As I child, I didn't really have any type of religion. I was Presby in name, and went to curch on easter and sometimes christmas. My father felt he didn't have a need to go into a church to be with god, and so I was raised outside of one, though with the morals of the Church. When I graduated out of elementary school, I went into a Roman Catholic Junior High, based around a church, and because we had to be members of the church for various reasons for me to attend, I 'converted'. My motive was so I could get into a good school - the public schools are iffy on the saftey issue around my hometown - and because I was going, I thought it would be fun to serve as an alter server.

After I became one, I realised that I was by far the most dedicated to it, and by the time I stepped into High School, again Roman Catholic but this time also single sexed, I was starting to realise somethign was amiss. Sittin on the alter, pouring my heart into something where I was 1) taken advantage of for my willingness to work other people's 'shifts' and such and 2) not seen as being at all part of the community, I realised that I wasn't getting anything back. I was serving God in the best way I could, living a good life, having barely anything to confess during the times we were required to as a part of the carriculum of my junior high.... It was strange. And that's when, in High School, I met someone very dear to me. Her name is Amata, and without doing anything more that showing herself to have the same interest and devotion to religion, began the porcess of my disillusionment.

Over the course of my years in High School I discovered Wicca. She herself had been researching the subject since the age of 8 (or thereabouts) and had a wealth of information to share. Coupled with her, I also had a diverse collection of friends (something I had never had in my life before) and each of them inturn told me their own spiritual stories, and it changed me. Not a surprise that I stepped away from serving still at my old junior high and began to study for myself. By the end of my High School discoveries, I had branded myself an Agnostic. I was a person who understood there was a 'higher' force in the world, but I did not know how I understood that.

Last summer, just as I completed my first year in college, I was speaking to the moon (a meditation) near Beltane (midsummer) and I realsied exactly what I was. I was Pagan, yes. I was a witch, yes. And, for as long as I had been agnostic, I had also been Wiccan. Wicca was the heart of my spirituality, as I attuned myself to nature, respected it, and therefor found a deeper respect in myself by doing so. I had refused to be called Wiccan earlier because I had been disqusted by the steriotype of Wiccan = Witch, with no differention between the two. That night I realised Wicca is the Spiritual path to discovering myself and the reality around me, and Witch Craft, is the Physical Path to 'creating my own reality' (as Kerr Cuhulain explains in his work "Full Contact Magic").

The summ of it all? Because of my time spent at a Catholic alter watching those in the pews sleep, disrespect, and not care for those thigns which were supposed to be so important to them in their lives... I left to find my own path- one where my dedication wouldn't end me up in a battle to become the first Catholic priestess. Now, being on my parth for nearly 5 years... I'm glad I made the step. My passion for religion, my unending curiosity for the divine has found it's way into reality through the reclaiming of the ancient cyclical, natural traditions lost but now found in modern Paganism...and I would never go back. From a dead alter, to a living, breeathing one... I create my own reality.

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