Last month couldn’t end fast enough for me, but I’ve got to say that the end of this month makes me a little sad. I’ve really loved being a pagan. The lack of organization and the freedom of choice—for both personal deities and the structure of daily worship—were just right for me. I’m starting to think I’m just not a very structured person in general, and I want my religion to reflect my inherent craziness.
To me, religion is best when it doesn’t feel like an obligation. I mean, is worship really worship if you do it because you’re afraid of the consequences and not because you’re actually expressing love for God?
As a Christian, I felt like I had to go to church and I had to say prayers and I had to read the Bible, because the alternative was spending eternity in hell.
As a pagan, however, I prayed and did rituals and read spiritual texts because I wanted to, and because it kind of seemed like fun. It was a whole different experience, unlike anything I remember from growing up in the Catholic Church.
They always say that the best way to live is to find work you love to do, because then work seems like play. Shouldn’t religion be the same way? Now that I know religion can be that way, I’d be hard-pressed to ever consider going back to the “fire and brimstone,” “do it or you’ll fry” style of religion I knew as a child.
So, I’ll definitely miss paganism—even the things I thought were a bit kooky, like fairies and divination and magic. I think I might even miss nature—the bugs and the wind and the scrawny Texas trees.
But the good news is that I have a whole new religion—actually, two religions—to look forward to next month. Who knows? Maybe I’ll discover that I like being traditional Chinese even better than I liked being a wild, nature-loving pagan who meditates naked in the bath. I guess we’ll see.
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