Wiccan Work it Out
by John Gibson
I wasn't always a pagan.
I was actually born a Methodist, and was baptized into Christ by the Methodist Church. I remember going to church on Sunday mornings to go to Sunday school. I remember that one of the biggest reasons why I was there was the fact that they served really great cookies and juice. None of the early lessons stand out in my mind.
My mind goes blank as to whether or not I was taught any doctrine or dogma in my Sunday school classes. I remember acting out Bible stories, but I don't remember any teaching that went along with them. I can remember bits and snatches, like when my third grade Sunday school teacher acted out the temptation of Christ in the desert. I can also remember some snatches of the confirmation class that I took in sixth grade, but nothing really stands out as far as teachings.
As I sit down to write this article, I think back on that, and on all the rest of my life, and I am struck by the awesome mercy and grace our Lord Jesus has for each of us.
I still marvel at the fact that just over a year ago, I had no interest in Jesus Christ, the Catholic Church, Scripture or the future of my soul. You see, I was an "enlightened" member of the neo-pagan religious community. I was chairman for the self-proclaimed Chicago Pagan Leadership Conference, I was assistant forum leader for Religions and Ethics, and I was forum manager for the pagan area on America Online, where I wrote rituals and liturgy for the glory of false gods. I flirted with Wicca and ceremonial magick for a bit, before finally focusing on trying to recreate the Irish pagan religions. In short, I was pro-choice, pro-pagan and anti-God.
Today I look back on that part of my life as almost a dream. I sometimes can't recognize the person who was involved in all that because I've changed so much. Sometimes I look back in anguish over my past sins, knowing they've been forgiven, but also knowing I put the souls of my family and others in danger as part of my rebellion against God.
Until I was 18 and went away to college, I was active in United Methodist Youth Fellowship, but this program was mainly social. We met on Sunday nights, had supper and had some sort of program. We would go out on overnights, go on ski trips and work on service projects, but in all the times that we got together, I can rarely remember praying.
On one overnight, my best friend Greg smuggled some beer into the camp, and we proceeded to drink it with two girls down on the beach. The alcohol went to my head, and my hormones and I were off and running. Both Greg and I were caught, but all I got was a slap on the wrist. The youth minister didn't lecture me on the immorality of my acts, he simply told me not to do it again.
I was also involved in the Youth Choir at the church. I remember getting in trouble there for sneaking alcohol aboard the tour bus. But again, we were all just given a slap on the wrist and not told about the danger we were putting our souls into. If I had been told, I probably wouldn't have listened anyway. I simply didn't have any grounding in the faith I was being raised in, to help me really understand what these actions were doing to my soul.
My parents are Methodists, and both go to church every Sunday. They've both served as Sunday school teachers, on the board of the church and in other functions in the church, but the main thing I remember is that for me, church was mainly a social thing. To this day, my parents pray with the family just three times a year: at Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. We were active, but I felt I was just going through the motions. I wasn't prepared for the spiritual battles that were to lay ahead.
When I was finally out of the house and at college, I removed the church obstacle from my life. Simply put, it wasn't cool to go to church when you were at college. Besides, I was usually too hungover to get to church.
During this period in my life, my drinking got out of control, and so did my drug habit. I had experimented with drugs during high school, but didn't start heavily using them until college. College was a hedonist's dream. No one watching over you, no one telling you what to do. I can still remember my Residence Assistant in the dorm telling us the best place to go and smoke pot where we were most likely not to get caught. I was caught up in the tangled web of drugs and alcohol and women. I turned my back on God, and my Lord Jesus. I started calling myself an agnostic because I really wasn't sure there was anything out there.
It was at this time that I started dabbling in the occult. I got into tarot cards and was using them to try to tell the future. It seemed like fun at the time, but it was this dabbling that would lead me deeper.
