To Be Silent? No, to be LOUD.

This blog is part of The Pagan Experience.  If you would like more information or are interested in reading other blogs following this path, please follow through on the link.

This is actually my first blog for the Pagan Experience this year.  I can’t garauntee I’ll do another one after this, but I’ve been seeing this topic float around for the month of April.  I debated on whether or not I wanted to speak on this idea of silence or if I should, ironically, remain silent.

But then some things happened today, and I cannot keep my mouth shut on this topic anymore.

I cannot remain silent.

priv·i·lege

ˈpriv(ə)lij/

noun

1. a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people.

There are a lot of people out there in this world who will deny the idea of privilege.  They will deny, deny, deny white privilege because they grew up poor and struggled like the media portrays the black man, not realizing that class privilege is actually a thing as well.

If you are a upper-middle class, white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, English speaking, Christian male, you live in a world of privilege.

If you have one or more of the above descriptors, you live in a world of privilege.

I live in a world of privilege.  I also live on the other side of privilege.  I am white.  I come from an upper-middle class family.  I am, for the most part, able-bodied, and I speak English as my primary language.

I am not cis, but many people see my expression as cis, so I hide under that security blanket.  But I am typically-female bodied.  I am not a Christian.  And I am homosexual.

I understand discrimination well here in the United States of America.

And I cannot and will not be silent.

I work with children who are just beginning to stand out on their own.  They are teens on the edge of adulthood, who are learning to think and process for themselves.  They are learning how to form their own opinions and understand things about themselves that maybe they didn’t realize before.

And silence will kill them.

Something happened today, where someone close to my wife and I expressed her disgust at a recent episode of Once Upon a Time.  In this episode, a minor character falls under a sleeping curse.  The sleeping curse can only be cured by true love’s kiss, and the bad guys are all rejoicing because this character?  Well, she has no true love… She has no family… She has no one, and she will be under this curse for the rest of her days.

But she does get true love’s kiss, and that kiss comes from an unlikely source: another woman.

That’s right: there was a true love’s kiss between two women on a fairy tale shoe that jacks up so many fairy tales to begin with… but this… this is what upset said person in our lives: she had to watch a TLK between two women on national television.

She was SO UPSET that she said she was never going to watch the show EVER AGAIN and she was going to give us all of her DVDs of the show (which we gave to her as holiday gifts).  The ultimate regifting.

Yet, she loves us.  She thinks we’re special.  She supports us.

She’s okay with “our gay,” but no one else.  Not on television… Not in front of all those children!  THINK OF THE CHILDREN, DAMN IT!

Erin wrote about the experience on Facebook.  She was hurt.

And there was one response, from a straight woman, that said that she was “obviously trying” to be okay, but that “this was how she was raised” and that it must be hard for her to change her black and white beliefs into ones where “this wasn’t immoral.”

The good old argument: You, the one who is hurt by others’ words, need to be okay with the hate/injustice/ignorance/etc that you are getting because said person is really trying but these things take time.  It’s how they were raised and that takes time to move past that.

Excuse me?

Why should I be okay with someone’s ignorance?  Why should it NOT make me angry or feel hurt?

Why should I just let them get off the hook for it?  Why should their boundaries not be pushed or their feelings not be hurt?  Why do they get to live in blissful and willful ignorance?

They don’t.

And that is why I cannot be silent.

My faith calls me to action.  My faith sees the divine in all creatures, and it cannot be silent when aspects of the divine are being hurt by other’s human immaturity.

Love is love.

And love cannot be silent.

I live my faith.  I live my sexuality.  I live my life.

I live it because there are kids in my classrooms that found peace and love and acceptance because I keep wedding pictures on my desk.  I am open about my pagan faith, but live a life as judgment free as I can.

So no… I cannot be silent…

Not when my wife is hurting.  Not when my family is being attacked.

Not when there are kids on the edge of a cliff ready to jump.

Not ever.

TPE – On The Human Condition

I’m writing for The Pagan Experience. This week, the topic is our thoughts on humanity.  How do you define “humanity”? What is your contribution to the collective space of humanity? How does your spiritual path support this definition and contributions? For more blogs on this topic, go here.

