faith, redux.
On learning to exist without binaries.
There’s a memory that lives rent-free and isolated in my head, such that I can’t offer any context except that I was having a text conversation with a friend, working through something. The snippet that lives on is: “I know trusting yourself is easier said than done, but…” What came after the “but” doesn’t matter and my brain’s exorcised it accordingly. “I know trusting yourself is easier said than done.” It wasn’t a jab; it was an observation. It was a statement of something true.
I spent a lot of time in church as a child. My family was the kind where Bible verses became home décor, where we couldn’t see a sunset without commenting on the greatness of God. On Sundays, my grandparents would have the church pastor over for lunch, and sometimes he’d do a lesson, a parable of sorts, for all the assembled children. Though this sort of omnipresent, overt religiosity may feel alien to those with more secular upbringings, we weren’t an extreme household—no speaking in tongues or having infinite babies. In the wider landscape of the ‘90s and ‘00s conservative Midwest, I’d say we were pretty normal.
It was this environment that shaped my ideas around faith. In Sunday school, I learned that faith meant belief in the absence of evidence. But I also learned that evidence of God’s power was everywhere: in the natural world around me, in anything I prayed for actually happening, in my brother’s cell phone showing up in the lost and found when he dropped it on a busy city street. Faith meant choosing to believe that everything was the result of a divine touch; it meant believing that the harder you believed, the more that belief would matter. Put like this, faith may feel naïve. Put like this, it may feel like the bravest thing in the world.
I haven’t identified with Christianity since my teenage years, and the fact of being queer in a family whose profound homophobia stems from their interpretation of Christian doctrine has given me a complicated, uncomfortable relationship to any ideas linked to my upbringing. To call the word “faith” triggering would be to give it too much power, but it’s definitely itchy, like the building discomfort of a cheap wool sweater on dry skin. I recall sitting on a pew in an Anglican church in Newark-on-Trent to shelter from the sudden rain outside, the cold stone of the sanctuary holding centuries of ecstasy and desperation, and feeling upset with myself for finding a sense of peace in this old, old place. Christianity as I had experienced it deals in absolute binaries—good/evil, saved/damned—and so to hold complexity in a religious space seemed both an act of profound blasphemy and something I simply could not do.
So let me make a provocation that simplifies, in that it collapses two concepts into one. Let me concede to my religious upbringing this way and extract from it something that serves, even as I am about to speak sin.
Trusting yourself, at the end of the day, sounds a lot like faith.
--
During my junior year of college, I studied abroad in Berlin, living with a German family in the heart of trendy Prenzlauer Berg. I’d never lived in a city with public transit, and this was before the heyday of smartphones, so I tried my hardest to memorize maps before setting off for my first foray into the city. As often happens but is completely bewildering for someone who has never ridden a subway before, construction had fucked up the lines. Lost and thrown off-kilter, but knowing I needed to get to Oranienburger Street, I experienced a moment of relief when I found “Oranienburg” on a map in the subway station and felt brilliantly accomplished when I got on a train that would take me there.
Anyone familiar with Berlin geography already knows where this is going—namely, not to Oranienburger Street, which is in the center of the city. Oranienburg, by contrast, is a village almost an hour north of Berlin and the terminus for the S1 subway line. Totally disoriented, I did eventually manage to find my way back to Mitte (two hours late for, ironically, orientation). I felt relief, but it was short-lived: in the evening, I had to get home again.
A few things worked in my favor. It was September, so the night breeze was warm. I had spotted the Fernsehturm, the iconic TV tower of Berlin’s skyline, during my earlier haphazard dashing about, so I had a landmark by which to navigate. And I didn’t yet have the street smarts to know it was a really bad idea to be a young woman walking around a tourist area at night staring at a paper map, so I did just this. Abandoning public transit at Alexanderplatz after the maze of it gave me a headache, I decided to trust my own legs to carry me forward. I couldn’t figure out how to navigate the subway to save my life, but I could walk. No one was coming to get me out of my situation, but I could do it myself. I could put one foot in front of the other.
I return to this moment whenever someone asks me to summarize what studying abroad did for me, because it was that night in Berlin that introduced me to self-trust. Whatever being in a new place meant, I could find my way through it day to day. I wasn’t good at making friends, and I didn’t click with my host family, so I spent large chunks of my time abroad alone. Unless I wanted to exist solely in my room, I had to practice that self-trust over and over again. New to adventuring this way, the choices I learned to make involved exploring different areas of the city via activities I felt comfortable doing by myself (a classification that has grown and changed over the years). It’s probably not an accident that the area in which I trust myself the most is still taking solo trips, walking with a map in hand.
