Religion

A cool breeze sent a painful shock down my spine as I walked through the harsh cold of winter. This winter differed from others before it. Each burst of frost-bitten air pierced your heart with truths, scraped your soul with remembrance.

As you grow, you learn, and as you learn you realize that not everything is as it seems. As a child you see nothing past the innocence that screens your eyes and clouds you tiny mind. You look up to everyone and feel mesmerized by every word that came out of their mouths. 

I licked my chapped lips and winced against the night air in remembrance of the pain truth has brought upon the world. 

Curiosity is a natural part of life. Every child falls victim to curiosity but at some point pays a price.

***

It was a cold winter night at my house. My best friend Savannah was staying over for the night. Such a devout Christian was she, blinded by the ignorance she still held. Like a child. 

"What is this?" Savannah stared in amazement at the open book laid before her. i maneuvered myself to where she sat but knew what she was seeing far before i caught a glimpse of the chant. 

It was a new fiction book I'd picked up at the library. It was based primarily on the Wiccan belief system, and though ignorance is supposedly bliss, I see it as ignorance and only that, and we have far too much of that in this world. 

"Just some book. I think you'd really like it though. Its really cool. its all about this chick who gets into magick." i pointed out the "k" in magick, specifically because it was used consistently in this book. It was the way the Wiccans spelled i, or at least I assumed, and right now all I wanted to do was be like the character in the book.I wanted to go on adventures and be a strong powerful woman, like the girl in the story. I must admit I was not quite educated enough on the subject at the time to be sure of anything in particular. I only knew that I felt drawn to it and felt the need to show it to someone. 

" Oh, OK." she replied light-heartedly.

" But, it isn't just fiction. Some of it's real." I edged myself closer toward expressing my interest for it, but was taken aback slightly as the smile vanished from her pale cheeks and her thin blonde hair fell lifelessly in front of her eyes, hiding any further emotional responses from my view. She was looking at the book again with newfound interest.

" How much?" She looked up with a blank expression in her eyes and when her head tilted slightly like a confused young puppy, I grinned fiercely. I saw what I needed to see in her. I knew I could trust her with this and I equally trusted that she find the same interest that I did.

So I loaned her the book and within the next 48 hours I received a phone call filled with curiosity and a blossoming passion for it. We learned as much as we could from the books, which weren't the best source for information, but they were all we had at the time. We didn't realize the reality behind what we were getting into though. We knew what we knew and understood it because we were ignorant and unbiased on the subject, but we learned very soon after that, that even the people closest to us might reject us or at least what we were doing, because of what they thought they knew.

I made the mistake of attempting a ... ritual of sorts.... a circle, which in reality is just the way we connect to our deities and to nature, but my mother "sensed" some sort of evil lurking within all of this. I was accused of Satanism, by my own mother, of all people. The one who promised me protection and promised me she would accept whatever i wished to believe whatever I wish to follow. this was no belief, she told me. This was no religion. This was a path to darkness and to unholiness. It was a path that I was now forbidden to follow. 

I would have warned Savannah it were not already too late, but she had expressed her newfound interest with her family as well. Her parents automatically put the blame on me, and though we had been so close, now I feared the loss of her friendship nd when her parents forbade her from visiting me the next week, i was sure I had lost her, but i still spoke with her often.

" Listen to this Mary, 'No one shall consult a soothsayer, astrologer or diviner.  The perverse pronouncements of augurs and seers must fall silent. ... The universal curiosity about divination must be silent forever.  Whosoever refuses obedience to this command shall suffer the penalty of death and be laid low by the avenging sword.' That's a quote from something called the Codex Theodosius. It's.... it's like... a law passed by the catholic church of England. It was passed centuries ago, but i think I get it now." And I knew just what she meant. She found why just the name "Wicca" struck fear in to the hearts of the Christian families we had grown up in.

You see in another excerpt from that horrid Codex thing it stated "The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition, and may therefore deserve to be considered as a singular event in the history of the human mind." The Christian community had decided everyone had to be Christian and in order for this transformation to occur they had to somehow eliminate the way people saw the old religion. The first religion. paganism, and of course to our dismay the Catholic Church made them "Of the devil" they made Wicca's ancestors evil.

This made me angry of course, but the effect of this newfound truth sunk deeper and became more prominent in her life than in mine. I had no religion I believed in nothing so in turn i had nothing quite to lose. She on the other hand began to question everything she believed. Everything she devoted her soul to. Where would she turn if she lost all hope? Losing faith became a torturous event in her life and gaining it became the same for me.

Everything we had come to love became an "alien superstition". It became the end of our childhood. 

" Are you gonna be okay Savannah?" I questioned hesitantly.

"I uhm... I just.... there's a lot I need to do right now. I'll call you later ok." and the line went dead. I didn't hear from her for a few weeks after that and began to worry, but I had issues of my own to deal with.

My mother was getting more strict about me staying away from this Magick. This "evil spirit." but I pestered her constantly about how she didn't know what she was talking about and that I was not doing anything "evil." After a day or two she had finally let me convince her to give it a chance and let me explain that she didn't understand it yet. She wanted to sit through one of my circle's but I refused, they are too sacred and I would feel violated by her presence. I did convince her to take me to a local Wiccan/Pagan shop though which gave me hope.

All the while Savannah had been busy reading and learning and crying. She had been gaining knowledge and losing faith with every word every flip of a page every click of the mouse. It was almost an obsession. She spent hours at the library doing research determined to, for the first time, really get an understanding of her religion and learned that she couldn't accept what it was. She told me about the way she felt inside about all of this. How she realized she never had faith in any of the what she had read in the bible and the history books. 

Soon, word got around our school that we had got into Wicca, thanks to Savannah who talked it up like a priestess trying to draw people to the faith. People reacted just as we has feared they would. No amount of Savannah's explanations took effect and the next day of school was a sad day for her indeed.

"Witch, Witch!" A small group of boys chanted as we walked by on our way to our lockers. I was determined to ignore their idiocracy, but she, of course made a glance their way. 

"AH! She's trying to use her powers on me! Satanist!! Evil!" a group of stuck-up girls in pink grew wide-eyed and took off in a mass of shrill squeaks. The boys laughed, pleased with their results, "Why don't you go worship Lucifer somewhere away from all of us." They smirked at the tears forming in the corners of her eyes and walked away. I left out all the profane words for he sake.

Finally we both received a wake up call. Faith is not a peaceful, warm, subject. Every religion holds a sad bloody history in our minds now. We never could quite feel safety in the idea of it, but we both found guidance and understanding somehow in Wicca. Savannah found that connection she had lost, in Wicca, as did I, and both of us  realized we finally had a place we belonged in the spiritual world. But, it still set uneasily in our hearts for knew no one would ever truly accept who we were, who we had become. It was the connection with nature that drew Savannah to it. The understanding of all the elements in nature and how they work. How they bend and flow together and interact to create an interweaving network of life between all living things. The earth became a spirit and the air and water became her friends. She had something to keep her moving on in life now. 

I learned to trust the night and listen to the calm calls of the air. I found reason to be in Wicca. We both did. and we will never be the same after everything we went through. we will be stronger, wiser an we will always have our faith.

Author's Note

i wrote this with writers block so dont be too harsh it was a coming of age narrative for my high school english class. We had to write it from the POV of another person

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[Zeitgeist Manifesto]

This quite the story of personal integrity.
It's strange how people can treat others so harshly
for simply trying to find their own truth.