Eventually, I dragged myself into AA and got sober and straight. I wish I could say God was the center of my life at this point, but He wasn't. A few months later, my college career came to a screeching halt when the house of cards I had built came crashing down. I had been lying to my parents about my classes. I would drop classes during the year, then retake them in the summer months. Finally, I failed the Student Use of English test and was held back from graduating.
But God didn't forget about me. Seven days before my last drink, God threw me what was to become my lifeline back to Him. But it would take a lot more storms and rebellion before He would pull me into His Church.
The lifeline was Susan — the woman who would become my wife. A week before my last drink, I flew up to Chicago to help marry off my best friend, Greg (the same Greg who had smuggled the beer into church camp). There, I met Susan. When I boarded my plane back to Texas, I had her number and address. We started corresponding, and I began flying up to spend major holidays with her. Eventually I proposed, and she accepted.
Susan was a cradle Catholic who had fallen away from the Church. We got married outside the Catholic Church (without the Church's permission) and started our life together.
At that time, I was working in a computer store and she was studying for her CPA. We were attending (every so often) the Methodist church that we were married in, but we moved to Riverside, Illinois, and she decided to go back to the Church. When she went to confession, the priest told her she was a fornicator and that our children would be illegitimate, since we hadn't been married in the Church. I know the priest's intentions were good, but I give him an A for effort, and an F in form. The incident drove a wedge between us and the Church, a wedge that would keep us away for another eight years.
The next few years were uneventful. We moved to Westmont, Illinois, and started attending the Methodist church there. We also attended the Young Adults group, but once again, the group was more of a social group than anything else.
Finally I started to get more heavily into the occult and pagan stuff. My wife and I dropped out of the Young Adults group, and I started meeting with other pagans on America Online. We would meet in an online room called "White Magick." It was then that things started getting strange.
I had heard about Wicca and Ceremonial Magick and was interested in them. While in the White Magick room, I asked if anyone knew of anyone in Chicago that could help me learn. Five seconds later, a person popped into the room and typed, "Hi! From Chicago." That's how I met Alan.
Alan was a member of a group in Chicago who were into various beliefs. They claimed to be based on the Hermetic Order (a Ceremonial Magick group), but also incorporated many different beliefs into their system. They claimed to be working with the Kaballa, based on Jewish mysticism, Wicca, Ceremonial Magick, Gnostic Christianity and Celtic beliefs.
I met with Alan, became interested, and started meeting with his group during their new moon rituals. Most of these rituals were what we called "prosperity" rituals, because they were aimed at getting money to the participants. I participated fully in these rituals. At this point, I'd like to mention a sinister reality: At times, the devil can use the tactic of giving "gifts" as a lure. During one of these rituals, I was in need of a couple of thousand dollars to pay bills. The next day, I was contacted by a gentleman who wanted to purchase two computers that I had for sale.
I got deeper and deeper into the study of these religions. I started studying Wicca, but could not accept many of the historical claims by many its adherents. I studied Ceremonial Magick for a while, but decided I was most interested in the Celtic religions that had been in Ireland before St. Patrick converted the people to Christianity.
It was also at this time that I was hired by the forum leader of America Online to be his assistant forum leader. I remember him asking at the time he hired me why I had turned away from Christ, and I remember telling him that I felt it wasn't my path. We had a good relationship and we worked well together, but when I was hired on to the forum, I brought my agenda with me and I started working on it. My agenda was to build a forum on America Online for pagan religions, and I can tell you right now, I succeeded.
If you have access to America Online, you can type in a certain keyword, and you'll see my shrine to my rejection of Christ. Over a period of four years, I nurtured the pagan area from a single folder in "Other Religions" to a section with many message boards, several libraries and a chat room. How? By micro-managing the boards so they looked busier than they really were.
On America Online, the message board system is set up so that when a message board reaches a certain number of topics, it starts housecleaning. Housecleaning is where the system marks older topics for deletion to make room for newer topics.
