Christeopaganism & Me

 I'm procrastinating right now on writing the next scene in my third book because it is a biggie...it's the scene that in large part is the cornerstone for the whole series, so...no pressure or anything. 

Anyway.

I thought now might be a good time to unpack my spiritual beliefs. 

I wouldn't have any spiritual beliefs at all if it weren't for the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which gave me permission to understand that I do not have to fit myself entirely into any box in order to have a relationship with a Higher Power. AA taught me that I could create my own conception of God.

So, that's what I did. That's what I am continually doing in a process that is evolving with me as I evolve in my own journey in sobriety, my own journey as...well, an embodied spirit on this temporal plane of existence. 

I discovered that there were parts of the Old Religion that suited me as well as parts of Christianity. And so, cafeteria style, I've just been picking out what resonates, and discarding the rest. 

This works well for me. However...I don't know how well this is going to work for me in the world, as someone who is (ready or not, y'all) soon to be coming out with a book series, a platform, an identity as it were (albeit one intentionally cloaked in anonymity) that will be evaluated, consumed, inevitably rejected as much if not more than it is embraced. And that is fucking...overwhelming. 

Everyone is SO polarized and angry right now and believe you me, I get it. There is a right to this anger, a righteousness to it. 

But I'm just...at this point...just over here trying to be myself, to whatever degree this is possible. AA has taught me that as a recovering alcoholic, I have to cease fighting anything and anyone if I'm to  maintain my sobriety. Resentment--whether it is at people, places, things, or some combination thereof--is a toxic tincture that, if consumed, will be my end. 

But yes, the polarization. I'm terrified of it. I'm not going to be anyone's particular blend of tea, I'm afraid. For those on the right, I know I'm going to seem like too much of a leftist. For those on the left, well, I may be discounted as someone who is too aligned with the right. 

So I thought that perhaps a decent use of this moment that I'm not presently making the technical highest and best use of would be to parse this out, before it becomes any kind of issue. 

Here is my deal, as best as I can describe it:

I identify as both a Christian and a Pagan. This kind of boils down to the fact that everything in Nature is, to some degree, comprised of masculine and feminine energies. It takes both masculine and feminine energies to create, nurture, sustain, and propagate life. This is just as true for humans as it is for all creatures and plants. The manifestations can vary. And for the moment, I'm not factoring in the very viable and real existence of the nonbinary and undefined; I'm speaking in terms of the binary, the dichotomy, for my own illustration here. Please don't think I'm discounting this real reality; I'm just parsing out a challenging thing for me to parse out. 

But anyway, yeah. I believe in a divine masculine and a divine feminine, because the foundation of the past, present, and future of life reflects these realities. We all carry within ourselves a continuum of these energies, and it is beautiful to see all the myriad of unique ways these express themselves within all people. 

Christianity: I find a lot of digestible, palatable wisdom in the Bible. I'm a person of words; there are a lot of words in that thing. A lot of them that contain wisdom that I enjoy meditating on, using as a vehicle to understand who God is to me better. There are a lot of good directions that I find that this wisdom points me in.  I can read this religious text, I can consider its contents, I can find meaning therein. The shittier parts, I just ignore. I don't accept them as part of my reality. I don't have to. My Higher Power is my own to conceive of. I take what's relevant, and I discard the rest.

Paganism: I've always connected deeply, ever since I was very young, to the energy of the divine feminine. I've always felt it thriving and vibrantly alive within me. I cannot imagine any Creator God without also attributing reverence to the Mother Goddess who is Creation itself. Do I believe that God created the heavens and the earth? Maybe. But this isn't the alpha and omega--perhaps He did breathe that life, but then, that life went on to live, and just look out the window, step outdoors, and behold the miracle, the beauty. Consider in that litter of baby bunnies or puppies the replication of life going on, life persisting and flourishing forward. Maybe God did create life, but the Mother Goddess perpetuates it. Maybe God did make Adam and from his rib, make Eve, but...the two were as one. Life itself is created from masculine and feminine. Without one, the other wouldn't exist. I think about this. To me, this is truth. I can hold fast to both and know, this is all of the everything that is, was, and ever shall be. It's very powerful. 

I have embraced the divine feminine as the essence of what defines my gender identity and expression. I remember this discussion of gender identity and definition on an autistic women's forum once upon a time and how I found myself describing me as someone who was more so feminine than female...someone who was a manifestation of feminine energy in the same was as a tree, an animal.

 I feel very full of the instincts of divine femininity...I'm interpersonally compelled toward being very passionate about being pregnant, bearing children, feeding, nurturing, bringing up those children in the same way my sweet mama rabbit becomes when it is her time to bring her babies into the world. I've always been happiest when my energy is focused on turning my house into a warm, comfortable home in the same way my sweet mama rabbit pulls out her fur and arranges her straw to make a nest for her young. I like taking care of those who depend on me. I love cooking and cleaning for them. It is simply what brings me joy. It is simply an expression of who I am, how I identify myself in this world. 

Here's where the line is drawn, however: JUST BECAUSE THIS IS MY PATH DO I BELIEVE WHATSOEVER THAT THIS SHOULD BE ANYONE ELSE'S. 

This is what pissed me off to no end about these self-appointed representatives for Christ and the whole thing. They love sitting on high horses and puffing themselves up as righteous and making a big show of informing anyone who doesn't do exactly how they do that they are pieces of condemned shit who are going to burn in a lake of fire for all eternity while they sit up in the clouds, sipping nectar, and dumping the occasional bucket of gasoline down on them for kicks. 

Ah, yes...resentment is the number one offender, so I'm reminded. I'm not entirely free of resentment; this is one I'm still working on. 

