Reach Out, Touch Grass
[June 2026]
I converted to Judaism in 2024 after a long and messy spiritual itinerary. The first nineteen years of my life I spent as a Christian, mostly in evangelical-charismatic circles. From age twenty to thirty-six I was Pagan. Then came roughly six or seven years of calling myself “none,” a period of raw disillusionment that ended when I began exploring Judaism in 2023. I converted Reform but carry strong Reconstructionist leanings. None of this unfolded in a tidy arc. It was more like a series of doors slamming shut and one unexpectedly opening onto something that finally fit.
In my Christian youth, the big sell was the “personal relationship with God.” We were encouraged to treat Jesus like a best friend. Youth group leaders told us to talk to him the way we would talk to each other, to cast our cares upon him, to expect him to speak back. People around me regularly announced, “God told me this,” or “The Lord said that,” fancied themselves prophets, experienced signs and wonders. Buddy Jesus had not yet become a meme when I was deep in Baptist, Pentecostal, and Vineyard spaces, but the vibe was already there. I was “born again,” sincere, and fully immersed. The expectation was constant two-way communication. You did not merely believe in the Christian god; you hung out with him.
That baggage traveled with me when I left Christianity and entered Paganism. I found patron gods and eventually fell in with the devotional polytheist crowd. Conversations in those spaces often sounded a lot like the Christian ones I had left: casual reports of divine interactions, messages received, relationships cultivated. At the same time, I butted heads with strict reconstructionists, especially Heathens. I respected lore and wanted historically grounded modern rituals, but the hard recons insisted the gods kept limited access to ordinary people and when they did get involved in sagas or history, it rarely ended well for the mortals. I knew this firsthand through family lore. One of my distant ancestors on my Norwegian maternal side was Ragnar Lodbrok, said to be touched by Odin. That connection did not spare Ragnar from a particularly gruesome death. The lesson seemed clear: divine attention was not a cozy friendship. But I still doubled down and insisted that treating the gods like friends and family was a good and holy thing.
(Now would be a good time to mention that when I "spoke with" these entities, I never heard disembodied voices, it was an "inner voice" that felt separate from my own thoughts, but was not like the hallucinations schizophrenics report.)
By 2016 the whole structure collapsed. Severe bullying in the Pagan community affected and complicated my meatspace life in negative ways. If the gods were real, it started to feel like they did not like me much. That suspicion hardened into flat rejection, believing "there are no gods, religion is a lie, and all it does is divide people". I walked away from everything. I looked at my former beliefs through the lens that people with C-PTSD are known for maladaptive daydreaming, and my old path was a cope that fell apart because there was no there there.
In addition to looking at my old path as maladaptive daydreaming... I had to take a good long look at the *why* I ended up getting sucked in. I come from an abusive family and was bullied in school and my workplaces, and am disabled in a world that equates your worth with productiveness. A lot of the "prophets" in my Christian days and spirit-workers in my Pagan days come from dysfunctional or abusive homes, and were weird/different in school and were also disabled. I don't think I wanted to be special in any sort of narcissistic "look at me, I'm so important" sense, but it was twofold: 1. from a family and in a world that said I was worthless, I wanted to prove my worth to the Divine by "doing something with my life", 2. I was surrounded by other broken people and had empathy overload and genuinely wanted to help and provide comfort and encouragement. I think a lot of my former co-religionists were in the same boat from their background. So I had to let go of the belief that I had to prove myself to be worth love and dignity, and the belief that I could actually help "guide" people without being properly trained in psychology.
Then in 2021 I caught COVID before vaccines were available and nearly died. In the fever I had a vivid hallucination of a Grim Reaper-like figure. Santa Muerte appeared in that liminal space and, in a way I still cannot neatly explain, shoved me toward Judaism. As a small child I had wanted to be Jewish. My mother, a fundamentalist in a cult (Worldwide Church of God aka Armstrongism), shut that down immediately. The longing had gone underground for decades.
Becoming Jewish did not magically resolve every question. I still wrestle with belief in a literal Supreme Being. Some days I feel Hashem is there, the Force that holds existence together. Other days it seems like a beautiful idea I cannot confirm. I converted because the culture, the traditions, the ethical framework, and the story of a people who keep choosing life spoke to me. Certainty of belief was never the price of admission.
On the days when belief sits solid, my understanding looks nothing like what I once practiced. Obviously, I do not see Yeshua as Moshiach or divine, and while I am technically a henotheist rather than a strict monotheist, I direct no worship toward any other gods.
