Originally Posted by Babr
"When one defines oneself as Pagan, it means she or he follows an earth or nature religion, one that sees the divine manifest in all creation. The cycles of nature are our holy days, the earth is our temple, its plants and creatures our partners and teachers. We worship a deity that is both male and female, a mother Goddess and father God, who together created all that is, was, or will be. We respect life, cherish the free will of sentient beings, and accept the sacredness of all creation." Edain McCoy
Basically and simplistically that sums up our belief system.
My own journey began when I first questioned my spiritual beliefs and path as I was sitting in church, listening to a Sunday sermon. I had searched everywhere for the answers. What was this all about, what was missing from my belief system. Why was I so empty and so miserable? For years I had sat there every Sunday in a room listening to a speach from a man, a mortal man, listening to words that made no sense to me. I repeated words that were memorized, not from the heart, mind you, but from years of sitting and listening to the litany over and over again, and it made no sense to me. It left me empty and angry. So I left the church.
As I grew older, I lost all of my faith. It happened in small bits and pieces. I saw a world filled with hate, man against man, violence, crime, pollution. Destruction. And I grew bitter at a God that seemed never to be listening to me, after I had spent years listening to him, and I was getting resentful. My spiritual life lost meaning.
I lost a child, when I was much older. a very much wanted child, and the words of comfort that were handed to me were, "It's God's will, it's what he wanted." What had I done that was so bad that he would do this to me? Well that basically turned me against all I had ever known. This way of being, that I'm supposed to follow, made no sense to me. So I shut down spiritually.
Then one day I happened to read a poem it was on a poster, Called "The Beginning" by Pentad, I had found it, or it had found me :)
"When the moon is white against the winter sky...
and the Lady's face shines down, you feel no shame.
The sins are gone . . . they were never really there.
You'll hear the voice that has always called your name.
You'll dance, you'll sing, to a song that always been...
But you'll never ever, ever be the same."
"No shame"! What? The "sins" were never really there. I had done nothing bad in my life to deserve the repurcussions of an angry God.
At last, I recognized and could release what I had felt and known and lived
in conflict with all my life, the source of my incredible emptiness. My mind had never fully realized what my heart had always known, it had never occurred to me that a person could actually live outside of, beyond, above, the dogma of Christianity . . . that we *are* free, and good, and we don't need the Christ figure or the Christian God to make us so, we never did, and never will.
It was like an explosion in slow motion, the old conditioning went, finally, to the winds. I felt it, as all that old conditioning just lifted.
For me, those lines I read surpassed everything I had experienced thus far, they completely removed the last of my pain, my emptiness substituting in its place, a happiness and a thing called "peace" which I had *not* ever felt before, not as a child, not as a teenager, not as a woman.
So I read, and learned and finally found others like myself. Today, I still look, seek, learn and grow. And I have never once regretted the path I started the day I saw those words, they were what was in my mind and in my heart all along. So I read more on the way of Wicca, and I grew and I realized that I was finally, and blessedly, home.
