Religion-shaming and other nuisances

I’ve been a very committed Episcopalian. I’ve been a student in a ceremonial magic tradition. I’ve been an urban, American druid. I’ve taken refuge and bodhisattva vows as a Tibetan Buddhist. I’ve identified as a devotional polytheist. I’ve been an interested bystander to Wicca, Feri, Reclaiming, and other traditions of the Craft.

I can still go to the church where my late ex-husband was the organist and feel at home, welcomed by family. Last year I discovered the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and their queer sangha that meets online once a month. Meditating with those folks, talking about Dharma and queer life, I know I am with my own people. The Ancient Order of Druids in America welcomed me back after a long hiatus, and while I first got interested in learning Welsh because druidry, I’m finding that learning Welsh for its own sake points me back toward the druid way.

But when I look back on the heyday of the polytheist movement in the mid-2010s, when I look back on a lot of my involvement with “pagan community” online, I just remember a lot of people telling me I was doing it wrong. That I was still too Christian and not pagan enough. That I wasn’t a good Buddhist if I wanted to practice druidry, too, or not a good enough druid, really, if I was interested in Buddhism. That whatever I was doing for or giving to the gods, however important they were in my life, it wasn’t enough.

For so much of my life, I have felt I wasn’t enough, even while I was exceeding expectations, or excelling in something creative.

Now, I’m ten years distant from an ex-spouse who owed his livelihood, which was also supporting me for most of our marriage, to the institutional Church. And I have a diagnosis of ADHD, which I didn’t have until three years ago. A former friend once told me I kept changing my religion as a way to cope with my depression. She was not, I guess, entirely wrong. But I was also using my religion to cope with my increasingly hollow marriage and my undiagnosed ADHD and my overall unhappiness with life.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I felt like an oddball for being interested in a pagan monasticism, or interweaving polytheistic devotion with the Dharma. Now as I look at pagans, polytheists, Buddhists, and Christians online, those ideas are everywhere. Polytheist monastics are thick on the ground. Buddhist lamas talk about ancestor veneration, deities, touching the earth. Syncretism is no longer a slur with an academic tone; it’s just what people do as they try to relate the gods and the wisdom teachings to the challenges of daily life.

Right now, I’m interested in exploring a Druid Dharma or a Buddhist druidry. That may change, although I suspect the Dharma connection won’t. I have a body of work that I’m getting into shape for publication, and I’m ready to explore new territory in fiction, in poetry, and in blogging. Here’s to the Full Moon of Beltane, to Vesak, to new beginnings!