Spiritual Quest Proves Empowering

By Arayah Larson
Published: 02.23.2007

Before the divorce, I guess you could say my family was my religion. My parents had a traditional marriage, with two kids and a house, and we all felt safe and secure in the warmth of our protected family environment. We never went to church, but the one strength we had was our own collective set of ideals and morals — we were our own belief system.

So when my mom, sister and I were sorting through our clothes and packing up to move to Tucson, far away from my dad in Oregon, it hit me that my family — and my personal support system — was breaking apart. For the first time in my life, I felt I needed protection. I didn’t feel safe at night, and I was paranoid and scared every day. I would lay awake and get the feeling that a strange, menacing man was standing over the head of my bed with a butcher knife, always just about to stab me.

I didn’t know what my role should be in my family anymore — I felt like a newly endangered species in an unprotected habitat. My mom, sister, dad and I were all left to find a way to “fix” ourselves, like reassembling the pieces of a puzzle. We needed stability to get us through the trauma of divorce, and that’s when we began our separate searches for religion.

Before, we were single members of a unified group, but after our household was divided, individual identities came with our new personalized beliefs. My 9-year-old sister thought of an ancient goddess, of whom she was a re- incarnation, and began to pray to her and create a world where her word ruled and magic grew. My mom adorned the house with Buddha statues and altars to the Hindu god Ganesha, remover of obstacles. I stewed over my ideals and ethics, finally settling on a potluck religion of my own. I was inspired by Winter Solstice, a pagan holiday where worshippers stand in a circle, holding hands, communing with nature and wishing peace for the world. The earthy Egyptian goddess Isis gave me strength to stand tall and follow a religion that I had never before considered tangible. My dad practiced the Protestant religion of his childhood once more. Whenever we stayed with him, he asked us if we’d join him at church, but each Sunday we declined.

We began to see our parents differently. Mom was no longer simply a wonderful, caring mother, but she was also a person; we shared our problems like best friends. Dad surprised us by showing us a vulnerable, lonely side of himself. Seeing them as individual people with flaws and questions of their own gave my sister and me a new sense of freedom to rebuild our own personalities. When friends or extended family interrogated us about our new religions, we could stand up for our ideas, and our parents supported us because they could understand our need for a spiritual search.

Divorce always seemed like something from “The Parent Trap,” something that could never happen to me. The only strength I had, the togetherness of our household, fell out from under me, and each member of my family seemed lost and bewildered. We had to build a much stronger support system — ourselves. Based on individual religions, new friends, and projects at work and school, we put ourselves back together. Each of us became stronger, better individuals, forming two smaller but stronger families standing on stronger people.