Eight years ago, entering grad school, I thought I had done a close examination of my religious background - and baggage.
Maybe it wasn’t close enough.
I won’t go into the “how-to” or “what is it” when it comes to deconstruction here as plenty of others have done that, but below are some relevant links, that even some of my more liberal Christian friends may find friendly and even helpful.
https://www.sophiasociety.org/blog/what-is-faith-deconstruction
https://www.sophiasociety.org/blog/how-to-deconstruct-your-faith
Instead, I will go into my own journey, where I’m at now, and what I’m considering as I slowly move forward into trying to find faith, of some form, once again. The primary decisions involved started in November, 2021, and were deepened in January 2022. It’s also worth noting that, while people who know me may work out one or two of the people here, any names used have been changed, except for a few preachers, and if there is copyright involved. (Also… pretty much all of the content warnings for all of the things, to a degree.)
I was raised in a very religious family. Throughout my early life, there was an instant, if confusing, answer for how I was raised: “A mix of Baptist, Catholic, and Pentecostal.” My grandmother had raised my mom Catholic, and then converted to a Charismatic Church of a flavor similar, but not identical to, Assembly of God churches. My mother, being more reserved, had left the worship style but not the theology, and wound up attending mostly Southern Baptist churches, such as Jerry Falwell’s, while reading strict Calvinist preachers’ books by the time I was growing up.
Some things fascinated me and stuck with me, such as the idea that spiritual qualities could become infused into things such as water, or “prayer cloths,” or a string of beads, much the same way as I later learned some witches charm or bless objects. I was exposed to that much, however, by as young as age four, and “magical thinking” was never seen by me as the superstition many skeptics see it as. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t skeptical, even at a young age.
While it’s perfectly normal for children to accept things at face value, perhaps it is worth it for me to look at that in the light of my mother’s Biblical literalism. I certainly had some weird ritualistic and literalistic behavior, including an incident I strongly recall for some reason, where I thought that turning over a new leaf meant actually having to pull a baby leaf off of a bush and turn it over to symbolize the change. I was perhaps five when I did that, and it came in the context of a few relevant pressures that, I suppose, make it memorable.
My grandmother grew up in Brooklyn, a Sicilian Catholic living side by side with many Jewish families. When I was four, I was put into a preschool that was mostly Jewish. I think my mother came to see this as a mistake though. I definitely didn’t understand why my closest Jewish friend was seen as being a different religion if he still believed he was created and loved by God. Jesus was just one voice echoing the love of a Creator to me, at the time. Later on, as a teenager, a discussion in the Baltimore Catechism hinted at God as immanent in all of creation as well as transcendent as a separate entity, which other USCCB Catechisms have since downplayed to distance from Paganism and Hinduism. It was this that I kept returning to, and why I love the phrase I’ve heard both liberal Christians and Buddhists use for Divine Consciousness - the Ground of All Being. Even in Norse mythology, the gods breathed into us, sharing with us the consciousness and Being that fills all that is.
I also, hilariously enough, got some early exposure to 1980’s environmentalism, even though my mother was clearly not a fan. It seemed, to me, to simply be part of “doing the right thing,” and isn’t that what I had thought my parents were encouraging me to do? Around the same time, my family kept talking about the “sinner’s prayer” and “giving one’s heart to Jesus,” but the whole thing just seemed odd to me. Why would I need a specific prayer when I was born into those beliefs, and had prayed before? Didn’t God know who I was from praying? I wasn’t converting from something else. I even joked that I’d said whatever prayer they wanted me to say in the hospital when I was born. (Edit: For clarity, I did say a simple version of it when I was five.)
The environmental issues weren’t the only time I pushed back against how my mother and grandmother viewed the world. While I went along with their young earth creationism for a long time, I did push back in other areas where it seemed like there were experts who knew more than they did. Nonetheless, the day I did the weirdly literal new leaf ritual I mentioned earlier, I kinda wound up dealing with both ideas - saying a variation of the prayer that was in the Gideon New Testament I always had in my hand when we went to church, and also trying to commit to doing what I felt I “should” - from taking care of the earth to trying to be a better kid. I’ve often mixed my better motives with caving to pressure from others, unfortunately.
