As of December 11, 2020, I have completed my first semester of divinity school. Deciding to apply for the fall semester was a bit of a spur-of-the-moment decision, although now I feel like it was definitely the right one to make. Pretty much as soon as school started, I was thrown into a whirlwind of emotions and moments of reckoning, including a run-in with campus police. (Long story short, I was racially profiled by a white female undergrad student who reported me for looking like a “suspicious-looking female.” I might share that story another day.) Some of the lighter moments have included making a great new group of friends. I’ve taken courses that have delighted and challenged me. I have fallen back into the mentally stimulating and satisfying rhythm of doing research both for class papers and for my work-study job as a research assistant for an amazing scholar completing her dissertation. Overall, it’s been an immensely rewarding experience, so much so that I’m almost sad that we’ll be on break for six weeks. I can’t wait to start my new courses in the spring. At this moment, the main thing I want to reflect on is how my time as a divinity student has affected my relationship with magic.
I sometimes wrestle with reconciling magic with Christianity. It’s commonly known in our faith that the Bible speaks clearly about sorcery being a sin. Historical accounts of Israel dividing into two kingdoms are explained in scripture because King Solomon worshipped idols. (Thank you to BIB521: Old Testament I.) I’ve never actually worshipped any god other than the Abrahamic God (the God of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity), but my point is, I have always been aware that it’s frowned upon to do anything ritualistic that is not related to worshipping Jesus Christ/God/The Holy Spirit. However, I can also not deny that there was a time in my life when I did not feel welcome in the church because I am a part of the LGBTQIA+ community. I also became resentful of the messiness of church politics after seeing what my parents have been through as ministers of their respective congregations. I have always been a very spiritual person, and not going to church did not mean I also stopped being spiritual, or believing in God, for that matter.
I was hungry for another way to express my spirituality. I would go to the library to check out books on Buddhism, astrology, and clairvoyants. I think also because I generally try to be an open-minded person, I was opened to considering if I could find a spiritual home outside of Christianity. I became particularly interested in crystals, frequented one of the local metaphysical shops for sage, incense, and candles, and began to track the cycles of the moon. I never settled upon a name for these practices. Some people call it “New Age” and others call it paganism or witchcraft. Even still, I felt a resonance with the crystals that sat in my hand, and the practice of smudging felt like an empowering ritual that gave me a sense of agency in influencing the energy around me. I just didn’t have a name for any of it. I still don’t.
One of the courses I took last semester was Intro to World Christianity. It was a survey course that began with observing how Christianity is practiced in regions throughout the Global South. While our professor was quick to acknowledge that the term “Global South” has its own limitations and inaccuracies, many scholars currently still prefer it to saying “third-world” or “developing nations.” The Global South includes the regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific Islands. After briefly exploring Christian practices in various regions in the Global South, we transitioned to examining concepts that are frequently studied in the field of World Christianity. One of these concepts is the term “multiple religious belonging.” This term describes people who may adhere to more than one faith practice, or who practice some elements of one faith and parts of another. It’s an umbrella term that can describe several different scenarios. We learned that many Christian people from the Global South, as well as in other parts of the world, of course, practice elements of other faith traditions alongside Christianity. It’s not uncommon for a person to feel both Buddhist and Christian for example, or for a faith community to fully integrate faith traditions, such as the Christianity, Islam, and African traditional religions that are practiced in parts of Nigeria. Many Africans practice Christianity while still embracing traditional African religions, and many Black Christians in the United States acknowledge that many traditions in the Black church have roots in traditional African religions. Some people, like me, identify more with one tradition than another. I would say that I am more Christian than anything else. (The budding scholar in me feels it is necessary to qualify that “multiple religious belonging” is a conceptual term to describe this phenomenon, and people don’t have to expressly identify with this term to represent it. There are also definitely people who do practice elements of different faith traditions who may very well reject this identifier.)
I say all this to say, learning this concept was the first time I felt like I could accurately describe how my experiences as an empath and with magic did not have to necessarily contradict my upbringing as a Christian. The day we were scheduled to talk about this concept in our Zoom session, I very eagerly went on a blubbering tangent about how excited I was to learn about multiple religious belonging, and how affirming it was to feel like there was a way to describe my spiritual identity. None of my classmates replied. Some had awkward yet appreciative half-smiles, and I have a feeling that others were possibly condemning me to hell. My professor was supportive and thanked me for sharing my experience. Not much else came out of my revelation that day, but it was still a happy moment for me.