It's also in these situations that the notion of faith chafes the most. If life has taught me anything, it’s that my abilities are the only constant. That sounds arrogant as I write it, and it’s also objectively not true (thanks, mid-30s vs. mid-20s brain), and yet there’s a kernel in it that resonates. What’s historically gotten me from situation to situation is my own drive and often the help of loved ones. If a divine touch existed, it hadn’t touched me. By the logic of my upbringing, this ability to realize the sort of life I thought I wanted meant I was the one deserving of faith.
This wasn’t an uncomfortable thought, but there was nevertheless a little voice in my head that said it was wrong—wrong in the moral sense, not the factual sense. Wrong to think that any power I witnessed wasn’t divine. Wrong to think power could come from myself. Wrong to think it could be mine.
--
Contemporary practitioners of magic sometimes talk about a collective, lasting trauma that keeps people (often, but not always exclusively, women) from “stepping into their power.” This “witch wound,” as it’s known, stems from the centuries of witch hunts in Europe, which spread elsewhere via imperial routes. Estimates vary, but however one counts, tens of thousands of people were killed following accusations of witchcraft. Some 80% are believed to have been women. Many were burned alive.
Intergenerational trauma is extremely well-documented, and it is quite probable that descendants of those killed by or witness to the witch hunts carry the horrors of those events with them. Whether that trauma can be felt vicariously—that is, by people with no ancestral connection to witch hunts but who identify as witches today, despite the fact that most witch hunt victims were not witches—feels like a thorny, appropriative mess I can’t properly adjudicate. What I will say is that the witch hunts were not independent of general patriarchal and antisemitic efforts by the same church forces complicit in the forced implementation of strict gender roles in imperial and colonial settings. Controlling so-called “deviant” behavior, and especially behavior that suggested power absent the hand of God, is a hallmark of oppressive systems.
Recently I read the entire Malleus Maleficarum, which I cannot recommend to anyone but that is still, I think, an important bit of history. The Malleus, or Witchhammer, is a 15th-century text written by two horrible German men on the subject of identifying and prosecuting witches. It was theologically suspect even by mainstream Catholic doctrine of the time, and the obsession throughout with phallic fortitude is overwhelming and grotesque. Strange focal points notwithstanding, the Malleus was enormously influential on the European witch hunts, and echoes of its depictions of witchcraft reverberate throughout contemporary Christian belief. My father—part of my “normal” Christian family, as I’ve already asserted—was initially hesitant to let me read the Harry Potter books as a child because they dealt with “witchcraft,” however fictionalized. He would come to very much enjoy Harry Potter after the movies started coming out, which given JK Rowling’s politics is perhaps not a surprising convergence. I digress.
I cannot tell you how many times while reading the Malleus I had to stop and breathe for a moment—not because of the horrors authorized against alleged witches, but because the language used to describe women and witchcraft was identical to things still taken as gospel five centuries later. The Malleus derides anything approaching nature-worship, calling to mind the invocations of God that are constant in my family whenever we encounter natural beauty. Its reification of midwives as a unique form of evil lives rent-free in my memory, reflected in today’s terms through the prism of rejecting any woman’s wisdom regarding healthcare. It is not far from here to the insistence that infertility and miscarriage are works of the Devil—and in the theology of the Malleus, the deliberate acts of witches, who are almost exclusively women. (Men are “archer-wizards,” which is a fucking hilarious image, and the chapter attempting to explain this was a welcome moment of levity in the general barrage of awful.) The claim is strong, and it is consistent: witches hate children, flout wedded monogamy, and generally engage in all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with men or serving them. Witches may even go so far as to disagree with men, an act of naked heresy. Sound familiar?
So you can imagine the quietness with which I initially began to practice. You might also imagine the sudden flash of warmth, of something like power. Picture it like a small ball of energy buzzing at the base of your spine, the vibrations gentle like a massage chair with the potential of a bee swarm. Visualize making a choice so outside the realm of what you have been taught. Conjure self-trust. It is a profound act of rebellion.
--
When I achieved ABD (all but dissertation) status in my PhD program, I started going to therapy for the first time. At that point, I hadn’t been to see any sort of healthcare professional in over three years. I’d never been to a mental healthcare professional of any sort. As a teenager, I self-medicated with angsty Xanga posts sent out into the ether; in college, I self-medicated with alcohol. But I had very good health insurance, somewhat shockingly for a grad student, and I figured I had nothing to lose by using it.
My experience with therapy is another essay—in short, going was the best decision I made in my 20s—but what’s relevant here is that I learned through it about my preference for binary thinking. I wanted clear-cut answers, always. I liked categories with firm boundaries. The minute a case fell outside those boundaries, I’d declare the taxonomy unfit for purpose. Some helpful insights fell out of this tendency: it was the messiness of trying to fit things in the “terrorism” category that set me down a more critical path that eventually became my entire academic career. In my personal life, however, I wanted a workaround for the fact that I found people really difficult to make sense of. I wanted a label that could explain it all.
