A Grove of Ashes and Aspens

Now Playing: The Repentant by Elvenking

So personal religiosity is complicated. What it means to each person will be different, and how each person goes about it will be different. But if that’s true, why am I only bringing it up now? I’ve brought up other heavy topics on here before.

Recently, I was asked to answer a set of questions relating to a specific practice within ADF. (Ár nDraíocht Féin, for those who are unaware. They are a Druid organisation, and I am a member, though my practice is still inherently a solitary one, due to a lack of an active local branch, from what I could easily find.) Now, these questions mostly entail why I chose this specific path and, because I’ve been in the organisation for a couple years now before getting around to it, why I decided to start now. But that got me thinking: what is the core of faith, when you really get down to it?

This is a really complicated question, because faith will look different to everyone, and that can be broadly applied to anyone who is religious, regardless of if they’re pagan, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or another faith. As a result, a lot of this will be a (very incomplete) sort of generalisation on my thoughts in relation to my own practice, with intricacies of cultural/social context. (This will likely also be a topic I revisit a few years down the line with a more comprehensive answer, considering how intricate this topic is, but that’s for another time.)

Where I am right now in life and with my practice, I place a lot of my faith in the world around me. I can physically interact with trees and plants, and storms are right there in front of me (when I’m inside, all around me if I have to be outside in one), all that. It’s mostly based on actual things I can physically see.

What faith I do put in the gods is relating to my own understanding of them as spiritual entities, rather than wanting to submit myself to a higher power or an active belief that the gods are wholly and completely better than me or anything. Sure, they are far more powerful, but they’re equally fallible, just with potentially more physically devastating consequences if you want to get literal with it. The gods can make mistakes as much as the rest of us, so I don’t consider them to directly be above me in the same sense as deities from other religions, especially those that are monotheistic.

Again, this isn’t super in depth, and I do plan to go more into depth with this when I’ve given it more thought in a few years. But this is where I stand now.