In most online areas, people will pop in to see if there's a topic they're interested in. If there isn't, they'll create a topic. The problem is that many people are lazy, and they won't look completely through a message board to see if the topic they want is there. If the topic isn't found within the first ten to fifteen topics, they'll usually use the "create topic" command to create a topic on the board.
Since the housecleaning routines don't go into effect until after 3:00 a.m., there was time for me to go onto the board and make sure that topics were consolidated into one, and messages were moved to folders that had higher numbers of messages.
For example, there would usually be more than three new topic folders on Wicca a week. Each of these new folders would have 10 to 15 messages the first day. However, at the bottom of the topic list was the first Wicca folder, which had 400+ messages in it. I would move the 10 to 15 messages from each new folder into the older Wicca folder, then delete the new topic folders. This would ensure that the older Wicca topic always had new messages in it, but would also mark it as a folder that had been used that day, and therefore be ignored by the housecleaning routines.
Another way I micro-managed the board was to check out the dates of the last post. This is how the system would determine which topic folder it would delete. The topic folder with the oldest last post was the one that usually got axed by the system. If I had a topic which had a high message count but hadn't been posted to in the last 15 days, I would post a message to the topic and that would not only save the topic, but also put it on the "New Messages" list so others would see it, too. By managing the topics in such a fashion, I was able to make sure my areas had high posting numbers. I would then use that information to beg and plead for more message boards because I was "running out of room." Under my tenure as Pagan Forum Leader, I was able to boast that my area had close to 15,000 posts over seven message boards.
This strategy was also used in the file areas. By tapping into my resources on the Internet, I would upload files under my name or several throwaway names. This would fill my libraries and get us a reputation for being a good pagan-friendly area. The more members I got, the more files I would have. By tapping those I knew had good connections for files, I was able to get more done with less and fill up the libraries. By uploading large collections of files zipped together, AOL saw a higher percentage of time used in my libraries and was inclined to give me more resources.
Finally we started working on getting a better front end for the area and to get a chat room. Up until this point, the area's online was just made up of lists that you'd access by clicking on one icon to go to the libraries, and another icon to go to the message boards. I started working with the forum leader to get a better looking face on the area, along with our own keyword. Finally AOL agreed, and the area as you now see it was created and put online.
Getting the chat room out of AOL was a bit more difficult. I recommended a friend of mine to be the chat coordinator for the Religions and Ethics area. She was also a pagan, and she helped recruit many pagan hosts for our area and started getting pagan chats in the main room. The more pagan chats we could get going, the more likely AOL was to give us the chat room. We did get a few complaints about the fact that there were more pagan chats than Christian, but we usually said we were waiting for Christian hosts to come on board and start chats.
On the chat front, I really didn't have to do that much. Our boards and file libraries were so large that we were pulling lots of pagans online. The chats would start out with 20 people, would grow to 45, then hover around 35 to 40.
The usage numbers (AOL can track how many people use what and for how long) were a different story. Later I was told that while the Christian areas had 50,000 posts, the average time a user spent in the area was 10+ minutes. In the pagan areas, the average time spent in the message boards was less than two. I was lucky that at that time, the producers looked only at the numbers I was able to manipulate, rather than the usage numbers. I believe they implemented a new policy after I forced the numbers higher through the careful management of the message system.
During the last three years of my pagan career, I had been focusing on the Celtic religions. I was convinced I was being called by the "old gods" to recreate these religions and bring them back into the world. I was working with other Celtic pagans, reading the myths and trying to put together as many pieces of the puzzle that I could. But many things started cropping up.
One of the biggest issues you'll come up against in the neo-pagan religions is the issue of abortion. A majority of the neo-pagan community are Wiccans, and of that, a vast majority of them are women. The issue of abortion is a very important one. Most Wiccans favor the right to choose. However, this is more of a mental choice than one based on theological grounds. Wiccans have one moral law. They call it the "rede," which means something like, "A harm to none," or, "As long as it harms no one, do what thou wilt." Well, we all know that abortion does harm someone: the baby.
