[Continued from earlier]

So I got through the hardest year of my life as an atheist. I have no doubt that it is possible to live without prayer or faith, even through quite trying times, because I did it. This is also how I know that my later embrace of my Goddess wasn’t an act of weakness, but simply a choice to accept that I had an experience which didn’t fit neatly into a materialist metaphysics, and to allow that to have an effect on me.

Towards the end of 2011 I stopped being homeless. A huge lucky break in July resulted in me getting a job, and by November I’d saved up enough money to get my own place. For the next two years, I was essentially in recovery. Several months after starting work, my writing came back to me, after a years-long absence. It was a glorious night when I realized I could compose fiction again. Like getting a superpower back, really. In something like four months, I wrote the first draft of what would become Necessary Cruelty. My semi-regular bouts of suicidal ideation stopped happening. My panic attacks stopped being so frequent. My emotional fragility healed, more or less. When I first moved back up to the Portland area, I was always on the lip of fury or terror.

The job was hard, though. Very stressful. I can’t imagine how I didn’t get fired in the first six months. Every few weeks, after leaving work I’d have to bellow black rage up at the sky just to get it out of me. I was healing, yes, but that’s only because what I’d come out of recently was so much worse. It wasn’t a very emotionally healthy place to work. And so, soon my depression and despair about life came back to me. I was scared that this was it, this is what my life was going to be like forever: homelessness or working at a call center.

Years prior, when I was first trying to figure out what it meant to me to be an atheist, I’d said that if I ever did turn to religion, it wouldn’t be Christianity. Too patriarchal. Too stifling. Paganism, that was the ticket. Because paganism implies a worship of nature, which is powerful and glorious and terrible and actually makes sense to worship.

The first time I really seriously considered it, I was in a grocery store on the edge of tears because I was just so miserable about life. I asked the Goddess if She would mind if I prayed to her, and maybe She could just nudge things my way for once. It wasn’t a very sincere prayer. It wasn’t a very sincere prayer. I didn’t feel any connection. I was lonely, though. I wanted somebody to care. (Lots of people cared, but that’s the nature of depression; you don’t see what you have going for you.) But nothing came of it, so I forgot about it, and tried to pretend that I hadn’t done it. Apparently, I was not as firm in my atheism as I had thought.

In December of 2012, while waiting for the paramedics, I started to pray in earnest. I thought I was having a stroke. I thought I was going to die, or become a vegetable. I was terrified, and so I asked Her to keep me safe. I pledged that I would pray to Her on a regular basis if I survived, and when it turned out it was just a pinched nerve it seemed like poor form to forget about my promise. Even if the promise was just to, what I conceived of at the time, as an imaginary friend.

And as I write this, I am of mixed feelings about how it’s coming across. It sounds like paganism was something I resorted to after a series of failures in life, like it’s a crutch, like it’s weakness. It isn’t. I could blot out my experiences and pretend I haven’t felt the things that I have, or discredit them as brain chemistry being strange. I could turn away from this, and go it alone again. But there was no need to, and I found utility in this practice. Before a few months ago, I would have called it a coping mechanism. I would have tried to minimize it, to say it came from a feeling of obligation, like if I made the promise and then broke it that it would somehow be disrespectful. To Her, to myself, or maybe to something else entirely.  It was rote, and not very sincere, but it was comforting.

Another legacy of my period of homelessness is that I have an acute anxiety disorder. When any of my life plans get interrupted or stalled, I have a panic attack. Setbacks are terrifying for me. I get scared that it’s happening again. I can see the chain reaction coming, the cascade of failures that inevitably lead to my death in a gutter. In March of this year, I had one of these attacks. My plan to return to school was scuttled by an error on my part. The class I needed to take was unavailable to me, so I became convinced that I was about to die.

In desperation, I reached out and grabbed hold of a tree and asked Her to help me. She did. It was like all the fear and the pain got sucked out of me into the tree, and what replaced it was calm, and comfort, and the knowledge that I was loved. That’s when it stopped being an invisible friend thing. That’s when I stopped thinking of it as a coping mechanism. I truly, sincerely believe in my Goddess now. I don’t know much about Her. I wouldn’t pretend to have gained any special insight to the structure of the Universe. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there are many faces to only one. Maybe they predate us or maybe they’re an emergent property of our own consciousness. And maybe I’ve snapped, maybe I’m believing in things that don’t exist outside of chemical imbalances in my brain. But I don’t think so.

I think that She is real, and I think that She knows about me, and that She cares. It’s been building for almost two years now, but it feels so sudden. In middle school, I had a teacher who had recently become a born again Christian. He described the experience as filling a hole in him that he hadn’t known was there until it was filled. The description is uncomfortably close to my own experiences. So maybe that’s it: this is just my way of manifesting the common heuristic failure mode that afflicts all humans. Or maybe we really are coming into tune with something beyond ourselves. Maybe that heuristic accounts for the numinous and the ephemeral because those things do exist. Maybe we all find the god or Goddess that is right for us, and if none of them are, we find nothing and are content with it. Maybe it’s just different ways of interpreting the same phenomena. I don’t have any answers, only my Goddess.

An acquaintance of mine killed herself recently. When I heard the news, I felt gutted. I didn’t know her well, but she was also trans and suicide is the way for trans women to die. Every time one of us kills herself, the rest of us remember that it could happen to us. We’re all survivors of suicidal ideation. I don’t know a single trans women who hasn’t considered ending it all. I work in customer support and I found out while I was in the middle of my shift. I put myself into break so I wouldn’t get a call and went outside to grab onto a tree and pray for her. The misery and grief were making it hard to focus, and the moment I touched the tree it was all sucked away from me. For a moment, I was disturbed. I didn’t want Her to just take it from me. I didn’t want to not feel these things. But then I realized that in taking them, She had given me enough tranquility to go back to my job and finish my shift. And then later, after work, another trans woman and I met up at a bar and mourned our dead sister properly. It’s things like that which make me believe. She knows what I need, and if it is within Her power She grants them.

And so now I am quite religious.

I’m getting ready for my first big formal ritual soon. I’m very excited.

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.

 

[Continued]