My spirituality is important to me. This is exemplified by the fact that I tossed a perfectly good job in retail to continue my clergy studies. (The decision was also influenced by burnout and a bad back, but sometimes life conspires in order to get you to follow your heart.)

In my opinion, the difference between spirituality and religion revolves around what you do from your heart, and what other people expect you to do. Religion is the "how;" spirituality is the "why." I'm a fan of experiential religion - creating your own worship via your own experiences with the Divine in your daily life.

I was raised Anglican, attended a very stark church, did the Sunday School thing, confirmation, and participated in the youth group. Somewhere around the age of sixteen, I got claustrophobic. I was serving on the Altar Guild and the Flower Guild with my mother, did my scheduled hours in Nursery, and attended Youth Group at least once a week. When I began to feel overwhelmed by the Youth Group's demands that I commit to attending more than once a week, I backed off. In my view, I was already devoting a significant amount of time to my religious community, and the fact that they were pressuring me to devote even more bothered me. I understand now that my discomfort arose from a lack of return for the energy I invested. The community simply was squeezing me dry, and my spirituality wasn't being nourished.

So, like any other introverted teenager, I withdrew completely from the pressuring parties.

Let me make this clear: I didn't abandon spirituality or reject God. I did what many volunteers do when they're overloaded with work; I left the enterprise.

What followed were about ten years of everyday life. I still believed in a higher power who had initiated change in the universe to create life; I still believed in a concept of deity who stood for our higher self. I attended Anglican services twice in that time: once in Prince Edward Island while on vacation, where I felt comforted by the familiar ritual; and once in a West Island church which had adopted the new book of services that made me uncomfortable.

In October of 1995, I undertook the creation of a character for a collaborative story, and decided that this character would be a modern witch. I made the choice to research contemporary magical traditions to base character in reality rather than making it up. A friend directed me to the local metaphysical bookshop, where I spent hours looking through books on modern witchcraft and nature-based spirituality, finally selecting three. When I read them, I gradually moved from reading them for research to reading them for personal interest. These books described an approach to spirituality that made sense to me, stressing three main tenets which I understood and held as well: namely, that the Divine is in the world around us, not in some distant place; the Divine manifests in both male and female energy; and Nature reflects the beauty of the Divine.

When I first read Anne of Green Gables by fellow Prince Edward Islander L.M. Montgomery, one of the passages that struck me deeply described Anne's devotion to Nature and her perception of worship. I'd just go into a field, look up, and feel a prayer. From the moment I read those words, that was the ideal method of worship for me. It's much easier to appreciate God's talents and love when you're lying outside, looking up at the shifting dappled shade of leaves in early summer, feeling the warmth of the breeze, hearing the wind, and smelling the lush green smells around you. It's easier to understand God's might when you're standing in a thunderstorm. Particularly around Easter, when the windows would be opened for the first time in church, I resented being inside when God's work was more evident outside. God was not solely in the words we spoke and heard inside. God was the entire world.

To realise that there was a contemporary spiritual practice that encompassed my beliefs was staggering.

Spiritual research (if I may call it that) challenged me to think about my perception of the Divine. I had always been neutral about the concept of a father figure in the sky. The concept of an incarnated form of the Divine, such as Christ, was more appealing to me. The equation had never seemed quite right, though. As I read more books on nature-based spirituality I understood that what had rendered the equation unbalanced for me was the lack of female energy. The Anglican church is a product of the Protestant revolution, which scolded the Catholics for being too pagan and lax ("The Bible says, 'No graven images!' Those icons are graven images!") while simultaneously being too strict ("Man doesn't need an intermediary to talk to God!"), and cut out the pantheon of saints, including the Virgin Mary, who constitutes a major part of Catholic worship. With no feminine content in my spiritual teaching, I hadn't been able to connect with the Divine any more than I had.

Given that the cycle of Nature reflects the stages of, well, pretty much everything, physical and abstract - birth, maturation, death, decomposition, birth -- I immediately understood why my childhood enchantment with Anne's form of prayer had remained with me. God was in Nature; God was Nature. And, wonder of wonders, nature-based spirituality posited a feminine face of God: a Goddess associated with the earth, abundance, and growth, among other things.

