Tag: magic

Sources of my Multidimensional Self

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     Many powers influenced the development of my multidimensional self. The two that I think are most important on my journey through seminary are the influences of the Polish Catholic community and the empowerment I find through paganism.  These influences do not stand alone, they are intertwined and have been both sources of inspiration and desperation for me.  We’ll begin with a look at the influence of my family of origin’s Polish Catholic community and then at the paganism I grew into.

     My mother was born in a Red Cross camp in Germany at the end of WWII.  My grandparents were young, able-bodied people who had been taken from their homes in Poland and put to work in forced labor camps. The men worked the farm and the women worked in a bouillon factory.  They would meet at a fence and exchange vegetables and bouillon, eventually deciding to marry while awaiting rehoming after the war.  Sadly my grandparents died before we found their families, but as an adult, I made my DNA public through 23&Me, and first one set of cousins and then another found us.  We were the missing ones, the rest of their families had found each other and resettled in Poland.

     My grandparents were Polish Catholics.  Their religion was the one characteristic that prevented them from being murdered outright or sent to a concentration camp as part of the Nazi occupation of Poland.  I never knew my grandfather to be particularly religious, but my grandmother’s beliefs were the difference between remaining herself or being broken by the Nazis.  Once in the United States Grandma went to Catholic mass regularly.  Both my aunt and my mother were sent to private Catholic schools even though the tuition came at a higher price, and both remain to this day to be devout Catholics.

     I do not know where my grandparents landed in terms of psychological impact.  After the war, they chose to be sent to the United States under the assumption that their families were destroyed and there was nothing to return to.  They were sponsored by friends made in the forced labor camp who had come to the United States ahead of them, as sponsorship was a requirement to come to the US.  My grandparents had begun building their family amid displacement, lived with friends until they were able to find employment and housing in the Polish community of Wheeling, WV, and worked hard to provide a good life for their daughters.  I see the intergenerational trauma that plays out in my mom’s generation as well as in myself and my siblings.  Developing attachments is difficult when there is a very real fear of losing everything in a moment and overuse of resources, such as binge eating, is an ongoing struggle when it comes to access to resources that were in short supply.  Many of us have difficulty forming friendships due to social anxiety and depression prevents some members from connecting outside of regular church attendance. 

     Growing up I went to a Catholic school and developed a deep love of ritual, prayer, and community.  I prayed regularly, enjoyed going to church, and got involved as much as I could through choir and volunteering to read and sing in the school’s weekly mass.  Looking back, I do not know how connected I felt to the Trinity and God. I was a child who grew up in the Church and believed everything I was told with no questions because I was not aware there were other beliefs out there.  Over time the cracks began to show though, such as the power imbalance due to prescribed gender roles in the Catholic Church.  If Jesus did not discriminate between men and women, why should the Church get to?  My parents supported my decision to look at other traditions; they had books on the shelf about Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism and I was given free rein to read whatever I wanted.

     Discovering paganism is honestly my coded way of saying that I got involved with witchcraft.  I learned about the Gardnerian Tradition of Witchcraft and began a spiritual journey in eighth grade that continues today.  In witchcraft, I found empowerment in a way that the Catholic church did not provide.  I could write and perform my own rituals, honor whichever gods and goddesses I chose, if any, and engage in spiritual work anywhere and anytime I wanted or needed to.  I spent years reading books about witchcraft traditions, self-help, and mindfulness and adapted these tools to work for me.

     My Catholic upbringing certainly inspired my love for ritual, community spiritual practice, and routine when it comes to religion.  But the ability to self-define my religious beliefs lets me take pieces of mindfulness practice, self-help, ritual work, and work with the tools also provided by my therapist.  This includes avoiding practices that would be detrimental to me, such as silent meditation which can lead to dissociation or the use of intoxicants.  Self-defined religion is also useful because different parts of my plural self have differing spiritual beliefs.  Those parts can then engage in practices that may be useful and appropriate for them, but not for other parts.  

     One of the important pieces of being part of a witchcraft and pagan community is the ability to come out as transgender, queer, and disabled, and know that I am not going to be rejected by my community.  I struggle with how Catholic prayer and ritual still work for me and bring me comfort, yet I am not able to be a part of that community without being considered a sinner.  I’m able to work in both traditions by engaging in religious plurality, allowing each tradition to cover part of my needs and letting the things that don’t work for me         

     Groups are working within the Catholic church to change opinions around transgender and queerness, but a community that must tolerate me, rather than embrace me, does not provide the safety and comfort needed to engage in spiritual work.  I’ve also found unexpected pushback in the witch community as well, as there are unfortunately many elders that hold trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF) values. Both traditions can receive education to bring them up to speed in the latest science around gender, but an openness to new ideas about gender and sexuality are required for education to take hold.  These two powers provide such great inspiration and unfortunately can also inspire desperation at the same time.  Being able to hold these two truths, and a multitude of others, at the same time allows me to continue to develop as a spiritual being, while supporting my mind-body self as well.

My Spiritual Autobiography

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     Once upon a time, I was a Catholic schoolgirl.  I was devout because that was what everyone around me did – I didn’t know there was any other option. I prayed regularly, sang in the church choir, and always volunteered when it was time for my class to lead the weekly children’s mass.  I loved all of it, the ritual, the incense, the songs, and even the building itself with its marble altar and stained-glass windows.

