When I was in first grade, a friend of mine invited me to go to church with her. It was a Baptist church, and I started going every Sunday. As the years went by, my friend stopped going, but I continued on in Sunday School only, not the church service. In junior high, I went through the stage of trying to find any excuse that I could to get out of going because sleeping late was more important than spirituality at that time. (I was the only one in my family that went. My mom wasn't Christian but thought the church would help me with moral values.)

When I was in high school, I was still a little in that frame of mind, although I did go to Sunday School more and more often. Two girls in my German class at high school also went to my church. They invited me to do things with the youth group and to join youth choir. I wasn't really very interested. But between the two of them and my Sunday School teacher, I got tired of being continuously invited to go places and having to find new excuses not to go.

Finally, for spring break (this was my sophomore year in high school), the youth group was going on a spring retreat. I didn't really have any plans for spring break, and I thought that if I went on this retreat then they would stop bugging me to do other things for a while because the retreat was a really big thing at our church.

That retreat really changed my life. I had always considered myself a Christian before that. (I'd like to interject a funny story here if you don't mind. When I was at Vacation Bible School in third grade I was filling out the information card and one of the questions was: Are you a Christian? I checked no. Another girl asked why I checked no. She said that I was a Christian. I said, "I'm not a Christian; I'm Baptist." *chuckle*) Anyway, I never really became "on fire for God" or anything like that. But at the retreat I became better friends with this girl named Emily and now that I had a good friend to do things with I started to go to church and do other activities with the youth group.

It got to the point where I was at the church nearly every time that the doors were open. I don't ever regret that. I had a lot of fun and did so many things that I would not have had the opportunity to do otherwise, like go on a mission trip to San Antonio and work with the kids at a homeless shelter or perform in several musicals.

But by my senior year in high school, I started to experience some doubt. I don't really know what started it, but I know that I felt really guilty about it. If I was such a good Christian, why did I have these feelings? Until one night we had a small group together discussing things and we were playing a game where each person answered various questions. My first question was "which character in the Bible do you most identify with?" I said Thomas. (Thomas was the disciple that didn't believe that Jesus had returned from the dead. He actually had to see him and his wounds for himself before he believed.) So we got into a discussion on doubting and I will never forget when my youth minister looked at me and said, "Karen, do you think that doubting is wrong?" Until that point my answer would have been yes, but something hit me and I realized that at times, doubting can be really good. Only then, by questioning what you think, can you really discover what you truly do believe. Plus I found out that many of the other people in my youth group had the same doubts as me.

So for a time I was floating, not really sure what to believe. I continued going to church, but when I got to college all I did was go to the church service; I didn't become involved in any other activities. By my sophomore year, I stopped going to church altogether. I needed time to sit back and think about things. I had never before allowed myself to think about anything outside of Christianity. It was either that or nothing, or so I had thought. I had no idea that there were so many other religious beliefs out there. But one day as I was walking across campus a single word popped into my mind - Wicca. I wasn't really sure exactly what it was, but I decided to find out some more about it. I looked it up on the Internet and read as much as I could about it. I bought a couple of books to read and signed up for several email listservs and an email study course. In doing all this I felt a like a new and more complete person. I knew that I was finally on my way to discovering my own personal spirituality.

I never allowed myself to think beyond Christianity before because I had always been taught to think that anything else was evil and not something that I really should be thinking about. And so now that I allowed myself to think of these things I found a whole new light. For a while I did have a return to Christianity - sort of as a safety cushion because I was comfortable with it and I had been a little scared striking out on my own on my new path. But things felt so different; it didn't feel right to be back at a church again. I'm glad to have had that minor return because it really confirmed for me that I was on the right path and that there was no way that I could turn back without killing something important in myself.

There were so many things about Wicca I could totally identify with. As I've heard from many other people, it felt like coming home. That was about four years ago. I've since classified myself less as Wiccan and more as eclectic pagan. Not to say anything against Wicca, but I just felt that I needed something more, something a little deeper than I felt Wicca offered me. I also felt drawn more to Goddess energy than the balance of God and Goddess. And then I found the Sisterhood of Avalon, which just seemed like what I had been looking for all along. I've always had a fascination with the Arthurian legends. And when I read Mists of Avalon I felt as if I had finally been awakened. I thought, surely this book couldn't be all fiction. There was definitely truth underlying it somewhere.

I know that I still have a long journey to go. It's one I'm looking very much forward to. I thirst for knowledge and want to know everything all at once, but I'm trying to keep it one thing at a time and savor everything that comes to me. I do tend to try to take on more than I can handle, but I'm learning to balance everything and being patient about having things come in their own time.

And now I'm at another stage in my journey. I was reading an article for one of my classes about one theory that had been advanced about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and why it wasn't accurate. I came to a sentence that made me stop - it really slammed me into a wall. Something to this effect: "They are trying to make something out of it that they want and not what is really there." I realized that this is exactly what I had been doing in my religious life. I had a vision of how I wanted things to be (for Avalon, that would be how Marion Zimmer Bradley described it) but that's just not how things are as much as I want them to be. I've been untrue and lying to myself. So I put in my resignation for the Sisterhood of Avalon. Then I thought, "Well, I guess it's time to study Gnosticism since I've been interested in that." But something still felt wrong. I finally realized today (3-27-02) what that is. I'm meant to be a student of religions and not a follower of them. I can't make myself believe something just because I want to believe it. So I'm still off on my study of Gnosticism, but more for the intellectual sake of it than for the personal spiritual side of it. It feels good not to be lying to myself anymore.