My interview on The Haunted Road Trips Show with Tracy St. Croi comes out tomorrow! I am really excited to be on her podcast! She asked me about my spiritual experiences growing up and how they got me to where I am today.
Inspired by that conversation, I thought it would be a good idea to dive a little more specific on a particular quirky interest of mine and how it evolved from my experiences being Christian growing up to now being enthusiastically spiritual but not religious.
Many of you who have been keeping up with me for any length of time are aware that I grew up in the Christian Church. In fact, I grew up in many churches within the overall Christian Church. For astrological purposes, I will put dates below
- United Methodist (Birth – Summer 2016)
- Location 1 with my mother & father (Birth – Fall 2010)
- Location 2 with my mother & father (Fall 2010 – Spring 2012)
- Location 1 again with my mother (Summer 2012 – Summer 2016)
- Location 3 with my father’s parents (Summer 2013 – Summer 2016)
- Southern Baptist with my mother (Summer 2016 – October 2017)
- Non-Denominational with my father (Summer 2016 – April 2017)
- Same church as Location 2 but they withdrew from the UMC
- Presbyterian Church U.S.A. with my mother (October 15, 2017 – November 23, 2023)
This timeline is reflective of the evolution that I went through in my childhood, which I have talked about before on the In the Stars podcast streaming on all popular platforms.
I share this timeline because not only does it reveal the amount of church experiences that I have had solely in my childhood, but it also has everything to do with my own spiritual journey, self-discovery, and a unique interest of mine that I am about to share.
My Scorpio Mercury remembers me being very little at Location 1 and attending the contemporary services. My father was a youth minister, and I went to pre-school there, so I was literally at Location 1 six of seven days of the week, sometimes all seven if there was an event.
I never really felt anything in the modern worship environment. In fact, I would have been completely happy if I never had to go to church again. I remember feeling that people just regurgitated popular prayers and phrases and had no idea of the substance behind them. I remember particularly when it came time for the ever so popular Lord’s Prayer. I remember cringing whenever I heard the monotone voices in the congregation with no excitement or zeal, with no enthusiasm, and most likely no idea of the actual meaning of the words.
I did not make the connection until when I was writing this article, that many people probably gravitated towards Location 1’s contemporary environment because all of the songs that were sung had a beat and all sounded the same with very similar meanings. Every song could be boiled down to three words: Jesus, God, and holy. The songs lacked nuance and were very surface level and most people like that for some reason. Now that I am a metaphysician, I can validate childhood-me’s experiences with being annoyed and frustrated in that environment.
My parents were in the process of divorce in 2012, and I had gone to my maternal grandmother’s house just outside of Nashville, Tennessee for two weeks. She was Presbyterian so I had gone with her to church one Sunday not because I wanted to, but because she took me!
I am so grateful that she took me to her church!
I remember walking into that environment and immediately feeling my spirit just light up. It was truly magical because I never got this feeling before at church back home.
I remember particularly feeling spiritually energized when singing one of the first “real” hymns I ever had sung: Open My Eyes, That I May See.
I am not going to lie; I was excited to go to church with my grandmother the second week because I absolutely fell in love with hymns. It was the words! It was the tunes! It was the substance! It was the organ! It was not cheaply sounding! My Capricorn Venus was yearning for more!
Keep in mind I was not even in first grade yet!
That second Sunday was just as magical as the first. It was that second Sunday where we sang the hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling set to the tune BEECHER (not HYFRYDOL because my grandmother’s church does not use the official Presbyterian U.S.A. hymnal).
BEECHER was my absolute favorite tune growing up, I would even go as far to say that it is THE sound of my childhood. That is how much of an impact it had on me. I would get so excited when I would go to church with my mother or my grandparents and see in the bulletin that we would be singing Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. The lyrics were “meh”, but the tune was one of my connections to spirituality. Below is a recording of the tune:
Many more church experiences occurred, many of which I talk about on the In the Stars podcast or the Patreon, but it was not until the Fall of 2022 where I began writing my own hymns. I was becoming more and more dissatisfied with a lot of the hymns in Christian traditions because I felt like they were not very empowering, in fact they were more “put yourself down and God can save you” if you know what I mean. They were lacking the spark of God, Source, Spirit, or whatever you want to call it, present in everyone and everything that exists or will exist. I was also really going headstrong in my metaphysical studies at the time as well so that definitely encouraged a lot of my skepticism and criticism of theologies and spiritual dogma.
As it happened, I had the first hymn I ever wrote sung in church with the enthusiastic support of the church’s interim pastor at the time, Jody Welker. Nobody in my community would have really known that writing was a talent of mine if it wasn’t for him!
I set my first hymn to the tune GENEVA (the tune of Swiftly Pass the Clouds of Glory).
This was also around the time when I found my astrology mentor, Laurie Rivers, on TikTok. Little did I know then that I would be professionally practicing astrology three years later.
Even after I decided to leave the church all together in 2023, I still kept up with hymn writing. My hymns were never about “praise God or you will go to hell” or “Jesus died for your sins” (which by the way, did you know that Jesus dying for your sins to be forgiven is not even in the gospels? He died because of human power structures and egos).
My hymns were always about self-empowerment and locating the divine in everything. Everything is divine because the divine is not a power structure to divvy up limited resources. You cannot apply economic principles to spirituality and the divine, however I saw a lot of that when I was a part of the church which was one reason of many why I decided to leave.
I want to share with you all a hymn that I rewrote. I did not write it in its original form; in fact, it is an old Irish poem. Because it is a common practice in Christian tradition to rewrite outdated language into more progressed terminology, I chose to rewrite it because the original lyrics were not only archaic but felt kind of martial. I thought to myself, how can I update the lyrics, which were actually really beautiful at their core, to lyrics that people can understand today without getting caught up in the narrow and myopic language originally used (mainly for a very specific demographic). I also wanted to show people how even though I am not a practicing Christian, I can still appreciate the value that Christian art has on spirituality in general. With that, below is my revision for the timeless hymn Be Thou My Vision and a recording of the SLANE tune that accompanies it.
