Reflections on Paganism: Five years out

Posted by Aaron Springer on November 23, 2009 under Wogblog | Read the First Comment

Five years ago, I left Thalia Clan.

For those who were around then, for those still in Thalia, and for those who know me best, this was quite a departure from my path.

Twenty some off years ago, I began questioning my faith. At the time, my parents and I were in a church that had stumbled down the path of the charismatic. Speaking in tongues, jerking around, and all that. Like the kid I was, wanting to be part of the group, I played along. That’s right, I played along. I spoke in tongues. I jerked around. When the adults translated what I was gibbering into words of Faith in unfaltering English, it broke my faith. I mean, I knew I wasn’t saying anything, and I reasoned that anyone with the real gift of the spirit would have seen right through my act. As they didn’t, I realised that they were acting, too.
Over the next ten years, I sought out truth, and meaning. Where I found the Bible, I found an absence of anything but illogic and fear. In 1997, I gave up on Christianity.

In 1998, I was introduced to a group of people that a friend had been talking about for some time. He led me to believe that they were a group of freethinkers to whom sex was not that big a deal and “if I couldn’t laid in Thalia, then I couldn’t get laid.”

As one of the priestesses of the group came on to me at my first social, I figured they were correct. The hormones of a twenty year old override the spiritual search of said twenty year old.

But something told me to turn her down. Granted, in the short term, that was a bad idea; it led to her trying to ruin my life. But, in the long term, I think it was the best decision I made. Because I said no, I met my first wife, and we hit it off, getting married and having Young Springer.

“Wait,” the rabid pseudo-reader says, “I thought you hated your ex-wife.”

Truth be told, I don’t hate her. I did once, but I have let it go. I hate some of her actions, and her pettiness, her self-centered-ness, but I do not hate her. The marriage to her helped set the stage for my marriage to Mrs. Springer, and now most is right with the world.

Back to the story at hand. I joined Thalia, originally assuming it to be a groinal free-for-all, and several events bore that out. Over time, I felt what was really at the root of it. It was not sex, not really. It was togetherness; a group of like minded individuals, standing against the darkness, doing what they believed was right. The sex was incidental, and the lasciviousness was practiced by a small subset of the group. Looking for a quick boff, I found my faith again. Funny how that works out.

Over the next five years, I grew as a person, and became first a dedicant, and then an Initiate in the Storyteller tradition. It is one of the achievements that I am proud of, even today. My arm bears the mark that I gave myself (well, sort of. I paid for the guy who did it, anyway) to commemorate the event.

In 2002, my marriage fell apart, and my ex-wife left Thalia, and Paganism. Just before my divorce was final in 2004, I left Thalia as well. Other than a brief stint in another hearth, my time as a Pagan was nearing its end.

It is now 2009. I have attended a memorial for someone I knew in Thalia, and a lot of old feelings have come up. A lot of good feelings.

The problem is that I know that I barely knew the people who were serious about the faith, and now I find myself beyond the barrier of strong agnosticism. Logic has a funny way of closing the doors to the illogical, and I find myself having only slightly more faith in my former Pagan beliefs as I do in Christianity.

I have found that since I abandonned the idea of God that I had held for so long, everything else in my life is falling into place. There is no one that will do for me that which I need to do, so I am doing it for myself. And it is working.

Don’t get me wrong; there are people for whom Paganism is perfectly acceptable and healthy. I am just not one of those any more.

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