Tag Archives: the sacred

Emotions, Love, Paganism, Personal Development, Religion

#changingpathschallenge2024: Love

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Jesus Loved Me. Freyja Taught Me to Love Myself.

That was my joking answer back in 2022 when Meghan Crozier1 asked her followers what they would title their own deconstruction memoirs. The statement has stuck with me ever since. It’s funny how sometimes what we say when joking turns out to be profound truths, even if only personally true or profound.

My understanding of love was somewhat limited when I was an evangelical Christian. This was due to the fact that in that religion, I was taught that love — or at least pure love — was something that was only given out by the perfect god of the religion, who poured his love out on the undeserving — that is, everyone else. Realizing that I was only receiving love because the Almighty was giving it to me despite myself ruined my sense of self-worth, something I’ve talked about multiple times.

So when I came to Paganism, I was confronted with a new in which I could see myself as inherently worthy of love. That changed so much about the way I saw both myself and love. In time, I’ve come to realize that love — whether for myself or others — is a natural reaction to recognizing the sacred nature — which I define as the inherent value — of the beloved. If I and other are sacred/inherently valuable, how can I do anything other than love them? This allowed me to pour out love2 — both for myself and for others — more freely.

(This post is part of the #changingpathschallenge2024. See Yvonne Aburrow’s post for more details on the challenge.)

Footnotes

  1. As an aside, Meghan co-hosts a wonderful deconstruction-themed podcast with Cortland Coffey called Thereafter. I highly recommend it. I’m their number one fan. (Pay no attention to the sledgehammer behind my back.) It also occurs to me that I should see if I can help get Yvonne Aburrow on their podcast. I think many people in their audience would appreciate Yvonne’s book(s). ↩︎
  2. I will note that as an evangelical Christian, I always found it other to be loving toward others than toward myself. Much of (white) evangelical Christianity is designed this way. After all, we are commanded to love others, but deny ourselves and do things like “put our sinful nature” — which is often conflated with “the flesh” — to death. Plus, I grew up learning that “Jesus, Others, then You” spelled J-O-Y, and that was the order you were supposed to prioritize people in. The reality was, I rarely got around to the Y part, so I had more JO than JOY. ↩︎
Books, Paganism, Religion

Desiring sacred community: Exploring a journal prompt from chapter 6 of “Changing Paths”

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Hello and happy Friday, dear readers! In today’s post, I want to explore a journal prompt Yvonne Aburrow offers at the end of chapter six of their book, Changing Paths. This chapter is titled “The Conversion Process.” Here’s the prompt:

What do you experience as sacred? What do you regard as important, special, emotionally significant?

I’ve given a lot of thought over the past few years on what I think it means to call sacred. Most recently, I did a video on the subject:

I then did a couple of follow-up videos: one on the sacred self and the other one about acknowledging the sacred in others. I think that these three videos together make it clear that I think everything and everyone is sacred. I also think they give a glimpse into what it means to me to treat oneself, others, and even the world in light of that understanding.

As such, I’d like to focus on where this is currently leading me personally at this time. My belief that both I and the other are sacred has me focusing more on building and nurturing relationships between the sacred self, sacred others, and the sacred world. I find myself looking more at the importance of community.1

Wen I first came to Paganism and witchcraft, I was greatly focused on myself. I was relieved to find a spiritual tradition and magical practice that focused on empowering myself and celebrating my own worth. At the time, this was necessary, given the ways my former religious upbringing had stripped me of any sense of self-worth and value.

But as I’ve matured over the past couple decades, I’ve begun shifting my focus toward the people and the world around me. As someone who is confident in my own value and worth,2 I started once more looking for ways to connect with others and even help others. I wanted to share my experiences and what wisdom I have gained from them with others. In fact, this is one of my primary motivators in maintaining this blog, as well as some of my other projects.

Right now, a lot of this effort is focused online, though I’m starting to crave local community as well. I haven’t figured out what that looks like for me these days. I’m not sure if I would be best served by re-joining the local Pagan and Witches meetup (assuming they are back to having in-person meetings in addition to the online ones), getting involved with the local metaphysical shop, or starting my own coven or kindred. That latter one has a certain appeal to me, but I have my reservations, including whether there are others in the area that would want to work magic and/or honor the gods in the way that i do.3 Plus I’m not sure I have a well-enough defined ritual or focus to really build a communal practice. That may be something I work on developing, though.

So I suppose even after all these years, my path is still evolving and progressing. I’m not sure where my desire to have, build, and nurture community will lead me. But that’s what’s on my mind right now. Mainly because that connection with sacred others is what I value and desire most right now.

Footnotes

  1. One of the things that I love about this chapter and the book in general is how central Aburrow has made the concept of community to their discussion of religion and finding a religious home. ↩︎
  2. Though I do try to maintain a modicum of humility. After all, becoming an ego-maniacal boor would be an undesirable over-correction. ↩︎
  3. I’m in a weird niche where I tend to be too Norse-focused for most Wiccans and other witches, yet too “loosey-goosey” with ritual style for most Heathens’ comfort. ↩︎