Honestly, so much of it was so irrational. I remember as a kid the first time I went on an airplane feeling skeptical about Heaven because I didn’t see any ghosts standing on the other side of the clouds. Likewise, in my childhood, I had a fear of skeletons and skulls. Why? I took it as immediate and literal that the dead could rise at ANY second, and even though adults told me “but it’s a good thing done by God, and they’re just all going to be gathered by God for Judgment, and you as a Christian have nothing to fear…” uh. No. They’re rising for Armageddon and I fully expect that dead thing to come out swinging the moment it animates. You can’t tell me the dead can come to life any second to start a religious war, and expect me to not be suspicious that any second could be That Second when I’m around anything dead. (One more reason to note: Of Course Hela turned up first.)
When I was six, I got dragged into a truth or dare game with these two kids whose dad was a local Baptist pastor. The older one was 12 or 13, and should have known better, but long story short there was some sexual abuse there. I suddenly somehow felt dirty, and that was the first time I really scrubbed my hands under hot water to the point of being raw, marking the onset of my OCD symptoms. There I was, as young as age six, during thunderstorms saying the rosary throughout the storm praying God wouldn’t strike me with lightning over things… like this.
Growing up and hearing adults around me talk about sexual sin, I got the idea this had meant I had somehow sinned, and was guilty of something so many of them seemed to consider something as bad as murder. I assumed it also meant I wasn’t a virgin until I learned otherwise, well into my teenage years - and contrary to narratives about abuse “creating” homosexuality, I was actually only able to come out, even to myself, as bi after I finally fully processed this and other things. This is what purity culture does - instead of questioning if I felt awful after all this because of something that had been done to me, I thought it was somehow something I had done wrong, and victim-blamed myself.
My mother often disagreed with experts, and she was very wary of doctors, except for personal friends of the family, such as a Bible study leader I had who was also an MD. I wound up having to self treat all kinds of conditions, which lead to learning herbal medicine. Somehow, mom also gave me an abridged copy of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and let me read Monica Furlong’s books, especially Wise Child, which relied less on fantasy magic and more on things modern Pagans actually do, such as astral projection, and herbal medicine. She also encouraged me to read fairy books and folklore because it was the most “girly” of my interests and she felt I was a bit too much of a tomboy, I suppose, for also having an interest in learning martial arts. (Which, by the way, predated the bad truth or dare game.)
I eventually figured out in my teenage years that I’m bisexual - right around the time when many of the authors my mom was reading and many of the Christians I found myself surrounded with were double predestination Calvinists. They basically thought one way to know who was among the elect was that those who kept repeating the same sins would not be going to heaven - something that would make even the most traditionalist Catholic priest I’ve met laugh for days after all that they hear in confessions. But I began to believe at the time that there was no prayer of faith I could pray, no penance I could undertake, I was condemned to hell no matter what. But… after a time of being suicidal, I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that whatever divinity had made puppies, kittens, sunsets, and put the sugar cane and cocoa bean on the same planet could be quite that cruel.
During that dark time, I definitely turned to ritual - of a sort. Before the “double predestination” idea fully sank in, I had a sense of existential dread every time I didn’t feel “okay” with dying that day, due to doubt or sin or anything else. For a long time, I self injured to “make myself feel Christ’s pain” at my sin. While other friends had attempted to intervene, my boyfriend at the time, whom we’ll call “Eric,” made me promise to stop - and for him, I did. Something else took its place.
