It started with the trees.My parents bought a cabin out in the country. We lived in New York City, but my father, especially, needed to be away from masses of people. It was a place to go to on weekends, and more extended times in the summer. It felt different than The City (people in the area still speak of it with the capital-letter inflection in their voices). I was a small child, and it was here that I came alive. I'd wander from breakfast until lunch, and then from after lunch to dinnertime (amazing how I kept that food-clock going within me) in the woods, which I was told stretched for three miles behind us. I spent a lot of time talking to the trees, and, yes, they talked back, in a slow wordless meandering language deep as taproots. I curled up for hours in what I now know as sacred spots, absorbing messages and the grime of humus-rich topsoil.
It was a different world than that of The City. We lived in upper Manhattan, west side, with a view of the George Washington Bridge. There was a strip of woods alongside the Hudson River, along which I'd walk the neighbor's shaggy little dog for a quarter a pop. (I'd cringe to think of any kid today being left alone in such a spot -- but at the time I walked the dog not for the quarter, nor for the dog (who lacked in the personality department), but for the permission to be there, out under the trees. These trees, too, spoke, but they spoke not of majesty and serenity, but of trepidation -- lone outposts of their former glory which stretched tenuously up to the park abutting the Cloisters (Central Park was too far south for it to have much impingement on my awareness).
We were Catholic. Religion, I was given to understand, had nothing to do with the trees and the messages they gave me. I kept both facets of my life separate -- religion was something external that the priest bestowed down upon us, and that school nuns kept us in line with. My experiences with the trees was something separate, something for which I hadn't been given a verbal name. Catholic was something that we were, just as most of the people in the apartment were Jews, and that that was a religion with different ceremonies. But since I was born Catholic, that was what I would remain as. (I had a Jewish friend there who was adopted; she told me that her adopting parents had asked her if she wanted to be Jewish, and had told her that if she said no, she couldn't be their child. As she was a person with a rather loose way with the truth, at this point I rather doubt this story, but at the time it stuck with me for a variety of reasons.)
We got a variety of messages from the nuns in school. The priests were so distant that the nuns seemed to be their more immediate messengers. And the priests were the messengers of the even more distant God. This was the apparent meaning behind the heirarchy to me as the childhood observer. (I must point out that this was the time prior to Vatican II.) The Mass was in Latin -- while there is a certain beauty to a Latin Mass, the effect on this young child was to increase the sense of distance from the spiritual. There was never any effort to teach us Latin. When I sat still long enough in Mass (my parents tell me I was often quite fidgetty there), I'd let the Latin words wash over me and try to make English sense of them -- when my imagination got particularly carried away, I heard the priest talk about cats, which I rather liked.
Religious instruction seemed in my mind mostly to be about memorizing the Catechism and the Ten Commandments, as well as a few prayers. The Catechism is a series of questions and answers given in a strict format. We had spelling bees, and we had Catechism bees, run just like the spelling bees. An answer was wrong if one misplaced an "a" for a "the", or vice versa. No partial credit. We didn't discuss the meaning behind the rote words of the Catechism, but we did discuss the Ten Commandments. Well, some of them. When asked what "adultery" was, the nun in charge quickly covered with, "don't worry about that one, only adults can commit it." While we were told about Mary, the Mother of God, she really only became important for us around May Day, which became sort of a popularity contest for the girl who could become May Queen and the two other girls who became her attendents. (You had to be doubly popular: with both the presiding nun and with your classmates. I never even daydreamed about it...) The most interesting ceremony was for the feastday of St. Blaise (around Imbolg...) where our throats were blessed for health by the priest with twin candles. I remember this one with fondness.
The world view I received was interesting. We were taught that old canard that the Jews killed Christ -- yes, one of them actually said this. I didn't believe it then; knowing well that my Jewish fellows back in the apartment building did not have any such role. We were told to go tell our parents to vote for Kennedy as president -- he was Catholic, after all, and this was suffient reason thereof. I remember distinctly thinking that my parents could make up their own minds, and resolving not to pass on this missive.
Religion, thus, to me the child, was rote, passed down from someone on high from someone else even more on high, distant. God didn't talk to me, but He sure knew everything about me, and if you misbehaved... He was right there, counting coup. The nuns made sure one knew this, right down to the screaming nun (whom I towered over in fourth grade, but who sent me into tizzies of insecurity and fear nonetheless).
Vatican II happened, late grade school, and the main change, besides the English Mass (more prosaic, but more approachable) was that most of the nuns I met changed from using fear as the weapon of control to love. "God loves you, so don't hurt him, but do things my way, because God loves you." Sort of the Guilt Trip message. This extended into high school. (I went to a variety of schools, and a bit of public school appeared briefly there, while my parents had me on a waiting list for a new Catholic school -- I can't say my brief stint in public school was much better -- a great teacher there who had a habit of calling less-than-gifted students "amoebas" in front of the entire class -- at least she didn't swing a mean metal ruler...)
