I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that phrase and thought that the women in my life were more likely to be there for me as a guide than any man would be.

Fifteen years ago, thinking that my father would be more accepting of me if I believed in his God, I told him what he wanted to hear. I would go to church once in a great while with friends, just so that I wouldn’t be a liar. I borrowed the Book of Psalms from my Grandfather and knew the very basics about the Bible. No matter how I tried to please him without being drug down the whirlpool called Christianity, I felt hollow and empty.

What did I really believe in? Who did I believe in? Why….why was I willing to put up a false front just to please someone?

Five years later I was introduced to Wicca through some of my mother’s side of the family. Their comfortable demeanor and sense of pride with their religious beliefs intrigued me. Over the years, the popularity and rise of Wicca and other Pagan faiths in the mainstream public eye spurred me on to find out as much as I could. You hardly ever see a mainstream religion having that kind of comfort level unless they are recruiting others, or proclaiming Christ while taking the money out of your pockets.

Do as Christ would do? I don’t remember reading about Jesus being a thief, a liar.

My children are my guiding force, urging me on to help find something for them to believe in besides SpongeBob, Dora, and Hannah Montana. They ask me questions, I try to answer as best as I can. If I don’t know, I ask someone more knowledgeable. I tell them to believe in themselves, to follow their hearts, to respect themselves, others and Mother Nature, to only “harm” in self defense. I tell them to be honest and truthful to themselves about what they want to believe in, and to do it for the right reasons, not what someone else wants.

Some of those who guided me along my path and who inspired me have forsaken their beliefs in favor of believing in Jesus and the teachings of the Bible. Were their beliefs strong and steady? Were they Wiccan or Druid because they believed, or was it just convenient at the time? Did they change faith to be part of an accepted, mainstream religion because of peer pressure, or do they really now follow their teachings? There are so many questions, and the answers are, to me, as false as a pair of Vegas eyelashes.

One person who has chosen to convert to Christianity gave excuses about Wicca having “no unity”, no “unified moral code of ethics”. Reading the mass email she sent out, she professes that Wicca teaches us to think selfishly, that the spells and “ritual things” aren’t needed to be close to God. In a way she is right, I know many who don’t use things like athames, or wands. I just have to say though, excuse me?! What does she call all the pomp and circumstance of Sunday Service, all the “ritual things“ that they use?  That could even go for the whole “church” concept. We, as a nature-based faith, often don’t feel a building is needed, for anywhere can be our “church“.

As predicted, she then goes on and tries to recruit those she sent the email to. How disgusting is that?!?

Finding stability in society is hard enough, without the people you look up to for guidance doing a wishy-washy dance of uncertainty. What is even more disconcerting and suspicious, is when they change without any forewarning or clues. For some, maybe it is a life altering event that has made them think twice about what they believe in or practice. My father hadn’t gone to church for years, but always told me to believe in God and to go to church.

In 2003, my father was driving down a poorly lit main road when a man stepped out in front of his truck and was killed. My father never saw the drunk man until it was too late. He took this as a sign from Jesus and God. The man’s name was Jesus, and he had been trying to cross the road to his daughter’s house from the church across the street. My father saw this as a sign that he could still go to church. He explained it to me this way; he said that at 52 (at the time) it wasn’t too late to go back to church and be one with God.

My epiphany moment happened and I didn’t even know it. My soon to be mother-in-law was dying of cancer. On the morning of May 29, 1999 we were all at their house doing some major cooking for a birthday party. Three of us were in the kitchen when we heard a “thump”; her lungs had filled up with fluid, her heart had stopped beating, and she fell to the floor. We tried CPR, we called 911 and we cried. The Hospice showed up (I won’t go into that here), the paramedics, the whole neighborhood. My husband’s cousin was on the way with her three day old daughter, just moments away. There was nothing we could have done, she was gone. I want you to understand something, my mother-in-law was and IS a very strong-willed woman.

Later that night, about 7 or 8 pm, we got pager messages to get to a phone. We were worried about my husband’s younger sister or his father. Needless to say, what we found out was NOT what we expected.

