Like many other Pagans, I was the black sheep of my family. My family were hard-working blue collar folk, with some low-level white collar aspirations here and there. They believed in the ethic of hard work. They were not at all religious, having had negative experiences with the Anglican church of their youth. They didn’t understand the mystical bend that shaped my life and experience from the earliest time I can remember. When I went to my best friend’s Mormon church for the first time, they sat me down to talk to me about it in the same manner that I later would experience when they sat me down to discuss drinking, drugs, and sex.
But I suppose the foundation of my Paganism was laid by the way in which I was raised. Though my parents shunned the Anglican Church they embraced a lot of Anglican values, and I’m convinced that Wicca is what happens when you expose an Anglican countercultural folklorist to Hinduism. I was a Brownie and then a Girl Guide, and as Ronald Hutton pointed out, the woodcraft movement was a powerful influence on the development of modern Wicca. Through my father’s imagination, I learned a sense of wonder; through my mother’s love of the natural world, I learned to find the sacred more keenly in nature than in any human building.
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Thank you for telling this story. Coming out to your family can be so hard and it is great to hear of of the positive connections
