About Us

First Sunday Speakers

March, 2004

In the beginning, there was Christianity, with 8 years of perfect attendance at Sunday School. Then came adolescence, when logic asserted itself and belief in God and the divinity of Christ were put to the test. My questions were met with advice to simply accept these teachings on faith. Eventually the fear set in:

"If God is real and I don't believe in him, I'm going to Hell."

For the next 20 years I did my best to believe. I really did. When my faith waned, I immersed myself further in church life - choir, lay-reading, study groups, teaching Sunday School. I even wrote a song for the choir to sing.

Then, seven years ago my own young daughter came to me in tears. I was suddenly reliving my adolescence when she blurted out "If God is real and I don't believe in him, I'm going to Hell."

That was the beginning of my conversion. I finally realized I'd been approaching religion with the irrational fear of a child, and it was time to let go of that fear. Yes, there was anxiety, but I didn't fight with it. Eventually I was able to admit my disbelief without the fear of eternal damnation. Those nagging inconsistencies about Christianity lost their protective fuzz and I was able to examine them. Here's the biggie for me: the Christian god will damn me to hell if I live a decent life in the service of mankind, but don't happen to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. That same god will admit a rapist/murderer to heaven if he accepts Christ as his personal savoir. The whole thing is just illogical and now seems as "unreal" as Grimm's Fairy Tales. Please understand that it’s not my intention to denigrate Christianity or Christians. It is a fine religion for many people, especially when it is practiced as it is taught in the mainstream churches. It just didn’t work for me.

It's easy to define what you don't believe. It's much more difficult to define what you do believe. When I first stepped away from Christianity I was, for all intents and purposes, an atheist. It was a tough place for me to be.  To my scientific thinking, it made no sense to believe in God, but atheism left a huge hole in my life. I decided to be an agnostic instead, so I wouldn’t have to completely close the door on the concept of God.

The first time I ever heard of The Goddess, I was still deeply entrenched in my Methodist church.  I was reading the credits on the first femme m’amie CD and saw that they had thanked, among others, The Goddess. I remember thinking, “oh, that’s cute….. and a little pathetic.”  I was completely clueless. I thought The Goddess was simply a reactionary feminist reworking of the Biblical God.

The next time was a couple years later, about the same time that I was giving up Christianity. I had a Wiccan client at work and wanted to understand more about her religion, so I did some research on the Internet. I liked the concepts, but my lack of belief in deity kept me from fully identifying with the religion. Besides, the formal ritual of Wicca was, well, too formal for my tastes.

With a couple more months of internet research, I discovered Unitarian Universalism. What an eye-opener! That innocent looking church I'd driven by thousands of times allowed, nay, encouraged its congregants to believe what felt right to them, and to search for their own truths. I remember as a child driving past this church and seeing the steeple lying on the lawn, for what seemed like years. I asked my mother about it, and she suggested that perhaps the church couldn’t afford to put their steeple up. I remember feeling sorry for the members of the church, that they didn’t have enough money to put up their steeple. I’m sure my mother would have been very surprised to learn that, while money was part of the problem, the greater issue was an internal difference of opinion about whether there should even BE a steeple on the church. Imagine that – a church without a steeple. I joined this church as a member after attending services for 5 months.

A year passed, during which I came to think of myself as an "agnostic pagan." Like other pagans, I chose an earth-centered approach to philosophy and worship. I began celebrating the changing seasons and sought to align myself with those changes, in order to bring about and maintain inner peace. The first indicator I had that this approach was effective, was the fact that for the first time in 10 years I did not need to take medication during the winter for Seasonal Affective Disorder. I was on to something!

I reinforced my native tendency to treat the earth and its inhabitants with care and respect. I acknowledged what I've always known - we are separate individuals, but unavoidably interconnected with everything else in existence. What we do to the earth and to each other, we do to ourselves. I came to recognize and believe in an energy force that flows through and binds the cosmos and all its inhabitants together, but I had great difficulty believing this energy force has the self-direction of deity. 

During the next year, I became even more "earth-centered." I developed a relationship with Earth Mother, accompanied by Sky Father, the moon and sun, rain, snow, mud, bugs, plants, trees. They didn't take on the role of deity with me, but they were rather "companions" in my life journey. I also found myself relating to everything, living or not, as if it has a spirit. The mundane was elevated to the sacred. Even if the rocks and trees do not have spirits, it felt right to treat them as though they do. It put the qualities of respect and gratitude into a whole new light. During that time I was driven to recreate the pagan group that had been offering seasonal rituals at this church, but had faded with a change in minister. We’ve offered 8 seasonal rituals a year since October of 1998. Participating in this group and leading or helping to lead several rituals a year, more than anything else, has deepened my spiritual roots, and helped me to feel connected to religion again.

Gradually, over the course of a couple more years I moved away from agnosticism.  I can hardly believe it, but I seem to believe in God again. My vision of God is, of course, quite different from the Judeo-Christian concept of God, but I do, nonetheless, sense a divine presence in my life. For me, God is ultimately formless and genderless, but I relate to the divine in many different aspects - Goddess, God, young, old, kindly, vengeful.... Always present, always the same, yet always changing. Prayer has become an ongoing daily conversation with the divine - friendly, companionable, sometimes whiney or resentful - much like the conversations one might have with a best friend.

Most recently, I've moved toward a Druidic approach to worship - honoring the spirit and deity of place, through prayer and simple offerings. It helps me to stay "in touch" and balanced with my surroundings. 

It’s interesting that I should come full circle with regard to belief in God. While I used to think, “Belief in god is illogical and unfounded,” I now find myself saying….  “Why not?  It’s possible…. Let’s go with it for now.” In the past I felt no sense of comfort by believing in God. He never seemed to be there when I needed him or talked to him.  Now I have a sense that “it’s ok.” Whoever I’m talking to is there to hear me, even if I haven’t had any concrete proof of his or her existence.  It has certainly helped that I have redefined God away from the Biblical version.  I tend to go back and forth between two basic concepts of God.  At times I see the divine as “one All with many different faces,” At other times I take a more Druidic approach, which recognizes and honors the energy, spirit and deity of place, a true polytheistic outlook.  And, quite honestly, sometimes I slip back into agnosticism, or even atheism, during brief, cynical moments in my life.

Spirituality is a strange and fluid thing.  Five years ago I came close to calling myself an atheist.  Now I'm definitely not.  Who knows where I'll be in five more years? Whatever changes may come, I feel confident that some form of paganism will continue to be my practice of choice. After all, ever since I was a small child, the moments when I have felt closest to God have not been in a church or while hearing an inspiring sermon, or even during heartfelt prayer. Those moments have come when I've been surrounded by nature, in the natural cathedral of the God and Goddess. That is where I've felt true divine energy.  Why mess with that?