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

[manfalling.livejournal.com]

These days I don`t feel much need to go out on a Sunday and spend the day playing frisbee.

It`s not the same as church sure- but in my head I`ve often thought of the 2 as pretty similar. It`s a community of all sorts, that stretches round the world, and once you`re IN that community, I`d say it`s wider and more inviting and accepting than most any other sport. I could go to just about any big city in the world, hook up with a frisbee team there, and because the sport is still not mainstream, the people will probably welcome me, and I may even know some of them, or they`ll know someone that I know.

We all go out on a Sunday morning and spend some time deeply involved in doing the same thing.

But these days I`m losing interest. Perhaps what I got from it, and what I had to give to it, no longer works for me. Sounds like your feeling wit the covenning.

Likewise I wonder if I`ll regain that interest. I think maybe not, though.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't know about you, but I find I have a short attention span. I spent something like a decade in the Church and a decade as a witch- and at the end of each decade I was bored and fed up and needed to move on.