Just a Post-Religious Vagabond Finding My Way Home
(With some help from my new planetary friends)
When I started this blog last spring, I intended for it to be primarily about religious deconstruction with a heavy emphasis on spiritual reconstruction. Check.
Typical of my historical writing path, I’m always on the move to expand my writings to include the old while infusing the new. I don’t need to write exclusively about religious deconstruction. We have people like ex-Evangelical pastor Jim Palmer and his vast, thorough, inspiring work at his “Deconstructionology” Substack blog for that. Or ex-PK (pastor’s kid) Aaron Abke. Or recently deconstructed seminary grad and friend, Logan Barone. You can also check out my own deconstruction videos on Youtube), my incomparable (in my humble opinion) book with 500 Amazon reviews (Raising Hell), which deconstructs—shreds, actually—the false doctrine of hell (also available on Audible).
I’ve been deconstructing my Christian roots for almost twenty years now. It’s a crucial topic for all those looking to escape from limiting, toxic religion in order to begin a healing journey in their relationship with “God” (Divine Source). But my everyday life, thoughts, and experiences keep expanding into new territory on a regular basis. I continually seek to transition my focus from what I don’t want or what no longer serves my Being, into what I DO want and what is beneficial and empowering. This is a crucial part of the human spiritual quest. I still get inspirations surrounding deconstruction topics from time to time, but these days, I’m really asking the Universe to resurrect something new out of the ashes. I’m creating new wineskins adequate for holding new wine.
I have a lot to say about spiritual reconstruction. What I especially love about this topic is that it carries the open-ended feeling of “The World is my Oyster.” No one can say how a person will spiritually reconstruct. It’s like diving for pearls, or spinning a Wheel of Fortune, or buying a lottery ticket. It’s an exciting yet blindfolded journey of many unexpected twists and turns. No two reconstruction journeys look alike, and that is the absolute beauty and point of it all. We are all free agents, on a freedom journey out of Egypt to figure out our own unique path toward our own Promised Land—why we are here and what we want to do about it.* We are each here to create something beautiful and unique—if we have the courage.
*Want to know what agreement you made before coming to learn here on earth plane? Book a mini astrology session with me (contact me via email) to find out your life lesson and/or your life purpose—it’s written in the stars!
My Life Lesson
Anyhow, I’ve long been grappling with the epic caterpillar struggle in the dark of my cocoon to transform something ugly and constricting into something beautiful and liberated. The deeper issue, and my life lesson, has recently solidified itself in my awareness as seeking to find a sense of security and significance amid feeling lost and alone at times in this cryptic, indiscernible Story. I have searched for this sense of comfort everywhere I could think of in the sea of earthly desperation, nearly to my death.
But recently, I am learning to be intentional to amend my perception of this Story into my own new version—that of a safe, easy Story filled with connectedness and belonging. I am beginning to understand that it is our perceptions that create our realities, and therefore we attract to ourselves what we believe about it. Whole new paradigm.
Religion stole the innate sense of security from me as a child. It told me that this world is not my home, that nothing here is safe. That I am not safe. My parents also took away my security when the outer home they created was replete with emotional neglect and abandonment, abuse, and frightening inconsistency. I became a vagabond soul from a very young age, always feeling like I was looking for somewhere to feel at ease or where I had belonging and significance. I was always looking for home.
Though I’d like to flesh out this lifelong search in future blogs, I will continue to include angles on spiritual liberation and reconstruction because those areas are intertwined with this topic of finding our sense of home here on earth. To find the locus of invincible security and comfort means untethering yourself from disempowering, fragmenting and polarizing systems, powers, beliefs, people, and relationship patterns outside of yourself where you have heretofore searched, so that you can survive and even learn to thrive on this dense, murky earth plane.
Understand, I have not arrived. That’s why I want to need to talk about my process. I am in the most delicate, fragile, and difficult search for home in my life. It’s raw, and real. Transitioning from always looking outside myself for this comfort in person, place, or thing, to turning inward because there are no other resources, still feels like a death. How I wonder if anyone reading this blog identifies. I think that adults who felt loved in their childhoods have less of a struggle with this. But children who endured childhood with absent or threatening parents see this pattern of dysfunction and fear playing out in all their adult close relationships.
Regardless of one’s upbringing though, I still feel that not being at home within oneself IS the human struggle. This is the reason for addictions, the search for something you can’t identify, feeling lost and alone, struggling for significance, dealing with codependency issues, and a general sense of isolation from Source and others. Most of us have never been taught that we are what we seek (“Thou art That”), or that we can find a safe place—a home—within our own being.
