Losing My Religion

When I left the Church in 1986 I wasn't yet ready to give up on religion, so I read lots of books and flirted with lots of spiritualities and wound up as a pagan.

It was the Goddess who drew me in. After all those years spent worshipping a masculine Deity some sort of balancing was needed.

For a while I was a pagan evangelist. 

Then Ailz and I became witches and ran a coven. That was brilliant fun.

But somehow- and I can't say exactly how- the need went away.

If I say I grew out of it, it sounds patronising. But maybe we shouldn't be afraid to patronise religion.

The dangerous question is "Why?"  Why am I wandering round this room naked with a sword in my hand?  Why am I addressing the empty air  in mock-Elizabethan English? Why am I wearing these papier-mache horns on my head and pretending to be Pan?

It's not that I became a materialist. I still think the universe is full of gods and spirits and ghosts. I'm one of them- and so are you and you and you; we're all working our passage. But I don't require sweet savours and people bobbing up and down in front of me- and I question the sanity and ethics of any spook that does.

I devised a Wiccan third degree initiation which ended with the candidate facing an unshaded window with her back to the temple. That was effectively the end of it for me. Look, I was saying to the candidate (but mainly acknowledging to myself) you don't need all that jiggery-pokery any more.

A Maze

I wrote this in 1986. It sums up how I felt shortly after leaving the Church. Apart from being rather more down in the mouth than I am these days, it still speaks for me. 

                                    A  MAZE

 

                                    The charm of a maze

                                    Depends on the fear

                                    Of getting lost.

                                    You turn and turn

                                    As the lengths of path

                                    Fill up with shadow

                                    And panic mounts.

                                    If you reach the centre

                                    There's nothing there

                                    Of any importance-

                                    Maybe a statue

                                    Or garden bench

                                    And the satisfaction

                                    Of crossword solving.

                                    You have got to "there"

                                    When "there" is only

                                    A shape of sodden

                                    Seedy grass,

                                    Out of sorts,

                                    Its meaning wholly

                                    Contained in the pattern

                                    You've traced to find it.

 

                                    This is an image

                                    For metaphysics

                                    Or any kind

                                    Of system building.

                                    Nothing is nothing

                                    However you dress it.

           

                                    Yeats at the end

                                    Of his life acknowledged

                                    There's only the heart.

                                    Our loves, our hates

                                    Generate patterns;

                                    The mind pursues them,

                                    Thinking it has

                                    An object and

                                    Ariadne's counsel.

                                    There's nothing there.
                                                                                 

                                    Now I have spent

                                    A half a lifetime

                                    Fussing with questions

                                    I'll never answer.

                                    Time to call quits.

                                    I am ready at last

                                    To ask of life

                                    No more that simple

                                    Human friendships,

                                    Human loves,

                                    And like Candide

                                    To work the garden.

Cumberland Falls

Another early poem. Maybe the best I ever wrote. It looks back on my first marriage- but mainly its about something else. 

                                    CUMBERLAND FALLS

 

                                    I spent my honeymoon in the woods

                                    Where the high Falls of the Cumberland river

                                    Made Wordsworthian settlers think

                                    Of something smaller they'd left behind

                                    In Ireland or the Hebrides.

                                    The water's pounding holds a ghostly

                                    Fiddle music.  It sings about

                                    The Clearances, the Forty-five...

 

                                    And swallows the crack of the long rifles,

                                    The hatchet's swipe as the exiles drove

                                    A flint-age, oral culture

                                    Backwards, with the timber-line.

 

                                    Rivers ingest our human sorrows,

                                    Rendering down our misery

                                    To the inhuman pathos of Nature.

                                    Shut in a cabin among the pines,

                                    We worked at love, and memory shows

                                    Her small, peaked face confronting mine,

                                    Tightened in angry determination

                                    To make a go of what she loathed,

                                    Frigging me in the shower.  Its jets

                                    Needled our slack, reluctant flesh

                                    And I laughed- not, as she thought, at her

                                    But with her- at a brave try,

                                    Hurting inside to think my love

                                    Might never meet an unforced response.

                                    Water rilled down her breasts and made

                                    Her long hair cling like river weed.

 

                                    And that first night I thought there were three

                                    Souls in that cabin; she and I and ...

                                    Was it the Falls with its Celtic voices

                                    That summoned up that unseen stranger,

                                    Old as stone, and the yellow lichen,

                                    Dark and ravishing as the woods,

                                    Holding me in her saning aura

                                    While in a separate world of pain

                                    My wife stirred as the same defender

                                    Entered her dream?   I kept waking;
                                    Still we were three.  The night resounded,

                                    Filled with the voices of the Falls.

                                    It was as if the Woman spoke,

                                    Wordlessly, maternally,

                                    "Lay aside your fear, your rage;.

                                    You are timed but I am always;

                                    Rest in me.  My tourbillons

                                    Unmake your troubles, and your true love

                                    Waits with me.  I smoothed those fiddles

                                    Into history's wall of music,

                                    Reconciling killer and killed

                                    In one amazing, timeless cry."