misguidance, tortured and murdered hundreds of women accused of witchcraft. They were also the largest group of enslavers during the imperialistic era.

Today, we still see acts of hate. We see bigot groups claiming to be Christian and preaching that anything not a stoic, Caucasian heterosexual is a child of evil. Christian males excuse beating their wives and girlfriends by quoting the story of Eve being the first to sample the forbidden fruit. Intolerance of other religions runs rampant, especially for Christianity's parents of Judaism (Jesus Christ was Jewish) and paganism (many Christian traditions and manners of worship come from it). People excuse the murder of Matthew Shepard on the basis of a few Bible verses condemning homosexuality.

Even my former congregation was not free from predjudice. My preacher and his wife were unable to have children and adopted their first child. When they were ready to adopt a second child, the adoption agency representative was going to give them a biracial child. The preacher considered not giving this child a home because he didn't "approve" of biracial children! My congregation expressed sympathy for such a hard decision. My immediate, muted response to the preacher's worries was for him to give the child a home; because race is only a skin color.

What happened to love they neighbor as thou love thyself? Why do so many people who follow Jesus Christ, a man that loved uncondiditionally, hate others that are different from them? How could they attempt to crush those that are different, yet cry persecution when they are called on it? On paper, Christianity preaches love and service, but that isn't the way in practice. But the book from where Christianity's teachings come contradicts itself, so it's no wonder that the religion built around it is also contradictory.

Think about it. If God is indeed almighty, omnipotent and all-knowing, why did he place the tree of forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden? By the same token, why did he create Lucifer if he knew Lucifer would turn on him? And why is kissing Christ's holy ass the only way to get into heaven? If God is a real, viable entity, then he seems to be on the same level as any megalomanic cult leader. The idea didn't sit well with me.

If I ask a Christian why my parents' break-up or the abuse happened the answer I get usually feels inadequate. The most common responses are that I'm being punished for not being a good enough Christian or that my faith was being tested. I did everything in my power to help others and spread my faith. I obeyed the Bible to the letter. The cover story that God was trying to make me a better person was as transparent as Ricky picking fights with me just so I would cry and using the same excuse.

These paradoxes are what finally turned me to Wicca. Because of the lack of religious writings, Wicca does not have the danger of becoming archaic through its practitioners following words that were written thousands of years ago and went through numerous translations. Through Wicca basing its teachings on largely oral tradition, it is free to remain flexible as times change. The Rede is easier to follow and remember the Ten Commandments. Instead of our diety having an arbitrary gender and the corresponding mortal sex gaining dominance over the other, equality is promoted through worshipping both a male and female deity. I am free to be myself, to do what I want, and feel the full range of emotions.

It wasn't easy to convert to Wicca. I was turning my back on everything I was taught and making things up as I went along. The first few months saw me rushing back to Christianity to return to thought patterns I was comfortable with. But I gradually adjusted to a pagan life and I haven't looked back.

Wicca has proved to make me a better person. As a Christian, I would get upset with others and hope that God would punish him/her for it. As a Wiccan, I have been tempted to wish them harm. But, I stop and remember the Law of Three and that people sometimes get upset with me and wish me harm. Instead I wish these people well and hope they realize that they can upset others.

I feel I have been reborn. I am still learning about paganism and my chosen religion of Wicca, but I have always enjoyed learning new things. I can face the world as a stronger woman -- proud and beautiful.