Another reason I was convinced the neo-pagan communities had their stance on abortion wrong was because many of them believed in reincarnation. The ancient Celts believed in transmigration of souls, which taught that when you died, your soul would go to the other world. However, the Celts also believed that the souls of your ancestors were born down your family line. That meant that if you allowed abortion, you were condoning the murder of your great-grandmother or great-grandfather or any other member of your family that had died. My argument was that the gods choose to send back souls when they wanted them back, so to abort a baby meant you would not only be committing murder, but you would also be upsetting the plans of your gods.
Many times I was told that the old gods really didn't care about us here on earth. However, in ancient times, the people would sacrifice to the gods for continued fertility of the fields, and for a successful hunt. That hardly suggests that the ancient peoples had a belief that the gods really didn't care about what was happening to them. If that was the attitude of your god, then why go to the trouble of sacrificing? The issue of abortion was one of the first major chinks in my armor, but I really didn't know it at the time.
What many people don't realize is that neo-paganism isn't just one religion, but a set of religions. Wiccans are by far the most abundant type of neo-pagans around. Wicca is usually a religion with a dual deity, the Horned God and the Lady. Most Wiccans will say that all gods and goddesses are aspects of these two gods. Wicca has eight major holidays: Imbolg, Beltain, Lugh's feast, Samhain or the fire festivals, and the cross quarter days which are the solstices and the equinox. One of the most important ceremonies in Wicca is called the Great Rite. In some groups, the high priest dips a dagger into a chalice of wine. There are also minor monthly celebrations on the new moon and full moons.
There are usually two types of Wiccans, those who say Wicca is millions of years old and is the basis of all the ancient pagan religions, and those who say Wicca began around 50 years ago or so.
The first group can be dealt with on the basis of history. History will not bear out the millions of years theory of Wicca. Many Wiccans will point to the cave paintings that show people with horns. Many idealistic Wiccans have written that this is proof that the early ancient peoples believed in "the horned god." However, careful study shows that we cannot know what these early beliefs were.
There seems to be this wanting of an ancient religion, and it usually has to be older than Christianity. It's often a sticking point with neo-pagans. There's a strong need to identify their religion as older than the one they've left.
Another point is the dual deity aspect of Wicca. Most ancient pagan religions were polytheistic, that is, they promoted worship of more than two deities. Take, for example, the Celtic beliefs that there were more than 15 major deities, with local tribes having additional local deities. One major Celtic scholar has put out a book which lists the gods of the Celtic belief systems, and the list is over 500. The ritual of the Great Rite has been linked by many writers in the neo-pagan religions to the ancient mystery religions of Babylon. In reality, Wicca has about as much resemblance to the ancient mystery religions of Babylon as it does to Islam. You can usually overcome Wicca's claims of validity simply by studying history.
Be prepared for arguments where the person will tell you he or she is part of a family tradition, or "fam-trad." Again, there's really no historical evidence to back these claims up. Most of them that I've run into claim to have a book of shadows (spell and ritual book) given to them by a member of their family, and that the book is anywhere between 100 to 200 years old. I've heard claims as high as 500 years old. When asked to present the proof, though, you'll usually be told they're oath-bound and cannot show it to anyone outside the faith.
For some time, I had been treasurer of the Pagan Leadership Conference, and later I became chairman. This group was put together to try to make the pagan religions more acceptable to the mainstream. We would hold conferences with topics on pagan parenting, how to have a close-knit community, what's wrong with our community, and dealing with law enforcement. The main goal of this group was public relations. We were out to make the pagan community look acceptable. Under the guidance of its first chairman, and I as treasurer, we held two conferences the first year of our existence and we were getting more and more people interested. But the problem with the neo-pagan community is that it tends to attract many who are seeking power over people and groups. Our group was no different, and it started to self-destruct.