This resentment, as it were, ate me up so bad that it was literal decades of my life that I spent not giving Christianity or the Bible a chance because these assholes and their ilk were all I felt I ever needed to know about this religion. It was only after several years of sobriety in AA and the encouragement of my sponsors as I worked through my resentments that they pointed out a particular line in the Big Book: be quick to see where religious people are right. 

Well... I can't say I ever got to that point, but when I met the man who became my husband... my mind opened a little bit more. I remember going on three or four dates with him and falling all at once in deep like with him. He was handsome, and he was smart, and well-read, and open-minded, and just such a cool person. He was even a nudist! I was like, hell yes! This is my soulmate. 

Finally, one evening after we were well in our cups (this was pre-sobriety), he finally just blurted out something that made me feel like I was coming undone with abject confusion...this amazing, wildly attractive, interesting as hell person I really, really dug...had just confessed to me that he attended seminary, he was an ordained Baptist pastor for a number of years before stepping down and...yeah. He wasn't just a nudist, he was a Christian nudist. 

I felt like I'd been had. If I had known ANY of this at that time, bygod, I would have deleted his message so hard he'd have felt slapped in the face on the other end of his phone. 

But I'd gotten to know him...before I knew...that about him. And for the first time in my life, I'd met someone who was a full-blown Bible believing Christian (he has a fully parsed out theology where Christian Nudism is concerned, too) but wasn't a hypocritical piece of dog shit. I had to take a deep breath after learning this, but I found...I still liked him. 

Fast-forward into my first several years in sobriety, my working on resentments, this person who I now loved, who loved me, and who never demanded or expected that my religious beliefs conform to his...who held some conservative points of view here and there, but respected in a hands-off way where we differed...one day, I finally just confessed to him all the bad experiences I'd had, what I perceived his religion to be like, how I was sure I had nothing for it...but at the urging of my sponsors in order to get over my resentment, I asked him if he'd share with  me what it really was all about. 

I remember how he got very quiet and asked if I was sure, wanted to make sure I wasn't just initiating this as a means to make him happy, because...he liked me just fine the way I was, and I didn't have to be like him to be liked by him. 

No, no...I insisted. Just...lay it on me. My mind is open. 

And so, he came over one night and he brought his Bible. And the first verse he shared with me was the one about the Proverbs 31 woman. 

This shit completely blew my mind. 

The whole time I thought that to be a Christian woman at all was to be a vapid fundie doormat with no agency of her own (because, yeah, thanks self-appointed representatives)...but the woman in this verse was actually really different than anything I'd conceived of. This woman was the original boss babe. Yes, her energy was focused on her family and home, but she was industrious af. She got up at the crack of dawn and worked herself hard, getting so much done. She made major purchases and produced goods and services and sold them. She kept everything in order and maintained control. I was really inspired. This really made me want to learn more. 

And so, I learned. Jesus Himself wasn't anything like all these fools painted Him to be. No, he was the original revolutionary. He was so revolutionary and committed to social justice and equity that He was put to death for it. My favorite of His moments I think was in Matthew 21 when He and His buddies were walking around and He was hungry and spied a fig tree and was like, ah, yes, thank goodness, I'm starving! But when they came upon it, they discovered it had no fruit and He used His divine power to set the frickin' thing on fire because he was pissed! Like, couldn't He have used that divine power to, I don't know, make some fruit appear? I mean, surely, but instead...He hulked out like the demigod He was and just roasted it! I remember laughing outloud like, Yes! This is so fucking relatable!  I'd have done the same thing!

And perhaps the best part of all...in Matthew 23, he clapped back so hard at those people who made a big show of going out and hollering prayers in the street making sure everyone could hear and see them and know how righteous they were. He was like, yeah, no. That's stupid. Go into a closet and pray where only God can see you. When you do good things, don't let anyone know it; what should matter is God's approval, not getting the old school equivalent of likes and follows. 

It hit me so hard: the same people who drove me as far away from this faith as I could have possibly been driven were literally the same people that Christ Himself would have stomped right up to and snapped, Y'all...just kinda stop. 

So... I found my home here, too, as well as I found my home in the Old Religion. 

And as for me and my Baptist Nudist ex-pastor? We married in 2019. At our nudist community. In a state of Nature. By a Christian Nudist pastor who heads the church there. Hubby is on track to take over pastoring of that church in a few years, too. We're both completely who we are, two very different people, but yet within those differences, there are some crossover similarites. There's a part of him that's just as wild and naturey and free-spirited as me; there's a part of me that's just as traditional as him. 

And so, we do find ourselves engaging with one another in our marriage in terms of gender roles that would probably turn those of my inherent ilk inside out. And that's okay. But it works for us. It may not work for anyone else. But my strongest energy is feminine, and his strongest energy is masculine. We merge and blend and pursue a life that works for us. And we're happy. We're happy in a way that may not make anyone else happy. But that's okay. 

No, that's more than okay. That's the way it should be. As fast as I hold to the elements that create my Christeopagan identity, I hold even faster to the tenets of Unitarian Universalism: to each their own free and responsible search for truth. 

What I'm speaking of is merely my own. And I don't know what that's going to mean. I don't know if anyone is going to not reject me because of it. I'm accustomed to not fitting in; it has been the story of my whole life. But...ultimately, what I want more than anything? Is to maybe, just maybe, be someone who gives others permission to not fit into prescriptive boxes, either. Maybe I can be someone who demonstrates the reality that, we're not made to be carbon copies of anything. True authenticity, I believe, is discovering your inner facets. Embracing and celebrating all the uniqueness inherent to how fearfully and wonderfully made you are. You don't have to be this way, or that way. All you have to be is you. 

So, in conclusion, if I could sum up my spiritual orientation in a photo, this would be it: