I am a person who has always struggled with religion, faith, spirituality, etc. I can be so interested in it, I can love all the tenets of a faith or religion or spiritual path, but then loose all interest in the subject just as quickly. I have been interested in and following Wicca for the past 5 years now. However, I go in spiritual spurts. Meaning I have a tendency to go long periods of time without doing anything spiritual and then all of a sudden realizing that I’m falling into a rut again where I have no faith.
For me, a lot of the problem was the fact that for the first year and a half of my studying Wicca, I lived with my terminally ill mother. She was Mormon and as good as the Church was to her, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her or any of the members of the Church who came to see her that I wasn’t interested and that I didn’t believe in it. So I hid it from her and from them.
Then she passed from this life into the next and I moved in with a roommate who liked to claim she was Wiccan but was so terrified of what her parents would say that she made me hide everything from them when they came over. So that didn’t help me any. I was being forced to hide from everyone else who and what I was.
I was so happy when I could tell my friends that I was Wiccan and not have to worry about being treated any differently. Then I moved back to Iowa from Texas with a friend of mine and all of a sudden, her father and the bishop of the Mormon church ward she belonged to fed her a bunch of lies saying that she couldn’t be re-baptized (long story) into the Church because Christ wouldn’t enter her home because of me. I knew that to be a bunch of crap, because frankly, MY beliefs have nothing to do with HER deities and how they treat her. At first they were happy with me putting away all my Wicca and magick books and not practicing. I even let this blog go at that time – the domain name sat dormant with nothing on it because it was Wicca related and I couldn’t use it.
Then all of a sudden it was being said that I needed to find a different place to live – because of my faith. So I had to move into a crappy apartment that 2 years later, I still can’t afford to move out of. When I’m home, I’m fine, but if I’m at my best friend’s house, I’m stuck going to church with them every Sunday. So I’m being bombarded with things I don’t believe in and being stifled by faith that is not my own.
Of course, if I’m at home I have no internet access and I need internet access as I do some work from home on my blogs. So now I’m working towards the goal of simply getting my bills paid off and getting my life back on track to the point that I can get my internet access back at home so I can start being me again.
But one thing I have to say, is I know I let myself do these things. I allow myself to be pushed into things I don’t want to do concerning faith and religion. I allow myself to be dragged off to church each Sunday even if I don’t believe in it and I don’t listen to anything they say. I allow myself to be stifled by others. Now – I know this, I admit it. I just have to change it. And unfortunately, changing it is the hardest part of the whole thing.