Warmth Within the Wiccan Culture

By Velvet

I will admit that I was angry over the way the story "Way Back When I Was A Wiccan" was presented and I pondered long and hard before I decided to write my comments.

I too had troubled times when I was younger. At one point in my life I had sunk so low that I took an entire bottle of my mother's Valium to make the pain go away. I wasn't finding answers anywhere, not with my family, not with God, and not with my friends. So I decided, "Why Bother?", and swallowed the pills. I slept the day away to be awakened with my step-father yelling and shaking me and telling me to get up.

My parents very quickly figured out what I had done and took me to the nearest ER. Luckily for me, the pills were the lowest dose available and were also very old, so instead of killing me they just put me to sleep for a couple of days. I remember very little of the first two days of my hospital stay. I was moved from the ICU to the children's ward on the fourth day and ordered to see a child psychologist. He was young and calm. I needed calm very badly then. He came to my room and we talked about everything I felt drove me to the edge. As I said he was a calm individual and though he could not provide me with the answers I was seeking he did make me see that killing myself was not the answer.

I returned to my room and thought over what he had said to me and what I had said to him and figured ok, maybe death isn't the answer, but what the hell is? I was released from the hospital a few days later, when all had agreed that I wouldn't off myself while at home. I continued to see my psychologist and spilled out my frustrations, but again, it wasn't really helping. He then suggested that I look deeply inside myself and find what had kept me going prior to the suicide attempt.

Well that didn't help me at all, but I was past the point of wanting to die, so I continued to search and question. At this time I was going to church every Sunday and frankly I just pissed everyone off. My questions went unanswered and any attempts at challenging my so called teachers of the faith ended up in calls to my parents about how I was disruptive and disturbing to my peers with my questions and not accepting the bibles direction and questioning the basic tenets of my faith. As a result I quit going to church. I mean really, if you can't turn to God or those who are supposed to teach Gods word, where can you go?

So the summer passed and it was time to go back to school. It was the beginning of my eighth grade year. The first day, I reported to my homeroom, and found that the teacher (a rather anal sort of person), had assigned seats to everyone, and our names were taped on the tabletops for our assigned seat. As I sat down, I discovered that my table mate was one of the popular girls at school. "How wonderful"! I thought to myself, not only assigned seating, but I get to sit next to little Miss Popular herself. Just great, not my ideal way to start the school year.

However, it turned out that I was wrong in my opinion of her. As we were forced to spend time together each day, we got to know one another very well. We even became good friends, good enough that it got to the point that I trusted her enough to tell her about my suicide attempt. She was shocked with what I told her, but then went on to tell me that she also had been going through a lot of the same things herself, and was beginning to feel a little desperate. After that moment we were inseparable. We talked about everything and together set out to find our answers. Of course no great revelations occurred, but having similar problems and someone to talk to about these problems, really did help a lot.

Then came the day when our teacher assigned the "Big Project". Basically what this was, was that we had an entire semester to do a project, or research about anything we wanted and to be prepared at the end of the semester to give a presentation about our subject. For about three weeks we exchanged ideas, considered our options and tossed most of them out. Then we decided that we would do a paper on the different religions in today's society. We checked out books from our school library, the public library, and even managed to get some theological books from an older friend who was in college. We had books on Middle Eastern beliefs, our own society's beliefs, etc.

One weekend I was staying at her house, and we were wading through our notes and books, when her older sister came into the room. She knew what we were trying to do and wanted to help. She gave us a book that she thought we should look at. She told us that it wasn't part of the "mainstream", but it was interesting. All I could think of was great, another damn book, but thanked her and set it in our growing pile of books and information. We continued on our way with our studies and promptly forgot about the book she gave us.

The next weekend, I was home and I was bored. I didn't want to work on the project, it had become kind of mind numbing by then. My parents had gone somewhere and they had taken my brothers with them, so I had the house to myself. I went to my room, to look for a book to read and came across the book my friend's sister had given us and the name caught my attention right away. The book was "What Witches Do" by Stuart Farrar.

I climbed up on my bed and started reading. My parents came home, but still I read on, my dad had to drag me out of my room for dinner and family time. That night I put a blanket over the window and another at the bottom of my door and continued to read the book. Call it teenage rebellion if you will, but every word of that book called to me, it spoke to something deep within my core that still resonates to this day. As trite as it may sound I had found my answers and quite frankly, I found peace. I finished the book that night, and I have never looked back. I no longer felt the emptiness inside me, instead I felt warmth, a light if you will, that made all this searching worthwhile.

When school resumed on Monday I shared the information from the book with my friend, she found it interesting and read the book herself, she didn't find what she was looking for, but was glad that I had.

After that I read everything I could on the subject of Wicca, not an easy thing to do in a small, Midwestern farming community. Most of my books had to be ordered by mail, and sent to an older friend that had her own apartment, because my parents had seen me reading some the material and of course instantly decided that it was devil worship, which it wasn't, but that is neither here nor there.

I grew up, got older, was not so smart and got pregnant when I was 17, had my baby, and I did graduate right when I was supposed to. I moved on with my life. I have had one very abusive marriage, another that just didn't work and I am now married to my soul mate and we have been together for 17 years now, I have three adult children and four beautiful grandchildren. I went to college and received my degree in Nursing and now work as a nurse in the Emergency Dept.

Through it all my faith in the Goddess/God has kept me strong. I have been able to reach out to them whenever I was troubled or down. I have not become involved in drugs, and I have never again descended to that place where I felt my life had no meaning and no reason to continue. I am a happy and well adjusted person, and I thank the Goddess/God everyday for their help in seeing me through my troubled times and helping me get to where I am today.

So this is my story of Wicca, I will admit that it quite frankly is a short version of the past thirty years, but it makes my point. Faith lives in the heart of each individual. My faith may not be right for you, but it works very well for me. It doesn't make my faith wrong, just different.

Faith is a beautiful and wondrous thing, whether it comes from a belief in Wicca, Christianity, Buddhism or whatever belief calls to your soul. It is wrong to revile any religion just because you don't understand it or fear it, or it just doesn't call to you. Belief is something that is between you and whatever deity you worship and others have no right to bash your beliefs because they do not coincide with theirs.

Please send stories of your Wiccan experiences to comment@newsblaze.com.

judythpiazza@newsblaze.com

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