It’s interesting to me that this week’s topic comes at the end of the series we’ve had at Unity, the church that Erin and I attend.  The church believes and preaches that “all paths lead to God,” and we are welcomed there as Pagans and as Kemetics.  It’s been a wonderful experience to be in a place of worship that is open to all faiths and practices.

Unity believes in the five basic universal principles.  They hold true for all of humanity whether you believe them or not.  The first one is that God is in all things.  The second is that Humanity is divine.  The third is that our thoughts and feelings affect our physical world.  The fourth is that affirmative prayer works.  And the fifth is that we can’t just know these principles, we have to live them.

We’ve been talking a lot the last five weeks about the nature of humanity and the human condition, and I’ve been trying to work these principles more into my every day life, and it has been challenging.

I define “humanity” as Homo sapiens.  I believe that every human contributes to humanity.  I believe that humanity has a physical nature and a divine nature, and that if we aren’t spiritually awoken, we’ll never fully understand what it means that we are divine.

The divine energy, however we wish to define it, is in us, around us, above us, and below us.  Because it is within us and all around us, then we are, by that same thought, within in.  We are divine.  We have a divine spiritual nature.  Humanity is divine by nature.  But we are also immature, and we make mistakes.

If we put the entire life of the planet into a 24 hour day, humans would only have existed for the last two seconds.  We haven’t, as a species, been around very long.  We’re still children in the eyes of the divine spirit, and children make mistakes, but just look how far we’ve come as a species and how much better things are now than they were.  Less people are dying of preventable diseases, we’re living longer, we’re eating cleaner, we’re more understanding of civil and human rights.  We are, very slowly, becoming more mature as a species.  But it isn’t something that will happen overnight.

So what are my contributions to humanity and how does my spiritual path support those contributions?  The fifth principles calls on us to act on our beliefs.  We are all divine in nature, and when we interact with others, we interact with the divine energy in them as they interact with the divine energy in us.

Actions speak louder than words, and I am a teacher.  Not just science to high school students, but I see myself as a spiritual teacher as well.  I’m not one in any official capacity, but with the amount of time that I spend talking about faith and spirituality to people, answering questions that come to me, and helping others to feel better about situations in their lives, I feel like the Gods are pointing me in that direction.  Or at least to notice that this is part of my calling on the planet.

I try to guide people to be more spiritually aware of their divine nature.  I want people to become more spiritual versions of themselves, and when they approach me, I will respond.  But when I’m not approached, I simply model the behavior I want to see in others.

That’s what the fifth principle calls us to do: act on the other four principles in ourselves and model that to others.  Respond to situations that happen in our lives in a positive spiritual manner, and we’ll see the situations around us begin to turn into a more positive situation.

TPE – All Paths Lead to God

I’m writing for The Pagan Experience.  This week, the topic is to write on the letters A or B.  To read more blogs on this topic, go here.

One of the things they teach us about in our Education classes is that not all people learn the same way.  Some people learn from seeing while others learn from reading or doing.  To reach all learners where they’re at, we’re taught different ways to teach different types of learners, and we’re expected to use as many of those different types of teaching as possible so we can reach all of our students.

Of course, then the people who haven’t been in a classroom end up throwing it all to shit by forcing all students to take the same test at the end of the year or putting them all through a copy cat system designed to educate people in a way they feel they should be educated, but that’s a different blog for a different time.

What the point for me here is: education doesn’t stop at math, science, history and english… It goes past that into our every day experiences.  We learn many lessons simply by being alive, and many of that flows over into our lives as spiritual beings.  With that being the case, how can we possibly say that this path or that path is the one true and right way to believe?

The answer is simple: we can’t.

I think there’s a general consensus among theists that “God” in whatever name you wish to call Her/Him is all powerful.  That there isn’t anything that our Higher Power can’t do.  They’re aware of all things at all times.

If this is the case, then when we put boundaries on this higher power, we are limiting the divine energy, which is, and many will agree, limitless.  The Gods don’t hate anyone.  That divine energy can’t be hateful.  There is no being in a big chair pushing the punishment buzzer for our mistakes.  If God is limitless and loving, then there is limitless love.  The End.

