The W word. Witch

A Message Presented by Tina Whittle

February 1, 2009

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Statesboro

It's a hard word to wrap my brain around, much less my mouth. The same with Wiccan, pagan, priestess, practitioner of an Earth-based spirituality. Yet these are all words that I claim now as vital parts of who I am, especially in here, within this congregation. It's easy here, in this safe and nurturing space.

Sharing this identity "out there" is more problematic. In the Pagan vernacular, this is called "coming out of the broom closet." And two years ago, I kicked myself right out of the broom closet when I volunteered to present on "Solitary Eclectic Wicca" during our Summer of Passions. I was passionate, all right, so passionate that I forgot that an announcement of or service was going to appear in the local newspaper.

I will admit -- and this is a painful admission -- that when I realized my Wiccanness was out there, black and white and read all over, I started thinking of damage control. I am a mystery writer and an academic, I told myself. People will think this Wicca stuff is just research for my next novel. After all, I do research on committing the perfect murder too -- nobody's yet cancelled a playdate because Kaley's mom likes to read about do-it-yourself poisoning or quick and easy pipe bombs.

In the end, however -- and I am proud to say it only took me two minutes to get to this realization -- I figured out that who I am is who I am, and that whatever challenges others had with accepting that were their challenges, not mine. And in the end, the only questions I got were more about UU than Wicca, as in, what is up with that UU church? Do they just let you believe any old thing you want to over there?

The answer is, uum, pretty much yes. Any old thing, any new thing. Your beliefs are your own, and you are welcome to them.

Which is why last summer I stood before this congregation and lit a candle of joy that I'd completed my first official year and a day of study, and that I could claim my title of Initiate in the Temple of Witchcraft tradition. I even got a certificate.

Which is cool. But it's not what made me a witch. That journey -- the one that moved me from Primitive Baptist to UU to UU Pagan -- started with the dinosaurs.

Or rather, it started with an idea I heard in my teens, from people in my church -- that dinosaurs were a tool of Satan, created to confuse good Christians into doubting the accuracy of the Bible. Which I knew was a ridiculous, and also unnecessary. I never understood the need to separate science and faith, as if saying the bible were a story, or a myth, makes it less true. And I never understood why my questions were always treated with suspicion, as if those too were a tool of Satan.

Like many spiritually baffled people, I ended up at UU, where I began to entertain the radical idea that faith was more about questions than answers. I didn't know what this faith was, but I did know that my spirituality could not be separate from the dinosaurs. It had to include black holes and Neanderthals, string theory and geology, not just exist comfortably with them, but include them in a coherent whole.

For the more I understood about the world around me -- biology and physics -- and the more I understood about the world within me -- psychology and neuroscience -- the more I understood that as a human being, I was poised at the fulcrum of two vast universes -- the outer and the inner. I was the boundary, the portal, the point of connection. And I needed a spiritual practice that incorporated this knowledge.

Being a UU and a writer and a college instructor, I knew about all kinds of religions, including Earth-based Spiritualities like Wicca and Druidism. I found these fascinating because they were spiritual systems, encompassing all aspects of life, not just religion. They celebrated science and nature and a life of the mind, as well as symbol and myth and the human drive for narrative meaning. Most importantly, they put theory into practice in a way that complemented the UU principles I'd grown to claim as my own.

Paganism was everything I was looking for. Too bad I didn't realize this for years.

It felt like something other people -- more unusual people -- practiced. I just never saw myself as a robe and ritual knife kinda girl. Paganism was on the edge, and I am a lot of things, but I 'm not edgy. Not hip. Not dramatic. I'm a middle of the road intellectual with a lot of imagination, yes, but also a very solid grasp on what makes the world . . . solid. What did ancient ways have to teach me, a child of the Hubble telescope and DNA sequencing?

As it turns out, the answer was a lot. A whole lot. Because some of the very same qualities that make science so valuable to my understanding of the universe, are found in the Pagan way of seeing as well.

And yet, when I first started studying Paganism, I didn't see these connections. I read voraciously. I bought a lot of crystals and incense. For Christmas that year, my husband gave me a witch's calendar. And I started wearing a pentacle around my neck, an unobtrusive one that only on second or third glance reveals itself for what it is.

I became a solitary eclectic Wiccan, solitary because I practiced all by myself, eclectic because the faith I practiced was exclusively my own, pulled from various traditions. It's a valid way of being in the Pagan community, where your faith is as personal as you want to make it, and as private. Both of these aspects have since changed, for as I grew more comfortable with my identity as a Wiccan, the other thing I discovered is that deep in my bones, I long for the support of the group.

In other words, I discovered I'm not just a spiritual person I'm a religious one too.

This surprised me at first, since I'd always associated religion with limits and orthodoxies. I liked being my own spiritual boss, and I am not the only witch who feels this way -- it kind of comes with the territory. I am reminded of novelist Terry Pratchett's oft-repeated line that the natural number of a coven is one. But while I found, and still find, profound meaning in solitary practice, eventually I realized -- and this was another surprise -- that to continue my "free and responsible search for meaning,, I needed Pagan kinfolk. Terry Pratchet explains this thusly -- witches have to keep an eye on each other to make sure nobody starts cackling.

I needed limits, I needed rules. I needed -- to my utter amazement -- a religious institution.