To make a very long process of self-discovery short, my predilection for binary thinking stems both from how I was taught Christianity and issues around self-worth. I’ll probably be working through the latter for the rest of my life. Converging in this moment are the person I was instructed to be and a version of the person I actually am, wrapped in a lovely mess of trepidation-colored wiring. The problem becomes thus: can I trust myself to be myself? Can I have faith in my own ability to care enough to try? These are fundamentally different questions from “can I trust myself to get out of this situation.” Taking action of some kind was never the matter up for debate.
I never talked about it in therapy—you never know how such things will be received, even in slightly-crunchy Madison, Wisconsin—but it’s probably not a coincidence that it was around this same time that I started observing full moons. Like many new practitioners, the door I stepped through was Wicca; like many kids raised in a faith tradition, I viewed a spiritual practice through the trappings of religion. I put the Wiccan rede up on my bulletin board and drank a mug of grape-apple brew on Mabon, the witches’ sabbat observed on the autumnal equinox in the northern hemisphere. I searched for ceremonies that mimicked the ritual of Sunday services. I searched for holidays to mark sacred events. I didn’t know what I was doing in every sense of that phrase, and it would take me years to reckon with the religious motifs involved in a practice I viewed as completely anathema to Christianity. These motifs traversed an easy religious/non-religious binary, so you can see why I found them uncomfortable at first.
A full moon ceremony goes something like this: following some sort of grounding or meditation practice, one engages in a symbolic act of releasing that which no longer serves one’s goals and well-being. For many people, present company included, this involves writing down sources of doubt and shame and lighting the paper on fire. It is a powerful act to watch barriers go up in smoke. I told a curious friend about this practice after doing it for a few months, and she asked if she could join me. Yes, I thought with glee: something like the covens I had read about! In any case I was thrilled to have someone to share this with.
What she chose to release was profoundly, triggeringly painful. As someone who was still learning how to be vulnerable with myself, much less around another person, I was caught off-guard and emotionally derailed by the trust she placed in me and the energy she brought to the ritual space. I don’t mean this in an accusatory way at all; she simply needed something from the practice that was different from what I needed. But I hadn’t yet learned anything about protection magic, which seasoned practitioners rightly note is the first magic anyone should learn. I was completely drained. And I felt knocked off course, because here was a practice I had trusted myself to perform, and I no longer felt that I merited that level of faith.
It was a long time before I did a full moon ritual again. I kept practicing in other ways, but always alone. Alone was safe; alone was comfortable. And, alone was always piecemeal. As perhaps a more relatable illustration, I learned more French in a 10–week class in college than I did in half a year of independent study. I simply do better picking up new material alongside other people, learning from an expert instructor who’s designed a curriculum in a deliberate way. Which is to say, if I was ever going to actually learn protection magic (or much of anything, really), I would need a classroom. I would need a collective.
So a year ago, I swallowed my doubts and fears around practicing with others, took a leap of faith, and joined a coven.
--
The thing about witchcraft is that it’s not devoid of deities. To be clear: there are plenty who practice without engaging with gods or goddesses. But if you interact with other witches, you’re going to come across more than a few who leave offerings to Brigid, the Irish goddess of wisdom and healing, or who work with Hecate, the Greek goddess of the crossroads. The triple goddess motif—maiden, mother, crone—is a central component of Wicca, the neopagan religion that some witches practice, and is an archetype dear to many others besides. Pantheons outside of European contexts abound, and many witches choose to connect with gods and goddesses rooted in their culture from before the arrival of Christianity.
The gift of witchcraft, however, is that it also encourages following your intuition. If deities don’t resonate with you, you don’t have to work with them. If a belief or action doesn’t jive with how you experience or understand the world, there are no hard feelings for leaving it behind. The guidance is to have an open mind and educate yourself. Learning about the gods and goddesses with whom some of my coven sisters entreat is, for me, an interesting intellectual exercise and nothing more.
Lunar and Wild is not a traditional coven, insofar as most of its activities take place online. Spurred in part by the pandemic, this structure of practice is becoming more common—Danielle Dulsky’s Hidden House coven and Wild as the Moon’s lunar-centric coven come to mind. Though nothing beats the power of a shared ritual experience, the frequent online interactions have, for me, exemplified the principles of witchcraft. Expose yourself to new ideas; try new techniques; find what works for you. The range of possibilities one can witness with dozens of practitioners at different stages of their craft is simply broader than in a traditional coven, which is often limited to 13 members and may have as few as three.