Do you feel the ache at times? Do you feel the forlorn, lonely, desperate, disconnected lost feelings that I feel on a regular basis? Do you struggle with looking for belonging and significance in your significant other, your job, your status, your talents, your passions, your drugs of choice, or any other way?
Steered Toward Home
A couple weeks ago, I posted about the sudden turn of events surrounding selecting my theme word for 2025, which ended up being the word, “HOME.” In a nutshell, I’m coming up on my second Saturn Return (when Saturn passes the same sky coordinates as one’s birth which happens about every 28-30 years) this year. In astrology circles, it’s a big event! Saturn is the planet that enforces life lessons.
If you think back to your life around age 28-29, did anything significant happen to ignite great change in your life or to shake things up? Saturn comes heavily on the scene around that time in life and starts the conversation with individuals about their life lesson. Then during one’s second Saturn return, somewhere around the age of 58-60, this life lesson has potential to come full circle and be rendered completed—if you do the work. If you don’t do the work, they say, no problem! You keep getting more opportunities.
I didn’t know any of this before the last twelve months. Yet…there was my large and in charge life lesson all along, perfectly and prominently predicted (or prearranged) in my astrology natal chart. My life lesson? To find HOME within myself.
To find home within oneself would require such interventions as intentionally learning how to become my inner child’s own mother, looking within for my own sense of home, and taking the time to rewrite my childhood script.
My Saturn two returns both appear to revolve predictably around this life lesson, providing the opportunity for me to complete this challenge throughout my life. In my first return, my outer home (marriage, family, and literal home) that I believed to be secure for life, disintegrated before my eyes. And now, another Saturn trip around the sun later, I have been undergoing a life circumstance (I’ll be writing about it soon) that is deeply challenging my emotional sense of home at a time in life when I should be totally secure, settled, and at ease. To be continued…
It’s true that this is my personal life lesson. But as mentioned, I still believe that many, if not most of us, are all trying to find this elusive place within.
I remember back in my first Saturn return at age 29 when my whole life (and home) imploded. I have always referred to that time as my “ground zero” event. Back in those days, I was a very devoted, proper, conservative Christian girl. I didn’t recognize my infrequent intuitive experiences of “clairaudience” because that would have been akin to witchcraft and Satan worship in those days. Clairaudience is where you hear a voice, like the “Voice of God” (similar to Samuel’s experience when a voice kept calling him at night in his bed, though not audibly which is why Eli the priest could not hear it). It’s more like a sudden “foreign” Voice in your mind that crashes into your consciousness with a completely new thought. This Voice comes at surprising times and usually with contrary, radical, or unusual messages or directives. I have heard The Voice at least a handful of times in my life, each time resulting in the course of my life, or my worldview being completely altered.
On this unique occasion (my first Saturn return), I still believed God was opposed by a nefarious arch enemy who, judging from outcomes, was actually more powerful than God. Based on the message, I thought this particular Voice in my head was the voice of Satan. The Voice came while I was at a Christian women’s retreat at a Baptist youth camp in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. I had attended this same camp as an early teen, at least fifteen years earlier. On an early summer’s evening, I was flying on a wooden swing suspended on ropes from a giant pine tree—the same swing I loved as a youth. Swinging so high, I felt giddy, light, and free—without a care in the world. I was completely absorbed in the elation of the moment. I remember even being filled with gratitude and ease as the light turned golden.
Suddenly, The Voice dropped loud and clear into my mind, sending my whole world into a tailspin. “Is God big enough for you, Julie?” At that very moment, something cracked open all of my unconscious doubts and disappointments relating to my futile prayers and requests to God over the past several years. At that time in my life, I was already describing myself as “a salesman who didn’t believe in my own products,” which was the reason I didn’t “share Christ” with others. Despite consistent, wholehearted devotion to God and following all the algorithms of a good, obedient Christian life, I could not obtain what I was desperately seeking and praying for. What did I have to offer anyone if it wasn’t working for me?
But I hadn’t fully allowed those existential questions to arise within myself or take them to the logical conclusion that The Voice was now taunting me with. If I’m a salesman who doesn’t believe in my own products, what does that suggest about the “God” I believe in—that I’m putting my hope in for answers and miracles, for emotional and spiritual healing, for the eternal destinies of me and my children? Geesh, I should have already been asking these questions, but religious blindness is an illusory thing. But now here was The Voice, making me face them.
