Spirituality

I've been going through a cold spell lately. I've felt somewhat resistant about participating in anything spiritual.

Spirituality is new to me. When I was younger, I tried very hard to make myself have faith and believe that there was a God. My older sister, married and with children of her own, would take me to her Southern Baptist church and I would cry and cry. My sister said that I cried because I had not accepted the Lord as my savior. I didn't have the guts to tell her that the real reason I cried was because I didn't believe. I looked around all these people during the service, their faces radiating joy, their faith palpable, and I felt nothing. I envied them.

It's called faith for a reason. Either you have it or you don't. I wondered if I could fake it until I make it? I tried, it didn't really work.

When I first fell into Paganism, I had a lot of issues with the Gods and Goddess part of the faith, but as Cunningham said,

"Any and all religions are real, to their practitioner. Each of us must find our ideal way to attune with Deity."

and

"We don't bow down to them [the Goddess and God], we work with them to create a better world."

I like the idea of working along side the Goddess and God to manipulate energy and bring on the changes we want in our life. To me, this is a lot easier for me to accept...to believe. Slowly, bit by bit, my faith in higher powers has grown. I've worked to add more ritual to my life. My daughter is also inserting herself. I don't force it on her, I don't even ask her to participate, she sees me light a candle and meditate or pray over it and she asks if she can also pray. Then I explain to her why we are doing the ritual and what the candle represents. In the end, it was her interest that brought on the cold spell.

It scares and thrills me that she is interested in Paganism and would probably be a better Pagan than I ever will be. I always said that I'd let my kids chose what religion they wanted to participate in, if any, and she had been exposed to Christianity and said that she wasn't interested in returning after going to Sunday School and services for about 3 months. But with Paganism, she is hungry to learn more, she asks me questions, and I fear that I am putting her on the path for rejection by her peers.

She already thinks differently. She stands out among her peers as a bit "different". She isn't a sheep. This is good and bad. She is going to have to have the fortitude to stand up for what she believes in (and I don't mean spiritually but with everything). I had to take some time to come to terms with this.

That time is up. I miss my ritual, I miss meditating, I miss working alongside the Goddess and God. I pulled out a couple of 7 day candles last night after she had gone to bed. You should have seen her eyes light up when she spotted them this morning. She immediately ran to them, closed her eyes, and said a little prayer or as she put it, made a wish, a small smile on her face.

Anyways, I wanted to post a few quotes from Cunningham about Deities. I know that a lot of people don't like Cunningham, which I don't understand why, of all of the 101 books I've read, his is the best.

"Goddess and God live within us and manifest in nature."

"Prayer is a form of Religious Magic."

"Because Deities are the creative forces of the universe, we call upon them to empower our rites and to bless our magic."

 "Divine power is the energy that exists within the Goddess and God-the life force, the source of universal power which created everything in existence."