A while back I was out walking by the apple tree up the lane from us, where I keep a candle lantern and light it several times a week. I was just lighting a candle there when a lady came by in a car, stopped, rolled her window down, and asked what I was lighting the candle for. Not wanting to be too in her face, I said I was celebrating the beauty of nature in the area. Which was, of course, true.

She was confused, though, by what I was doing. To her, the way to celebrate nature is to praise God who created it. She couldn’t see how lighting a candle was doing that.

This got me thinking. When I see something beautiful, my first reaction is one of awe and wonder. It is only afterwards that I think about it, analyse it, try to ‘understand’ it. My first reaction is a heart reaction, a gut reaction. When I start to think with my head, it takes me away from the thing itself, into the world of abstracts and abstractions.

And that, more than anything, is why I can claim to be Wiccan, because within Wicca it is perfectly acceptable to have reverence for the world that is, without worrying too much about the whys and wherefores. That’s not to say that there aren’t Wiccans who argue angels on the head of a pin about who or what The Goddess is, or how The Summerlands work, but there’s a large enough body of Wiccans who treat is as an experiential religion rather than a theoretical one that I can feel comfortable there.

And, just to be clear, there are plenty of Christians for whom Christianity is about Jesus as a God of Love, for whom the words in a Book don’t govern them but the ‘feel’ of being and doing good does. I have great respect for these people. It just so happens that my own expressions of awe and reverence tend towards my love of nature more than my love of fellow man. To each their own.