There was a ring I used to symbolize feeling right with God, so to speak. When I felt I had sinned horribly, I would take off the ring, take a shower, lock the door, take off my robe and slippers, light a candle and put on a specific playlist. I would kneel fully facedown on the floor crying. Many of the sins that drove me to this were teenage hormone based, especially the ones that gave me inklings I wasn’t exactly straight. Eventually, when I finally felt okay to do so, I would put on the robe, the slippers, and the ring, mimicking the verses about the prodigal son returned. Except for moments like this, I wore that ring almost constantly. In many ways, it symbolizes a few years of my life in which I lost the last of my parent’s theology, and found a new way forward. Little did I know that the person I eventually gave it to, for being so influential at that time, would wind up following me on my future paths. Candles, symbolic jewelry, and secret rituals behind locked doors, and going what the Wiccans would call “sky clad” didn’t exactly make the transition to later ritual difficult, admittedly.
I’d met “Eric,” along with “Ann,” “Tim,” and others, through a yahoo group originally made for “Christian goths.” Around the time Eric wandered out of my life and back into a harshly strict school for Christian missionaries, Tim introduced me to the Tao te Ching, Tarot, and a friend of his from a traditional Wiccan coven. I studied, instead, the Norvicensian Christian Witchcraft tradition, taking my year and a day at a distance. I went beyond the basic curriculum, and made a real in depth study of it, and it will always be my original witchcraft training, modified with a grain of salt now though it may be. While mom sat in sermons, I slipped out of the church and wandered the graveyard out back where two friends of the family had been buried. I believe I encountered an entity out there… not a ghost. I sensed something that, at the time, I thought of as a young grim reaper lady. It was only later it occurred to me this might be Hela.
In 2005, I lost my virginity, and also a possible child. At the time, grief consumed me. For ten days, I couldn’t bring myself to eat, and found myself living on water alone and listening to my CD player and going on seven mile walks to occupy a majority of my day. This was… different from past disordered eating behavior. It didn’t come from the same place. It was grief, pure and simple. Food would have tasted like choking down cardboard.
The next time that happened, for seven days, was when my marriage to “Andy” was ending in late 2008. By this point I had tried to be purely Wiccan, and… then the world fell out from under me. I lost my home, my marriage, my then religious community, and very nearly wasn’t able to continue my education. I didn’t have the energy, the feeling of any sort of power, to do anything resembling anything “magical” about it, and I never really connected with any polytheistic deities or pantheons while Wiccan. So I went to the God I knew, and I went to a place that at least understood charity and poverty and trying to put some intellect into one’s faith - the Catholic Church. I needed to feel like I could break down crying around some sort of deity, and that was as good a place to do it as any. In the process of this conversion, I again found myself walking, even sometimes trying to run, miles and miles per day. Once again I found myself living on only water, this time for seven days instead of ten.
While it was lack of Divine interaction that made me ultimately turn from Wicca to Catholicism, I didn’t get quite what I was looking for there, either… not until the Heathen gods. The first Heathen I ever met was around this time, a Lokisperson who was in my counseling psychology class. During the early painful part of the divorce, she was one of the few friends to actually show up for me and visit, when I finally managed to get back from my geographic exile at my parents’ home.
While much of what led to that point in my marriage was irrelevant here, one incident does stand out, and was certainly a major regret and personal low moment - a wedding reception for “Andy”’s boss that went absolutely sideways. This older gentleman guest and my then-husband were talking, and I became irritated when he told us that we should put any future children into private Christian schools. I said through clenched teeth, tapping my pentacle watch “Can I tell him {I’m not Christian}?” I got back a slight head shake. The wedding itself wasn’t even Christian, but Buddhist. Despite the memory of corporal punishment, such as getting hit with ping pong paddles or clip boards, which mom gave Christian schools permission for before they kicked me out, it’s not like I was going to go on some anti Christian rant. Well… Until that exact refusal to let me make even the simplest objection, led me to get drunk and rant to other guests about how archeology conflicts with parts of the “Old Testament.” I’m not proud of this. I definitely behaved badly, and was a rude guest.
