Posted on Monday, 29th December 2008 by Maritzia
Last week I talked about my belief that we each have a path to follow in life. This week, I’d like to explore the idea of how we discern what is true. To start talking about finding truth, though, I must first give a bit of background information about my own belief systems.
During my life, my belief systems have evolved quite a bit. I don’t like to say my beliefs have changed. It’s more that, as I have grown older, as I have experienced more of life, I have gained a greater understanding of what I believe to be truth.
I was raised Southern Baptist, but as I became a teenager, I questioned more and more the tenets of that religion. While it worked for many people I knew, for me there were too many questions, and I was left with a constant feeling of first restlessness, and later anger. For me, there was too much rigidity, too many admonitions not to ask questions. Of course, being the inquisitive person I was, being told not to ask questions just made me more frustrated and more angry. I knew there was something more, but at that point in my life, I didn’t even know how to reach out and look for it. Let’s face it, I lived in the middle of the bible belt and the internet didn’t even exist yet.
In the ’80s, during college, I became interested in Catholicism. In so many ways, it was the very opposite of the teachings of my childhood. They didn’t hold with the very strict interpretation of the bible that Southern Baptists tend to hold. Questioning and spiritual exploration seemed to be not only tolerated, but encouraged. This was the Post Vatican II American Church. Spiritual exploration, differing forms of prayer, differing ideas of theology were rampant. It called to the intellectual side of my soul!
And then there was the ritual. While many Catholics my age were actually looking for the more emotional experiences of the type of church of my childhood, I was seeking the more traditional rituals of the Church. Before then, I had never really experienced formal ritual (although I’ll argue that in their way, the evangelical churches are as ritualized as the Catholic). It was in ritual that I found the real homecoming for my soul. Here is where I found that something that I had wanted but couldn’t name. Ritual is where my soul found freedom and energy.
I remained Catholic for over 20 years, even as my belief systems continued to evolve, becoming more Pagan as time passed. I must admit that even today, after several years as an unrepentant Pagan, I still have a penchant for the Mass and the other rituals of the Catholic Church. They are what nurtured my soul for many years.
Over time, however, the Catholic Church started pulling back. The Pre-Vatican II rigidity started creeping back into the American church. Truthfully, it had already started at the time I joined the Church, but it was a while before I started seeing it. I was comfortable for many years knowing that some of my core beliefs were not exactly in agreement with the Church hierarchy. But as time passed, I became less and less comfortable with the direction the Church was taking, and the election of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope was the last straw for me. As much as I loved parts of the Church (and still do), I could no longer call myself Catholic.
By this time I was already quite pagan in many of my beliefs, so it didn’t take much of a push to pull me over the edge to claiming my Pagan beliefs, and in the last few years I have embraced my identity as a witch and reveled in the opportunity to expand my concept of the divine.
Now that I’ve covered the “what” of my religious past, in my next post in this series, I’ll talk in more detail about they
whys and hows of the evolution of my beliefs. I hope you’ll stick around and share some of your own religious background.
Posted in Religion/Spirituality | Comments (1)
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:03 pm
[...] been a busy few weeks, but I’ve finally gotten back to this series on Discernment. In my last post in this series, I talked specifically about my religious background, just to give you an idea of who I am and [...]