Adelina St. Clair - The Path of a Christian Witch

About the Author

Adelina St. Clair has been a student of Wicca and Paganism for over ten yearsa passion she combines with an ever-growing interest in Christian studies. She has also studied fields as varied as microbiology, bioethics, Reiki, shamanism, theology, and herbalism.

Adelina works as an occupational therapist in a Cree community in northern James Bay, Quebec, Canada, where she lives with her husband and two children. She also spends part of the year in Montreal with her family.

Please visit her website, www.adelinastclair.com.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

The Path of a Christian Witch 2010 by Adelina St. Clair.

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First e-book edition 2010

E-book ISBN: 9780738726410

Cover art Jupiterimages/Polka Dot/PunchStock

Cover design by Adrienne W. Zimiga

Editing by Brett Fechheimer

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To my family,
for giving me a place to lay my roots

To Marek, my everything,
for being husband, soul mate, teacher, and friend

And to Jakub and Chiara,
for allowing me to witness love grow
right before my eyes

Acknowledgments

As always, to Whitney Lee, my agent; Diana James, my manager; and to all the good folks at Llewellyn Worldwide/Midnight Ink, especially Bill Krause, Rebecca Zins, Marissa Pederson, and Ellen Dahl.

To the folks who allowed me to pick their talented and expert brains: attorney Mark Hardiman; Felicia Donovan, author of Cyber Crime Fighters: Tales from the Trenches ; Lee Lofland, author of Police Procedure & Investigation ; and Officer Brenda Tozloski of the Sunderland Police Department.

Special thanks to the many people I met while researching this book, especially the folks at Mikes Maze in Sunderland, Massachusetts (http://www.mikesmaze.com).

And last, but never least, to my dear friends and family, who are always by my side.

Contents

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Appendix:

I am a Christian Witch. It has taken me many years to be able to say these words with the reverence that they deserve. It took years of searching, reading, questioning, and heading sometimes into the darkest of places and sometimes into the brightest. Many years it took me to make this statement without fear or guilt or apology. After countless attempts at explaining my path, I have found that there is no short explanation of what it is. And mere explaining, I have realized, does no justice to the profound journey of self-discovery and liberation Christian Witchcraft has led me on. It is a journey of experience, of coincidences and of pure magic, of random roads taken and of special encounters. Above all, it is a purely personal process.

This is my diary, my testimony. All names have been changed to preserve anonymity. I only hope that my stories inspire you to open your eyes to your own magic and to follow your own journey of discovery.

As is often the case with spiritual journeys, my road was not a straight one. It turned and twisted in the most unexpected of ways. It was in the widest turns, however, that I learned the most about myself and about my place in the world. I was interested in paranormal phenomena from a very young age. I was always looking for uncanny occurrences that confirmed that there was more to the world than what was visible. I started reading about astral travel and the auric field and got interested in all matters relating to metaphysics. Concurrently, religion was also an all-powerful part of my life. I would spend hours talking to Jesus and Mary before going to sleep. They were my solace and counsel.

As I grew up, I became increasingly aware of the incongruities between my beliefs and the actions of my church. My faith was that of the innocent child, relying on the simplicity of Jesus teachings and on the beauty of love. I could not comprehend the teachings of the men who claimed to represent him. Politics and worldly greed had entered my sanctuary, my sacred space. Like an adult who looks at her parents through mature eyes, I could not understand what my church had become. I gasped at the polemics of the church on homosexuality and womens rights. It was around this time that I discovered Witchcraft. I started reading about it and signed up for classes. I discovered magic in myself and in the whole world, and I felt reborn. The gifts I had developed as a child rushed back at me in a great wave. And yet, despite all these discoveries and the reconnection to a deep part of myself, I lived in anxiety and misery. My most intimate friends, my Lord and Lady, could not be part of this. I had lost my tradition, the rock on which my faith was built. I was lost.

Here is the new chapter in my life, and it is a beautiful one. I have chosen to bring together all the beauty in my life into one vibrant and loving spirituality. I have given up nothing. I embrace it all.

Initially, I set about the task of writing these lines with the mindset of the scholar, making a case for the possibility of the coexistence of two beautiful philosophies, Paganism and Christianity, into one coherent spiritual practice. I wanted to dig up the roots of history and find the initial meaning of Christianity, its core teachings. I wanted to tear down the politics and the perversions that had infiltrated the church. I wanted the truth to come out so that we could rebuild a faith the way Christ would have wanted. I was the new Inquisition, tearing away the hypocrisy and the injustice that had marked the reign of the church for centuries. It was time for the Holy Institution to stand trial and to answer for its atrocities.