It’s always tough for me to talk about my religion, as several incidents lately have reminded me.

There’s this wonderful interview with a professor of environmental studies and scholar of Paganism, Adrian Ivakhiv. I came across this today (linked from The Wild Hunt), and reading it threw several things into perspective for me. (I also recommend the interviewer’s blog entry on the topic.)

I would say that religion itself, as we understand it, has undergone a real series of changes, particularly with the Protestant Reformation. And, you know, over the last couple of hundred years, it’s become a matter of belief and a sense to a set of doctrines. ‘We believe that this and this happened historically, and therefore, this is what we’re supposed to do’ or ‘We’ll be saved by believing in Christ as our Savior’ or something like that. Whereas in the past, it was more rooted in a set of really, you know, cultural practices that were based in everyday life that were full of images and symbols and meanings.

I think this quote really gets at the heart of why I find my religion so hard to talk about with most people. I think that most people have a general set of expectations about any religion — even one that they’re not familiar with — that there will be certain things that define that particular religion and make it different from any other religion.

The first problem with that is that Paganism isn’t a specific religion so much as an umbrella term, so there’s always that tension between talking about my personal spirituality and worrying that people will (inaccurately) generalize to Paganism as a whole. Which makes it tough to speak without a lot of boring disclaimers.

Secondly, I feel like when people want an explanation of a religion, they expect a statement of belief: “I’m a Pagan, and that means that I worship so-and-so Deity and follow such-and-such holy text”. But my religion isn’t defined that way. My religion is more like the second thing he mentions; it’s about everyday life, it’s about experience. But how do I explain an experience? How do I explain a feeling of connection, of meaning? How do I convey the way a skyscraper, a city, a mural, a neighborhood, all of these mundane parts of life, can be sacred, can have Spirit? How do I explain immanence?

For me, the way to reconcile that one level of reality, where people talk about [mystical experiences] and maybe experience that, and the other level, which is sort of the material world that we can measure and know what’s going on in, is just to acknowledge that, as human beings, we have this fabulous capacity to imagine things, but it’s not just a one-way kind of imagination from scratch. It’s a way of putting order or putting a face to our experiences.

The gods are made-up. And They are also real. We create Them, and They create us. How do I explain that something can be true without being literal? How do I tackle the necessity of paradox?

And as long as there are going to be mysteries, you know, everybody’s going to make an effort to put a face to those mysteries, to kind of draw on whatever stories and tales and narratives and images that have been circulating in order to make sense of those gaps.

So what do I believe?

I believe that the Sacred is everywhere, in everything — in people, in animals, in trees and skyscrapers. And also in books, in computers, in forks, in dishwashers. Everything all taken together makes up god — singular. So my beliefs are pantheistic in that way.

And I also believe that most of the time, we human beings have a really tough time grasping that notion of Everything. So I believe that we take certain aspects of that Everything, of God Singular, and personify. We give faces, and names, and human personalities, so that we can relate. So that we can understand. I believe that the gods exist for relationship, for connection, so that we can have that connection to the Everything. And so my beliefs are polytheistic, in that way.

I believe that no one knows what happens after death, and that it’s impossible to know, and I’m okay with that. (Unlike many Pagans, I don’t buy reincarnation, at least not literally.) And so my beliefs are agnostic, in that way.

I could even make arguments for both monotheism (in that Everything is a Unity, a One) and atheism (in that I acknowledge that the gods are human-created), although both are a bit more of a stretch.

So do you see why this becomes complicated yet? We haven’t even gotten past the Deity-and-afterlife bit, and already I’ve yammered on for far too long for our hypothetical lunchtable discussion. And we haven’t even gotten into ethics, traditions, holidays, prayer and meditation, “magic?”, or the usual disclaimers against Satan-worship, sacrificing goats, and suchlike.

Sometimes I think I should just become a Quaker. Life might be simpler, that way.