That said, there was another negative side effect this led to. Not only had I felt a lack of connection to deity driving me elsewhere… I felt a stronger than ever lack of trust in my own ability to make any decisions, ever. Part of me seemed to want to be a mindless follower, for once, because I was so broken and so tired of always feeling socially isolated… though thankfully not all of me felt that way completely. I still favored rational thought over being a blind sheep, I just didn't think I was capable of said rational thought. I didn’t realize I was probably on the autism spectrum yet, but I realized that my own nonverbal communication couldn’t be trusted, never mind that of others. Just imagine if every conversation felt like a job interview, and you felt you had to watch every flinch, every normally involuntary movement, and it suddenly all had to be voluntary, forever and ever, Amen. That was my life - that and constant rosaries, novenas, and daily Mass.
After the divorce, one creepy thing kept reoccurring in my conversations with my mother. Time and again, though it took me seven years to date again, she would lament, wishing I could find a “good Christian man.” I cringed internally, thinking I would rather die than have that sort of living death, shackled to someone who would think I should die for my bisexuality, who would disagree with me about most of my politics, and would think he was the defacto head of the household. I joked in my own head that I’d rather date an anti-Loki “Brosatru Heathen” than than a conservative Christian, and I was away from Heathenry at the time.
While I was Catholic, I also had ways I was atypical. I practiced Benedicaria - Italian Catholic folk magic. Because a lot of what it’s *supposed* to be, instead of what some racists made it into, is stuff that got a pass as “lawful enchantments” even under things like the Mallus Maleficarum, it is still interesting to know from a historical witchcraft perspective. I had been introduced to this by “Ann,” from the Christian goth group I mentioned earlier. I also used the Tarot of the Saints deck, and an unusual translation of the Bible - The Inclusive Bible by Priests for Equality, which I found through a “Celtic” prayer book that had prayers for holidays like Beltane in it, but for Catholics. Hardly your standard Catholic reading material, though stumbling across both was probably what let me keep that faith so long.
I spent a lot of time after my marriage trying to convince myself that passionate, deeply romantic, love was only ever infatuation. I tried to tell myself that what I found with my first partner after said marriage, seven years later, was better. Love that just felt like we were already familiar, in the sense that found family is familiar, realistic love… “netflix and chill” the relationship. I made myself content. Later, I made myself content again under different circumstances, but … I lied to myself there, too.
This is jumping ahead, but by the middle of 2019, I had buried my desire for romance, for children, for ever being able to manage full time work - let alone a career - with my disabilities, and had maybe even given up on finishing my education. I had also given up on Religion altogether, more or less… but we’re not at that point of the story yet.
But what made me change this time, I don’t like the implications of at all. In 2014, I suffered a head injury, after which I was hyperreligious for a period of time… and then the opposite, essentially agnostic, but hanging out with Buddhists because at least I could prove the benefits of meditation. During my “hyperreligious” time, while I still attended Mass, one of my friends whom we’ll call “Valki” had gotten close to Odin, and “Serilda,” got close to Thor… and that was when the same entity worshiped by the first Norse pantheon person I had ever met came knocking.
My first solid experience with the Norse gods was Loki practically moving in like a roommate for two days. I had done a goofy ritual dedicated to him and… he definitely took the invitation. Not all of the resulting “coincidental” bouts of luck were bad… most were good, even, and the rest kind of hilarious.
One day, early in writing this, I was walking a large black dog in a black summer dress, despite it being winter. Even though there were fallow fields nearby, I saw nine corvids, half of whom were eating offerings I left them in a field. I heard an owl, had a falcon fly overhead, and found a heads up dime. All of this was in the same 20 mins. At least for me, this is an example of Odin and Freyja offering small consolations during hard times. I’ve certainly gotten more day to day life interaction from the Norse pantheon over the years, if anything, not less.