And that was the first click -- the first connection between the science I loved and the faith I was growing to love. Science is an institution too. It reveres past discovery, but only as much as it informs present discovery. Nothing is ever lost, only incorporated. Like in the way that we still honor Newtonian physics despite the fact that scanning tunneling electron microscopes operate outside of these laws. Scientists don't throw out the old, not if it makes sense in terms of the new, but they don't enshrine it either.

And science has rules for discovery -- the scientific method. Scientists collect and examine data, form hypothesis. They test those hypotheses and retest to verify. They create theories, which are then subject to critique and further examination. Only if the theory continues to meet these assessments is it accepted as true, but it is a relative truth -- the best answer until a better one is found. This entire process is fueled by peer review, where scientists are "kept straight" by other experts in their field.

Without the rules of the scientific method, scientific research would not exist. And without the testing of peer review . . . well, scientists left alone for too long start to cackle too.

Like the scientific institution, the institution of a Wiccan tradition -- both its rules and its community -- offered me religion in its most linguistic sense -- to rejoin, to bind together. It gave me a system of belief that I could share with others, people who could use the same spiritual language with me, who could go deep with it. A friend compares this process to a spider web, that there is value in the round and round, certainly. But eventually you have to start going toward the center, he says. Eventually, he says, you must confront the Mystery.

That's Mystery with a capital M. And it's where the outer and the inner universe meet, where science and religion find common ground -- at the Mystery.

For mysteries and puzzles aren't the same thing. As theologian Diogenes Allen explains:

"When a problem is solved, it is over and done with. We go on to other problems. But a mystery, once recognized, is something we are never finished with. Instead, we return to it again and again and it unfolds new levels to us. Mysteries, to be known, must be entered into. We do not solve mysteries. The deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get. Still greater depths are revealed to us the further we go."
http://clf.uua.org/quest/2007/04/index.html

My religion is a mystery religion. It does not posit a set of hidebound hierarchical rules that I must accept -- rather, it encourages me to engage with past tradition by bringing my own personal revelations to it.

Science too, is full of mysteries, from the cosmological to the mundane, from the grandest scale to the tiniest. The edge of the universe has its secrets, but then, so does the human genome. We have not figured this thing out, folks, not at all -- it keeps surprising us.

I think of quarks as a prime example. A quark is a type of elementary particle found in nucleons and other subatomic particles. They are a major constituent of matter, and they come in three flavors -- up, down, and strange. But don't ask me further -- I haven't got a clue.

I do know, however, that nobody's ever seen one. As physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne explains, "Quarks are unseen realities. Nobody has ever isolated a single quark in the lab. So we believe in them not because we've seen them . . . but because assuming that they're there makes sense of great swaths of physical experience . . . . So, in this indirect way, the unseen reality of quarks become an absolutely fundamental aspect of our understanding of the structure of matter. . . . It's the fact that they give intelligibility to the world that makes us believe that they're actually there."
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/quarks/

Here is the intersecting territory, the unseen reality, that both science and Paganism share. And to take it even further, they both share the idea that while the Mystery is often a paradox, it's one that we humans can interact with personally. In Wicca, we do this through worship and prayer and spellcasting. In science, they do it through experiments. And the universe responds.

Polkinghorne says, "If you ask [the universe] a wave-like question, it gives you a wave-like answer. If you ask it a particle-like question, it gives you a particle-like answer. [But] you can't ask both questions at the same time."
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/quarks/

This responsiveness intrigues me, for even though Polkinghorne and I don't share the same religious vocabulary, we do share this idea that no matter what you call it -- prayer or spell casting, supplication or magic -- it is possible to share a personal interaction between humanity and the Divine.

For like I said earlier, science hasn't gotten this thing figured out, not by a longshot. This universe in an organism, evolving and growing, not a machine. Even physicists -- the men and women who say that if I drop this pencil, it WILL have the forces of gravity exerted on it -- even physicists find that in the quantum world, cause and effect don't work they way they do out here, in our level of existence.

There is an unseen -- and at this point, unseeable -- world that is the foundation of our seen reality. To use Polkinghornes's term, quantum adds a certain cloudiness, a randomness. This, he says, is the key to how prayer can have an effect in the world, how human agency can participate with the whole of creation. Some things are predictable, "But," he says, "there are other aspects of the world which are cloudy, and I think those are the areas where there is, so to speak, room to maneuver."

Today is Imbolc, the Pagan Sabbat that celebrates the dormant seed, the cleared ground. Halfway between the long night of the Winter Solstice and the balance of the Vernal Equinox, Imbolc is a time of promise. Tonight, for the very first time, I will co-lead a Wiccan ritual honoring Briget, the Celtic Goddess most closely associated with Imbolc.

And tonight I will say, Most blessed Briget

Living light

Bright arrow

Sudden flame

Goddess of the eternal fires

I guard your spark

I bless your name

There are so many ways to know this Universe. They are paradoxical but complementary, predictable and surprising. I am a skeptic and a witch. I read both Scientific American and tarot cards. And I know there is something to the Universe that participates with us, with me. I now live this knowledge the same way I live the knowledge that the force of gravity that works on this pen will work on me when I walk outside. It will keep me from flinging out into the cosmos. It will hold me in place, right where I belong. I have faith that this is so.