There were two primary issues I had begged, pleaded, and frequently cried to God for years that did not have any resolution or even noticeable improvement. No one prayed more sincerely and wholeheartedly than I did about these two things. One was my consuming, destructive struggle with anger. I was foremost angry at my abusive father, and experienced extreme self-loathing—perhaps feeling unlovable and therefore worthy of the punishments and abandonment I experienced throughout my tumultuous childhood. This anger frequently and uncontrollably surged up like hot lava, burning those closest to me (primarily spouse and children). It was a terrible cycle of feeling powerless over the anger and rage, only then to experience exponential self-loathing and sometimes even self-punishment.
The second issue was my marriage. Married young to my high school sweetheart who became a workaholic, reinforcing that I wasn’t worth coming home to, my anger was usually directed at him. The loneliness in my marriage—after a lonely childhood—was palpable. I worked on myself intensely those years in my twenties—going to counseling for several years, participating in support groups, reading and trying to apply all of the self-help books I could get my hands on, taking responsibility for my unhealthy anger (never excusing it), immersing myself in degrading patriarchal-sponsored women’s Bible study groups at church that were centered around becoming a quiet and submissive Christian wife (kill me now). But no matter how hard I tried; I couldn’t reach him. Eventually I figured out that his work was not his other mistress—instead was a hidden alcohol problem and later a real affair that ended our marriage.
The Voice at the women’s retreat was really the beginning of the end of my marriage—and my faith as I knew it. The question posed was so penetrating, that a sense of gloom and hopelessness washed over me in that moment that did not leave for months. It led to a crisis of faith and identity for me, which led to me stepping out of my marriage looking for love and attention. You could say my path of religious and personal deconstruction over the next fifteen years of my life was intrinsically related.
Love Notes from the Universe
In my recent blog entry, “The World is Becoming My Oyster,” I detailed how the Universe (or maybe Saturn) changed my theme word for 2025 from “power” to “home,” leading to prolific synchronous messages surrounding oysters and how they relate to the sense of home (recognize that this was my first “love note”). Ever since, I’ve been being guided around this theme of home, and I finally saw the pattern that illuminates what I am doing here. What I’m doing here, as in, my mission on this earth.
For any new readers here, I wrote a series of posts last summer about the discovery of and my deep work on a previously unconscious mother wound of emotional abandonment, and how it has shaped my life with a complex attachment style (both anxious and avoidant) and difficulty bonding to partners in my adult life. See “Mother Wound,” also “Mother Wound and Coyote Trickster,” and “The Voyage and Mama Whale.”
Aside from causing a lot of unrest and dysfunction in my adult romantic relationships, this ongoing quest for wholeness—some call it a “hungry ghost”—feels like a requisite journey of healing. Like, there’s no way around it. If I try to outrun it, or rebury it, or drown out its hollow cries with any of the usual methods, it will only lay in wait for the next opportunity. Perhaps another relationship in this world or, God forbid, the next. There’s a saying, “Wherever you go, there you are.”
As I come to understand more of the Cosmic Story we’re living in (and here), I realize the agonizing compulsions I feel arising from this mother wound may also stem from previous lives as it feels out of proportion to the circumstances of this lifetime. Maybe I brought it here with me, and attracted my mother in the first place, along with various other abandonment scenarios throughout my life.
But what to do with such a painful struggle?
After getting messages and synchronicities around the theme of oysters and finding home within, I started getting flooded with love notes from the Universe to affirm my direction and that I am not alone.
Love Note 1: Encounter with Archangel Raphael.
In early January 2025, I was listening to Betsy Gutting, one of my favorite intuitive astrologers during her reading on the upcoming Cancer full moon on January 13. The full moon theme for my particular sun and moon sign readings (both in Aries) fell in the 4th house of mother (ruled by Cancer, no less), all of which pertain to early childhood, security, and home. This felt like a huge synchronous alignment for starting out this new year and Saturn return year.
To finish out the reading, Betsy pulled an oracle card for my sign, and it was Raphael, the Archangel of healing. Usually such a card would just be a sweet, lightly-held idea to latch onto, but this one came to life. As I detailed in my previous blog, I randomly encountered two other Raphael’s that same day, which is unprecedented. This card also came to me only a couple days after I asked the planet Mercury for help with healing my heart and the seemingly bottomless wound. I later found through a Google search that Archangel Raphael is associated with the planet Mercury! Raphael is also associated with the East, looking forward, higher self, and healing body and emotions.
Love Note 2: Encounter with Archangel Gabriel.