So what does it say about us that we have a single path of a limited view of this higher power and then try to make all others follow our same path?  Someone may be comforted by the idea of a savior while others may not.  The Bible even suggests that there is more than one God.  Throughout all of Genesis, God refers to “himself” in the plural.  And Cain and Abel’s wives had to come from somewhere, and I don’t believe the incest argument.

Joshua even says, “If worshiping God is evil in your sight, choose this day whom you will serve, whether it is the Gods of your ancestors or those of the lands that you now live in or the Gods of Egypt across the Nile.”  He literally acknowledges all the other Gods that are out there and tells them, “look, it’s okay if you go to worship these other Gods, but don’t start worshiping this God and then stop because He will be pissed.”

Nearly every Pagan I have ever met believes that all paths are okay (except for some who deny Christianity, which you can’t do and still say that all paths are okay).

If the divine energy is limitless, then it must be inside of us because if we say that that energy isn’t, then we are putting a limit on the higher powers.  We are never separated from the Gods.  We are never separated from that energy.  It is in us and we are in it.  With that being the case, the path we are on is a path that connects us with that divine spiritual energy.  We don’t have to follow some set of rules or dogma to connect, we are connected.

Now, it’s okay if you do those rituals and prayers and the rest of it because sometimes we feel disconnected.  Those things we do help us to reconnect to the divine energy within us and around us, so it’s perfectly okay to do whatever we feel we need to do to connect with that energy; however, keep in mind that there is no wrong way to connect.

If something doesn’t feel right to you, then maybe you are on the wrong path.  Maybe it’s time to rethink what your spirit is telling you and work on focusing on connecting to the divine energy rather than what color goes with what corner or that your spell is rhyming correctly.  If those things help you connect, great, but they shouldn’t stress or bother you into feeling like you’re doing something wrong.  If you feel that way, then you are and you should stop completely and re-evaluate.

You are never disconnected from the divine energy, the divine source.  Don’t let anything in your life make you feel that you are, especially if it’s under the guise of being spiritual.

TPE – How I Came to the Faith

I’m writing for The Pagan Experience.  This week, the topic is on Deity and Divine, and we’re to write on those who guide us, inspire us, and inform us.  For more blogs on this topic, go here.

I had originally planned on writing a blog about the Goddess Hathor and how she’s seemed to make her way into my life rather suddenly the last few months, but the energy wasn’t there.

Then, last night, I was at church teaching my class on the Kemetic Faith, and we’d opened the room to questions, and I got asked a question that I get asked quite a bit as a Pagan:

“How did you choose to be Kemetic?  How does anyone choose the Gods they’re going to worship?  I mean, there’s so many of them, do people just point and say, ‘That’s who I’m going to worship?’  How does that work?  And why do they always seem to pick the same ones?”

Well, for me, it started when I was really young.  My family was active in a local Presbyterian church.  We went every Sunday, and I went through the 8th grade curriculum where we did intense Bible study, memorized a bunch of prayers and commandments and Bible verses, learned all about what it meant to be a Presbyterian, and then were confirmed into the church.  We got a Bible as a gift and everyone prayed over us and promised to help guide us through life and into adulthood.

That is, of course, unless you’re gay, which it just so happens that I was.

The kids at the church already didn’t like me too much.  I didn’t fit in with all of them.  I was that weird girl who got along with the adults more than she did the kids my age.  I tried to be friends with them, but I dreaded going to youth group because I never had any friends there.  I started going to my friend’s church, which was a Methodist church, and I found the people there to be slightly nicer, but I think it was mostly because they liked my friend and I was there with her.

Once I started to realize that I was gay, and I think it was one of those things that everyone realized before I did, and that my differences might be more than just skin deep… The rumors started up, and eventually, I felt so unwelcomed at either church that I stopped going to both completely.  It was really, really difficult for me because not only did I lose my church groups, but a good many number of my friends suddenly stopped talking to me as well.  This was the time of the “gay by association” deal, and a lot of people I hung out with were assumed to be gay, even if they weren’t… and a lot of them stopped talking to me.

It also consumed a whole lot of my focus because holy shit… I was gay… and this was new.