The God and Goddess work in beautiful and mysterious ways.

After all those hours at the funeral home, the funeral director heard a noise. I kid you not, he heard a noise coming from her bag. When he opened it, she was breathing, her eyes were open and she looked right at his ashen face. The poor man fell, screamed, called 911 and promptly passed out. He would never talk to us after her memorial service.

She was with us until around 11pm that night, giving her friends and close family time to be with her to say goodbye. I look back on that day as the day when the Goddess first showed herself to me. The strength of my mother-in-law, her love for and belief in her family was like none I had ever witnessed before. She was a mother, a sister, a warrior, and a Goddess in her own right.

My point is this; we all have our reasons, but we should have them for the right ones. Have them because you believe, not to be part of the “In” crowd. Be proud of who you are and what you believe in.

For convenience, I’m going to not continually type ‘and goddesses’ every time I use ‘god,’ ‘the gods,’ or ‘god forms.’  Suffice it to say that I’ve given up trying to satisfy everybody in my writings.  Not only is it an impossible task, it’s a thankless one as well.  Whatever I use, it has no meaning concerning gender.  We speak of gender when discussing particular god forms, but even then it is less about gender than a similar discussion about flowers would be.  Our concept of ‘god’ or ‘goddess’ is based solely on a human condition that we are attempting to relate to.  I expect that ‘sex’ between deities is not dependent on any definition we might come up with concerning gender.

First of all, let me give you my take on who or what the gods are.  I settled into a Unitarian church after trying out a lot of churches in my city between the ages of 12 to 18.  One of the best things I heard in that Unitarian church was the ‘joke’ about when god made man in his own image, man returned the favor.  Cute, but it says volumes about how we think about deity.  For thousands of years, we’ve painted pictures of gods and goddesses, written long treatises about what they may be like, and generally made asses of ourselves trying to prove who was right or wrong.  Pagans don’t tend to get upset over what name or image of a god or goddess somebody else holds dear, but we also don’t (as a group) tend to think too hard about exactly what the nature of deity might be.  We kind of dance lightly around the subject and go back to other areas of our spirituality that might seem safer or less mentally taxing.  While that may be one of the reasons we don’t have any big arguments about the many different viewpoints we embrace, it also is a weakness in our understanding of what it means to worship any of these thousands of god forms.

My concept of deity is that it is a subject that’s way too big for any one human consciousness to grasp.  It’s a lot like the number we call infinity.  Even though we can play with it in mathematics, it still is beyond meaning in our minds because that is part of its definition.  Deity is not one, or two, or any other number we can count.  It is beyond that.  Deity contains all those numbers but is more than all of them combined.  What we can get our minds around is something far more pedestrian, much more like what we are used to.  Thus, Zeus becomes Mr. Big, the somewhat tyrannical figure who will often take advantage of the fact that he’s the boss but also has a more ‘human’ side to him that comes out even when his schemes seem to be abusive.  Hera, a goddess herself, is the long-suffering wife who has hissy fits over her husband’s affairs and who is hardly ever more than a wrong look away from attempting retribution or revenge.  We can relate, right?

Personally, I don’t know anyone who uses Zeus or Hera as the central figure on their altars (though I expect there are folks who do), but this is just an example.  These god forms are projections of our own lives and culture but in archetypical form.  They represent aspects of that bigger thing we call deity that we can’t quite get our minds around.  Some Pagans use the generic forms we call The Lady and The Lord, or God and Goddess.  Even these are projections of our understanding of the world as incarnated beings.  When questioned about our own favorite god forms, we invariably pick one out a mythology that resonates with us.  That’s our choice.  In spite of all the cosmic power we ascribe to our god forms, it seems none of them can force us to believe in or worship them without our consent.  How strange.  “We reserve the right to refuse worship to any who do not please us.”  It should be cross-stitched into our altar cloths.

Once, many years ago, my wife and I played at using Loony Tunes characters to portray many of the god forms that were popular among us and our Pagan friends.  Has it ever occurred to you that Bugs Bunny acts a lot like Loki or Coyote?  I don’t even want to get into who Taz reminded me of!  But can you see what I mean about our involvement in how the god forms are depicted?