But during my days of embracing Loki’s good cheer in my gloomy Catholic-wannabe-nun life, and having early chats with Odin and Freyja, I did try to reach out to the pagan community again. My old Unitarian Universalist Pagan group was happy to have me back, but the first kindred I tried to hang out with… well, that was a mistake. There was a college Pagan group that had kicked me out because I was uncomfortable with one of the witches in said group constantly talking about attempts at death cursing her cheating boyfriend. The leader who had made the decision to kick me? Turns out she was a member of this kindred, though I managed to avoid seeing her there. It was only over a decade later in writing this, though, that I realized that what made them uncomfortable wasn’t just that, or the communication accommodations I needed at the time. In re-reading the emails, I realized that they were kind of racist too, and were trying to pretend they weren’t just because they weren’t as bad as the AFA types. Indeed, the leadership tried to “make nice” with the folkish, were offended at the idea that someone (not myself) could have UPG of Odin appearing to them even temporarily as a black man, and called The Troth “too Wiccan,” (and not for UPG reasons,) even though their own priestess was an ex-Gardinarian.
Heathenry also has many disabled gods, but the way the social structure can act, and with the each-person-is-an-island level of self sufficiency that seems to be almost ironic in a religion where many meeting groups are called “kindreds”... a lot of the ways social expectations are set up are very difficult for the neurodiverse and others with invisible disabilities. I belonged wonderfully well with my CUUPs group, but often have been thrown out of Heathen spaces without even knowing why - a theme which, sadly, will come up again.
Humans survive because of our communities. It’s one thing to encourage a sense of independence and paying one’s debts or returning favors, but it’s another to try to imply that people should never need the support of others, and should stand alone. The disabled can’t live in situations like that, nor can they function well in Heathen communities that are almost militaristic in their expectations. On the flip side, sometimes even those from collectivist cultures find themselves alone… in the cold that can be deadly, that’s just reality. Having a survival strategy when depending on others fails you is important, but it’s also not something everyone can do. Heathens CAN have a balance between their individual and collective natures, between following a trail and carving your own path.
I understand wanting to avoid certain types of toxicity. Drama and backbiting are all too common in Pagan communities - and in small churches or communities of many sorts, unfortunately. The main “accommodation” I had hedged talking about earlier? Needing to be able to write my own thoughts down in order to speak at all. My brain injury had been extremely recent, and I still had difficulty answering questions because the connections between the two main language areas of the brain had some scarring - and probably still does, in much the same way my shoulder still does.
The most I would have written beyond that, would have been a reference to a specific piece of lore or book passage or author if I liked it. But, of course, even when I tried to suggest that I could show those in charge what I had written after every event to prove it was just my own responses to questions or something like “Havamal, LineX,” it was treated like I was stealing secrets or wanted to out the jobs of the members of the group, even with oversight, allowing me to basically not use any sort of communication accommodation and kicking me out over it. The next Heathen group I was with allowed that much… but based on the only feedback I did get as to why I was eventually thrown out, bringing up the head injury itself, even without details of how it happened, may have been “too traumatic” to share with the group. I am still trying to figure out what lesson to learn there, but… that’s jumping ahead.
One thing that comes up, even at work, and apparently elsewhere more recently, is that my asking questions out of confusion comes across as disrespect, when I genuinely want to know how to proceed or what I should change. I am also terrible at nonverbal communication in general, though in a limited one on one setting, some of my college classes helped me learn to do with analysis on purpose what most take for granted there. I went through a time last year searching for answers as to why this could be. Then I hit this section of one article… (https://socialpronow.com/blog/friend-doesnt-respect/ )
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People can mean different things by “respect.” Treating someone with respect can mean treating them as a person or treating them as an authority. Treating someone as a person means respecting their right to their own thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Treating someone as an authority means deferring to them or giving them influence over you.
Some people use these two different meanings of the word respect to create an imbalanced relationship. They might say that they will only respect people who respect them. This often means that they will treat others as people only if those people treat them as an authority figure. This is both manipulative and inherently disrespectful.
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It had never occurred to me that this was what was going on far too often, especially since I long ago learned that even people who are smart about one thing are often not about others. My mother is a genuinely masterful musician, but gets angry if you try to tell her Detroit is nowhere near the Canadian border because she thinks the lake reaches lower than it does. Just because someone can speak twelve languages doesn’t make them a scientist, or well able to evaluate science. We’re all human and mortal and there is only so much one can learn in one lifetime (which is yet another reason why the gods, though likely not omniscient, know far more than we).
