The Path of A Christian Witch

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So, if you want to develop your connection to the divine and to your own inner light by following the path of the Christian Witch, consider what it means to you. He'll be coming and going," [Mr Beaver] had said. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down - and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion." Yule is celebrated on the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. The date for Christmas was chosen by the roman Emperor Aurelian in the third century, to coincide with the feast of the Unconquered Sun. So, for both these feasts, we see a strong association with the power of the sun. Many pagan traditions were incorporated in the Christmas feast. Boniface introduced the Christmas tree, which was a Germanic tradition. Also, Santa Claus is an amalgamation of St. Nikolas and the god Odin. Then there are others who will follow more of a Wicca or more traditional Witchcraft path but will choose Jesus and Mary as their patron and matron deities.

Ritual practice: There are so many ways to celebrate life. One way that I find links both the Pagan and the Christian philosophy is by the blessing of the elements. This is done at the Easter vigil service every year, and I find that there is no better connection between Pagan and Christian rites than this. There is the blessing of the fire and of the water, and the burning of incense to sanctify the altar. Flowers are all around the altar. It really is a great representation of all the elements Wiccans work with regularly. You can perform the blessing of the elements in your own home with your own personalized ritual. You can then take this holy water to bless yourself and your home in a commitment to bringing forth life everywhere you go. Our Llewellyn Virtual Author Forums are a bi-monthly series of free online roundtable events featuring your favorite Llewellyn authors discussing topics important to you and answering your questions.Lewis condemned vivisection absolutely, and said so in a 1947 essay. He deplored the popular arguments in favour of experiments on animals, calling them "easy speeches that comfort cruel men". He pointed out that the same ideas could be used to justify experiments on humans, and explicitly drew a comparison with the Nazis.

Mike Stygal, vice-president of the Pagan Federation, told the Church Times: “Anything deeply spiritual has the potential to be dangerous. . . We don’t have a pagan clergy, doctrine, and scripture; so there is an element of DIY. [But] we try to make sure . . . there are people around who can advise from their own experiences.” Mr Stygal, whose wife is a Christian, said that one of the Federation’s current priorities was safeguarding. He was critical of the few pagans who targeted churches, which he put down to “historical bad blood” or immaturity. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. No one ever told me grief felt so like fear," reads the opening sentence of A Grief Observed. "I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." It is an honest account from a mourning widower: Lewis did not flinch from recording the times when his faith was tested. By the end of the book he had made his peace with God. I recently did an in person reading on a young woman of about age 19 who was clearly struggling with something. She had come in with a friend but was a bit hesitant, withdrawn. I finally looked at her square in the face and said, “It is ok to have Pagan and Wiccan beliefs and still believe in God.” Until that moment, not a word had been said about her beliefs or God or any of that. But, as soon as I said those few words, her eyes welled up with tears and the water works began. I do not where or whom the message came from, but I knew she had to hear it. The third book in the 'Space Trilogy' is called That Hideous Strength and set on Earth. It describes and extrapolates what Lewis saw as the evil ideas in contemporary science, personified in an organisation called (with heavy irony) N.I.C.E.Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Steele Alexandra Douris, author of the new Spirits, Seers & Séances. By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness ... by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all". He later wrote in Surprised by Joy that he "was living in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world." Contrary to the opinion of these leaders, many Christians over the centuries have practiced magic and considered their magic Christian. In the academic field of religious studies, scholars ideally don’t privilege the testimony of what Christian leaders claim is proper Christianity over the testimony of less-elite Christians. It’s not up to Christian elites to decide whether magic (or anything else for that matter) is or is not “Christian.” In Haiti there’s a saying that the population is 70% Catholic, 30% Protestant and 100% Vodou.* In other words, we needn’t see Christianity as incompatible with any number of practices or beliefs associated with other religions or cultures. I pray to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit every single day, many times a day. I am comfortable in the knowledge that God hears my prayers as does the Goddess and both are constantly working to help me create the best life possible for myself and my family.

Resurrection would be meaningless for some animals: "If the life of a newt is merely a succession of sensations, what should we mean by saying that God may recall to life the newt that died to-day? It would not recognise itself as the same newt". If the newt was not aware enough to be made miserable or happy by pain or pleasure, there would be no way to reward it or compensate it for its life on earth. Religion Dispatches is your independent, non-profit, award-winning source for the best writing on critical and timely issues at the intersection of religion, politics, and culture. Whatever the effect on Lewis, it is true that he was chastened. He was concerned that the public might confuse the disproof of a logical argument for God with a disproof of God himself. He realised that trying to prove God's existence through reason had been a mistake, and from then on his Christian writings were more concerned with intuitive faith and feeling.We were never told about the 300 to 500 flood legends around the world. Nor were we told that the flood story of the Bible is derivative from earlier sources, or that there were any other stories about floods and their effects on humanity, both physical and spiritual. This episode explores the spiritual implications of flood myths, the water element and its affect on humanity and our relationship with the gods over the eons. On the other hand, the statement that they 'have no souls' may mean that they have no moral responsibilities and are not immortal. But the absence of 'soul' in that sense makes the infliction of pain upon them not easier but harder to justify, for it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this. ... 'Soullessness', in so far as it is relevant to the question at all, is an argument against vivisection. The British-run magazine Sabat, which blends witchcraft and feminism, was launched in 2016 and has attracted almost half its readers from Britain (the other half from the United States). Treadwell’s Books, in London, runs three or four events a week — including a Young Urban Witches programme — many of which sell out far in advance. When the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall staged an exhibition in London in 2017, 3000 people turned up for the private view. Lewis's friends later described this debate as deeply humiliating for him and said it stopped him writing more books on theology. Anscombe does not remember the debate that way: quoted in George Sayer's biography of Lewis, she said it was a "sober discussion" and that Lewis accepted her criticisms. He rewrote a chapter of his book following Anscombe's criticisms.