More importantly, the texture of relating to the divine has shifted. I pray, sometimes formally, often informally and messily. When I was inpatient in 2024 getting sober and going through withdrawal hell, I prayed something like, “Hashem Adonai Eloheinu, I am a broken, fucked-up mess.” I have poured my heart out in my native language, and I have sung ניגונים (those wordless melodies of “lai lai lai, yai dai dai” that carry what structured words cannot). Rebbe Nachman’s teaching about honest, unpolished prayer resonates with me. But Hashem is not my buddy.
Hashem is the King of the Universe, sustaining every atom, every galaxy, every drop of rain, every chaos butterfly, every complicated human heart. He is not stopping by for tea like some devotees claim their gods do with Loki or Hera or whichever entity they feel close to. Ironically, my view is now much closer to the "gods of limited access" strict-recon perspective of yore that I so vehemently argued against. Hashem is busy doing Hashem things, and thank G-d. Of all the deities that ever existed, He is probably the last one you want personally telling you to Do Epic Shit because that usually involves plagues and building arks and wandering about in deserts and getting swallowed by whales and things.
In my Christian youth, the big sell was the “personal relationship with God.” We were encouraged to treat Jesus like a best friend. Youth group leaders told us to talk to him the way we would talk to each other, to cast our cares upon him, to expect him to speak back. People around me regularly announced, “God told me this,” or “The Lord said that,” fancied themselves prophets, experienced signs and wonders. Buddy Jesus had not yet become a meme when I was deep in Baptist, Pentecostal, and Vineyard spaces, but the vibe was already there. I was “born again,” sincere, and fully immersed. The expectation was constant two-way communication. You did not merely believe in the Christian god; you hung out with him.
That baggage traveled with me when I left Christianity and entered Paganism. I found patron gods and eventually fell in with the devotional polytheist crowd. Conversations in those spaces often sounded a lot like the Christian ones I had left: casual reports of divine interactions, messages received, relationships cultivated. At the same time, I butted heads with strict reconstructionists, especially Heathens. I respected lore and wanted historically grounded modern rituals, but the hard recons insisted the gods kept limited access to ordinary people and when they did get involved in sagas or history, it rarely ended well for the mortals. I knew this firsthand through family lore. One of my distant ancestors on my Norwegian maternal side was Ragnar Lodbrok, said to be touched by Odin. That connection did not spare Ragnar from a particularly gruesome death. The lesson seemed clear: divine attention was not a cozy friendship. But I still doubled down and insisted that treating the gods like friends and family was a good and holy thing.
(Now would be a good time to mention that when I "spoke with" these entities, I never heard disembodied voices, it was an "inner voice" that felt separate from my own thoughts, but was not like the hallucinations schizophrenics report.)
By 2016 the whole structure collapsed. Severe bullying in the Pagan community affected and complicated my meatspace life in negative ways. If the gods were real, it started to feel like they did not like me much. That suspicion hardened into flat rejection, believing "there are no gods, religion is a lie, and all it does is divide people". I walked away from everything. I looked at my former beliefs through the lens that people with C-PTSD are known for maladaptive daydreaming, and my old path was a cope that fell apart because there was no there there.
In addition to looking at my old path as maladaptive daydreaming... I had to take a good long look at the *why* I ended up getting sucked in. I come from an abusive family and was bullied in school and my workplaces, and am disabled in a world that equates your worth with productiveness. A lot of the "prophets" in my Christian days and spirit-workers in my Pagan days come from dysfunctional or abusive homes, and were weird/different in school and were also disabled. I don't think I wanted to be special in any sort of narcissistic "look at me, I'm so important" sense, but it was twofold: 1. from a family and in a world that said I was worthless, I wanted to prove my worth to the Divine by "doing something with my life", 2. I was surrounded by other broken people and had empathy overload and genuinely wanted to help and provide comfort and encouragement. I think a lot of my former co-religionists were in the same boat from their background. So I had to let go of the belief that I had to prove myself to be worth love and dignity, and the belief that I could actually help "guide" people without being properly trained in psychology.
Then in 2021 I caught COVID before vaccines were available and nearly died. In the fever I had a vivid hallucination of a Grim Reaper-like figure. Santa Muerte appeared in that liminal space and, in a way I still cannot neatly explain, shoved me toward Judaism. As a small child I had wanted to be Jewish. My mother, a fundamentalist in a cult (Worldwide Church of God aka Armstrongism), shut that down immediately. The longing had gone underground for decades.
Becoming Jewish did not magically resolve every question. I still wrestle with belief in a literal Supreme Being. Some days I feel Hashem is there, the Force that holds existence together. Other days it seems like a beautiful idea I cannot confirm. I converted because the culture, the traditions, the ethical framework, and the story of a people who keep choosing life spoke to me. Certainty of belief was never the price of admission.
