Goddesses like Brigid and Freya were abstract to me, symbolizing concepts like poetry and love, but they were not “people” I could “talk” to when I felt scared or down. I appreciated Wiccan tenets the way I did avant-garde art. ![]() But something nettled me, something that would take me years to properly articulate: I didn’t feel an emotional connection to any of it. I read them all and immediately threw myself into practice, drawing pentagrams on my belongings, doing rituals in the park with like-minded friends. In one corner, books with titles like The Truth About Wicca and Witchcraft for Beginners squeaked around on wire racks. ![]() A hole-in-the-wall space lined with candles and oils, this store quickly became my favorite after-school (and sometimes during-school) hangout. I was going to become spiritual or be damned trying.Īround the same time, as if in support of my terrible plan, a metaphysical store opened a block away from my high school. But I liked the idea of connecting with nature, and I really liked the idea of girls and women wielding power-which explains how I took a movie in which three of the four main characters suffer terrible fates practicing witchcraft and turned it into a plan for personal development. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was so into it. Like approximately sixty percent of people who grew up in the 90s (I’m approximating here), I was greatly influenced by the movie The Craft. And of course, there was that crayon problem. But did I want to go back to church? I didn’t love a lot of the ideas I was hearing from these same friends about women, premarital sex, LGBTQ+ rights, etc. Watching my friends peel off after school for Bible study, catching up with them on Mondays and hearing about all the church-sponsored social activities they’d participated in over the weekend, I wondered if I was maybe missing out on something great. Adolescence is, after all, a time of identity formation. “That’s how you end up getting scammed out of all your money.”īy high school, I was feeling the lack of spirituality in my life even more than I was feeling my lack of dates. “Don’t be like those people,” my father said to me. A service had just concluded, and plumes of worshippers were drifting from the temple courtyard like incense smoke. One of my earliest memories is passing by a famous Taoist temple in Taipei while taking a walk with my father. Where my mother was indifferent to religion, my father was outright hostile. I wouldn’t be surprised if she thought that a diploma from Harvard carried weight in heaven-like when I showed up at the gates, I could surreptitiously slip the document into Saint Peter’s hand the way a restaurant patron without a reservation can slip a twenty into the host’s. I also remember thinking, rather blasphemously, that if God were so great, then He would have given the church some crayons that worked.Įven if the spiritual teachings had made more of an impact, my mother soon decided that she was more concerned about my inability to play the piano than about my immortal soul (“Your soul won’t get you into a good college!”), so Sunday school gave way to music lessons. The teacher droned on and on about how faith could help one overcome all obstacles. I remember sitting in an overly air-conditioned room, coloring in a picture of David and Goliath with three stubby crayons that were giving me no pigment at all. A distant family member, deeply concerned about my immortal soul, convinced my mother to let her take me to Sunday school a few times, but either the material itself or the way it was taught didn’t connect with me. ![]() Why had it taken me so long to embrace a longstanding religion of my homeland as my own? ![]() Why had I never given folk religion a moment’s thought prior to this, I wondered. I surprised myself by tearing up-one of the few times I’d ever done so in response to an act of worship. It was hard not to get swept up in the excitement, not to marvel a little at how Mazuism was thriving across generations and across the strait from Fujian, where the historical figure is said to have lived more than a thousand years ago. Like the older women, they were there to celebrate Mazu, arguably one of Asia’s most beloved goddesses. The teens and twenty-somethings were on their float, blasting a club remix of a pop song. The folksy brass music faded away, to be replaced by. Next came the standard bearers, waving red and gold banners embroidered with dragons and characters like “harmony” and “hope.” Suddenly, the tone shifted. Instead of gangly high schoolers, I spied a troupe of grannies huffing into their horns and banging on their drums, wearing uniforms best described as somewhere between majorette and cheerleader, with short, pleated skirts and vests pink enough to signal for help from a deserted island.
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