Watch Me Try to Be Introspective and Fail

[masterofmidgets]

I've been thinking about my religion a lot the last couple weeks, and I'm not sure why. I don't know, I guess I've always had this idea of college as being a time when a lot of people have a religious crisis and change faiths, or stop practicing, or become atheists or whatever - not that /everyone/ does that, of course, it just always seemed like something that happened. But now I really don't see myself doing that, for a lot of reasons. One of them is that my faith isn't something forced on me by my parents, but something that I chose, when I was old enough to understand what I was doing, after a lot of thought and soul-searching. I'm Wiccan because I /want/ to be, not because I'll be grounded if I don't go to church or whatever. Also, the more I learn in my classes, especially SLE, the more I think that I just could not be anything else; I have too many issues with Christianity, with Islam, with Buddhism, with most of the religions that aren't what I am already (not that they aren't good religions, they just don't work for me). I have issues with Wicca on occasion too, but at least there's no such thing as holy writ. If I have issues, I can decide to interpret things or believe things differently, and I won't get burned on the stake. Mostly, though, being Wicca just feels right to me in a way that nothing else ever has.

That being said, I do feel like I've been having a minor religious crisis lately - not doubting my faith, but realizing I'm not practicing it very well. I'm doing my best to live in the spirit of Wicca and the path of the Goddess, and I think I do okay there, I just don't /think/ about it very often - I don't pray, I don't talk to Her, I don't spend time outside listening to Her, I haven't tried to do any spells or divination in a /while/. I just feel...disconnected, and I don't like that.

I'm not sure if pagans do Samhain resolutions, but I'm making one - I want to try harder this year to live as a Wiccan, and not just an ordinary college student who calls herself a Wiccan.

Goddess Bless and Happy Samhain, minna-san!

Comments

[estarial.livejournal.com]

I haven't had a religious crisis yet either. I was raised as a reform Jew and decided a long time ago that culturally, I'm Jewish (so I observe the holydays and whatnot), but in actuality, I don't believe in any divine entity. I'm not spiritual or religious and I don't believe that anything happens to me after death, besides rotting (even if I were a believing Jew, Jews don't believe in an afterlife, so I guess that's a non-issue).

[masterofmidgets.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a pretty practical way to look at things...very cool. I...wasn't really raised anything, particularly (my mom's atheist and my dad's agnostic), and being Wiccan was more like figuring out on my own a bunch of things I believed in, and then looking around and realizing "Hey! There's a bunch of people who believe pretty much the same things I do, and they even made a religion out it! Cool!"
Here's to not having a college caused crisis of faith!