     My family was what I’d call Catholic Plus – Catholic with the added folk beliefs that came from Poland with my Mom’s family.  We eat sauerkraut on New Year’s Day for good luck, wear underwear inside out to deflect the evil eye, and Grandma would have visits from the dead after they passed.  My great-grandfather was a village healer in Poland, who knew his way around herbs and remedies to care for farm animals.  My mother read books by Sylvia Browne and called psychic hotlines to get help in her life.  The idea of there being something else out there, whether it be a sort of magic, spirit, or energy was the idea that stuck with me.

     Over time, I started seeing issues in Catholicism that I couldn’t ignore or explain away.  I didn’t understand why Sister Margaret, the nun who ran our school, wasn’t allowed to perform the full mass when our pastor was away.  She had dedicated her life and knew all of the things to do.  Instead, she had preconsecrated hosts for the Eucharist and couldn’t give the homily.  I was jealous that the boys could be altar boys during mass, but the girls couldn’t.  That rule would change after I went on to high school, but it was too late for me.  

     As I identified parts of myself that didn’t fit with the Catholic belief system, it got harder to want to go to church or celebrate a God that wasn’t so into me.  I came out as bisexual to my mom toward the end of ninth grade and she was accepting and matter-of-factly commented that at least I couldn’t get pregnant with a girlfriend.  I wouldn’t come out as transgender until I was in my 30s but was already feeling like I was at a deficit in a gender that wasn’t allowed to do all of the things a man would be able to.  It didn’t come as a shock to my parents when I decided not to get confirmed in ninth grade.  

     My spirituality took a big turn in ninth grade, but the change started a year before.  We were working on our final science projects to finish off eighth grade, and for the first time, we were allowed to do a group project.  My two closest friends and I decided to work together, and one of them suggested we do a project researching extrasensory perception (ESP).  She had an ESP test kit at home that we could use for our experiment and we could send home permission slips to test the children at our school.  Honestly, I’m surprised to this day that we were allowed to do this at a Catholic school of all places.  We had very few rejections from students’ parents and one even asked to know the result of her daughter’s testing as she had shown some signs of clairvoyance at home.

     We did all of the ESP testing over the next few weeks, calling students into the school library and running them through three tests including predicting a dice roll to test for precognition, guessing what card we were thinking of using a set of Zener cards (5 basic shapes repeated on 25 cards) to test for telepathy, and guessing what card was pulled when the observer also didn’t see it to test for clairvoyance.  Sadly I no longer remember the results of the testing, but I would guess they were not particularly telling.  We did win an award and get to go to regionals for our work though, as we were thorough and as professional as three eighth graders could be in putting our project together.

     The spiritual twist in this journey came from the books we were using to do research.  We were mainly using scientific texts, journals, and an encyclopedia at the library to do our research, in the day of card catalogs that were index cards in a massive drawer setup.  We decided to have a sleepover to get the project board put together with our final touches. We were staying with a friend’s coach/bonus parent, and going through the books available on the shelves.  

     My friend pulled out a big blue paperback book, “Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft” by Raymond Buckland.  Aside from the text, it was a plain blue cover with a white star in a circle.  We flipped open the book and a whole new world opened before my eyes.  Images of ritual garments, directions for casting circles and creating spells, a language called the “Runes” – my friend began telling me about magic and witchcraft in a way that I’d never heard before.  I knew about the evil eye and that grandma saw dead people, but I didn’t have any language to connect it to before.  We used the book to learn about ESP, as psychic abilities were considered part of a witch’s set of tools along with palm reading and tarot card reading.

I was hooked on the idea of witchcraft at this point, a religion where I can write the rituals I need and use the tools that make sense to me to connect with a deity or the spirit world or my psyche without requiring a priest or go-between.  My mom took me to The Chrystal Shoppe in our hometown, a little gift boutique that was also the only story that carried all of the tools and books that a new age 1990s witchy shop should carry.  I looked around the first time and picked up a book that also stars at the beginning of many magical lives called “To Ride a Silver Broomstick” by Silver Ravenwolf.  It was a book about how to be a Wiccan that included more narrative and relatable information from the author’s practices compared to the Buckland book.  It gave me more context for what the tools were for, how doing magic could make me feel and set me up for many years of doing little spells and rituals in my bedroom.  My first set of tools included a leftover mulberry-scented candle from Christmas, a letter opener with a crystal handle as a ritual knife, and whatever herbs I smuggled upstairs from the kitchen. And incense. So much incense.

      On most days, I don’t believe in psychics, ESP, or the spirit world to be honest.  I say that fully knowing that one of my best friends is a tarot reader and advertises as a psychic whom I’ve gotten really helpful readings from.  I want to believe, and I enjoy the macabre rituals and beliefs like mediumship and ESP that came out of the weird times that were Victorian England and the spiritualist movement of the early 1900s.  Sometimes I feel more attached to the style and the drama of the ideas rather than the ideas themselves and that certainly played out in the rituals I wrote for myself in my moon and stars notebook that I called my Book of Shadows.

     The takeaway I did keep and still use is the flexibility and creativity to develop my own rituals, knowing that even if they were just impacting my own psyche like words of affirmation do, I felt more in control of the world around me and my relationship to it.  I continued practicing through high school and I didn’t hide what I was doing from my parents.  They had been teens in the 60s and had gotten way weirder than I ever could, from Mom following Black Sabbath to dad’s collection of books on every Eastern religion.  I was always given free rein over what I wanted to read and do as long as it wasn’t hurting anyone else.