At this point, it might look like I’m saying we invented the gods.  This would be blasphemous to those monotheists who insist they know who God is.  But, yes, in a way that is what I’m saying.  However, it goes beyond that… way beyond that.

One of the lines that anthropologists draw concerning what is human and what isn’t has to do with how we depict our world.  If we can draw graffiti on the walls, then we’re human.  If we can decorate our graves with trinkets, we’re human.  If we can carve fat-bellied naked women, we’re defiantly human.  It seems that we’ve had some idea of deity for just as long as any of these other abilities.  We may not have built big cathedrals back then (though most scholars agree that Stonehenge has some kind of spiritual significance), but we expressed our spiritual natures in a wide variety of ways even when we could hardly chip rocks.  It would seem being human means we have some instinct or desire for there being something beyond us, something that makes everything make a lot more sense than what we are able to understand.  In other words, humans have a sense of deity.

Our abilities to describe deity have produced a rich variety of images and concepts, but none of these productions come even close to what we would call the reality of deity.  So it shouldn’t be too surprising that there are so many differing descriptions out there.  In fact, it would be amazing if there weren’t.  When we say so-and-so is The God, we are bound to butt up against somebody else’s concept of The One True God.  The old argument of whose god is bigger extends back before recorded times.  The gods, as we perceive them, are how the archetypal forms combine with our sense/need/ instinct for deity.

One of the most interesting things about archetypes is the role they play in our minds.  They are specialized symbols that seem to be universal to all humans.  They are the foundation for what is termed the ‘collective unconscious,’ that body of information that is ubiquitous to us all.  In some instances, part of this collective is arbitrary but has become the agreed-upon ‘reality’ of our species.  The archetypes are huge, complex blocks of related information that appear to be formed at a surprisingly early age.  Some speculate that they begin before birth!  Almost without exception, certain archetypes appear before others, but usually by about the age of six, the human child has nearly all the archetypes formed in their unconscious and it takes extreme measures to modify or substitute them from that time on.  Some of these archetypes are so ingrained, they can never be changed.  We might add new tidbits of information to them as we grow, but they will remain pretty much as they are for the rest of our lives.

To say the archetypes are within us is only partly true.  As hard a concept as it may be, the other part that is true about archetypes is that we are within them!  We live our lives as part of the archetypes.  We order our perceptions to coincide with them, making them the compass of our existence.  Our understanding of deity must agree with these archetypes as well.  The resonance we feel when we choose our god forms is its agreement with our archetypical images and how we prioritize those archetypes.  Every iteration of deity, each god or goddess or spirit of any kind, is but a facet of that larger gem that we are driven to seek.

Worship is an expression of desire.  Our desire to find deity is so much a part of our being, so strong a force, we have killed and died for it.  Deity may always be beyond our understanding but it is never beyond our desire.  That we each might find a different aspect of deity that fits what we desire most is not surprising; even fast-food places offer more than one kind of hamburger.  Would you like to super-size that goddess?

Pagans tend to worship more than one aspect of deity; we have multiple god forms that reveal our deepest desires.  This shouldn’t be surprising because we don’t have just one desire or even simply one at a time.  We are complex beings and our choice of gods that resonate with complexity reflects that fact.  When I say we resonate with a god form, I mean that it is the chosen form that best expresses our desires at the time.  Many Pagans say that their discovery of whatever brand of Paganism they currently follow was like ‘coming home.’  Very likely this means they felt a greater comfort level with a spirituality that gave them more freedom to express their desires.  Multiple god forms allow for a life more deeply ingrained with spirit, more meaningful and connected with parts of deity.

Deity is not one thing, remember.  It is beyond and outside of any count.  The variety of god forms we use to express our participation within deity is strictly up to us.  No matter how hard we try, we won’t ever truly understand all of deity because that is part of its definition.  But if we don’t try, if we don’t find god forms that resonate with our deepest desires, then we will lead lives that are devoid of our own spirit and any outside form of worship we might display will be a hollow shell… as will we.

Now… would you like fries with that, too?