I spent many of my 33 years on this planet looking for my path. What I believed in was the biggest issue I faced in the course of this time. Did I believe in the Christians’ God/Jesus/Holy Spirit trinity, or did I believe in the Pagan gods and goddesses? Did I believe in any form of deity at all? Did I even want to believe in any form of deity? After all, with the issues I faced watching loved ones grow ill and pass away, I could very well have said that there were no deities. I could have said that deity, an all powerful being who could have stopped it and could have spared me the pain but did nothing, could not exist, for they would not want me or anyone else to suffer.
But I did believe in a higher power. I did and do believe that there is a higher power out there. I do not, however, believe that this higher power is decidedly male or is in any way vengeful against those who do not follow his words. I believe that deity can be male or female. I believe that all deities we call upon, no matter what their names or faces, are all part of the one great deity, the Androgynous being that is deity. Whether I call upon Ares and Aphrodite, Hera and Zeus, Cerridwen and Cernunos, it matters not. They are all a part of deity, all faces of deity. And so I did and still do believe in a higher power.
But I could not live by all the rules. So many rules, so many times of “do this or else.” It seemed worse than being in school. Worse to know that these were rules that I must live by or else suffer dire consequences, up to being completely cut off from my beloved higher power. I just could not do that. I can handle that there are consequences for my actions. I can handle that I will have to suffer those consequences. But I cannot believe in a faith that believes that our deity would cut us off from him/herself if we break those rules. It just does not jibe with the loving deity my heart and mind conceives of. And so I kept looking for another path.
Then one day, I happened to find a friend who was of like mind, at least in as far as she believed that the consequences for not obeying the basic rules of life should not be as dire as being eternally cast away from our beloved deity. So she and I started to do some research. I found the Wiccan path. She found a few spells and a few herbal remedies she liked, and she had already loved the Tarot. However, she decided that her faith in her Christian upbringing was more important than her new found freedom in the Wiccan faith and ran back to her Christian church and her family’s faith. And that was fine because that was her path.
It was not, however, my path. My path was one of never ending love, patience, and the knowledge that if I mess it up, I won’t be cast away from my loving deity, but will be returned to another life, another body, to learn the lessons over again so that I might actually get them right that time. My path is Wicca. What is yours?