TILT

The patriarchal smackdown of women who dared might have been a tired old story for other women, even then, but it was new to me. The story of women who dared look. Dared break the rules. Dared taste. Eve. Pandora. Persephone. Lilith. Women demonized because they were curious. Because they questioned. Women as the essentially flawed, who screwed up the patriarchy’s carefully constructed plans for humanity and ruined it for everybody. It was a new story for me though because I was not yet a woman. I was thirteen, and passionately Christian.

The Sacred has always been proximate for me, an ever-present Presence in my life. It is and always has been an innate, heart-thumping Nearness. Manifest. I was born this way, and when we happened across Pastor’s thunderous Christianity, I was smitten. Pastor’s fervent, reverberating Christianity could send me home crying for my mommy, terrified of my sinful nature, or make me well up with the compassion and beauty of Christianity’s brotherly (!) love. Through Pastor’s Christianity I became connected. I was a small part of something so much bigger and more important than me I could barely conceive of it. I was liberated in my forgiven insignificance.

My mother said children were born savages and that her job as mom was to affix a civilized veneer to us, easy way or hard way, our choice. Toward that end, she insisted we have exposure to religion. She was not dogmatic and let us snack widely on Christian variants. We’d go to Catholic mass on Christmas Eve for magical religion, for the soaring music and the incense and the robes and the chanting and the stained glass windows and the gargoyles. We went to the Federated Church sometimes for intellectual religion, when we were particularly ignorant in our savagery. And we went to the Southern Baptist Church for some fire and brimstone when we were just, well, savage. To put the fear of God in us when a butt warming didn’t quite do the trick. It was on one of these fire and brimstone pilgrimages we first encountered Pastor. He was the new pastor at the Southern Baptist Church and from then, it was the only kind of religion for me. This was ecstatic religion. An intensely bright light I could steer my unfolding life by. Within a year I was born again and baptized.

So there I was, in Pastor’s office, not long after I’d been so very happy to find my religious home and have my sins washed away in the baptismal fount, getting my patriarchal smackdown. You never forget your first time.

“Mary was filled with the Spirit. It was a miracle. You have to believe.” Pastor had fair skin and blue eyes, but his face was red, and there was a vein popping out on his forehead. It was hard not to stare because it was pulsing with his heartbeat.

“Um, I do believe, Pastor! I really really do! I’m trying to understand.“

Pastor sighed, taxed by the ignorant arrogance of the savage in front of him. I was one of his crosses to bear and he would tell God so right in front of me before the end of our counseling session. “What is it you don’t understand?” he said, his exasperation eloquent in his condescending tone. “We’ve been over this. Mary was a virgin and was filled with the Spirit and, knowing no man, gave birth to Jesus. It says so right here.” He thumped his bible, open to the appropriate page.

“Yeah, yeah, I get that part. But the Spirit is the Holy Ghost, right? A ghost. Not a physical being at all?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, well, what I want to know then, is why wasn’t Jesus a girl?”

“WHAT!!??“

“Well, see, we learned in Biology class that it takes an XY chromosome to make a boy. All a woman has to offer in is XX. Mary’s body didn’t have the physical stuff to make a boy with. I want to know where that Y chromosome came from. If there was no physical matter involved, only ghost, Jesus should have been a girl.”

Our argument circled the drain a couple of more times. I was afraid those blue eyes were going to pop right out of that red face. He hemmed and hawed and in the end, threw his hands up, yelled at me in that thunderous, scary, fire-and-brimstone Pastor voice “YOU. JUST. HAVE. TO. BELIEVE!!!!” He cast his eyes heavenward, and lamented the crosses, like me, his ministry required he bear.

At thirteen, I was starting to have opinions and awarenesses of my own. The other people in my life I looked up to for guidance, my family and teachers, encouraged critical thinking. With childish petulance that had just discovered adolescent rebelliousness, I sassed back “I don’t have to do any such of a damn thing.” I glanced nervously at the roof, expecting a lightning bolt for cussing in church, but it didn’t come. I was on a roll. “And why would God make the world this way and then break the rules he made himself?! Huh? And then punish us for breaking rules? By burning us in hell? Why would he give me a brain and not let me use it?”

It was but a marginally more articulate version of the toddler’s ’you’re not the boss of me.’ I stomped out of his office and never went back.

That was when Christianity and I parted ways. I figured it was probably for the best, though, because my shepherd was righteously pissed off at me and it was looking like I didn’t have the makings of a very good sheep anyway.

Meaningful discourse departs from definition of terms, and I was ever so surprised, recently, when a new friend, someone I like and respect very much, asked me how I came to convert from atheism to paganism. I have never been atheist. Atheism is a negative assertion I find unsupportable either rationally or philosophically.

I asked myself that ever-so-useful question What is it like to be you? My friend is Christian, a monotheist. For her, there is only one God. If that God, her God, was not a part of the heart-thumping Presence in my life that it is, no doubt, in hers, then I don’t believe in any god at all and am atheist. This is a false equivalency in my experience as an animist pagan. From my polytheistic perspective many other gods and goddesses exist as is obvious by their manifestation in the world and in my life.