And a little scary.

I found out about Paganism from this girl that I had the biggest crush on, who eventually turned into my first girlfriend, and I started reading about it because I wanted to know what she knew.  Eventually, I started calling myself a Pagan or a Wiccan, but it never felt right.  It got to the point where everything just felt forced, I felt abandoned, and alone.

And I got very, very depressed.  My body is littered with the scars from that time in my life.  I have tattoos to cover up some of them, but I can’t cover up my entire body.  My friend, Alex, once told me to be careful with my self-injurious behavior because the feelings I had were fleeting… the scars would be permanent reminders.

And they are.  They’re reminders of a place I won’t let myself go back to, and they’re reminders of how far I’ve come.  Sometimes, I look at them, and I think about that poor, helpless, depressed girl who felt like she had no one and no where to go… and I just want to reach into the past and hug her.

One night, I had hurt myself, and it hadn’t helped me feel any better, and I was crying, laying in my bed, and just wanting to be gone.  I don’t remember what had triggered me, but at that point in my life, it could have been anything.  I thought to myself, “If there’s anybody out there listening to me.. Please… let me know that it’s going to be okay.”

That night, I dreamed that a great big black cat came in through my window… materializing from the moonlight… and curled up on my abdomen.  I pet this cat and pet this cat and the whole time I felt safe.  I felt warm.  I felt loved and protected, and I knew everything was going to be okay.  When I woke up, my hand fell to my stomach as if I’d actually been petting this cat, and I could still feel the way the fur felt on my hands and the weight on my stomach.

She never said anything, but I knew.  Deep down, I had this feeling that the cat was Bastet, who had come to comfort me when I needed Her most.

It was around this time that I happened, accidentally, to find out about the Kemetic faith.  I was screwing around online and found a little blurb about it.  From there, I started researching everything that I could, and it all fit with what I already believed.  It was at that point that I finally felt at home in my beliefs and my faith.

I explained to the girl in my class that I didn’t feel I had chosen said deity, but that said deity had chosen me.  She replied, “Then why is it that the same few Gods keep choosing everyone?  If that was the case, then you’d see more of them if they truly existed, wouldn’t you?”

The Kemetics believe in the power of words.  When something is spoken or written down, it comes into existence.  When things are no longer spoken about, they cease to exist.  We see this a lot in ancient Egypt where the people would try to remove a person completely from the history books, or walls as it was.  If the Gods with the largest cults were the ones who were written about the most, then we’d expect them to be the ones who survived the sands of time.

The more your name is written, the more likely you are to be remembered because it it more likely your name will be seen at least once.  This means that you’re more likely, as the ancients believed, to continue on living.  If that’s the case, then it’s understandable why some of the ancients have survived to call on people while others have fallen to the wayside.

We can’t be chosen by something that doesn’t exist, but since some of the Names have survived through time, the divine spiritual energy has also survived through time and can then choose humans as children and continue to protect and love us as we grown and interact with the physical world.

TPE – Personal Spiritual Practice and Salvation

This is week two of The Pagan Experience.  If you would like to read more posts like this, click here.

This week’s prompt is, “Share your favorite spiritual/magickal practices.  What tools are incorporated into your daily practice?  What feeds you and replenishes you?”

When I think about personal spiritual practices, I think about meditations, or circle casting, or divination.  I think about prayer, and songs, and poetry.  I think about offerings, and tools, and tithing.  I think about going to church or ritual or small spirit groups or classes.

When I think about spiritual practices, I think about salvation or the connection we have to the divine.

Salvation is defined as, “deliverance from sin and its consequences or preservation/deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss.” In Christian terms, salvation is usually seen as believing in Jesus as the savior, and then working on that relationship with him, but for me, as a Pagan and a Kemetic, I believe it means something entirely different.

As a human, I think there is one thing we can all agree on: bad shit happens.

People get sick, people die, people steal, and murder, and hurt others.  People create laws that harm entire groups of people, and people vote for those people to be in office.  People lie, and curse, and say things they don’t mean.  People will disappoint you, and people will hurt you.  There is not a single person on the planet who has never been hurt by someone else.

