Interview #4

[omorka]

From theoldone:



1. How did you come to look beyond your family's traditional religious beliefs?

My mother is a fundamentalist Lutheran who is nevertheless very closely attuned to the cycles of Nature, and she is a very strong woman - one of the first fourteen women to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the US, IIRC, and the primary wage-earner in the household for as long as I can remember. My father is an intellectual and a Catholic, although his faith was lukewarm at best for most of my childhood. His mother, an Irish Catholic in fine Old New Orleans fashion, is an extremely devout Marian and every inch the matriarch of the family. Mom and Dad agreed to raise me (and all of their four children) in both churches until we were old enough to decide between them. Mom's church (Missouri synod) threw out her parents in about 1982 for being too conservative, so they left, taking about a fourth of the congregation with them, and founded a WELS synod church. (That's about as conservative-fundie as Lutherans ever get.)

Meanwhile, I grew up on a 40-acre plot of land with a pond, about 20 acres of rolling woods (mixed pine, hickory, and water-oak), a vegetable garden that provided a lot of our food, and cattle and chickens that provided much of the rest. Talking to nature spirits (I thought of them as fairies at the time) was perfectly normal to me, as was seeing people's auras. I revered the Sun and the Moon and the Earth quite naturally. I had subscriptions to "Ranger Rick" and "Odyssey;" the first is self-explanatory, I think, and the second was a very good astronomy magazine for older children that included the Greek myths behind the constellations.

School happened. I gradually became aware that my sense of the numinous was not something I shared with my Baptist and Methodist fellow-students. That was fine - I knew I was different from them anyway.

Sunday school happened. I gradually became aware that what I personally believed about the world was not what was presented in the religious materials for children. But these were clearly beneath me anyway - written for kids who weren't very smart. Surely when we got to the more real stuff, it would be okay. There was a little garden devoted to Mary behind my father's church, and I often asked to visit it after mass - I always felt very peaceful there.

I started Lutheran confirmation class in 1986 and rapidly discovered that in fact, I didn't believe much of the church's doctrine at all. Around the same year, I started checking books out of the "occult" section of the county public library. (They sucked, and I quickly figured that out, but they were all I had at the time.) This resulted in the only argument I ever knew my parents had about censoring my reading material. They decided, to my great relief, that it would do more harm than good - and I started smuggling the more interesting books home in my backpack where they wouldn't see them. (I also started reading a lot of science fiction at the time, which my father encouraged.)

The 1986-87 school year was extremely difficult for me. I was in my second year of confirmation class, trying very hard to believe doctrines that my bones - and my small but powerful personal experience of the Christ - told me were wrong. At school, I was suffering worse exclusion than ever. Sometime, for some reason - I don't even remember why, or what had happened - someone threw a new word at me. Not the gross plays on my (maiden) name, not the sexual insults (I sprouted boobs early), not the usual "nerd" and "geek" - someone called me "witch."

It was True. It was like someone had plucked a harp string down my spine. Of course I was a witch. I had always been one. I didn't know what it meant that I was one, but I was. It was a word of power. It was part of my Name.

I smiled, and stared down my tormentor. The word he'd thrown at me in anger was a word of fear when I accepted it. (That, in and of itself, was a problem - I spent much of the rest of that year defending myself from bullies by trying to make them fear me. Fortunately, I got over that real quick when my Odyssey of the Mind coach called my mother. I realized that my being a witch was something that I couldn't share with my family - indeed, I still haven't.)

Now I was in trouble. I knew what I was, but not what to do about it. I read up on the Salem witch trials in all the history books, but with the possible exception of the Caribbean woman at the beginning of the story, none of them seemed to have any bearing on what a witch was. Still, at least I had a fragment of a hint of a taste of a clue. I had been marking the phases of the moon and the solstices and equinoxes on my own for a while, and I knew that this was somehow connected.

My eighth grade year was terrible, too, but for academic reasons this time. My only refuge was band. And by now I had mastered Luther's Catechism backwards and forwards. I was confirmed in my grandfather's Lutheran church on Pentecost of 1988, into a church I knew I had little in common with. Then again, this admitted me to one of the two true rituals of the Protestant church - communion. (I was too young to remember baptism.) There seemed to be something to that . . .

