More Recent Dubious History

OK, I know the usual format is to have a long list of topics, each leading to a long list of links that you'll never look at no matter how many of them are your very own favorite topics, too! How do I know you'll never look? Because I never look (OK, almost never). Frevvinsakes, I have links I bookmarked five years ago that I haven't read yet.

Perhaps it would be less strenuous if you just read these Further Adventures of BoRegard, and clicked on the funny-colored text as your curiosity is aroused. If you don't think so, OK, I'll make a link list and put it here.

We pick up where my Dubious History leaves off: sitting in the third row, right- hand side, of Starr King UU Church, poleaxed by intellectual freedom and starting to like it. Starting to cavort inwardly. Picture a crooked grin appearing intermittently. Interspersed with the blank frown that betrays the frustrations of ignorance. UU is a wonderful accepting place all right, except that nobody knows its history. As my friend Alan once said, "I can't figure you folks out; you're goyische, but you're not Christian."

First thing I do, being an IRC veteran for some years already, is found a UU chat channel. It's so easy to found a channel. All you do is type "/join" followed by a previously nonexsistent channel name, and hang around until people show up. On that fateful evening of -- I forget exactly which night in the autumn of 1995, I typed "/join #uujoint" -- and waited, for several weeks, for nice Unitarians to come by and explain things. Well, many nice UU's have come by over the years, but history was definitely not #uujoint's strong point at first.

The church was working other changes on me, too -- which was why I was going, of course. For instance: a particular back issue of UU World stared at me from the literature rack. I didn't have the nerve to take it home for four months. Why? Because of the headline "The Welcoming Church Faces Down Homophobia" on the front cover. I was so afraid of the thing that I began with the shortest article that addressed the subject: a poem called "Gay and Lesbian Studies 101". It was decent free verse, very instructive too -- but the mindblowing part was that the author's signature at the bottom was "Rev. Mark Belletini, Hayward CA" -- yep, the same man whose sermons were efficiently blowing my mind every Sunday. In about ten minutes I went from "Well, it's still wrong, but so is gay- bashing" to "Legalize same-sex marriage yesterday!" This turned out to be the second of a whole string of "conversion experiences." (When I talked to him about it later, Mark told me: "Conversion experiences tend to cluster.")

Not too long after that, I began hearing announcements -- yes, at church -- about something called the Gay Prom needing chaperones. Horrors. I decided against taking part, even though I was getting antsy and itchy for social- action projects -- until I realized that I hadn't been doing enough scary stuff lately.

So I attended the planning meetings, not knowing what the heck I was supposed to be doing (chaperones only have to attend one meeting especially for them just before the Prom, but nobody realized I didn't know that). I spent about four afternoons listening to a lot of nice bright people talk about how plausible a New York skyline did they really need for the stage backdrop, and who the dj was going to be, and where to get five gallons of Seven-Up syrup, and other controversial topics like that -- and I'd go home just wrung out with the screaming horrors. And I had no idea why. (But I behaved flawlessly, I promise you.)

Well, I had long been a compulsive web surfer by this time, and one night I turned up the queer aphorism that "Homophobes are actually afraid of their own desires." I kicked this around for a while and -- hold on to your hats! -- realized it was true. Then worried for a couple of weeks if I was making it all up. Until women began to scintillate as they passed by on the street...

Somewhere in the background of the church -- OK, in the background of my experience of the church -- was something called a "Women's Spirituality Group." It sounded kinds of artsy- fartsy-feminist to me. (Don't ask me what I meant by that, I'm not sure I could have defined it at the time and now I can't remember.) I decided it wasn't relevant. At the time I was very busy cultivating atheism. I worked at it damn hard for six months, reading many of the documents available at the Secular Web. I had just about come to the conclusion that there was no God, and wasn't very happy about it. It made Armageddon seem more likely at the hands of perpetually thumb-fingered humans, not less. Sometime during this period Mark Belletini lent me his copy of Don Cupitt's Taking Leave of God, which showed me how it was possible to be less helpless and lonely and afraid, though no more certain about so-called "ultimate realities."

I was just getting used to the idea of there being no God, when I heard It laughing. Among other effects, I began to pay attention to the Women's Spirituality Group announcements. Eventually they announced a topic I was interested in; it might have been Susan B. Anthony, because I had just picked up a delightful book about her the week before they took up the topic. At any rate, the topic was not too "far out". We had plenty of good times in that group, discussing what womanhood meant to us, doing one or two social-service projects, nibbling at religious ideas -- mostly pagan ones, although we sampled T'ai Chi and Buddhist meditation, too -- that turned our childhood religious experience on its head (most of us had grown up Catholic or Fundamentalist). After a year, the founder of the group burnt out -- to the extent that she didn't even arrange for anyone to take over. We were wondering if we would have to disband, when it occurred to me that it couldn't be all that difficult to run the group, and if it was, then I would damn well draft a few assistants. So I took over. And it's not that difficult to run, thanks to the keen, vivacious women who attend; it's strictly Bring Your Own Brain, and by God Herself, they do! We've been together long enough to have established annual festivals: Women's Music Day, Sumbel, and Haloa.

Long before I took over the Women's Spirituality Group, some of the members invited me to something called a Full Moon Circle. It turned out to be a simple, graceful, not-very-literalist ritual with a lot of ceremonial headshrinkery in it. Equal parts sharing our joys and troubles and playing meditatively with beautiful, symbolic objects. It was heartening and refreshing and put me utterly at ease. I started doing a lot of Pagan web surfing. One thing led to another, so I now identify as a Pagan, or maybe a Witch, as well as a Unitarian Universalist. But I don't identify with any particular tradition, which is why there wasn't any Pagan stuff on my web page until last week.

I went to a conference of GLBT ex-Jehovah's witnesses this summer and saw, again, that when people leave Fundamentalist religions, they wander all over the map. About twenty percent of those at the conference are now involved in some kind of pagan or new age practice. Curious, I thought, that so many were finding healing where I did. I'm just beginning to explore the nature of the healing that takes place.

Magick, Healing and Paganism:
a website for former
Jehovah's Witnesses