Now that we’ve agreed that bad shit happens, I think there’s another thing we can all agree on: when bad shit happens, we want to be saved from it.  We don’t want to be a part of it.  We don’t want our friends, our family, or ourselves to be sick.  We don’t want anyone to be robbed, or killed, or raped, or assaulted.  We don’t want to be lied to, we don’t want to be cheated on, we don’t want to be disappointed.  We don’t want to see it happen to others (although sometimes, we fail at that).

So when bad shit happens, we want to be saved from it.  We want to be out of it, and however that happens, we want to see it happen.

It’s at this point that many people will turn to prayer and the Gods for help.

Salvation is the process of being saved from that bad shit, whatever it may be, and when it happens, everyone wants salvation.  We may not call it that, but that’s what it is.

But here’s the deal: the bad shit isn’t a result of the Gods’ punishing us for our bad ways.  It isn’t some devil or satan figure that is coming to get us (see more on this here), and since it’s not, we can, as humans, change it.

But the only want to make that change is to realize what I just said, and then act on that realization.  I’m not trying to insight people to go out and evangelize their truths as the truth for everyone.  I’m not suggesting we, as Pagans, follow in the steps of our Evangelical Christian brothers and sisters by going out and shouting from the rooftops that our beliefs and ideals are the ideal, and that others must believe as we do.

What I’m saying is this: there are some things that work to better society and there are some thing that don’t.  Getting along helps society.  Not getting along doesn’t help society.  We can get along and not believe the same thing.  Maybe that’s some unrealistic optimism, but if we all start working at it, and getting others to as well, then we can maybe start seeing it happen.  Who knows?

So what’s my favorite spiritual practice and what does all this have to do with it?

Well, I’d have to say that my favorite spiritual practice is guidance.  I don’t get to do it as often as I’d like to, but when I get the opportunity to help guide another soul on their journey, then I really enjoy that time.  When we guide others to their truths, we can teach others that it’s okay to believe what you do and to allow others to believe as they do, and help others so that we can all just “get along.”

It doesn’t require any tools except my ears and my voice, and it’s not something I had to study to be able to do, but the biggest factor is just listening to others and offering help when asked.  Never have I ever told someone to stop believing how they do, and I won’t ever start that.  (Now, I have pointed it out to people when their beliefs are emotionally damaging to themselves or others, but that isn’t to make them stop… just to hopefully realize.)

I believe that there is a path for every person that leads to joy, and I want to help as many people as I can find theirs so they can all experience joy as I have in my life.  That’s my favorite spiritual practice: experiencing a life of joy and helping others do the same.

TPE – Resolutions

I’m going to start writing for The Pagan Experience this year. I make no promises to write each week like is required, but we’ll see how it works out.

I wrote last year on how to make New Years Resolutions and keep them, and then I made my resolutions. I accomplished some of them, made progress in others, and didn’t accomplish a couple. And I’m okay with this. I don’t feel like a failure. Erin and I had a lot of things happen this year, including a failed adoption and a struggle with infertility, that got in the way of us accomplishing everything we wanted to.

I guess, this year, I’ll start by listing my resolutions first:

1. Continue to not smoke for 2015.
2. Get married to Erin on June 26, 2015.
3. Go on our honeymoon (the original plan was to Europe, but we’re putting that trip off a year) to somewhere, but not sure where yet.
4. Pay off a minimum of 50% of my debt.
5. Lose a minimum of 10% of my weight to help with my fertility stuff.
6. Finish our floors since there’s really only two things left to do.
7. Maybe get serious about baby making again this summer or next fall. 8. Read more, and read more spiritual books to draw Erin and I both closer to the Gods. We have three books we plan on studying, and I’d like to read a minimum of three other books, so a minimum of six total.

How will plan on accomplishing these goals?

My hardest part will be my accountability. I plan on posting a monthly update to where I am for my goals. Some of my goals are fairly easy for me to accomplish, while others are going to be a little more difficult.

I know there will be a lot of prayer involved, and a lot of faith. But that’s how it always is with us.

Hope everyone has a wonderful new year! For us, we’re both happy and sad to see 2014 go. Definitely not looking back.