A year ago, I couldn’t really imagine when I’d be out of the broom closet to my family.  I didn’t want them thinking that I’d gone off the deep end or was even having a mid-life crisis, so I tried to be very circumspect in my attempts to learn about and put my pagan beliefs into practice.  I guess I’ve been quite successful, because my husband and kids all know now that I consider myself to be pagan, and I think they’re all quite comfortable with it. 

This is probably why I have been posting much less frequently—a year ago I definitely needed the outlet of this blog as basically my only means of communication about my thoughts and feelings, but now that I can be more free with my words and actions around home, I’ve needed to blog less and less.  I did, in fact, come to the point about a month ago of considering taking my blog down, but I’ve decided to keep it here for the foreseeable future so that anyone else out there who is going through what I went through spiritually over the last year or two may find my posts and find some emotional support. 

I also intend to continue posting here, although I think the subject matter may become more diverse and time is always an issue September-June due to my workload during those months.  As I will continue to teach in a Catholic school over the next year, I am sure there will be interactions with students, co-workers, and the boss that I’ll want to reflect on here.  And as I continue to study and forge ahead on this spiritual path, I know that I will want to continue using this blog as a record of my journey.

One of the books I purchased on a recent book-buying binge was The Circle Within by Dianne Sylvan. I ordered through Amazon and so had to wait a few days before my shipment arrived in the mail. Meantime, I was feeling starved for good reading on Pagan spirituality, so I went to the library and checked out a couple of popular books on the topic that I had not yet read. The only one I’ll mention by name is The Practical Pagan by Dana Eilers because I found the information in this book to be just what the title promises—practical. Because Eilers is a lawyer, her focus, for much of the book, is how to avoid legal trouble and still have a fulfilling spiritual life. Kind of depressing to think that in the 21st century there are still uninformed types out there who believe Pagans are Satan-worshippers who practice human sacrifice, but Eilers’ book makes it abundantly clear that religious intolerance is alive and well and possibly living where you are.

I am not going to give the title of the second book I borrowed from the library because it is just really awful. I will say that it is by a popular and prolific writer on Witchcraft whom readers seem to either love or hate. And even though I thought while leafing through it at the library that it wasn’t totally my kind of book, I wanted to read it and make my own decision about this author’s work. I’ve always been an avid reader and when I was younger, I never entertained the thought of not finishing a book I had started. At midlife, though, I have begun to realize how precious time is, and I made a promise to myself that I would not finish books I hated reading. This one definitely qualifies, so back it goes, unfinished, to the library!

Happily for me, my book order has arrived, and if the rest of the books are anything like The Circle Within (which I delved into immediately—it’s been on my to-read list for a long time!), I will say I don’t regret a single penny of what I spent! Now, if you’ve read through my older posts, you will know that I am a former Catholic turned Pagan. I’ve been pretty open about the angst I sometimes feel because I teach in a Catholic school and, having undergone a change of spirituality that would definitely not find favor with the higher-ups, I am in the broom closet rather more than I’d like to be.

What I haven’t been quite so open about is the fact that sometimes I mourn my loss of Catholic faith, for there were times in years past that I experienced deep emotional fulfillment when participating in Catholic liturgy, reading Scripture, or just praying on my own. Even in the face of some aspects of Catholic theology and some of the positions taken by Church officials that made me squirm, this satisfaction with my personal practice of Catholicism is what kept me going. So when I finally, officially walked away from Catholicism a year ago, I felt bereft in some ways.

And here, at last, is where The Circle Within comes in. In the first chapter of this book, Dianne Sylvan goes to some lengths to describe her own spiritual journey, including what she has learned about being spiritually alive by adopting some of the attitudes and engaging in some of the practices of Catholic (and Buddhist) nuns and monks. I just had this great sense of comfort and relief after reading the first chapter of this book that I didn’t need to throw the baby out with the bath water. My theology may have changed, but my spirituality and spiritual practice are alive and well. I can disagree with Catholic theology while at the same time admiring and continuing some of the practices of Catholics (and really all people) who are truly spiritually alive.

As I am approaching the first anniversary of stepping onto the Pagan spiritual path, I made a decision several weeks ago (after my Happy Ostara! post) to take a short hiatus from blogging in order to spend substantial time reviewing and reflecting on my spiritual growth over the past year and coming to some decisions about what the best next steps will be for me as I begin my second year of dedication to the Goddess.  I continue to review and plan, (and with a few days off as my school observes the traditionally Catholic practice of spring break following the Christian Easter Sunday, I have more time to sleep, too )  but my curiosity got the better of me today, and I looked at my stats to find that a relative stampede of viewers have made their way to Pagan Dawn in the past few days.