So generally I treat everyone as… just human. I may be a little reluctant to annoy someone if I feel like I can learn more from them than would be worth bothering them in any way, and so will “hmm” or “uh huh” even if I disagree heavily with them. I don’t put anyone on a pedestal, though, even if they have published books. I am also honest to a fault. I very much avoid lying to people, except by omission. This… tends to get me in trouble, too, as it turns out.
When I was considering becoming a therapist, HIPPA was one thing. It’s easy to just be like “Hey, I can’t discuss patients, period, new topic.” That doesn’t involve lying. I make the comparison because therapists in a small town have a harder time navigating these waters, and avoiding drama in the Pagan community seems to be a very similar dance, and even more exhausting because there aren’t laws you can use to shut down conversation. Sitcoms trope on this all the time.“Person a and person b just won’t *talk* to each other. A million horrible misunderstandings ensue.” How many millions of half hour plots have boiled down to this? Privacy, secrets, boundaries… these are important and sometimes even fun, but a lot of heartache can also be avoided with honesty. The first time I read through Havamal, I admit I could almost hear the voice of a paranoid friend, Winter, who would get mad if I said anything more than “fine” when asked how he was, even if it’s a “water is wet” comment like “playing a lot of video games as usual.”
So why is it relevant to get this deep into my socialization? Out of 6 pagan groups I’ve tried to join (unless you count drum circles and the like), four of them eventually kicked me out for various reasons, many of which weren't exactly theological. The Christians never threw me out, no, but I was rarely fully myself. Only one group stands out - a ragtag bunch of progressive Christians of various denominations. Most of the others, however?
It was just kind of quietly implied - no one was all that harsh with me, except for one time when my former RCIA instructor caught me making dual ads for housemates on craigslist - one for Christians, one for Pagans. She was... disappointed, to say the least. Angry, betrayed, even, that I still did things like read tarot cards and attend drum circles. Drum circles? I even did those with the Lutherans for goodness sake! And at the time I used the tarot of the saints deck, with all the imagery being the same as holy cards! I did my best... but I guess I didn't quite conform enough. I can see why she felt hurt, but it was the best I could have done. I didn't feel I was lying to her, that's just how I do "Christian." And if that's not good enough, well... I don't want to say the Calvinist in me was right though, because the fundamentalist suicidal teen I once was has now learned that she had nothing to fear.
In many ways, I couldn't even forgive myself. And in the religion I'm in now, at least some Heathens see talk of forgiveness as a Christian holdover - but Forsetti is literally a god of forgiveness, and not a Christian imposition, I don't believe. Heathens believe we are all woven together, for good or ill, in the ways we interact. Our orlog, our frith... even the concept of wergild plays into it, since making restitution for wrongs as a society isn't necessarily a way of saying forgiveness doesn't happen. Someone can forgive without forgetting, and people can need to make amends for their wrongs to earn it in serious enough circumstances.
We also know from Tacitus that people set aside their weapons and conflicts as part of Nerthus' rituals. While a temporary "grith," people still celebrated together and put some things aside. (For any readers unfamiliar, while frith is a more long standing fellowship, grith is more like a temporary truce, like a parlay.) Freyr's worshippers also did the same when his carts passed. He was also known for giving up his sword in the pursuit of love - romantic love, but nevertheless. There is perhaps something that can be learned, in both self forgiveness, long term friendships, and people that we meet again and again as they grow over time.
I obsess again and again over the fact that it feels like I've bothered more Heathens that I've met than not. But oddly, I never bothered the people I participated in my first blot with, and it was a large group meeting in public. And I realize now that one mistake I made with that first kindred was one of the same ones I would make later... so I suppose even a broken clock is right twice a day.
But we have reached the point where I am talking in circles unless I move on. The Devil card from tarot in many ways is where we leave and pick up - chained to past abuses, bad cycles, but in many ways it shows my own resistance, too, to some very important lessons.
