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Awestruck

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In Swingers

I’m in Los Angeles, sitting in Swingers Diner. The air smells like onions and bacon, and before long I probably will, too. An Irish pub band is playing from the jukebox.  I’m the only customer here. I opened the joint.

After breakfast I’ll head to an Episcopal church on Hollywood Boulevard called St. Thomas. It’s only a few minutes away and they have morning prayer services. The church is Anglo-Catholic, which may be a little foreign to me. But Sunday was a travel day and I couldn’t make it to church. Morning prayer will hopefully bring a similar feeling of comfort and peace to the one I experienced in Portland.

This has been a strange couple of weeks. I’ve done a lot of explaining, profile editing, and summarizing. I don’t know if I’ve done well or poorly, because I feel like my explanations have arisen in the middle of a process.

When I run into a comment online from a Pagan that says something like,

“…now that Teo’s converted…”

I pause and think —

Is that what I’ve done? Has this been a conversion experience? That sounds so final.

Perhaps it has been a kind of conversion experience.

Except I was a Christian before I was a Pagan. This is not the kind of “coming to God” that one has without context of Christianity. This experience is not the same as a 2nd generation Wiccan realizing that they are actually a follower of Jesus. This is more complicated, more nuanced, because I already have a great deal of familiarity with Christianity. That said, all of this feels less like a falling into an old pattern than it does an attempt to uncover a new understanding.

I get that people want to rush to define what’s happening with me, but I’m hesitant to do so. This urgency to label my experience as “conversion” is being directed at me from the Christians, too. There’s this mild (and sometimes not-so-mild) rejoicing going on, as though they’ve won one back for the team. I suppose that when I say things like, “I’m feeling drawn back to the Church” that can be interpreted on a very simple, surface level; i.e. I’m going to be a Christian again. It gets complicated when you start to tease out what kind of Christian I might be. There is not just one way, even in the church of the One Way. Each Christian sect has its own framework, its own subtleties of language and theology, its own rituals. And within each denomination are people with their own personal biases, and they bring those biases to every Facebook or HuffPost comment thread.

I shut comments down on my blog, as well as on the Wild Hunt post about my Disruptive and Inconvenient Realization in order to maintain a little autonomy as I process through all of this. Blogging has been a communal event for me for a while now. The dialogues on this blog and others have taught me about who Pagans and polytheists are, how they think, and what lights a fire under them. But in terms of my personal evolutionary process I’m finding that the feedback coming from the internet — be the commenter a Christian or Pagan — necessarily gets a little big wrong about my intentions, my perspective, and my use of words. It makes me wonder how much of the identity-forming that’s taken place since I first found Paganism online and started blogging about it has been authentic, and how much of it has been an engagement with the projections that others place on me.

This is the kind of stuff I think about while I’m waiting for my eggs.

As important as it is for me to write through my experiences with this reawakening to God in Christ, it feels equally important for me to refrain from subjecting my spiritual life to an internet-wide workshopping session. It will happen to a certain degree; it already is. And that’s to be expected. But I need to remember that what I’m doing here in this discernment process is not about anybody else but me…

…and God.

Truth be told, I feel compelled to use these words — God, Christ, Jesus — and I feel somehow as though my life is being and has always been drawn into close connection to the Beings which stand behind those words, but I don’t know what that means exactly or how to explain it. It would be foolish of me to state with certainty that,

“Now I know what God is,”

or

“THIS is what Jesus wants for me,”

or

“Jesus is my best friend.”

It’s a little hazier than that, I have to trust that that’s ok.

But I do keep having these less-hazy moments when something small, or humble, or slightly broken about myself or another person will bring me into an immediate awareness of God’s presence in the world. In that moment I feel completely connected to everyone around me and fully alive in this body.

The best word to describe the feeling?

Awestruck.

When Jesus Hitches a Ride to the Druid Camp

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I’ve been a stay-at-home Pagan, a bookish Pagan, a CUUPS ritual-attending Pagan, and a blogging Pagan. But as of yet, I have not been a festival-going Pagan.

