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.

This is the post I had originally intended to follow my intro post.  It’s the one in which I attempt to make some sense for myself of what works for me out of the many ways Pagans think about and interact with the Divine.  Coming from a Catholic background and having a pretty analytical mindset in general, often I try to categorize and tidy things up too much.  But during my recent months of exploring Paganism, I have found delight in discovering that there is no such thing as neat and tidy in describing many Pagans’ spirituality.   There’s a bumper sticker I’ve seen every so often that says something like “My karma ran over your dogma,” which, years ago, I found to be merely a clever play on words.  Now that I am a recovering Catholic walking the Pagan path, I see the sentiment in a whole new light, and with a little editing I have (figuratively speaking) pasted that bumper sticker on my consciousness.  In my mind it now says, “My karma ran over your MY dogma,” a little reminder to myself that I am no longer constrained by institutional rules for being in touch with the Divine, while at the same time acknowledging that other spiritual paths (including Catholicism–I know many wonderful Catholics!) are right for some others.

So, I know what I have departed from (Catholicism), but I’m not as sure I’ve arrived anywhere else yet.  I find this both unsettling and exhilarating.  At times in my earlier years, I took great comfort and pride in knowing Catholic theology and practice well enough to teach it (I am a former Catholic school religion teacher), but now, as I enter middle age, I am seeing things in a different way.  I’m tempted to call it my midlife crisis, except that this has such negative connotations.  I’ve heard that the Chinese ideogram “crisis” is made up of two other ideograms meaning “danger” and “opportunity.”  (According to a University of Pennsylvania professor of Chinese language and literature, however, this is not really accurate, nor is the use of “ideogram” really correct in referring to Chinese characters.  For more information, please see http://www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html .)  Regardless of whether or not the Chinese character for crisis actually conveys a sense of opportunity, I see my own midlife spiritual crisis as being a time of opportunity.

I see that I’ve wandered pretty far afield from my original intent, which was to try to give some sort of definition or description of my spiritual location.  I know that if I wrap this post up without having done that, I will either be preoccupied by it while doing other things, or I soon will be back at my computer doing another post on it anyway, so to meet my own need for efficiency (I have a lot to do today!), I am going to finish up by describing my location right now in the Pagan world as solitary and eclectic but with leanings toward hedgecraft.  I see Divine Energy in every aspect of nature, and I  view my body as a temple of Divine Energy (admittedly, a temple, which at this point needs more nurturing–but that is a subject for another post. . .).