The Path of A Christian Witch

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My own daughter and son often asked me questions about God and various religious beliefs as they were growing up. I would answer them honestly and to the best of my ability but I did not make much of an effort to take them to church where they could truly learn. I did not want to force that upon them. But we did talk about God and Christian beliefs often. I tried to teach my children that there literally is no right or wrong way to worship.

The bookshop owner complains that many of her young enquirers “haven’t yet understood [witchcraft] is a religion” with “a veneration for the God and the Goddess”, not “a service provider”. Dr Helen Berger, a sociologist at Brandeis University, near Boston, Massachusetts, estimates that “less than 20 per cent” of those who explore for a few months stay. These feasts commemorate the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and the beginning of the harvest season. One of the girls provided another piece of inspiration when she asked to play in a wardrobe in Lewis's house. He soon set out to write a story for the children, who, he thought, did not read enough. One can detect the author's own voice behind the professor's repeated cries of "What do they teach them at these schools?"

I pray to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit every single day, many times a day. I am comfortable in the knowledge that God hears my prayers as does the Goddess and both are constantly working to help me create the best life possible for myself and my family. The trend appears to have crossed the Pond, albeit in less politicised and attention-grabbing form. The industry monitor Nielsen Book Research says that UK sales of books on mythology and the occult have doubled in the past five years, while sales of books in its “Alternative Belief Systems” category have risen 13 per cent in the same period — double the growth of general book sales. Ritual practice: Baking and sharing bread is a ritual both Pagans and Christians can relate to. It is especially relevant to Christians as a commemoration of the Eucharist. Before writing his Christian fiction books, C.S. Lewis was known as an apologist: a writer who defended his faith using logic. Inspired by his reading, Lewis's personal philosophy had been slowly approaching theism (belief in a god) under another name: he came to believe in a universal spirit without yet calling it God. He knew that his position was confused. In Surprised by Joy he likens the following process to being hunted down by God, or even being defeated by him in a game of chess.

Ritual practice: Burning candles throughout the night is a practice of both Pagans and Christians. Christians still perform a midnight mass on this night, a symbol of keeping the light burning in the darkest of the night. Pagans let candles burn all night long to give strength to the sun on the longest night of the year. One former pagan who is considering ordination and asked to be named in this article only as May encountered Christianity at university where mutual curiosity created “a lot of overlap” between the memberships of the pagan social group and the Christian Union. Now a funeral minister who identifies as a High Anglican, May says she has “blended” her beliefs with her old beliefs rather than leaving them all behind. The Screwtape Letters consists of a series of letters from a senior demon to a junior tempter, advising him in his pursuit of a human soul. The Letters had originally been published weekly in a Church paper called The Guardian (not the same as the British national newspaper), before being collected as a book. An occult bookshop in New York encouraged Facebook users last October to join them in putting a curse on President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee (now Judge) Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused by three women of sexual assault, as the #MeToo movement suddenly took on a spiritual angle. Lewis began writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1948. The inspiration is not difficult to guess. A few years earlier, during the Second World War, Lewis's household had played host to a group of children evacuated from London and other cities: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe begins with four evacuees staying in the house of an old professor.The rules of the church don’t work for me. I can’t have someone telling me “this is how it’s done because this is how it’s always been done”, especially when “the church” of today was built upon layer upon layer of “stuff” that has very little to do with Jesus himself. Is it possible to be both Pagan and Christian? Is it possible to be a practicing Witch and still pray to God and Jesus? A practicing Christian Witch? I’ve spent quite a bit of time studying Wicca, Paganism and other paths of Witchcraft over the years and while I certainly do draw from some of them, in some ways I find many of the “rules” of organised witchery to be just as dogmatic as the church. That may ruffle some feathers, but if you’ve spent any time in the witchy communities online you’ll know some of those communities can be just as “my way or the highway” as other religious groups! So for me being a Christian Witch is all about doing things my own way. Whatever the effect on Lewis, it is true that he was chastened. He was concerned that the public might confuse the disproof of a logical argument for God with a disproof of God himself. He realised that trying to prove God's existence through reason had been a mistake, and from then on his Christian writings were more concerned with intuitive faith and feeling. Mr Cudby, one of the C of E’s five active New Religious Movements advisers, says: “There are an awful lot of people called Christian witches — [who practise] a more or less orthodox faith, but they believe they have spell-crafting gifts.” Would these not be identified as prophetic gifts by parts of the Church? “It’s difficult to say.”

Church House asked the Church Times not to use several of her comments, including a reference to a specific parish that had experienced problems, in case it reignited tensions with local pagans. A priest in an area with pagan activity declined to be interviewed for the same reason.

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Typically, “they are fed up with it and want to move on, or they’ve got some problems with it.” She advises that if they look for a mentor online — “like Buffy has a mentor, somebody who’s going to guide them into something a bit riskier, something a bit more scary, but also a bit more exciting” — they put themselves at risk of cyber exploitation, psychological dependency, or simply being scammed. Lewis, very unusually for the time, thought that there ought to be some provision in Christianity for resurrection or heaven for animals. Lewis claimed the civil marriage ceremony, quietly performed in a registry office, was a purely legal measure to allow Joy to stay in the country. Nobody is quite sure of their feelings for each other at that stage, but shortly afterwards some news arrived that changed everything. Joy was diagnosed with advanced cancer and did not have long to live. Lewis realised he loved Joy and decided to make their marriage public. The ceremony was performed around Joy's hospital bed. When she was able to leave hospital, Joy, Douglas and David moved into the Kilns. For years she had been struggling with this very battle and feared what other people may think or say about her. She thought that one had to choose and she simply could not do that. We then spoke at length about her beliefs as well as my own. Please note here that there is a huge difference between being Wiccan and a Witch and I will discuss that in a future story. This young lady had chosen the Wiccan path.

Whatever works for you is what is right for you. It’s about your own relationship with the divine all around and within you. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, along with Aslan as Christ figure, one character fulfils a Judas role by being tempted to betray the others, while the White Witch herself plays the role of the tempter. The role of Father Christmas has been compared to the Holy Spirit, as has Aslan's magical breath. The name of the oldest child may even have been a reference to Saint Peter.Ritual practice: Imbolc or Candlemas is a great day to honor the Sacred Feminine. It can be done in a traditional way, like burning candles and offering flowers at a shrine in Her honor. This date also coincides with the feast of St. Brigid, a Druid whose life work was to tend to women's health, particularly in childbirth. What better way, then, to honor this special day by volunteering or making a donation to your local women's shelter. While I hope that this post has maybe inspired you a little or given you some ideas for exploring your path, remember that no one can tell you how to be spiritual but you. To Lewis the practice of taming animals, and making them more humanlike, was an obvious parallel to God's way of making believing Christians more Christlike. He suggested that domestic animals might somehow achieve immortality in the context of their masters' immortality. It is a comforting thought for anyone who has hoped to see their beloved pet in heaven, though not much use to a dog belonging to a non-Christian. On the other hand, the statement that they 'have no souls' may mean that they have no moral responsibilities and are not immortal. But the absence of 'soul' in that sense makes the infliction of pain upon them not easier but harder to justify, for it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this. ... 'Soullessness', in so far as it is relevant to the question at all, is an argument against vivisection.