I'm an academic by nature, and so I read everything I could get my hands on. I very quickly realised that the Internet was a next to useless resource which perpetuated disinformation and myth, so I went to historical and scholarly texts. Mircea Eliade, Anne Ross, Miranda Green, H R Ellis-Davison, Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Claude Levi-Strauss taught me about cultural perceptions of Divinity. Scott Cunningham and Stewart & Janet Farrar taught me how contemporary practitioners took much of that scholarly information and codified it in practice. Gerald Gardner, Doreen Valiente and Vivianne Crowley taught me about the historical evolution of the modern religion called Wicca, based in folk practice and mythology of the British Isles.

The best part about this new spirituality was that it encouraged constructing belief through experience. There existed little dogma. It also acknowledged that worshipping the Divine alone was just fine. It all came down to you and the Divine, anyway. Being an introvert and community-shy thanks to my earlier religious experience, this aspect further fascinated me.

I read, I thought, I interacted with my environment, and slowly understood that I was a Neo-Pagan.

It took me over a year to get my spirituality out of my head and heart and into my living room. Physically marking the seasonal cycles with honour and ritual scared the heck out of me, which is puzzling because I'm an actor and have been since I was thirteen. I'm used to performance and ritual in several different forms.

After four years of worshipping on my own, I began to feel a bit isolated. Solitary practice is fine and dandy, but every once in a while even an introvert likes to poke her head out of doors to see what other people think and feel. I chose to register for a series of classes on basic Neo-Pagan practice that examined fundamental concepts and assumptions, participated in exercises, researched ancient religions and pantheons, and read several books for discussion and feedback. While most of the information wasn't new to me, the idea of sharing with others and functioning within an intellectual community appealed to me.

Around this time the speculative fiction bookstore which employed me was bought by the owner of the previously mentioned metaphysical store. This brought me even closer to the staff with whom I'd struck up a casual friendship. Not long afterwards Silver RavenWolf, a prominent Wiccan author who had penned several popular books on "new generation" witchcraft, visited the store, and I had the good fortune to have dinner with her and discuss various ideas. After a couple of months I was invited to join her tradition, and I was dedicated into the Black Forest Circle and Clan Seminary in late summer of 2000, thus beginning my formal study of Wicca, built on the firm foundation of my previous five years of solitary study.

My faith is a cornerstone of my life. I now teach, counsel, and perform ritual for others. I serve as a consultant for a New Age imprint of a major American publishing house. I'm a contracted author who writes books and articles on alternative spirituality.

I make no apology for my faith, which is based in Celtic and Norse folk practice. My favourite areas of study include herbalism and history. I believe that ritual should nourish the soul, and an essential element of that is drama. I grit my teeth at the Wiccan myth of origin (get over it; it's not an ancient religion, it was created in the late 1940s in Britain from bits and pieces of occult orders and native folk practice), roll my eyes at the whole initiated witch debate, and argue strongly for everyone's right to practice and believe what they wish so long as it doesn't limit the rights and freedoms of others. I believe in hitting back, not turning the other cheek, and I have learned painfully that sometimes one does indeed have to be cruel to be kind. I admire people who choose to learn about what frightens them, instead of denying its existence or taking superstition for truth. Ignorance is not bliss, it's just ignorance, and fear and denial control too many people in today's world. Wake up, take control of your own life, and look around you. Experience your world. Question. Form your own answers. Be content in completion, not blind acceptance.

Take risks. The greatest rewards come from the greatest challenges.

And, for heaven's sake, learn as much as you can about this glorious existence, no matter what spiritual path you follow.

Black Forest Clan

My seminary work was done through the Black Forest Clan and Circle Seminary. Four years of history, meditation, shamanic training, Celtic and Germanic magical techniques, ritual design, divination, herbal magic, American Pow Wow work, and research earned me my third degree and legal clergy status within the United States of America. Of course, I live in Canada. I'm working on figuring that out. I am a lineaged witch, which, although I'm proud of it, doesn't matter much to me - it's my relationship with the Divine that counts - but it seems to matter a great deal to others.

Black Forest Clan and Circle Seminary is a three-degree, four-tier system of Wicca-based training, specifically designed to train clergy to serve the increasing numbers of alternate spirituality followers in North America. I had the honour to be one of the members of the first Canadian coven, which confirmed BFCCS an international institution.