And there is permission in anonymity, in being one among many—permission to ask for validation if you need it but also to fail without judgment. On a Zoom call with 30 other people, no one will notice that I smoke-cleanse widdershins instead of clockwise (because the former comes naturally, and choosing intuition is also a kind of self-trust). If I skip a session, no one is knocking on my door asking where I am (and the answer is I am here, maintaining my core belief that baths of all kinds are atrocious). But I can offer up what I know about an herb or ask a question about ancestral craft and feel my knowledge broaden. Relationality is the name of the game.
Tellingly, the more I’ve engaged with magic, the less I’ve felt the need to escape to fantastical worlds, because the one all around me is itself an endless source of wonder. (I still escape regularly, because fantasy novels are awesome, but it is a choice rather than a survival mechanism.) This is not to romanticize an hour-long spellcrafting workshop or turn a walk in the woods into a hagiography, but it is to note that you will notice all sorts of little marvels around you if you choose to do so. Something I also came to terms with in therapy in my mid-20s is the fact that adulthood for most people is not a series of big life-changing experiences, but rather a lot of repetition and mundanity. Within that, one has to actively choose to find excitement and pleasure in small moments. Learning to do this is an incredible act—and, for any skeptics reading, something that requires zero belief in magic if one so chooses.
Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it like this in her transformational book, Braiding Sweetgrass. “Words are spells” is a tired cliché, but humans have always called new relations into being through the power of stories, and the ones Kimmerer tells invite us to imagine our world otherwise by recognizing what Indigenous communities know it has always been:
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”
Contrary to what I was brought up to believe, this isn’t a denial of God. It isn’t even a rejection of divinity. Whether voiced in the language of religion or not, it is a location of the divine not in a single entity, but in the between spaces, in the relations woven between ourselves and everything around us. It invites us to cultivate trust through give and take and above all in collaboration. It tells us: wounds slow us but do not fundamentally break down what we are. The power to exist in relation, in solidarity, in partnership is not an identity we adopt, but what we intuitively are, a gift with which we enter the world. What is our choice is whether we resist external pressures demanding we deny ourselves that gift.
--
A week before I leave Nottingham for good, I go for a ritual walk in the cemetery. Some people refer to this as a walking meditation, and it is more or less the same act of being present with some blessings for the earth and a few scattered herbs thrown in. I begin it on the morning of the hottest day of the year so far, when the sun is still low enough to offer long strips of shade.
I wonder if some people think I’m particularly secure in my sense of self because I keep throwing my life into uncertain messes of chaos. When I got a job after choosing to leave my academic career, my dear friend Misbah said, “You are finding more ways to have the different parts of you align as intentionally as possible.” What she’s gotten right here is that this is all a process. Things are working out for me now in ways they never have before because there is an exquisite year of work in a coven behind it, in which I practiced constantly choosing myself and my own power. Magic is, at the end of the day, the intentional act of self-trust. And I wondered: if, once upon a time, I could have faith in something far beyond me, why couldn’t I have faith in myself?
The main path through the cemetery cuts underneath the boughs of a massive chestnut tree. Unpruned, it dips low over the pavement, sheltering leaning stones and delicate carpets of green. It is here I begin scattering dried yarrow, which already grows here. Yarrow is a protective herb that has been used for at least 60,000 years for healing. I leave it along the cemetery path in an exchange of courage—courage not to take action, but courage to let myself be.
There is a place in the cemetery off the main path, deep in the brambles, that I have come to know intimately. This is the destination for my walk; this is where I pause. The blackberries here are heavy on the vine, sweet with realized potential. I chew slowly. For a long time, blessings offered over food felt too much like saying grace to sit comfortably in my bones. But in learning to hold complexity, I am approaching a place where I can use prayer and ceremony as tools, ones invested with meaning only by the choices we make. “Thank you to the Earth for sharing this bounty,” is now what I offer. “Thank you to all who cared for it along the way.”
In an old interview with Publishers Weekly, Danielle Dulsky says that witchcraft requires not a to-do list, but a shift in awareness. “I’m not sure,” she says, “[it] requires anything more from you aside from taking notice of where you already are.” What I hear here is presence. It’s the dappled light through cemetery tree leaves; it’s that same light in the Massachusetts woods bent at a slightly different angle. It’s self-trust habitualized, present in scars and unblemished skin and everything uncategorizable in-between. It is belief that the more you practice belief, the more that belief will matter.
I have just under two weeks left in the UK and just under three before I officially close the chapter on my academic career. What is coming next is a rich unfurling of so much I set in motion when I chose to stop subordinating myself to what I thought I was supposed to want. I hold no illusions that it will be easy (it won’t be) or that it won’t come with its own challenges (it will), but I think back to the streets of Berlin. And then I think past them, not to action but to stillness, to presence, and to who I am when I simply let myself be. I think I’m going to like her a lot. I think I always have.
Trusting her, it turns out, is a lot like faith.