I always find there is a small up-tick in views when I post something new (thank you to the three of you out there who are such faithful readers ), but I hadn’t posted since late March, so my curiosity only increased at the Grand Teton-esque line graph indicating something like 40 or 50 viewers had dropped by over the weekend!  Had I the insightfulness, wit, and gift of language of other Pagan bloggers I read regularly (The Green Witch and Anne Johnson of The Gods are Bored come quickly to mind), I might be tempted to think that the increase in my viewership is due to blog surfers not being able to get enough of my writing, but my style is usually more tortured prose than scintillating poetry.  So . . . what could it be? 

Well . . . I’m not totally sure, but I think it might have something to do with Easter wars.  As you’ll recall if you read my late March post, “Happy Ostara,” I celebrated the arrival of spring at the time of the vernal equinox, and although I still have a lot to learn about Paganism, I understand that most other Pagans/Witches/Wicca celebrate it then, too.  Surprisingly to me, though, as I was catching up on my blog reading, I found a large-ish number of posts by indignant Pagan bloggers addressing the supposed co-opting of Pagan vernal traditions (painted eggs being the real biggie) by Christians who have supposedly morphed them into something associated with the resurrection story.  Another small-but-statistically-significant group of Pagan writers (possibly in an attempt to keep the peace with Christian soldiers??) wrote that really, the origins of celebrations abounding at this time of year are really all too old for any of us to know the absolute truth of, and yes, possibly the Pagan fertility lore and traditions are no older than Christian resurrection celebrations. 

I’m surprised by all of this, not so much because of the content—it’s pretty typical that minority groups of any type will have some members that are militant and others that prefer to appease—but because of the timing of these posts—most were published on the Christian Easter weekend of April 11 and 12.  Wasn’t Easter (Oestara) several weeks ago for us Pagans?  I don’t know about you, but I’m already beginning to look forward to Beltane! 

But content-wise, I guess I’m a little disappointed, too.  When I stepped away from Christianity and toward Paganism, I saw myself as moving toward a culture that accepts and shares with others.  The more we fight for “ownership” of any seasonal celebration, the more likely it is that we will lose any joy and deep meaning it has held for us.  If any of the readers stampeding over to Pagan Dawn last weekend were looking for a Pagan blogger with a bad-ass attitude about Oestara/Easter, I don’t think they found it here.  So I’m probably back to a readership of three now that they’ve seen this site is just one middle-aged woman’s musings about her quite ordinary Pagan life. . .

This year, the Christian celebration of Easter falls quite late—April 12, while the Pagan celebration of Ostara, as it is connected to the occurrence of the vernal equinox, is more than 3 weeks earlier.  Had I stepped into Paganism a year earlier, I might have felt quite conflicted about how to make sure my observance of Ostara didn’t get lost in the shuffle of my largely-Christian family’s Easter celebration, which was on March 23 last year.  As there is such a gap between the two celebrations this year, though, I’m feeling quite relaxed about it, including drawing out my observance over a matter of a week or more, as I gather both some physical symbols and my thoughts on the key aspects of Ostara.

To me, this observance seems to have been particularly long in coming.  I’ve been through one of the snowiest winters I can remember in decades (right up through last weekend!), I’ve been dealing with some thorny family issues, and I’m trying to address my own growing dissatisfaction with my current employment situation without causing household financial wreckage beyond that done by the national/global situation.   Despite the worries of my daily life, though, I feel joyful as the wheel of the year advances to the celebration of Ostara—a time to celebrate balance and potentiality.  As I continue to study the seasons and cycles in the physical world and my spiritual life, I find it helpful to have something specific to focus on during times of reflection, so I’m using the photos of seeds and nest eggs you see here as symbols of the season. 

Blessings to all who read this!  May this season be a time of renewal for all who desire it.

If you’ve read my last few posts, you’ll recall that L. and I had agreed to get together for an Imbolc ritual at the beginning of February.  As the time we agreed upon approached, she laid out in general terms how she thought our ritual should go, and I very much appreciated her taking the lead since she has a much longer history of Pagan practice than I do, and at that point I was feeling quite unsure of myself—not about my belief, but about my ability to plan and undertake a meaningful ritual.  And so the day arrived, we met at the agreed upon location, she led, I followed, and . . . it didn’t really work for me. *sigh*

I’ve spent some time pondering why, and I don’t think it’s any one thing, but just a little bit of several things.  Although we are both ex-Catholics who have stepped onto the Pagan path, that path is rather wide and we are pretty far apart in terms of our individual focuses.  Her practice tends to be influenced by Native American spirituality, and mine . . . is not.   I also think I was feeling pretty self-conscious about not wanting to seem like such a novice, but that just led me to holding back emotionally during our ritual.  In purely practical terms, I think I had difficulties because we were outside on a bitterly cold day and we didn’t move enough to stay warm.  So my goals, as I prepare for our Ostara ritual are to reflect on the “flavor” I would like to bring to it, to loosen up enough to become more emotionally involved in it, and to either plan it for a day of warmer weather or to dress more warmly.  J  Stay tuned.