I am now the High Priestess of a Black Forest coven in Montreal, and have the fortune to be training some highly talented and intelligent coveners. Only forty percent of those who begin training within the Black Forest Clan make it through to the end. It's a challenging course of study, and it's not for everyone. The teachings derive from Caledoni, Druidic, Germanic, and Seax-Wica bodies of lore, passed to the Clan founder by her own teachers. I have also had the fortune to study with Ray Malbrough, a Vodoun houngan and Seax-Wica initiate.

- Black Forest Clan official web page [no longer available after internal Clan reconstruction]>

Daughters of the Flame

In 1999, I was given a final assignment in the series of classes based on comparative religion and alternative spirituality that I was taking: choose a god and a goddess with whom you have an affinity or with whom you resonate, and write a paper on each of them. Although on the surface this sounds like an easy project, for me it had deeper meaning. After four years of study and practice, this was my opportunity to dedicate myself to the service of one goddess in particular.

For some time I had been drawn to Brigid, the pan-Celtic goddess of creativity, smithcraft, and healing. My first instinct was to select her without further thought; then I paused. I am of direct Scottish and indirect Irish descent. Perhaps I wasn't trying hard enough, or looking past the obvious answer to truly connect with the Divine female archetype. Brigid just seemed too easy. I researched other goddesses, and came very close to choosing Isis, until I received an e-mail from the Daughters of the Flame.

DOF is an organisation which recreates the sacred sisterhood of nineteen priestesses or holy women who served at the shrine of St Brigit in Kildare, Ireland, a practice said to be based on an earlier practice at a shrine dedicated to the goddess Bríd. The shrine honoured Brigit by the perpetual burning of a sacred flame, tended daily in turn by each priestess. On the twentieth day, the flame was left untended, and it miraculously burned until the priestess came again the next day. The Catholic shrine honoured its perpetual flame until desecrated and extinguished by Henry VII in his bid to abolish the Papal influence in British lands. In 1993 the flame was re-lit by two nuns at Kildare, and has burned steadily since.

DOF was founded on Imbolc 1993, simultaneous with the rekindling of Brigid's flame at Kildare. DOF and its sister order, Ord Brigideach, offers women (and in some cases with Ord Brigideach, men) across the world the opportunity to honour the goddess or saint in the modern world by tending a flame for twenty-four hours, once every twenty days.

I had reached out to DOF in late spring or early summer of 1999, and through various electronic and temporal mishaps and simple human error my communications hadn't ended up where they ought to have been. I had given up on them, until late 1999 when I was thinking hard about which goddess to choose for this assignment. When the message from the coordinator of the DOF landed in my inbox, I chose to interpret it as a sign. I became the woman who held the third shift within Cill Saileach, which translates to "church (or cell) of the willow."

I wrote my final assignment for that class on Bríd, and everything began to fall into place. I began to understand that Bríd had been my vision of the Goddess for the past four years. She was the archetype I appealed to in order to help me cope with graduate school, with my singing and other performance work, my cello studies, and of course, with my creative writing.

My work with the DOF filled a place in my soul that I hadn't known was yearning for feminine spiritual companionship. Here were three times nineteen women, bound together by their love and honour of this goddess and saint. We chatted via e-mail, prayed for one another, celebrated the accomplishments, and lent complete and utter support during the crises. I have never met any of these women in person, but I know them, and I love them.

A shift of flame-keeping varies from person to person. To burn an actual flame for twenty-four hours is encouraged, as is some act of worship or meditation; however, life gets in the way, and there are times when it's just not possible. Still, I have travelled on the road with a wind lantern sheltering a candle between my feet in the passenger seat of our car, and I have physically lit a burgundy candle at work when I was still in the employ of the bookstore. I have awoken from uncomfortable sleep to see the flame burning softly in a novena candle jar, and been lulled back to rest by the gentle patterns on the ceiling. At times when I have been unable to have a physical flame with me, I have invoked myself as Bríd's living flame, bringing light and healing to everyone I meet on my errands.

Bríd made a dramatic appearance at my second degree elevation, manifesting in one of the men participating in one of the challenges set for me as I stood blindfolded, and her presence made me cry out and release obstacles in violent tears. She goaded me to leave my job and trust in Spirit as I followed my bliss. Her lessons have not all been pleasant; in fact, some have been downright harsh. Bríd's triple aspects encompass transformation on all levels, though, and to dedicate your life to Her is to accept the danger along with the warmth and light.

As of January 2008, I am in my ninth year with the DOF. It is an honour to tend her sacred flame, and an honour to serve with the many women of different faiths, ethnicities, and continents who make up this order.

