My route here is as long as it is convoluted. I grew up in a household that was nominally Christian. While I remember our family attending with fair regularity when I was very young, by the time I was six or seven we had fallen out of the habit. For most of my childhood then, my experience of religion was mostly as a bar against which I was supposed to measure or an authority to which my parents would appeal. I don't recall a time in which Christianity was an active practice in my home that meant something on a spiritual level.
For the most part, it was the appeal to authority, often for what appeared to be arbitrary reasons. I remember being lectured about having female friends, because it was "improper" for an adolescent male to have female friends. This was mighty inconvenient, given that boys of my age were mostly into sports, pot, and porn for much of my developmental years. Lacking an interest in any of the above, I had a hard time connecting. I remember being lectured against reading the wrong things, because somehow knowing about other cultures or belief systems is how the devil gets you. There may be some truth in this, I suppose given that I am a heathen now. I remember being told that fantasy was dangerous, and being lectured against my interests in anything martial - swords and dragons and violence, these were all things hated by God. The net effect was that I learned to conceal my interests and tastes, and when I did get romantically involved with someone, I kept it quiet.
On the other hand, by the time I hit 14 or 15 years old I had a growing interest in spirituality. By then I was already a history nerd, and my interests expanded into not only who these people were and what they did, but a deep desire to understand what they believed and the culture they lived in. Like many, I first turned back to the bible, but knowing as much as I knew already, I couldn't take any of modern Christianity seriously - not knowing the truth about the pagan origins of this or that, or how much of the Bible was essentially cobbled together by the Council of Nycea to select which stories most fit the political aspirations of a developing state religion. Worse still was actually reading the bible. One cannot get out of genesis without having some serious moral questions. I would carry these with me for a very long time.
I then turned to Gnosticism, but while it developed in me an interest in the esoteric, I found too much of what caused me to resent Christianity in the first place - a denial of the world around you in favor of some promised mythology.
My studies became more obsessive with time. I spent some time in Islam and Judaism, Kabbalah.. I eventually turned to the Western Esoteric tradition and spent a good deal of time studying Hermeticism (something I'm still fond of conceptually, even if I do not identify with or practice it). This was about the time I had my first brush with paganism -- unfortunately, through Wicca.
Wicca is a topic for another blog, but suffice to say that while I was first captivated by the notion of returning to pre-christian religion, so much of it was.. flatly wrong. The "origin story" was highly suspect, the cult of persecution and victimization, and most importantly, the underlying assumptions of how paganism actually worked in a historical context. The new age movement soured me on paganism for a long time, and I eventually returned my search to other cultures and contexts.
Along the way I encountered Stoicism, and next to Heathenry, Stoicism is perhaps my second favorite ideology. It shares many of the core values of Heathenry and ultimately, Stoicism is what freed me from Christianity.
There's a funny thing about growing up as a Christian. Even if you don't intellectually buy the story, there's a part of your brain that will always go "..but what if I'm wrong?" What if there is a God and he is as described by the desert faiths? What if there is a hell, and torment, and all of that. While stumbling through Stoicism, I found a quote that is perhaps one of my favorites of all time.
"If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them." Everything fell into place at that moment. I realized it ultimately didn't matter if the desert god was real, he was not someone I wanted any part of. I was free.
The next few years would see me reading deeply on everything from classical Greek philosophy to Buddhism and Shinto, but I always found myself trying to cobble things together. Pick a bit of this, a bit of that. I briefly wondered if I would have to simply write my own religion and start some minor cult somewhere.
Then one day, on a whim, I downloaded a handful of podcasts from itunes, of all things. Among them was an episode of a pagan podcast called Raven Radio -- specifically, a Heathen podcast. The topic of the episode was "Does Wicca and Asatru speak the same language?" Being somewhat wary of wiccans, I was curious. I was instantly hooked.
Raven Radio was a very reconstructionist oriented heathen podcast. The people were ..normal human beings. Down to earth. They had jobs and lives and lived in the real world. Before that episode was over, I was overwhelmed with the feeling "these are my people." It was an awakening for me, a feeling of home and community I've never known elsewhere. I immediately downloaded everything I could get ahold of, grabbed a couple books I found on the subject, and got to work. It was not a long process to realize not only was Heathenry a kind of coming home -- It was not a conversion. I've always been Heathen. I just didn't know it.
I hope one day to get a hold of those guys - Chuck, Bill and Bob. Maybe even meet them in person. If it hadn't been for the work they put in on that show, I may never have found a place to call home.
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