Otherwise, things are looking up in my spiritual life.  I have been to more Pagan events—even heard Starhawk speak at the Women of Wisdom conference last week!  And my husband and I just wrapped up our umpteenth home improvement project, after which I conducted a ceremony to bless our re-configured space so that I would feel spiritually comfortable in it.  I am happy to report that the blessing ceremony I wrote and carried out was not bad, and when I am in our new space, I do get a feeling of peace and goodness.

When I met with L. a couple weeks ago, I told her I feared I might lose my job if anyone I work with found out that I have become a pagan.  At first, the likelihood of this was not very great—I was quite comfortable as a solitary practitioner for awhile.  But more recently, I have developed a desire to get out and meet other pagans and hopefully find a teacher or group with whom I can gain more practical ritual/worship experience.  The more I wanted this, the more anxious I became about my job—word of who-saw-whom-where-doing-what gets around in the most unlikely ways in circles I move and live in.

But my need to move forward outweighed my anxiety about my job, so I started taking some baby steps out of the closet a few months ago, and then last week, I attended my first full-fledged, call-it-what-it-is pagan event.  And I’m happy to report I’m still employed and the sky hasn’t fallen. J

If you’ve read my last few posts, you know that I’ve been feeling sort of stuck in neutral. I’ve done a lot of reading and reflecting, but my actual hands-on practice in terms of ritual just really . . . well. . . sucks right now. This is, I feel, a logical result of my personal need to stay pretty firmly in the closet with regard to my evolving spirituality. But having had several weeks out of the classroom for the holidays, I have had time to set some goals, one of which was to to re-connect with L., who has been sort of in and out of my life for a number of years. During those years, I have sometimes wished for a closer relationship with L., but the realities of our lives and lifestyles as we each married, established our homes, raised kids, and so forth made a close relationship between us unlikely.

Now that our kids are all basically grown, though, we have begun to connect again. When I was younger and more firmly entrenched in Catholicism, I had been oblivious to signs L. showed over the years that she was involved with pagan spirituality, but looking back now that I am on that path myself, I can’t believe I missed noticing things about her in the past that are so obvious, and so I decided to confide in her about my spiritual evolution.

Over the course of that l-o-n-n-g-g-g conversation, she was both very open with me about her own experience of paganism and also a bit surprised that I’m not just considering a move away from Catholicism but that I have actually done so AND I have firmly committed to paganism. At the same time, I think I made it pretty clear to her that I have a deep need to move beyond a mere intellectual understanding of this path and into emotional experiences. I am so grateful for her willingness to listen and answer a lot of my questions, but beyond that, she is willing to help me move forward from my stuck position by guiding me and participating in ritual with me over the next few sabbats! I suppose it’s possible that as open as we are with each other, we still might not . . . resonate . . . with each other in ritual, but if she is willing to teach me a little of what she knows, I am eager to try!  (Yikes!  That sounds sort of mercenary, and I don’t mean it that way at all.)  Whatever the outcomes, I want that new closeness between us-even just on everyday things–to continue.

Recently, I had a chance to hear Ann Holmes Redding speak about her decision to embrace Islam. If you have been reading my blog for the past few months, you may recall that I wrote a previous post about Redding, an Epicscopal priest who is in the process of being de-frocked for her commitment to Islam.  She has maintained that she can be both a Christian and a Muslim; the powers-that-be in the Episcopal Church have obviously decided she cannot. 

Her story resonates with me because of my own situation—having been a seeker over the past several years for a fuller and more fulfilling spirituality than that of the Catholicism I have practiced virtually all my adult life, I have within the past year embraced Paganism, but I am (at least for the time being) in the closet due to my ongoing employment at a Catholic school.

So, wanting to know more about Redding, when I learned that she would be speaking at a nearby Unitarian Universalist congregation, I decided to be in the congregation that day.  As she shared her story with the assembly, the following three ideas stuck with me particularly . . .