During my high school years, I wondered if I had merely made the wrong choice between my parents' churches, if I should have picked Catholicism. My father's church, at that point, had a priest who was one of the most genuinely spiritual people whom it has been my pleasure to meet, and the various rituals and rites he did for the congregation had real energy to them. And there was that little Mary garden . . . On the other hand, I knew that much of what I practiced - my markings of the solstices and so on - wouldn't fit in well with the Catholic church, either. Nor would my growing feminism. Somewhere around in here, I also had a fleeting but potent encounter with what, at the time, I identified as a guardian angel of the land my parents lived on. (I would now identify that entity as the Green Man.)

In my last year of high school, a series of events that can be chalked up to too many gifted, horny, emotionally wounded teenagers compressed in to too small a space occurred, and brought into focus for me that (a) I did, in fact, see people's auras, and (b) I wasn't the only one who was sensitive to energy. I started researching "weird stuff" again (much to my then-boyfriend's dismay) and discovered that a university library is much better than a public library for such things. In my research, I realized that in fact, I did believe in the old gods and goddesses of Sun and Moon and Earth and stars, and always had, even if I hadn't called them gods. I decided that as long as I honored the Christian Trinity first, that I was okay with that. I also realized that I'd been thinking of the Holy Spirit as feminine for a long time - that my Trinity was Father, Son, and Mother. At this point I took the name of "heretic" along with "witch".

Off to Rice, and away from anything resembling parental control. I spent my first year defending myself mostly against atheists who wanted to convert me to their way of thinking, and spent most of my time arguing out of personal experience of the divine - mostly using monotheistic terms, since that was what I had, but out of what was rapidly becoming a strongly polytheistic worldview. They did manage to break me of the last vestiges of my mother's fundamentalism, though, and I started attending a much more liberal (ELCA synod) Lutheran church - one that was much more "high church" than any I'd attended before, which catered to my love of ritual. I was confused, I was awhirl, and I was getting myself into an abusive relationship (may it be the last) with one of said atheists - whose roommate was a Celtic Pagan. Unfortunately, I never actually spoke to him about it.

The next year, I met moontyger, who at the time identified as Wiccan. Rice also had a better library than my previous campus. It had Drawing Down the Moon. Over the course of the next year, the term "heretic" fell away and was replaced by "Pagan," although I also still thought of myself as Christian.

Halfway through my junior year or thereabouts, I finally realized in conversation with another campus Pagan (we'd been putting together Rice's second Campus Pagan Alliance) that still honoring and revering Christ as one of many gods did not require that I keep the abusive father-figure Yahveh in my devotions. The label "Christian" finally fell away, although I still sort of think of myself as "catholic" with a small c - I do include Christ and Mary in my lists of deities, although they no longer have the prominence of place they once had.

I haven't looked back since.

Mother of mercy, that was long! Sorry about that . . .


2. Your first few Festivals must have been unlike any previous experiences in your life. How difficult was it for you to adjust to this new community?


Well, I went to them with moontyger and her then-spouse, and pretty much didn't leave their side for the first one! I found the nudity very easy to adapt to - my parents never put too much emphasis on bodily modesty. The open sexuality was very strange to me, but not threatening - mostly it just bothered me that the Spouse didn't want to come with us, and so I didn't have anyone to share it with.

My first festival was one of the two commonly referred to as "Helltane" - the one where Life Flight had to be called in the middle of revel fire. When they announced that they were going to call the helicopter in, originally they'd been going to douse the fire. They changed the landing site, and instead took advantage of the opportunity to hold an impromptu healing ritual. That was the first 200+ person ritual I'd ever been in - my group ritual experience was extremely limited, anyway - and it was one of the most life-affirming and mind-expanding experiences of my life.

Probably the most difficult thing to adjust to was the profusion of alcohol. My father is a strict teetotaler and did not permit alcohol in our house, even though my mother was not. (To this day, he receives only the Host in communion; he will not drink from the chalice.) I can strip off my clothes in front of 800 other Pagans, but drinking a glass of wine still gives me pause. In addition, I don't particularly like the taste of most alcoholic beverages, and dislike the behavior of drunk people - I value intelligence, and dislike the idea of "getting stupid." I still feel a little excluded from a lot of the Acronym's social life, simply because I don't like drinking for its own sake.


