I am sitting in a classroom with a small group around a large wooden table. We are all in Field Ed, a program of internships that is required during our second year of seminary. It's my turn to begin our class with a prayer. I invite the class to ground and center with me. I begin to pray. While I mostly stick with "God" or "Creator," at some point, I say, "Oh Lord, touch our hearts and help us be present in our work." I finish the prayer and the class begins.

At the break, a good friend of mine stops me. "Lord?" she asks, smiling.

"Yeah, well you all seem to resonate so strongly with the word Lord," I said, "and I've recently realized that if I just add "Ganesh" in my mind every time it's said, I almost always cool with whatever comes next. So, I figured I would just translate for y'all."

The Christians around me burst out laughing and my field supervisor jokingly shakes her head in mock exasperation. This is the diversity I bring into her classroom. My presence is good for the development of their Christianity and being here has been very good for my Paganism. This is part of what it means to be a pagan priestess studying at a Christian seminary.

Like so many of us, I was raised in the Christian church. In those days, there was no space for a feminine divinity or for women in the roles of religious leadership. Early on, my understanding of God was shaped by what I now understand are Wesleyan theological roots. God was ever present in my life, available to me when I needed to call him, and interested in the details of my existence. My family members were devout evangelical and conservative Christians who lovingly called upon Jesus to bless me and keep me safe when I was afraid. But as I grew older, the hypocrisy and biblical inconsistencies bothered me. As a teenager, I went looking for something different.

The first time I ever heard about Witchcraft was on an episode of Phil Donahue. While the women on the show looked very normal, they talked about magick and ritual in ways that sounded so appealing. Most importantly, I remember them saying that they had to learn all about astrology, tarot, runes, stones, herbs, and mythology in order to be witches. Witchcraft was a religion of knowledge and seeking. For a someone who is as enraptured by learning as I was at that age, my childhood church didn't stand a chance. Once I went looking, I found and read book after book. Guided by Adler, the Farrars, Weinstein, Buckland, Cunningham, and Starhawk, I discovered the Goddess and the Goddess discovered me.

Despite my conversion, there was never a time that I didn't have a deep desire to go to seminary. I've always been focused on the divine and human experiences of religion and spirituality. The idea of dedicating myself to the study of theology and entering a spiritual community has always been appealing. I would occasionally talk about this with friends, lamenting the fact that there were no seminary spaces for pagans like me. As time passed, my life unfolded. I became a high priestess, ran a circle, wrote articles, and got married. I lost my circle, went back to college, and got divorced. In 2010, finished my BA in Anthropology and was accepted to a Master's program at NYU. The following summer, my life crumbled. I found myself desperate to get out of academia, alone in an apartment in Queens, three thousand miles from home, miserable, and grieving. It was also the first time in my life that I was free to envision my future without considering anyone else's needs. I listened closely through the tears and the quiet voice inside of me said, "I want to sit at the feet of learned men and women. I want to talk about God."

Three years later I'm rounding the bend towards the end of my seminary education here at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA. This liberal ecumenical Christian seminary welcomes non-Christians into their ranks, though the programs are built to teach from a Christian foundation. I came here to learn about Christianity, to find a way to create a career within the world of spiritual leadership, and to gain the authority and connections that only come from a seminary experience. As part of the greater Graduate Theological Union, I am part of a wider community of Jesuits, Dominicans, Franciscans, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Unitarian Universalists, and to a smaller degree Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews, all studying together. It's a powerful place to be.

My life here is complicated. The many surprising gifts I have gained from this time in my life have all come at a high cost. Like an athame, I am being forged through the fire of this experience. My time here has been deeply healing, amazingly isolating, educational and eye-opening, spiritually transforming, incredibly challenging, and magickal through and through. I've found sisters and brothers in spirit who follow religious paths I never thought I could understand. I've been loved and supported by people I never expect to honor my spiritual gifts. I've had to explain and re-explain the holistic paradigms that serve as the foundation of my paganism, only to find that I'm still misunderstood. I've reassessing my own religious beliefs again and again, finding new ways to explain what I failed to make clear before. More than anything, I've become a better witch and a better religious leader than I ever knew I could be. I found not only a life path, but a career path that I couldn't have envisioned before. I am living deeper and thicker within the spiritual flow of my life than I ever have and it is changing me in new and surprising ways. I can see now how all of the unique aspects of my life have led to a very specific calling, a spiritual service that only I can offer the world.

The Goddess is alive and magick is afoot, even here in the heart of Christianity.