On the days when belief sits solid, my understanding looks nothing like what I once practiced. Obviously, I do not see Yeshua as Moshiach or divine, and while I am technically a henotheist rather than a strict monotheist, I direct no worship toward any other gods.
More importantly, the texture of relating to the divine has shifted. I pray, sometimes formally, often informally and messily. When I was inpatient in 2024 getting sober and going through withdrawal hell, I prayed something like, “Hashem Adonai Eloheinu, I am a broken, fucked-up mess.” I have poured my heart out in my native language, and I have sung ניגונים (those wordless melodies of “lai lai lai, yai dai dai” that carry what structured words cannot). Rebbe Nachman’s teaching about honest, unpolished prayer resonates with me. But Hashem is not my buddy.
Hashem is the King of the Universe, sustaining every atom, every galaxy, every drop of rain, every chaos butterfly, every complicated human heart. He is not stopping by for tea like some devotees claim their gods do with Loki or Hera or whichever entity they feel close to. Ironically, my view is now much closer to the "gods of limited access" strict-recon perspective of yore that I so vehemently argued against. Hashem is busy doing Hashem things, and thank G-d. Of all the deities that ever existed, He is probably the last one you want personally telling you to Do Epic Shit because that usually involves plagues and building arks and wandering about in deserts and getting swallowed by whales and things.
This marks a sharp break from my earlier spiritualities. In evangelical-charismatic Christianity, many people described themselves as on a mission from their god. Some were prophets, some healers, some evangelists, some "prayer warriors", some musicians in worship bands. Everyone seemed to need a special calling. In Paganism the language shifted to the Great Work. Spirit-workers talked about their roles as bards, makers, priests, healers, mages. There was always this sense of being burdened with glorious purpose.
Judaism offers a profound relief from that weight. For the vast majority of us, the calling is simply to be a decent human being. I think of Gandalf’s words: Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check. But that is not what I have found. I’ve found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love. That feels like tikkun olam to me.
Hashem does not talk to me the way I once imagined Jesus or various gods did. Prayer in this context is different. It is not transactional and it is not a chat with a cosmic pal. It is reaching toward something vast and ultimately unknowable, offering what I have, and trusting that listening is enough. Hashem does not need to speak back in the ways I once craved. The universe keeps turning. My small corner of it asks me to be kind, to pursue justice, to do what I can to make the world suck less. That is work enough for one lifetime.
Not everyone needs to become a great scholar or a rabbi. I once dreamed I had become a hazzan and had to defend my decision to stay married to my Gentile husband, Andy, a Pagan Druid who has no intention of converting; Andy made a piece of art called “Pretty Fly For A Rabbi” of me as a rabbi after I told him. If I had found Judaism in my twenties I might have pursued rabbinical school and become a hazzan. I also might have flunked out, given the requirements to live in Israel for at least a year and my strong opposition to living in what I see as an apartheid state and endless war zone.
The point is that none of that is required. The tradition does not demand I become exceptional.
And I do not use this space to preach. I share perspectives as a queer Jewish layperson for those who are curious, but that is conversation, not proselytizing.
I no longer need to feel chosen for some grand destiny, and it is a fucking relief. The phrase “G-d’s chosen people” carries layers most outsiders miss; it is not about superiority or being special but about responsibility to a covenant. I do not claim special status. I am a disabled, autistic guy who found his way home. My life is stable in part because I am not pouring limited resources into constant offerings and ritual/magick gear, or church conferences and mission trips, like I once did. I am not constantly getting in my own way chasing what I think is what some entity wants me to do with my life. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and many who insist their lives follow a divine trajectory turn out to be trainwrecks.
Looking back, the Christian emphasis on intimate friendship with the divine prepared me to expect constant feedback. Pagan devotionalism reinforced that expectation with multiple gods who seemed personally invested. When both frameworks failed me, I assumed absence of gods altogether. Judaism showed me another possibility: a relationship built on awe, covenant, and quiet persistence rather than constant reassurance or dramatic callings. I do not need to "hear" the Divine or feel chosen for greatness. I need to show up, do the next right thing, and let the King of the Universe handle the rest.
There is something grounding, almost humorous, in realizing that after decades of seeking epic spiritual significance, the healthiest path turned out to be the most ordinary. Pray when you need to, sing "lai lai lai" when words fail, and then go live your life. Be decent. Fix what is broken in your reach. Love the people around you. That is the Work, and it is enough.
And that, after everything, feels like coming home.
© Finleigh (FlameAndSong), 2026.
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