Under Pressure

“Mom, do you think your husband’s mother will try to invoke Jesus again at Thanksgiving?”

It was an honest question. My mom said, “She didn’t last year.”

“Yes, she did. Didn’t she?”

One of my sisters nodded in assent. My mother didn’t care one way or the other about my step-grandmother ringing Jesus at the beginning of our meal, but she didn’t want a prayer or invocation from one of us. My sister told me later, “It’s because our mom is a closet Christian. She thinks she’s Wiccan, but really she should just go back to the Church if she’s going to be all Biblical.”

We finally agreed that she should read the Native American story (I think Iroquois?) at the beginning of the meal in place of an invocation.

That is generally how holidays go in my family. We passive-aggressively skirt around the real issues: How do you have an interfaith Thanksgiving without pushing anyone’s comfort zones? How do you negotiate between a first-generation Wiccan and her children—one Hellenist, one Satanist, and one ambiguously ex-Christian vegan—a vaguely Christian husband, and one deeply evangelical mother-in-law? Should a household with only one vaguely Christian person celebrate Christmas at all?

First, let me say a few words about being out as a polytheist: I used to be a lot more out as a polytheist than I am now.

Firstly, when I was a preteen, the decision to disclose it was made for me by the girl next door who wanted to be more popular, not by me. I used to dream about the idyllic coastal areas where people wouldn’t care about my religious background, but found that unrealistic after I discovered people judging me during undergrad.

Most people in my graduate program don’t know I’m a Hellenist. No one has asked, and I think most people assume I am an atheist because I have mentioned on multiple occasions how being one of the only non-Christian kids in my conservative Midwestern town was the closest thing to Hell I have ever experienced.

I never talk about it because I want to do science librarianship and understand that the hiring committees for the kinds of jobs I want include scientists, many of whom feel uncomfortable about Christianity, let alone anything “weird.” I’m only in my mid-twenties and don’t want my personal life to detract from their evaluation of my portfolio. On the other hand, if they really want to know it, I try not to maintain a bifurcated existence and believe that anyone who truly wants to dig deserves some compensation for their queries. It just probably won’t show up on the first few pages of search results, and most people don’t read beyond the first one.

In my personal life, though, I do want to be open, and navigating this remains a bit tricky. I despise the idea of celebrating Christmas. I want to eventually end up in a relationship with a pagan and am crossing my fingers that she will not be Wiccan. And right now, I really don’t have any face-to-face contact with other pagans.

Growing up, I was very involved (for a teenager) in the Hannibal, MO, pagan community. I wrote horrendously bad articles for the e-newsletter. I co-chaired my undergraduate group for two years minus my abroad semester. And now ... not much of anything. True, I’m in grad school, and yes, I don’t know where I will be after graduation, but it is surprisingly hard to break into the community when you don’t have a car (and the Pagan Pride Day event is not public transportation-accessible) and don’t present as “pagan.” The campus group headed by Mary Hudson (I found her blog and she has really put a lot of energy into her chaplaincy) caters to helping students establish a foundational Wiccan practice.

All I really want to do is go out to a bar with educated pagans in their mid-twenties and have meaningful conversations, rather like the ones I had my last year of undergrad with C. and L. that once or twice ended with us going outside to make spontaneous libations in a decrepit, snow-covered garden.

So that says a lot about me and what I define as “outness” in my life. Now back to holidays.

The best way to make for a nice, interfaith Thanksgiving is to have a grace or prayer that does not mention any gods or multiple prayers that represent everyone. Someone everyone likes needs to stand up and steer that part of the celebration so someone with an explicit agenda can’t take over, and people need to be open and honest with family members about their religious beliefs unless one knows physical or psychological harm will come from the disclosure.

The questions I ask myself are far trickier than the ones I imagine my mom asking herself. Many people in my generation don’t put down roots. How do we keep deeply spiritual friendships with others when we don’t know where we will end up next year or the year after that? For those of us who have been on the Internet for the majority of our lives, how do we balance our Internet personae to capture who we are when we just want to be doctors, lawyers, librarians, schoolteachers, programmers, machinists, or hairstylists? How do we relate to pagans who didn’t grow up in the religion (or spend much of their childhood in it) without judging their thought processes? How can anyone say that we are “passing” when we’re just not bringing up irrelevant information?

The day after Thanksgiving, I enlisted one of my sisters (the Satanist) in the long-standing battle with my mother to stop celebrating Christmas so we could have a feast on the Solstice instead. It didn’t work.

My sister, again, attributed it to my mom being a “closet Christian.” I don’t. I think she probably has a lot of sentimental attachment to the holiday, possibly from her childhood. She was with our grandfather on Christmas while he was dying, too.

If my siblings and I have families in five years, maybe we can conveniently only have time to celebrate four days early.