All of us have the power of discernment. It was, in many respects a 20-year process of discernment which led me to Wicca. Is my discernment flawless? Of course not, but it gets better with use, not with deference to others to think for me.
If I may ask you a question
if we are all able to discern on our own, without any help from the Church, then why does everyone’s interpretation and discernment end up being contradictory? For example, I did not discern wicca to be correct, and you discerned it as your path. How can this be? Someone has to be wrong here… wicca (or Catholicism, or anything) can’t be both true and false. It’s not just that I discerned wicca to be the wrong path for me, personally… I came to believe it’s not what God wants us to practice. That is more than a subjective statement…truth is not subjective. How can we tell what is the objective truth, if our discernment is right or wrong?
when we discern with the help of the Church, we demonstrate humility and God blesses that. He allows us to go in the right way. Otherwise, much of our discernment is based on feelings and experiences, which can lie. I believe they can lie because people have contradictory experiences. God does not lie or contradict Himself.
My old profession was an excellent education in human nature across the whole spectrum. I know, more than most people, what evil looks like, how it moves, how it speaks. I have spent time inside the hearts and minds of murderers, rapists, corporate criminals, corrupt politicians, you name it. Can evil speak with a deceptive voice? Absolutely. But it always reveals itself if you know how to look. It speaks to ambition. To greed, to anger. To the idea of entitlement, to the idea that you should have power OVER others. Even when it can mask itself in sweetness and charity, the mask flies off the second it is tested. You attract entities such as demons only when you appeal to them directly OR when you seek the kinds of powers they have to give. I have had direct experience of the Goddess and it was 180 degrees different. No promise of power. No seduction. It was, rather, the essense of pure maternal love. Absolute peace and contentment and nurturing. A place I can envision but which was beyond time and place. A place where my own ego and sense of self and possessions were utterly unimportant.
I agree with you about evil. Regarding your experience with the Goddess that you describe… as a Catholic, I could interpret it in a couple of ways. It could be that you experienced the presence of Mary, but not knowing her, decided she was the goddess. Or, it was a real goddess, but I do not believe in goddesses, I believe there is one God. Alternatively, - it could have been a deception. I’ve read several stories in the lives of the Saints where the devil appeared to them in various forms…and often, as you say, there was something negative about it, something clearly evil. But a few times, it was more tricky because it did not feel oppressive or uncomfortable…I read about how the devil disguised himself as Jesus and appeared to St Gemma. She had many visions of the real Jesus, and Mary, and her Guardian Angel. She also had demonic attacks. Usually when the enemy attacked her, she could sense something evil about the vision or experience… but this time, she didn’t feel that at all, she felt at peace, and like it was really Jesus. Except that He told her something that Jesus would never, ever say. She almost fell into the deception but saw through it, because she knew Christ so well… and the devil disappeared. What I’m trying to say is that we can’t even always discern by feelings. Something can feel completely good, and yet be not good… and that is because the spirits, both good and bad, can affect our feelings. So how do we discern? One way is by examining the “fruit”… as in the results… and if the experience draws a person further from God and from the Church, it is not considered to be true, because God would not contradict Himself. He wouldn’t tell a person something opposite than what He has already told the whole world regarding Himself. This is why I am not sure about the experience with the Goddess, because God has said, there is only one God. However it might have been that you felt Mary’s presence and interpreted it differently. Just wanted to share my understanding of the matter
