I was planning on writing this post yesterday but by the time I got home from work I was totally wiped out. I guess my lack of sleep from the weekend was catching up with me. I went to bed at 8:15. So much for Christians’ fear of pagan revelry on Halloween.

It is getting harder for me to keep the spiritual part of my life secret. That is mainly because I don’t think I should be keeping it secret. It must be all my evangelical history coming out. “Don’t hide your light under a bushel” and all that. The husband may have started the beginning of the end of secrecy this weekend. Driving home from the show we passed a church. It is an offshoot of the church that we occasionally attended when we first moved here. He said conversationally, “Did you know they built that?” I said yes. My mother says, oh so innocently, from the back seat, “So why don’t you go there?”

If you think that was an innocent question then you never had a mother. While I was thinking of a good subject change, the husband happily says, “Heather doesn’t believe in god anymore.”

The silence from the back of the vehicle changed in character. I know that this will come back to haunt me. I say to him something about how it’s true that I don’t believe in his alien version of Christianity. (The husband had been talking all weekend about how he believes everything in the bible if you start from the premise that god is an alien and the Star of Bethleham was Jesus being beamed down from the mothership.) Then I managed to change the subject.

Still no response from my mother. He said something to her and she said, “I was thinking about how bad it would be if Heather didn’t believe in God.” Read that statement in the tone a mother use to say, “Heather better not be setting herself on fire in the middle of the street,” to get an idea. I will pay for this. I really wanted to slap the husband but that would have reinforced it in her mind and he would have been clueless anyway.

Then we got home and I was checking my emails to get the new password to order pizza online. She is standing by me. The emails are coming in – learninghedgewitchery list, kitchenwitch lists, other pagan lists. I’m not sure that she caught that but I wouldn’t be surprised at all. The next day she was talking about my brother filming their churches anti-Halloween festivities. She said something about not wanting to support Halloween because of the witches. That isn’t something she would normally say and the stress was on “witch”. I knew she saw the emails. The woman can be very passive agressive when she wants to be. I am so going to be made miserable over this.

This morning I saw a link to an article written by Chuck Colson about Wicca. Link courtesy of The Black Kettle. It is about how Christians should treat Wiccans specifically but could apply to all pagans. Admittedly it is for the purpose of converting us to Christianity but at least it is a call for the end of hostilities from a major Christian writer.

Pagans always say that if Christians just understood what we believe then they wouldn’t think we are satan worshippers. That’s not true. According to what I was taught anyone who worships anything other than the Christian God is being deceived by satan into worshipping him. If you don’t think you are worshipping satan that just shows how sneaky he is. You aren’t going to convince a fundamentalist Christian of anything else. Anything you worship = Satan.

For Samhain I was working on formulating a belief statement to show where I am at this point in my life. If I ever would get into a discussion of belief with anyone I didn’t have a brief and coherent statement to say what I believed. If I said I was an eclectic solitary I would only get blank stares. So here it is.

I believe that there is a universal force connecting us all. I think that the gods are manifestations of that force. They are representatives of human’s needs. The universal force is so incomprehensible to people that it needs to take on an approachable front. That is why the gods of different cultures have so many similarities. Praying to a specific god or goddess is a way to get in touch with parts of yourself that you need to work on or the aspect of the universal force that you need to contact.

I believe that everything in nature has power because it is also connected. It think that it is important to respect the earth. That means being proactive in caring for her. I think that you can recharge yourself by spending time in nature. I believe in energy transfer. I think you can send and receive good energy and bad energy out into the universe and that you are responsible for the results.

I don’t think that there is any way to know what happens after death until it happens to you. So don’t spend your time worrying about it. Focus on improving life on earth for everyone.

Happy Samhain (or day after) everyone!