Well before high school we'd sold the cabin in the country. That escape was cut off. We did move out to the suburbs when I was in sixth grade (which is when I temporarily did the public school thing). I stopped talking to the trees, and, worse yet, stopped listening to them. There yet remained some kind of calling from them, but the childs' openness had been sealed off. I was too busy trying to "fit in", doing that shy insecure adolescent thing. Learning that the harder I tried, the less it was likely to happen, and that the best people I met were those who were on the fringes themselves. I hung out with the wrong-side-of-the-tracks smokers and such in high school -- in part because they really didn't care if I smoked or not. (I didn't smoke because to me it tasted as foul as it smells, and I didn't try any harder stuff until my late college years because I was too scared to do so at the time, not because of any "principles" I may or may not have had.) This kind of laissez-faire friendship has been important to me for the rest of my life -- caring about the quality of the person rather than their habits, sexuality, ethnicity, spirituality, etc. -- expecting the same in kind back from them. If they can respect my choices in my own life, in my own home, I return the same, along with the friendship.
Religious instruction became more advanced in high school, going more into principles than rote, for which I was grateful, but by that point I really wasn't paying that much attention, at least not within, although certainly well enough for examinations, as I was considered a "good student" overall. I knew I was Catholic, and remember "defending my faith" (yelling at someone) at age fourteen when they had something critical to say about the religion. I remember the girl who prayed for her recently-deceased cat aloud at a Mass, a cat who was about as old as she at the time, a lifelong companion. I remember nuns chastizing her roundly in front of us all afterwards for bringing up a prayer for a mere creature at that service.
I went to college. At this point, I had my own say about where to apply for college, Catholic or otherwise, and indeed my first choice was a non-affiliated institution. However, they didn't choose me, and I ended up at a midwestern Catholic institution of higher learning, largely because the non-affiliated university I'd been accepted to was too close to home for my desires at that point. (Largely??? Entirely.)
I pretty much avoided most religious instruction there -- we had a core requirement of two classes of either religion or philosophy, and I took the Philosophy of Science (fascinating, and well-recommended as an area of study), and a survey class on relatively more modern philosophers, some but not all of whom came from a Catholic/Christian perspective. This, too, was interesting, taught by a Brother who did his best to challenge us to think.
However, I was getting better and better at noticing the disparities between what institutional personages were promulgating using the name of Christ as their weapon to get us to conform, and how these same sorts of people were often living their lives. This is not to say I didn't have positive role models on occasion within the Catholic faith -- my grandmother (who lived far away) and Sister Luke, and the Brother who taught philosophy courses stood out as exceptions. Usually, I avoided questioning things... there was always that part of me that tried to hide into woodwork, to just fit in, to just get along. I could be Catholic; I wouldn't be rocking any boats by just muddling along. It really didn't matter, in the scheme of things; religion was just something one did. I was an occasional Mass goer. For one thing, the little chapel and the bigger church buildings had excellent architecture, and I could feel something special in the little chapel when I went there to study in the back pews. (I never felt it there during an actual service, however.) As for the big church, it had an awesome organ, and I could feel something there, no question, when those deep notes sounded, rolling through me.
I went on to grad school for my Master's degree in aquatic ecology, still nominally a Catholic.
One of my best friends from high school died suddenly, and I got the notice from my parents. The newspaper clipping gave an indication of the time she'd died. That following Sunday, still shaken (in part because I was beginning to realize that a psychic link which had confused me earlier that week had apparently meant that I'd felt her die), I went to Mass for her, in the big church with the organ.
"Open up the gates of the church and let me out of here!
Too many people have lied in the name of Christ
For anyone to heed the call.
So many people have died in the name of Christ
That I can't believe it all."~~ Graham Nash, with Crosby, Stills and Nash, Cathedral
I heard the chorus of that above song resonating over and over and over again throughout that entire Mass. I walked out of church that day in early '78, and formally left the Church of my family. Except for weddings, funerals, architectural sightseeing, and one time to be with my parents for Christmas a few years after, I have never been back. (And that last time at that Christmas, the priest kept going on about twice-a-year Catholics in his sermon, and my parents -- who were essentially twice-a-year Catholics by that time -- kept thinking this referred to me, even though I kept explaining I was no longer a Catholic, and that the message just might have more relevance towards them, since it was still their avowed faith...)
I still had Catholic friends in school, of course. Many did not understand, and told me I was opting for the easy way out. For them, I agree, this might have been the truth. I tried to explain that for me, it would be the easy way to stay in, but the more difficult path in my case would be to make my own way. And, for my own sense of what I needed to search for, I had to do this. That to stay, for me, would be a lie, and a lie worsened in that it would be a lie to myself. Maybe someday I would return, or not -- but the now was what I needed to concentrate on.