• The Abrahamic religions are a “dysfunctional brotherhood” (I couldn’t help thinking at the time, if it were more of a sisterhood, maybe they would be more functional . . . J)
• The anger Redding has encountered in others in her quest to express her spirituality more fully actually has fear at its core.  I imagine those who seek or support Redding’s de-frocking see Redding’s spirituality as an electric light bulb that must either be on or off in one room at a time, when in reality her spirituality is a candle flame, and she could share the flame of her faith life with other candles (Islam, Unitarianism, etc.) while still that Episcopal flame could remain as brightly lit as always.  How sad it is that others are seeking to snuff the Episcopal flame out.  Definitely their loss.
• I was impressed by Redding’s calm resoluteness in the face of this situation.  I got the feeling that her spiritual journey has been quite similar to mine, and while I am not exactly comforted by the probable outcome of her situation (I imagine myself being fired if it were ever to become public knowledge at my school that I have embraced worship of the Goddess), I see in Redding a model to emulate in terms of not allowing others to intimidate me out of a spirituality that is personally fulfilling.

As I alluded to in my last post before this one, there are some unsettled aspects to my life just now—some due to deliberate choices I have made recently, others that are not under my direct control.  If any of these situations come to an unpleasant head, I will definitely need the kind of “soft strength” I saw in Ann Holmes Redding.

In that I am basically in the broom closet, my steps on my pagan path consist entirely of reading, sporadic devotions, and practicing rituals.  The reading is good—terrific, in fact, and I wish I had more time for it.  A few weeks ago I finally finished reading Drawing Down the Moon by Margot Adler and so I now feel as if I have a better understanding of the development of modern Pagan practice in the U.S.  At the same time, though, I also feel that I took a very academic approach to reading it, and right now I want something more personally involving, so I am going back to a couple of books I read earlier and developing a plan to work through the questions for reflection and the spiritual exercises. 

The devotions are so-so; I feel as if I know what messages I want to convey in my devotions, but I’m just not very good at it.  This feeling of dissatisfaction is a little surprising to me, since one of the things about paganism I feel most satisfied with is the freedom to develop my own spiritual practices rather than having them prescribed to be by a church hierarchy. 

And as for rituals . . . well, if my devotions are so-so, my attempts at ritual are really quite pathetic just now.  I’m not at all ready yet to create my own rituals, and I’ve attempted to adapt some that were meant to be done by groups into a format that would work for me in a solitary setting, but quite frankly, that hasn’t worked at all. 

In response to the feeling I keep getting that I should seek guidance of a teacher or mentor, I am beginning to put out some subtle feelers.  It is tempting to just shove my closet door wide open and step out into the broad light of day, but there are some other aspects of my life with my family right now that are in flux, and I don’t want to shortchange either them or myself, so for now I am just going to keep my spiritual antennae on alert mode and see what comes of it over the next few months.

I have not posted recently for several reasons; I’ve been sick during the last two weekends (at this time of the year I tend to think of a school building as a giant petri dish . . .), I’ve been doing the usual 10 to 12 hour days in my job as a teacher, and I have been doing quite a bit of reading on Paganism and thinking about what I have read in light of a local news report I read last week about the imminent defrocking of an Episcopal priest.  The Episcopalians have had a fair amount of press over the past several years, mostly due to the elevation to the level of bishop of a couple of priests who happen to be gay.  But the priest I am writing about today is not gay and not a male.  Her name is Ann Holmes Redding, and she is an Episcopal priest who has also recently started practicing Islam.  Perhaps you have read about Redding; if not, you might want to glance at this article which appeared last week in The Seattle Times. 

The reason I am thinking so hard about this is that I have been reading Paganism:  An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions by Joyce and River Higgenbotham, and as I have read I have been struck repeatedly by the feeling of rightness about how I am growing spiritually just now through my embrace of Paganism.  My journey on this path is the result of feeling that the face of the Deity that I was taught about during my years as a Catholic is just one small aspect of the Divine Force.  I have embraced Paganism in order to see the face of the Divine from other angles.  I imagine that Ann Holmes Redding’s embrace of Islam in addition to her practice as an Episcopal priest is a result of similar feelings—a longing to know more than just the face of Deity worshipped by Christians.  And look where it has got her.

In my more optimistic moments I dream of a day when I can be open with my family, my friends, and my co-workers about my spiritual journey into Paganism.  But when I hear of stories like Redding’s I am quite disheartened.  I’m sure some would say that if that’s the way the Episcopal Church treats Redding, she’s better off being defrocked.  I just think it’s terribly sad that Christianity—a faith that really is quite beautiful in some ways—is used by some as a game of political control.   Ann Holmes Redding is a woman who truly has the courage of her convictions.  I wonder, when moments for revealing “the new me” present themselves, will I be as courageous as she is?