There is a 30 day Pagan journaling challenge for the month of September set up on Instagram and I thought it would be fun to do it – and would get me back into the swing of things as well.

And back into blogging here as I answer the posts. (I’m not much of an Instagram person.)

Today’s question is:

Why did I become Pagan?

Because it felt like coming home.

I was raised Christian, but it never really felt right to me; it never “fit” with what my soul actually felt.

Once I found Paganism and the concept of both God and Goddess, I felt like I finally had some place where I belonged.

I’m not going to lie. It was a struggle at first, dealing with the guilt, and fear of hell induced by the Christian church.

How did I get past them?

One was the knowledge or understanding or whatever that various forms of Paganism had been around since long before Christianity. (I never did get a satisfactory answer to the question of what happened to all the people who died before Jesus was crucified.)

Then came the understanding that Satan is pretty much a Christian concept, not part of the Pagan mythos or belief system.

That helped, but what really clinched it was a dream I had one night, a few months after my grandfather’s death.  That was over 20 years ago and the dream is still vivid.

I was outside of a little country church. It was late evening; the moon and stars weren’t visible yet, but light spilled from the windows of the church. I walked up the gravel driveway toward it but my attention was on the forest beyond it, the pine trees nothing more than a black silhouette against the dark purple sky. Outside all was quiet and peaceful, but from inside the church I could hear a man’s voice: the preacher speaking. It was a service for my grandfather, one of the gentlest, kindest men ever to walk the earth, but not a church-goer, and the preacher was praying that he would be received into heaven even though he didn’t attend church regularly.

I stopped walking toward the building and turned toward the forest.

I woke with the words, “What a sad religion” in my head.