Losing My Religion

[poliphilo]

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.

Comments

[algabal.livejournal.com]

I think you can get the "good stuff" from a religion (or even a sect of a religion) without actually joining a church. I need the tradition, the ideas, the symbols of Catholicism, but am not a member of the church.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

What you get by joining a church is the sense of belonging to a great community stretching across space and time. I used to need that, but now, for whatever reasons, I don't.