A Witch in Church Part One - General Observations

As I mentioned last week we had a very sad blow and lost a beautiful lady, whom I called Danielle. She had passed very suddenly and thankfully peacefully in her sleep of cardiac problems. Loosing anybody is hard, and it seems that the best of people seem to leave us way too soon. We are left with a hole in our worlds, a void that cannot be filled. We learn to move forwards, we continue to live our lives and continue to love and be loved, but nothing will ever take that person's place. After her passing there was a funeral held for her at one of the churches in the big city near my little town.

I don't go to church much (obviously). I attended a wedding recently at an Orthodox Ukrainian Church, which was a beautiful ceremony that I will have to tell you about sometime. Other than the odd wedding held inside a church (where we go in, watch the wedding and leave immediately afterwards) I haven't spent much time inside churches. We came to the funeral early to ensure that we were on hand in case the family needed help with anything and for the first time in almost a decade I actually took the time to look around.

One of the first things that I noticed was the Main foyer of the church. There were multiple bulletin boards lining most of the walls. On one board there were the big picture boards that you normally see lining the hallways of a high school, proclaiming "Class of....” These were pictures of every person in the congregation, as I looked I realized that the church had actually hired a photographer to come and take pictures of the congregation. This was on the board that stated "Our Congregation Welcomes You", just under the names of the pastors. Next to it is a list of the new members under a welcoming message. There were signup sheets for potlucks, for charity drives and for bible studies and the sheets were almost full.

As I stepped further into the main foyer I saw that they had a table with copies of the church newsletter with messages from the pastors, recipes and gardening tips, along with updates on the church and a quarterly financial report. A few paces behind that was a magazine type rack packed with brochures covering a wide variety of topics including (but not limited to) Divorce, Marriage, Suicide, Terminal Illness, Stress, Anxiety, Job Loss, Children. I peeked at a few of them, they had some advice, some bible passages as well as a list of websites for support groups that were Christian as well as secular.

The next room was their Worship Hall that held the main Altar of the Church along with the rows of pews, but just outside of the hall was another room; this room had in it a crib and a rocking chair. It was a reasonably spacious room, the size of a small office. When I went to the bathroom I noticed a change table with some extra wipes under it and there was a bottle of hand lotion on the sink.

The bathrooms were right off a large gathering room where they had set up folding tables and chairs, each of the tables had a nice runner and centerpiece on it. Just next to the big gathering room there was a large kitchen which was full of people… to be continued.

Goodbye Too Soon

This week we lost a beautiful woman, she was a friend of mine who had children in our youth group. Her husband is the chair of our Parents Committee and she was a huge supporter of ours behind the scenes. For the sake of privacy I will call this woman Danielle. It's really cliche to say this but Danielle really had a heart of Gold. In the four years that I have known her I lost count of how many times I thought to myself "what a wonderful woman".

She had a kind and gentle spirit. Over the time I got to know her she shared a small bit of her past and parts of it were not always pleasant. She had many familial problems and yet you would never know this talking to her. She radiated love and acceptance wherever she went. Whenever she spoke of her darker past she spoke from a place of acceptance, love and forgiveness. There was never a bitter word said and she worked hard to understand what trauma's had shaped the people who hurt her. I often would listen to her speak of how she came to a place of understanding why they acted the way they did and how understanding their trauma's helped her to forgive them.

Instead to focusing on the past hurts she instead strove to build a brighter future for herself, her husband (who we will call Bill) and her children. She adored her husband and was devoted to her children. Her eyes would light up whenever she saw any of them and she often spoke of the pride she had in them. She was the kind of woman that you could forget her birthday and she wouldn't even be bothered by it.

Everyone who knew her was blessed by her presence. Our work with the youth group is often stressful and sometimes can even be isolating. She would often go out of her way to seek one of us out to talk with us for a while, let us vent a frustration or ensure that we had supper that night. You were never alone with Danielle around. I cherished those talks we used to have and found myself striving to emulate her easy grace, love and compassion.

She raised her children well. In the time I have gotten to know her two teenage sons through the youth group and had to marvel at their intelligence, their wit and their great compassion. They both frequently look out for others and were always eager to lend a hand. They have always done well academically and have been the kind of friend that will be there for whomever needs them. The love this family shared radiated from them.