As I’ve come to learn more about how I want to define my personal theology however, I still have pause about how it all adds up. Maybe one day I’ll decide that magic and Christianity simply don’t mesh for me, and I’ll lovingly donate my crystals and bundles of sage to another practitioner. However, in some ways that still feels like too easy of an “out,” at least at this point in my life. Magic was there for me when I felt alienated by the church, and I’m not at a place where I want to dis-acknowledge that. I also know that some Christians will think that I am going to hell for even entertaining any of these notions. I don’t have much to say to those people, because as a spiritual person, I do not believe there is only one way to have a relationship with the Divine, however you define that force that I believe permeates all things and has shaped the universe. In turn, I’m sure there are some practitioners and witches who would reject me from their community for being a Christian. I am also okay with this. I have spent my whole life feeling caught in the “middle of things,” whether if it was between my Black and white classmates as a school-age child, my sensibilities for both bohemian and preppy fashion, or operating between a number of other dualities in a culture that insists on defining almost everything within the confines of a binary.
Maybe my “pause” is simply in using the word “magic” because of all the weight it carries as being sinful or demonic and by being depicted as in opposition to Christianity in cultures that operate in binary systems. Maybe then the “pause” I’m feeling is not with trying to reconcile magic with Christianity, but in the tension of wanting to be fully rid of binaries of “either/or” sensibilities altogether. It’s been easy for me to understand that the limiting constructs of male and female are unproductive and arbitrary, and that gender is a fluid spectrum. I understand that people cannot merely be categorized as “privileged” or “unprivileged.” Someone like me, who is Black, a woman, queer, and has a disability, but who is also middle class, literate and well-educated, cisgender, and does not have a physical disability, is the perfect representation of that. Even as a Christian, I don’t deny the possibility of other gods, nor do I believe that my faith is inherently more “right” than any other faith tradition. Despite all the challenges the church faces and the issues we need to address, I do believe my faith in God and Jesus allows me to be the type of person I want to be, even as I work to address and challenge the biases, bigotry, and mental and physical harm that Christians as a collective are guilty of committing to so much of the world. Simply put, I have always believed that I am Christian because I was raised as one. If I had been born into a Hindu family, I very much believe that I would be Hindu if I felt like that faith tradition worked for me, for instance. I also no longer fault God for the shortcomings of people who identify as Christian and who have caused harm in Her name in the way that those feelings once led me to disconnect from the church.
The God I have a personal relationship with is one of compassion, forgiveness, and understanding, and who challenges Her children to be brave and stand up for justice and righteousness. I will also say again that I believe that Christianity is not the only way to come to know God and/or the Divine, and that any faith, tradition, or lifestyle that inspires you to treat yourself and others well is okay in my book. I have never been interested in the type of magic that involves hexing or cursing people, or that is used to try to influence or control other people’s actions or lives–other than the one time I considered a “leave me alone” spell for someone who wouldn’t stop calling and texting me. I never actually did it though. The only type that sits right with me is the kind that encourages me to be a thoughtful and compassionate person, very much in the same way I approach Christianity. To be honest, I kind of don’t consider my interests in crystals, smudging, and candles to be elements of magic more so than simply extensions of my personal sense of spirituality that I don’t have a name for. So maybe what I am being called to do is to continue to dismantle the constructs and binaries in my own mind and embrace what has always been truly intuitive to me: that spirituality is not something that can be confined or defined merely with human words and with human minds. None of us really know what is “out there.” We operate on faith, trust, and hope, in whatever it is that we put those things in. The God that I believe to be good is a mirror of the good that is in us. I don’t know if magic will always be a part of my life. For that matter, I don’t know if I’ll always be a Christian. I hope and pray that I will, because I believe the God I have come to know through this faith has done well by me. What I aim to do now in divinity school is to discern a vocation that will allow me to celebrate and honor my faith by serving and ministering to people, whether that’s in congregational ministry, teaching, in a non-profit organization, or in some other field. I don’t know where I’ll end up just yet. Heck, I don’t even know if I got all A’s this semester just yet. While I continue to try to figure all of that out, I’m happy to just keep trying to put good in and get good out, in the literal, metaphysical, and spiritual sense of those words.
Sankofa Virgo 