At this point, I was becoming disillusioned with paganism. I realized I didn't really want to be associated with them, because there tended to be some unstable people there. I had resolved to go off on my own and start work on my group called the "Temple of the Tuatha de Dannan." However, God had a better plan for me.
I resigned my position with the Pagan Leadership Conference, and was writing a book on pagan liturgy for those interested in worshipping the Celtic gods. It's strange and embarrassing to admit that many of the pagan rituals I concocted can still be found strewn around the Internet on various pagan Web sites (please don't go looking for them). I started working with a Seattle-based group, whose purpose was to form a national pagan association. But that dream was interrupted when in September, my wife dropped the bomb.
She told me she'd had enough of the "pagan stuff" and she wanted to go back to the Catholic Church. I wasn't happy with the idea because our children were going to get caught in the middle, and I wasn't going to raise them Catholic. My wife went out and bought a few books on the Catholic Faith, to read up on it and relearn what she had forgotten.
I don't remember how long I stayed angry over her decision, but in mid-October of 1995, my rebellion against Christ came to an end. Still angry at my wife, I was sitting at my computer working, and I was grumbling and cursing in irritation. I don't know if I was grumbling against God or just the situation I was in, but I was really angry. At that moment, as my anger and resentment simmered, Christ touched my heart with grace. I was overwhelmed with His presence. I knew at that moment that He was real and that He was with me. I saw my life as if it were a scroll, rolled out for me to see, all the way to the end. I could see the way it ended: I was headed for hell. I suddenly knew that if I continued on the path of magick and occultism, I would be separated from Christ forever.
I got down on my knees next to my computer. With tears in my eyes, I prayed for the first time, asking God to forgive all the sins of my life. After a time of quiet repentance and prayer, I walked out to my wife and told her I was going to enter the Catholic Church with her.
We decided we'd go to Mass that Saturday. We were going to find a church. Now, I don't believe in coincidence, and the gospel reading for that Saturday was the following: Luke 15:1-32. The whole chapter is a song to my ears, but I've pulled out the verses that struck me most powerfully that day.
"Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance" (Luke 15:7).
"Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents" (Luke 15:10)." 'It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found' " (Luke 15:32).
With tears in my eyes again, I lifted my heart up to heaven, knowing there were angels rejoicing for my return to God's fold.
The next day we attended Mass at another parish, and decided on that parish as our home. I called the rectory, and talked to the pastor. He said he was going out of town for a couple of weeks, but that his assistant Fr. Andy was conducting inquirer's classes. My wife and I attended, and she approached Fr. Andy about returning to the sacraments. I prayed Fr. Andy would not be like the priest of eight years ago. Fr. Andy told my wife she would simply have to go to the sacrament of reconciliation, and that our marriage would have to be sacramentally blessed by the Church, and until such time, she and I would have to live as brother and sister. I agreed, and in January of 1996, our marriage was made sacramental. My mother-in-law and my father-in-law, my RCIA sponsor, and some of the members of the RCIA group were in attendance.
During Lent, I made my first confession. I wonder how many priests get to hear the sin of idolatry? And on Easter Vigil, I was confirmed and received the Blessed Sacrament for the first time. It was with tears in my eyes that I received the Body and Blood of Christ, my Lord and Savior. Even today, I can get teary-eyed at the moment of consecration. Because I know He loved me enough to die for me, but He also loved me enough to pull me out of my life of sin.
The man I was 24 months ago is no longer here. In his place is a devout Catholic, one who loves the Holy Father and the Catholic Church, one whose will bends to the Church's and who doesn't seek to change the Church to his views.
I am a man who loves to sing the praises of our Lord. I love to read Sacred Scripture. I now serve in RCIA and Music Ministries, and have recently celebrated my first year as a confirmed Catholic. I want to light a fire under Catholics and help them understand what they have — what I now have.
I'm not perfect. I try to go to confession weekly, I pray every day.
And I ask you to please pray for me, John Gibson, your brother in Christ.
This item 6541 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
