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.

Supermoon Esbat Experience

My friend, J, and I attempted our first ritual together. We've been discussing it for months but have yet to actually do something. We were both nervous, for different reasons. I think if I had to explain it I would say that she is more spiritual in her path and I am more into ritual. Not that one is better than the other. That's the beauty of Paganism, to each their own.

So, we're coming at this from different perspectives, which in theory should work together. She should be comfortable in invoking the Goddess and I should feel comfortable setting up the altar and casting the circle.

It didn't quite work out that way. The sage threatened to set off the smoke detector, my hands and voice shook while casting the circle, we stumbled over the words while invoking the Goddess, and I spilled the wine during the offering.

But it wasn't horrible. Not in the slightest. We are both big energy producers. We held hands and played with that a little bit. I may have pushed too much as she ended up tingly and sweaty. Then we did visualization for our "wish." We ate homemade bread and drank wine, and made the offering to the Goddess.

Once it was over, we giggled at the mishaps while bagging up the candles we burned (so I could bury them under the pear tree in my backyard) and then she noticed it. The white candle. The one that was the "Goddess" candle. The one that we carved moon symbols into...the wax had melted off to one side and seemed to have hardened into a likeness of a Goddess or a woman. I didn't bury the candles until the next morning and I had another look at our white candle, the Goddess was there and was beautiful. I wanted to take a picture of it as proof that we were not seeing things but that didn't seem right. This was something sacred between me, J, and the Goddess and that was how it would stay.

Call us crazy. Go ahead. But I'm not one to see things that aren't there. We frequently get worked up over people that think they see faces where it's only matrixing (the brains natural tendency to see faces). We are careful about making such assumptions, but there she was plain as day. Letting us know that she was there for us and listening to our wishes, our prayers.

Let me reiterate, I'm not very spiritual, but this? This changed something deep inside of me.