3. As a young Pagan woman, you attended prestigious college in a different city. Did you find that your beliefs presented issues in dealing with the University? The Faculty?


My being an avowed feminist caused more problems than being Pagan per se. Most of the faculty whom I told thought it was either amusing or interesting. At the time, SNC was the director of student activities, and she was actually very helpful when we asked to set up the Pagan Alliance (I didn't find out until much later she was UU).

I flunked a course in Ancient Jewish Mysticism because I kept writing papers that were from too Pagan or too Christian a viewpoint, but that was my fault - I knew what the professor wanted, and I just wasn't willing to give it to him. He was even willing to let me take an incomplete instead of an F, and I couldn't go through rewriting the final 20-page research paper again, so I let it slide. That's the one time it actually impacted my academics.

There's a lot of alchemical symbology in the architecture at Rice. In some ways it's a very magickal place.


4. How did exposure to the Pagan community affect your interest in or acceptance of Polyamory?


I'd known that I was capable of loving more than one person, and that I was capable of loving someone who also loved someone else, all through high school. (Actually that was one of my unpleasant moments of self-discovery back in 7th grade - I had two raging crushes going at once, one on a boy, one on a girl. I suppressed that one for a long time.) It hadn't become pressing enough knowledge for me to do anything about - except for a near-miss my junior year, anyone expressing interest in me was rare enough that monoamory had seemed enough of a blessing.

I didn't know there was a word for it until attending one of Morning Glory Zell's workshops (was it that first Beltane? Or was it my second one? I don't remember now). It took me a long time to wrap my head around the concept that people actually *acted* on those feelings - my parents are still happily together after 31 years, and I'd always been taught that even serial monogamy was wrong. The concept made sense in the abstract - of course there was enough love to go around! Of course you should be happy if your beloved is happy, and if other people make hir happy, so much the better! I just never would have thought to attempt it in practice - it was an SF/fantasy concept to me, something that happened in Elfquest and Heinlein novels. So, it's unlikely that I would have found the poly community if I hadn't found the Pagan community first.


5. This Pagan Community has very different attitudes from mainstream society about many things, including sex and nudity. How did you deal with such a different set of values, and how much did they differ from your upbringing?

Again, the nudity was/is pretty much a non-issue. My father taught me to be ashamed of my particular body type, but I was never taught to be ashamed or frightened of the human form in general, including my own. The Spouse - who wasn't brought up with any of the standard Christian programming - has much more of an issue with it than I do. I actually find it rather freeing, and did from my second gathering onward - I have an exhibitionistic streak, and I enjoy having the opportunity to indulge it.

I had a somewhat schizophrenic set of values about sex growing up. On the one hand, I was taught that sex within a committed life relationship was something beautiful and awe-inspiring, the closest two human beings could come to sharing themselves totally with each other. (My parents have a very healthy sex life and never saw any reason to keep it much of a secret.) And that sex within that kind of relationship was pretty much anything-goes - I didn't have many taboos about "unnatural" sex acts. On the other hand, I was also taught that sex outside of a committed life relationship was one of the worst possible things one could do. (BTW, my brothers were taught exactly the same thing - there was no double standard in our household.)

I was well into the process of shedding these slowly by the time I discovered the Pagan community. For example, I'd ditched my parents' homophobia by the end of my freshman year in college. I think I largely chose to use my differences with the Pagan community to figure out what my actual sexual values are. It's still very much a continuing process - I was more prudish about casual sex when you first met me than I think I am now. I still think of sex as sacred - I just have a broader definition of what ways that sacredness can be expressed. And I still rather dislike seeing a few people in the Pagan community treating sex in ways that I see as being non-sacred. (I have a consent fetish.)


Wow, that was long-winded. Again, sorry 'bout that.



If you want me to interview you--post a comment that simply says, "Interview me." I'll respond with questions for you to take back to your own journal and answer as a post. Of course, they'll be different for each person since this is an interview and not a general survey. At the bottom of your post, after answering the Interviewer's questions, you ask if anyone wants to be interviewed. So it becomes your turn-- in the comments, you ask them any questions you have for them to take back to their journals and answer. And so it becomes the circle.

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