Last week we learned of her passing and immediately went to Bill and their two teenage boys. As we arrived and heard of how she passed I couldn't help but look around the house, my eyes rested on a framed photograph. I saw that photograph being taken only a month and a half ago. I remember that night vividly and can still remember what she said to me, her laugh as we exchanged funny stories of the week. I remembered the recent BBQ we had with the family, the food eaten and the laughter shared. As I looked around I felt a small hole open within me as I realized she physically was no longer there. I cannot begin to imagine the hole that Bill and the boys must be feeling.

At her funeral her eldest son took a moment to get up in front of the mourners and thank them for the outpouring of support his family had received. He commented on how difficult the week had been and how he loved his mother. He said "all things must come to an end and unfortunately for Mom it came too soon". How true his words are. It hit me to my very core about how soon things come to an end, how transitory this life is, how little time we have in this life.

All things must come to an end and sadly for us Danielle's story ended far to soon for us. Thank you Danielle for the time you blessed us with.

Notebooks

I am a notebook fiend, have been even before I could write. When I was younger my parents had to keep any notebooks they brought home out of my reach, otherwise they would go missing (and eventually rediscovered tucked away in a corner of my room). I loved back to school as a kid because it meant several crisp new composition books that I could carry around. Knowing my love of them my mother always picked up one or two extras for me. 

When we went shopping at dollar stores it was inevitable that you would find me in the notebook section, holding the various books, feeling the pages, seeing how they would lay open. I was rather picky about the kind of notebooks I liked and could spend the entire trip trying out every single on for the right notebook. Sometimes they wouldn’t have any I liked and other times my parents had to talk me out of buying 15 of them at once.

In high school it was disappointing to me that we no longer used the composition books, but I found that I liked having binders. The days before school had me putting in the fresh new pages, carefully dividing the binders with the bright new tabs and carefully labeling them in my atrocious writing. I would then sit back and flip to each section, admiring the pages. The first few days of school I tried hard to write in them neatly, to keep them tidy and organized, it never lasted. Eventually the pages tore, little notes got scribbled in the sides, snacks would be spilled on them and the writing smudged. I knew it was inevitable, but I’d try to postpone it.

Despite my love of notebooks and paper I have always been an inconsistent journaller (is that a word?). I would go in fits and spurts, writing out long entries for a few weeks and then not touching it for weeks or even months on end. I often reused old journals years later because there was still some good paper in them. If I wasn’t journaling I was doing what most teenage girls did, write stories, story ideas and really crappy poetry. Wherever I went a notebook or two was always with me.  

When I decided to become a witch in college I spent months hunting for the perfect notebook for my Book of Shadows, trying out several different kinds of note books and pens to see which felt the best. I had several magical books on the go at one point in time… a Book of Shadows for my spells, a Book of Light (detailing my spiritual feelings which is now scrapbooked… another story), a spiral bound notebook for notes from the books I liked and even binders with lessons I did for myself.

Over time my diligence waned. I slipped into being a lazy witch and an overall “Bad Pagan” (actually I might keep that moniker along with “Redneck Pagan” for the same reason… I find it funny). I wasn’t doing a lot of work on the magical side of my life as the physical realities of being a grown up (you know, work, marriage, mortgage, taxes, wondering why the hell I came into this room) took over. 

I got stressed, I got tiered and generally pissed off at life. And then we had a tsunami of crap (granted both good and bad) happen over the last year and a half that threw monkey wrenches into everything I planned and got me even crankier. I pushed through, did what needed to be done and started to take the chaos in my life and build a new future (with help from an amazing husband, a loving family and friends who didn’t care if I ate the whole pint while talking). Things started leveling out, and I started to get on with day to day life. 

As I went through all this notebooks were constant companions. They gave me release for all the pent up emotions, a chance to get out some of the negative things I was feeling in safe manner. And when I had finally exhausted the negativity and emptied out my soul I had space to fill up with the more positive things in life. Once again another notebook was at my side. Slowly I have started writing about the brighter things I see around me. Little by little the light within is shinning brighter. A notebook absorbed my darkness and another helped me find my light