I never fell into the error that Christianity or Catholicism was evil or wrong; I never hated the faith. I realized and realize still that there are many holy people over the millenium or two whom have been a part of it, and whom have integrated the spiritual path it can embody. It wasn't that I couldn't believe it at all, it was that, like Graham Nash, I couldn't believe all of it, not with the hypocrisies I saw as being too prevalent around me. Of course, that latter part is human nature, not the spiritual, but I needed to step aside, and to find and search for what it was that really belonged to me, the spiritual me. I was called out of that Church to find that aspect, to journey rather than merely just to accept.
I never became an atheist. I decided initially that my religion was Deism. There was Something larger than ourselves, and in its genderless/genderful way we could only know aspects of this, simply due to Its sheer size. I remained a deist until 1980.
Back I think in 1976 some of us discovered the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). That's the recreationist Medieval society which seeks to re-create the Middle Ages not as they were but as they should have been. Essentially, I liked the kinds of mindsets that were drawn into it -- not all of them, by any means, but a sufficiency of them that I joined up. Here I first met Witches.
My first recollection of real live Witches: We were seated for dinner at our medieval feast, when one barbarian type was corrected for stirring his goblet with his knife. Witches did that, evidently, and only in ceremony, and he might give offense to the wrong persons. Which indicated to me that there were real live Witches, or people who thought they were, in the room with me.
I noted it in the back of my head, just as a curiousity. I didn't know what it meant, but this barbarian-in-training decided not to stir her goblet with any knives, either.
I heard more about it later on. Somewhere in '77 some of us got together and started a small group. One woman had a bunch of source material we would use. We performed rituals in a back room of a house off-campus, four or five of us, all of whom were in our local SCA canton. I was still Catholic at this point, but I don't know if I saw it as a religion yet. Most of our source material owed more to the OTO than Wicca at that point; we invoked archangels at the quarters. We had communications with more bona-fide Witches in Wisconsin, but we really weren't going all that far with it. A lot of it was the emphasis on psychic phenomena, of which I'd felt a fair amount of low-level tug over the years. In high school I'd gotten books on psychic phenomena out of the library, and had a few experiences that I'd never been able to peg. I used to "make" people do things in high school, just to play with it -- nothing serious or so I thought at the time -- I'd think things at them to make them scratch their ears when I was bored in class. It worked. I moved on to thinking things at our high school sports teams to make them win, and discovered that it was easier to make the opposing team fumble. Obviously, I hadn't discovered an ethical stance for myself by that point. There have also been some precognitive flashes in my life -- which typically occur so quickly I haven't any time to prevent or deflect the incident which follows. And then there was brief stints with the ouija board, but that's its own essay someday.
You can start working together like this for awhile, and pick up "magical thinking" as a way to deal with your problems. Like: magic will solve everything, not hard work. At least one of our number, by her own admission, went this way for a time before she evidently eventually dropped it all. For myself, I never figured magic was that good, else psychics and magicians would be a hell of a lot better off economically and so forth than they were and are. Magic is a more subtle force in the universe -- water that eventually erodes rocks, but you gotta learn to deal with the rocks in the interim.
We did occasional work in the following few years together, supplemented by a few visits to and with the Wisconsin folks. I became a deist, as mentioned. I began to understand that Witchcraft was also a spiritual path, although I hadn't yet claimed anything other than deism in that regard.
I moved to Connecticut, where my parents were now living, as I finished up my Master's thesis.
In the late summer of 1980, I went back to the midwest, for a combination of reasons. One was to drive my brother to college, and then go to a Pagan festival to be held in Indiana, followed by a trip up to Wisconsin to job hunt and stay with my Wisconsin connections.
The festival was Pan Pagan '80. I was going for two reasons: friends would be there, and I really really wanted to discover for myself if Witchcraft were truly my direction, my spiritual path of calling. How deep were the depths? Was it something more and stronger than a "feel-good" party religion? I didn't know any place to find out about this on the East Coast.
The festival was pivotal. I became a bona fide Witch (eclectic) that weekend. A workshop with Margot Adler, and the new book, The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk, and the sense of connecting that transcended party-time brought me into the fold. Strangely enough, it was the chapter in Starhawk's book on why men might be drawn to the Goddess that resonated with me more than her other sections. At the festival, I bought a Worm Ourobourous pinkie ring I still have, both as a symbol of protection (the snake's head faces out) and as a symbol of my commitment.
I remembered my childhood, and the trees.
It all comes back to the trees. Margot Adler talked about Earth-responsibility. The gods and the goddesses took form. I came Home that weekend.
(parts II & III to come...)