I’m Pagan. Like, full on Goddess-worshiping, makes-own-candles-for-midnight-rituals Pagan. If you’d told me even two years ago that this is where I would be, spiritually, I would have been surprised. If you’d told me a year before that, I might have taken offense. It’s been a long, windy road to get here.
Let’s briefly skip over the beginning: as a young child I went to a very liberal church on weekends, and Catholic school during the week. Maybe that fucked up my notions of the divine and maybe it didn’t, but either way I left childhood without a real strong attachment to religion. In adolescence, my mother got involved in a Quaker meeting house in Pasadena, and I hung out with Quakers enough to at one point identify as one, but I didn’t really believe any of it. It’s not that I thought of myself as an atheist, or that my disbelief was an active thing. It was just that… I wasn’t getting whatever the other people associated with that church were.
A few weeks before the end of high school, I had a realization that was so terrifying I nearly fell off my bike. I remember it distinctly. It was a sunny day, and I was near the front of school, heading to ride my bike up the wheelchair ramp, and it suddenly occurred to me that we are alone on a tiny grain of rock orbiting a star that is only one of hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy alone, which itself is only one of hundreds of billions of galaxies…and that’s just the observable Universe. Worse, that’s all there was. Us, and our rock, and the infinite uncaring night. I’d never been very religious, but this was the first time the full weight of a Universe without a god dropped on me, and it was horrifying. The radiation from a supernova could snuff us out tomorrow, and nobody would ever know or care.
So I told myself I believed in God. Because I was scared. Because I didn’t want to deal with being stranded on a wet pebble, locked in the orbit of a 4 billion year old thermonuclear explosion.
But I didn’t. I didn’t really. I didn’t pray and I didn’t have any experiences that told me this was anything but a fairy tale I was telling myself. The thing about lying to yourself is that sooner or later, you’re going to call yourself on your own bullshit. For me, that happened about 3 years later, in college. For weeks I’d been coming back to a certain question, worrying away at it. Worrying in both senses, of being anxious, and of gnawing. The question was: is it possible for aesthetics and morality to have any value in a purely materialist metaphysics? In other words, if all we are is meat in motion, how does anything even matter?
I was worrying away at this question because I had started to stop believing the little lie I was telling myself about my “faith”. And if a belief in God goes out the window, then a whole lot of other things seemed to necessarily go with it. Not because I thought you couldn’t be moral without God telling you what to do, or anything silly like that. Just that, if there was no second layer to the Universe, somewhere from which meaning could spring and give value to the world around, if we were just atoms held together by covalent bonds, then why does (for example) art matter? Why does anything matter?
Anyhow, I ended up doing what a lot of college students did before me, and embraced existentialism. I didn’t want to live in a world where art and beauty have no meaning, and where morality is reduced to a sterile ledger. Existentialism provides a very robust framework to have that meaning without resorting to supernatural, spiritual, or other non-material sources. Short version: things matter because we decide that they do. Meaning is an emergent property of consciousness.
This freed me from “needing” a view of the Universe that included space for God or a realm of ideas beyond the metaphorical, and I became a fairly militant atheist. (Then I realized how much of an asshole Richard Dawkins is, and I became a really easy going atheist instead.) And there I thought I would stay, more or less in perpetuity.
I didn’t need God, I didn’t need spirituality. And I lived that. I was fully committed. I survived homelessness as an atheist. I came out and began transition as an atheist. There was comfort in the absence of a God, I found, because without a God pulling the strings that meant all the shitty things happening to me weren’t personal. Nobody was doing this to me, it was just something that happened. And that was comforting, in a way.
So yeah, I was an atheist and pretty firm in that, and if you’d told me just three years later that I’d be gearing up for a midnight ritual to consecrate a silver amulet, I’d say that you didn’t know me at all.