by Gillian Taber

Created on: July 18, 2008

It's a big question isn't it? Why did you choose the path you are on? Why do you believe what you believe? I certainly don't intend for any reader to think that this is the fabled 'IT', the answer to life, the universe and everything, to coin a phrase. I just want to share my personal experience.

I was brought up in a Christian household. My dad was a member of the Salvation Army and I attended Sunday school every weekend. I guess it says a lot that the one thing I remember about those Sunday mornings is not understanding something. I remember being deeply confused by Jesus being born at Christmas and then dying at Easter as a grown man. Of course, now, I realise that there were 30 some years between the Nativity and the Crucifixion but back then I just couldn't get a handle on how that could happen! Perhaps that was the beginning of my questioning the path my faith was taking. As I grew older, reached my teens, I found myself constantly asking how there could be this amazing God, a God of Love, a protective God when my life was Hell on Earth. My childhood was, shall we say, difficult. An absent father and an abusive mother combined to make me wonder if there was a God at all and if there was, why he didn't care about me. Christianity became a series of events, about as far away from belief as it could be. The festivals marked points in the year, nothing more. Christmas was about the cynical collecting of presents, Easter was about how many eggs I got. Christianity had failed me and I began looking for something more.

Through my early teens I looked into spirituality, into Buddhism, Catholicism, Wicca and nothing at all grabbed me. I think I was beginning to give up when a book saved me. Not for the first time either, but that's another story. I've always been a rabid reader, reading everything I can and I picked up a book called The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer-Bradley. Why? Because the front cover appealed and it involved my favourite myth/legend of all time, that of King Arthur. I also liked the idea of how it was told from the point of view of three women in his life, his mother, his sister and his wife. Anyone who knows anything about paganism will perhaps see the Triple Goddess in that trio but I didn't know much about that at the time. From the first page I couldn't put the book down. I read it through and then read it again straight away because I had found my personal 'IT', my answer. Morgaine was exactly where I wanted to be, believing everything

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