Let me be clear, I have never felt as if I garnered any attention from archangels before last month, nor was I sure if such beings existed. However, I listened to a very convincing interview with Robert Gilbert, ex U.S. Marine Corps instructor in Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Warfare Defense, and also expert in Bio-geometry and ancient spiritual traditions. He convinced me that archangels were real, and I believe it was because of Mr. Gilbert’s interview that I asked for Mercury’s help with healing after he spoke of the conscious psychological effects on humans by the planets.
So, a couple weeks later, Betsy Gutting gave a reading for the subsequent New Moon in Aquarius (Jan 29th). Again, the reading applied to my 4th house (home, mother, inner child) through my 3rd major sign of Scorpio (everyone has three major astrological signs that influence personality, emotions, and soul development). The card she pulled this time was Archangel Gabriel, pertaining to creative writing and leadership. As in, it’s time to step into leading others to freedom with all of the lessons I’ve learned, and it’s time to begin writing about my experience (there are many other active areas in my Astro chart that favor me producing my next book this year).🥳😻
Out of curiosity, I looked up archangel Gabriel. He is the archangel of the West, associated with Cancer and the moon, the past, home, roots, early childhood, deep emotions, and the 4th house in astrology! I felt a beautiful reassurance by these two archangels, representing my past and my future, and the healing that is forthcoming through my life experiences from my past younger self (west), to my future higher self (east).
Love Note 3: Another Oyster Synchronicity.
In Betsy’s same New Moon video above, which came out a few days AFTER my Oyster blog, at 1:05:45 she said, “the world is your oyster.”
Love Note 4: “Sweet Home” by SYML.
Next, a new song suddenly appeared on my Spotify playlist—one that I couldn’t get out of my mind for a couple weeks. Again, it was synchronous on two levels as my husband and I recently built our “final home” after years of relocations, upheaval, and never feeling settled, occurring at the same time as being directed to build my inner home.
Welcome home, your last and only one
Never more to roam
Have no fear if you don’t see the sun
I will hold you (myself) close
Welcome home
You are home
Nothing tastes like sweet, sweet home
Welcome home. No greater words were ever spoken (except maybe, “you are loved”). Those words feel like medicine on a weary vagabond’s heart and soul.
Love Note 5: New random book intro.
Last night I began reading a random book I found on Amazon about karmic astrology relationships entitled, Written in the Stars: The Astrology of Soulmate, Karmic, and Twin Flame Relationships, by Kate Rose. I couldn’t believe my eyes as I read the first page of the “Letter to the Reader” section.
“Dear one, the universe has always had your back. I know that it has not been easy. …That love has only equaled confusion and that amid the strongest storms, you have doubted yourself. You have doubted your own magnificence, your own divine essence. You forget that you are a part of this universe as much as the stars are, as much as the sun that beats down hot on your bare skin.
“But it’s time to come home to yourself. To return to yourself. The journey of love is designed to do precisely this. To help you see that every love, no matter how little time it lasted, no matter how much it broke your heart, was intended to help you become more YOU than you have ever been.”
These words and the rest of the intro were the exact medicine my aching heart needed, reassuring me that the holes in my heart are healing, through facing these deep wounds within myself and not running away.
Aquarius New Moon Dreams
New moon energy is the time to cast your hopes, wishes, dreams, visions, intentions, and goals into the Universe for manifesting what you want. Aquarius energy, ruled by the planet Uranus, also brings forth hopes, wishes, and dreams, so the Aquarius New Moon was a powerful time of manifestation to be having all of these messages and synchronicities from the Universe.
My hopes wishes and dreams, coming upon my second Saturn return next month, are to finally find this home—safety, security, belonging, healing, and significance—all within myself. Where my inner child is finally healed, whole, strong, secure, and self-contained (oyster). Where nothing on the outside can phase my sense of security and belonging. Imagine a life with this kind of inner strength and knowing. Nothing would be impossible.
My greatest hope, wish, and dream is for next half of my life to be full of joy, fulfillment, productivity, expansion, connection, happiness, and peace.
Thank you, Saturn. Thank you, Uranus. Thank you, Moon. How could I not also give a shoutout to Pluto, the planet of transformation and my personal chart ruler? What a conversation is happening on my behalf! (I’m not unique…these conversations are ALWAYS happening on all of our behalves, we just have to open up to them).
With all of these love notes from the Universe and promises of breakthroughs looming on my life horizon, it feels like the Universe is conspiring in my favor! Welcome Home. 🏠🌈❤️