That all changes this week.

On Wednesday I shall make my way to the Prosser Ranch group campground, located just outside the town of Truckee, California, and celebrate Druidism, ADF style, at the annual Eight Winds festival.

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The timing of this religious retreat is rather interesting. Over the last month, swamped as I’ve been with work-related travel and the upkeep and promotion of my Indiegogo Campaign (which, by the way, wraps up in a little over a week…nudge, nudge), I’ve neglected my daily practice. Some days I approach my shrine with an open heart and a still mind, but most mornings I dive straight into work without much attention at all to the gods or to my spirit. There’s been no consistency, only a cursory amount of reverence or piety, and a whole heaping load of worry and stress.

On top of all that, I just finished reading a book about Jesus, and it’s thrown my mind into a bit of a tailspin.

[STAY CALM — This is not a conversion post.]

The book, Jesus through Pagan Eyes: Bridging Neopagan Perspectives with a Progressive Vision of Christ, has done quite a number on me. I’ve written a review for HuffPost called, “Every Conceivable Jesus: A Review of ‘Jesus Through Pagan Eyes,'” and it should be published sometime this week (UPDATE: Post published on 6/26). The long and the short of it is this:

Reading Rev. Mark Townsend describe his complicated, rich, and heartfelt understanding of the many persons of Jesus reminded me of what I loved about being a Christian, and reading the book’s essays and interviews from Pagans about their perspectives on Jesus left me feeling a little underwhelmed. Perhaps reading a book about a central figure from a Pagan tradition — say, Pan or Lugh — in which two dozen Christians reflect on that particular god’s relevance (or irrelevance) in their religious lives would affect me similarly. In any case, it was the lone Christian in the bunch whose voice resonated with me most, and I’m not exactly sure what that means.

I remember writing about a similar quandary last Winter, and one of my readers responded with something like, “If you want to be a Christian, be a Christian. If you want to be a Pagan, be a Pagan. But pick one already!” I found the comment to be rather rude, and terribly reductive. We are never just one thing. We are always the sum of our parts, a work in progress, a collage. Many of our parts remain hidden from us until we are ready to understand them, but they’re all there. We are mysteries, even unto ourselves, and part of the wonder of living is unpacking the mystery.

Know thyself is a process, not a single action.

To be reminded in such a visceral way of my former expression of religiosity on the eve of a celebration of my newer expression of religiosity is confusing, to say the least. It makes me wonder whether or not I will be able to surrender completely to the experience of fellowship and ritual at Eight Winds, or if I will be consumed by my own questioning. My hope is that there will be opportunities for dialogue with other ADF members, and through that dialogue we might come to know one another (and ourselves) a little better. Perhaps Jesus will hitch a ride to the Druid camp, and I’ll be forced again to examine who he is in relationship to this new, thoroughly Pagan environment. Or, maybe when we’re all naked and dancing around a fire (which, in my imagination, is key to any successful Pagan gathering), Jesus will calmly retreat into the background, and await rediscovery at some future point.

I wonder – do you find that religious retreats or Pagan festivals provided you with opportunities to explore and express the more complicated sides of your religious path? Do they serve the purpose of simply affirming what we know about ourselves and our traditions, or do they challenge our assumptions? Have you ever gone to a festival expecting one thing, but you ended up experiencing something altogether different?

Feel free to share your festival experiences, or reflections on anything in this post. Then, click here for a clip of some wicked, unreleased Pagan music.

On Converting a Christian to Paganism

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I’m a convert to Paganism.

I was born into a Christian tradition, and spent most of the first 25 years of my life identifying as a Christian. I’ve written of this before, but the subject keeps coming up for me. There’s something about how we arrive at our tradition that seems worth reflecting on, especially for a convert.

