The Path from Catholic to Pagan
The landscape has changed but the road remains the same.
It’s still surprising to me I started doing reiki and attending pagan festivals. I really didn’t know what reiki was until I sat down in level one class. I knew it was something vaguely related to energy and healing and that it was practiced by people who smell like patchouli and talk a lot about crystals. Don’t get me wrong. My values are as hippy as they come. But until I started attending burning man events, I was more of the free love and end capitalization kind of hippy. I prided myself in avoiding the more “woo” side of the commune.
But once I started attending burning man events and spending time with those other kinds of hippies, I realized we had some things in common. I didn’t always agree with their reasons for believing the things they do, but I could recognize that their spiritual experiences were very similar to mine.
If I had to label my spiritual practice, I’d say that I’m a mystic. Since my earliest memories, I’ve felt a strong spiritual connection to the world and people around me. To the universe. Being raised Catholic taught me that the part of me feeling this connection was my soul and that the larger thing I felt connected to was God. He lived in heaven, loved us a lot, and sent his son Jesus to teach us love by feeding the poor and loving everyone. This all aligned really well with what I could feel to be true. So for much of my early religious life, belief in God came easy for me because I didn’t need faith. I could feel it.
Because I could feel that connection and that truth, I didn’t stay with the Catholic Church. I didn’t believe that having sex or being gay was a sin for the same reason that I did believe in God. I could feel it. When I left the Catholic Church I became a Quaker for a long period. Their firm stance on social justice and pacifism seemed much truer to God than most other forms of Christianity.
Raising kids, getting divorced, struggling for money, starting a new career and a new marriage took up most of my energy from 2003 to 2015. Even as I attended Quaker Meeting, the firm connection to the universe that had been the one true constant in my experience of the world from childhood through early adulthood faded. I neglected myself for so long that I started to think I’d just imagined it. That perhaps that’s just what it feels like to be young.
I began to climb out of the hole I’d dug for myself in my 30s. When I found the time to actually pay attention to myself again, I also remembered what it actually feels like to be alive. When I started attending burns and spending unstructured time in nature, I realized I felt it again. But this time I’m feeling it while surrounded by hippies instead of Catholics. So my context and the intellectual peers who I discussed these things with give me different words than “soul” or “God” or “sin”.
They have words like “energy” and “source” and “blocked” instead. These new age ways of talking about the spiritual connection to the universe feel more true than the old Christian way. I’ve been a Christian but I’ve never been a theist, so I was relieved to find a community that could do religion without the concept of a supernatural being who intervenes in the world. I’ve always been able to look at a tree and see the face of God. It was wonderful to meet others who could as well.
That said, I have my hesitations about really embracing much of this approach. A lot of new age spirituality looks like the prosperity gospel repackaged in cultural appropriation. When I looked through the new age section in a bookshop recently, I saw lots of books with spells to improve your love life or make more money. I didn’t see any spells for fighting injustice or sharing more love. And I find some beliefs of this group just as plainly untrue and ridiculous as I did the ones about gay marriage or eternal damnation. But rarely have I found them to be as hateful or harmful.
That’s why I’ve gradually come to plant my spiritual flag closer to the pagan realm of the spiritual map. We have to use a language to talk about these things and I prefer the language and culture of this group. My beliefs and how my spirituality informs my day-to-day life hasn’t actually changed much since I was in the liberal, social justice area of Christianity. I just like the people and the conversations better with the pagans.