- Daughters of the Flame official web page

Crescent Moon School and Spiritual Learning Centre

In 2000 I co-founded the Montreal Pagan Resource Centre, the first pagan-based community and learning centre in Canada. Designed to be a place of open welcome to people of any faith, run completely by volunteers from the Pagan community, the Centre offers a research library, a community connection service, and a space for ritual and discussion. Through no intention of my own, I became a leader of sorts within the community, a position which I understood to be the responsibility it was. After two years, I resigned from the MPRC, embittered and jaded by the resistance originating from within a small, poisonous sector of the Montreal Pagan community itself. Although the need for a neutral networking space was evident, a small population of destructive individuals began a campaign to undermine the Centre by attacking the directors. When one of a spirituality's tenets is tolerance, often phrased as "there is no one true way," attacks made upon a community venture to offer something of value to both Pagan and non-Pagan populations are senseless. I resigned from the board of directors around the same time I left my job in 2002, suffering from burnout on several fronts.

Also in 2000, I became a core teacher with Crescent Moon School, a Montreal-based spiritual learning centre which offers four levels of survey programs in alternative spirituality and earth-based religions. In Crescent Moon, I found the feeling of community and support for spiritual self-development that was lacking in the Montreal community at large. It has been a privilege to lecture, communicate, and discuss various ideas and concepts with over a hundred students over the past four years. The school has flourished and expanded, acquiring more teachers and developing more programs to answer community needs. In mid-2004 the school registered as a legal entity. In 2005 I stepped down as one of the central directors and teachers, and now do guest teaching sessions for specific topics or or to replace absent teachers.

At approximately the same time that I began working with Crescent Moon School I began to teach spiritual and occult workshops at Le Melange Magique. Introductions to such topics as divination, spellcasting, designing rituals, seasonal celebrations, and tools and elements are one-night workshops which I enjoy leading. Every season I try to develop one new workshop, and temporarily retire an old one. Also in 2005, I temporarily retired from leading public workshops. With my ongoing writing career and raising my young son, I simply don't have the time to carry a teaching load too. I fully intend to resume leading public workshops at some point in the future. For now, however, there are very capable and inspiring teachers offering workshops at the Melange Magique, and I urge you to check out their workshops.

- Crescent Moon School official web page

Conclusion

All this illustrates clearly that my spirituality is now the central axis of my life. Thanks to the recommendation of a friend and sometime employer, I am now the contracted imprint specialist for Provenance Press, the New Age imprint of Adams Media Corporation. I am also the series editor for the For Life series of books being released by Provenance Press and Adams Media as of fall 2004. In April of 2004, I was offered a contract to write a book on spellcrafting for Provenance Press. The leap of faith which I took in the summer of 2002, where I left my job as assistant manager in a bookstore to reassess my life path, focus on my clergy studies, and attempt to establish myself as a freelance writer and reviewer has more than rewarded me. My under-graduate and post-graduate work in literature analysis and Western Culture has married my personal interest and research in alternative spirituality to create a focused, dynamic, and deeply philosophical teacher, editor, and priestess.

Life isn't a bowl of cherries by a long shot. Working as a counsellor and consultant is stressful, unstable, and undefined. There's a lot of throwing my hands up in the air and saying, "Well, what do you want me to do?" to the Divine. My path is rarely clear. At times it's frustrating to have students look to me for guidance in their path when I'm wondering about my own. With the blessings of the Divine, however, I seem to say the right things at the right times. I ended up on this path of service for a reason. Whatever that reason might be, I trust in God that it's part of the bigger picture, and that the difference I make in the world is worth every moment of confusion, appeal, and uncertainty.

Writings on Spirituality

Apart from my books (see below), over the past decade I have written a number of articles on various aspects of my spirituality, which have been published on-line, in periodicals, and presented as academic teaching material. To read them, please visit the Read section of this site. Enjoy!

Books

	I am proud to announce that my third book, The Way of the Green Witch: Rituals, Spells, and Practices to Bring You Back to Nature will be released by Provenance Press in May 2006!
	My first book, Power Spellcraft for Life: The Art of Crafting and Casting for Positive Change was released by Provenance Press in May 2005, and is now available.
	Solitary Wicca for Life: A Complete Guide to Mastering The Craft On Your Own was released by Provenance Press in September 2005, and is now available.

This material (c) A. Murphy-Hiscock

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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