We hear much about conversion to Christianity, and I understand what that looks like. As I explained it to my husband, becoming a Christian involves accepting a certain set of beliefs about Divinity, specifically related to the God of Israel, Jesus -his humanity and his divinity- and about the role of the Divine in the course of human history. It also involves a certain engagement with Christian scripture, and a whole series of adjustments to whatever worldview you had before. For true conversion to take place, every part of you needs to change, or evolve (depending on your perspective). Your entire being needs to be made open to the development of a “relationship with God.”

But what does it mean for a Christian to convert to Paganism?

At first, this question seems problematic simply because Paganism is not a unified religion. There is no one form of Paganism; no core belief system. And, as anyone who’s paying attention will tell you, most Pagans aren’t fond of having their religious identities, with all of the diverse expressions and cultural lineages associated with them, roped into one, overarching religious title.

And yet, a Christian can become a Pagan, and in the process of doing so experience the inevitable inner-interfaith dialogue between what they believed before and what they believe now, or at least what they are moving toward believing. Those beliefs, old and new, must be in conversation with each other inside of the convert in order for that person to truly become what they’re becoming.

I’ve heard about the ills of Christianity — I’ve spoken about them, myself. I’ve heard reasons why the patriarchy is broken, why the “Big 3” are monopolizing most of the religious landscape in this country and around the world, and why Pagans would do good to let go of the damaging perspectives and social structures that they believe to be the direct product of a Christian worldview.

Those things are all arguable, but not really interesting to me right now. Conversion is more than just letting go of the beliefs you’ve had before. It has to be more than that. After all, being a Pagan is more than just not being a Christian.

What I want to know is – How does a Christian become a Pagan, and how do Pagans help Christian converts through that process?

With conversion to Christianity, the convert must engage in a process of developing a relationship with their God, with Jesus and with (in some sects) the Holy Spirit. The relationship is key. It’s where it all begins, and – as the belief goes – it’s where it all ends, too.

What, then, with Pagans? Are we not to develop relationships with our Gods and Goddesses, too? That seems like a natural parallel. But, how do we do that, exactly? What do we reference to teach us about how our Gods and Goddesses are working in the world — TODAY.

Christians have the Bible. It’s a useful tool in starting the conversation about how their God engaged with humanity in the past, and it can springboard Christians into an exposition of how their God is interacting with humanity in the present. There are inconsistencies in the text, yes, but it’s a starting point.

Why don’t Pagans have these kind of stories?

From what I’ve learned, there is literary fiction, poetry, historical record, and ample text on ritual practices. That’s what Pagans are working with. But, we don’t have a book, a volume, a testament which says — “This is what (insert god or goddess) said to me about the nature of reality, the place of humankind in the larger scheme of things, the will of the Divine. This is an account of my God/Goddess interacting with humanity. These words are holy, because they come from the Being whom I worship.”

There are the old myths, and these myths do much to inform our knowledge of ancient cultures; cultures which have been replaced many times over with new cultures, and new myths. They allow the Reconstructionists in our midst to have a go at forming something that resembles the “Old Ways.” But what do these old myths tell us about those Gods and Goddess as they exist in the world today?

This is what it boils down to for me. These very old Gods and Goddesses must be working in the world — this world — if they’re worth building a religion around. They have to be real in order to be deserving of altars, shrines, devotees. They have to be doing something in this place, otherwise they’re just characters in old stories, no different from Captain Ahab, Don Quixote, or Robin Hood.

Clearly, having been enculturated into Christianity, I have a need for finding some immediate relationship with the Divine, and perhaps Pagans reading this will tell me that this sort of relationship is unnecessary, or distinctly Christian. If that’s case, perhaps I’m not cut out to be a Pagan after all.

But, for the moment, I’d like to ask my fellow Pagans — especially those who, like me, didn’t start out as Pagans — the following question:

If the Gods and Goddesses are real and present in the world, where do we turn to hear their voices? Do they speak, as does the God of the Christians? If so, are we listening?

I’ve yet to find a Pagan perspective being voiced in books or blogs that speaks to these questions of conversion from Christianity to Paganism. If you have, please share them with me in the comment section, and share any insights you’d like to offer. It would be nice to know that I’m not alone in feeling this way.

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