Pastor’s betrayal had destroyed the safe religious certainty of my young world. Although I was never atheist I did try very hard to be agnostic as I made my way through high school and college. I sought the certainty through science that Christianity had promised, but then denied me. I still had that innate heart-thumping sense of proximity to Presence, but found its manifestation in my studies and through experience of the living natural world as Sacred. The touch of an octopus is a profound thing, as is the insistent cheeping of a baby bird, and the waggle dance of a honeybee. A baby’s giggle. The evolution of teeth. Hummingbirds. An avalanche. The yearly resurrection of perennial plants, pushing their way up through the bodies of their dead in spring. I was still part of something vast beyond comprehension, something more important than myself. I came to know myself as a natural child of the earth, offspring of the capital-G Goddess.

By the time I ran away from home to be a ski bum after I finished my biology degree, I had surrendered to my deeply pagan nature. I was a fully-fledged animist, alive in a living world. A world in which there is no conflict between science and religion. A world in which the Sacred is natural, not supernatural. A living world suffused throughout with incarnate gods and goddesses large and small; multivalent, ever-present Deities who sing in a joyful chorus of pagan voices.

Raised by a father who did not discriminate against me because of my gender, I was ill-prepared for the battering I took at the hands of the patriarchy. By the time I had experienced personal, professional, and emotional violence at the hands of men—-men who had the god-given right to abuse me—-my feminist rage burned white hot and fierce. My righteous indignation and I became devoted worshippers of the capital-G Goddess in all her myriad guises and manifestations.

I was Element of Fire then, but flamed out. I am not an angry person by nature and fury takes a lot of work to sustain. As I grew past injured child and into thoughtful adult, I surrendered to the way gods and goddesses have made the real world, where masculine and feminine aspects of the Sacred are balanced.

Mythology is not factual. It is nonetheless an important articulation of the truth. Our truth. It shapes our world as the story of our sacred center. Mythology reveals what is important to us. It tells us who we are. It tells us how we should be, how we should behave, and why we believe as we do. It is allegory, something deeper and more meaningful than it appears on the surface. I’d like to think that, thanks to my mother’s broad-mindedness, I might have been able to appreciate the difference between truth and fact even at thirteen. But I’ll never know because Pastor didn’t trust me enough to give me a chance at it. He didn’t have the courage to let me seek my mystical truth in the mythology of the Bible or the Christ.

Jesus wasn’t male in Christian mythology because of his genetic makeup, he was male because he was a child produced by and for the patriarchy, that it might procreate itself. That’s the point of the Mary story, isn’t it? She barely had anything to do with the Incarnation, it was male begetting male, to ensure the continued hegemony of the masculine over the feminine.

Pastor offered me the only truth he had based in the only authority he knew and I forgive him for that. His book is Pastor’s proximity to Sacred. The only avenue he knows. He liberated me from the church and the book and ultimately, that was a gift I thank him for now.

My respectful new friend and I dance around each other with care and deference. Neither of us wants to risk a developing relationship by trying to convert the other or insult her religion. I write my own mythology now to celebrate that jubilant, ever-present Presence in my life. To share my joyful pagan noise, not to shame anyone else or degrade her religion.

CODA

My youthful encounter with the monotheistic God tried to teach me, through Pastor, his emissary in my life, that I had to choose. I could either be rational (I equated this with science at the time) or I could be spiritual (I equated this with religion at the time) but not both.

Science and religion speak mutually unintelligible languages.

Scientific fundamentalists demand that religion verify itself according to the scientific method in repeatable experiments in the lab. Religion cannot do this; it doesn’t work that way. Religion is a transcendent experience. It is to be touched by Mystery, by the unfathomable, by infinity. It doesn’t translate to the lab.

Monotheistic fundamentalists demand that science feel the religious Presence with the certainty they do. They think science should share the heart-thumping sense of nearness to Deity that weaves the world into Creation for them and ties all the world together. Science cannot do this; it doesn’t work that way. Science cannot accept the veracity of monotheistic religion on faith because it says so in a book.

It is an essential disconnect that reinforces what both camps preach as an impassable chasm between them.

Lack of proof is not proof of lack.

This is a call for peace, and acceptance. We are all—both the scientific and the religious—like those blind men trying to comprehend the elephant. None of the blind men were wrong about the elephant, but neither could any of them grasp enough to understand the enormity of the whole.

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Terryl Warnock is an eccentric with a happy heart who lives on the outskirts of town with her cat. She is known as an essayist, proof reader, editor, maker of soap, and proud pagan. A lifetime student, she has pursued science, religion, and sustainable communities. This, plus life experience from the local community service to ski instructor, from forest service worker to DMV supervisor, from hospitality to business owner gives her a broad view on the world.

Terryl is the author of:
The Miracle du jour, ISBN-10: 0989469859, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎ 978-0-9894698-5-2

AJ Brown, in a past life, was an embedded systems engineer (digital design engineer). He worked on new product designs from hard disk controllers, communication protocols, and link encryptors to battery monitors for electric cars.

A few years ago he surrendered his spot on the freeway to someone else. Now he is more interested in sailing, building out his live-in bus for travel, and supporting the idea of full-circle food: the propagation, growth, harvest, storage, preparation, and preservation of healthy sustenance. He is a strong supporter of Free/Libre Open Source Software[F/LOSS] and is willing to help most anyone in their quest to use it.

Together, we are MoonLit Press.