In 2000, at the age of 13, Burke Denning found the gateway to her faith at Borders bookstore. After convincing her father to buy her a copy of Silver Ravenwolf's "Teen Witch," she devoured it in two days and decided to become a pagan. \nPresently a precocious 18-year-old freshman at IU and considering a major in folklore or outdoor recreation, she marks that fateful moment in her life as truly defining. In the five years since, her faith in and devotion to paganism has strengthened. Sitting in the sun outside Collins Living-Learning Center, her face lights up when speaking about it. \n"I owe so much to it. I have gotten so much from it, and I still get so much from it," Denning said, extending her finger to a colorful spider scurrying across the picnic table in front of her. "It's a really great way to structure your life if you're a person like me."
Googling a religion\nBurke stumbled upon paganism, a revival of pre-Christian religious traditions characterized by a reverence for both the natural world and the spirit world. It was a time of personal turmoil and distress in her life. Against the backdrop of her parents' divorce, she was uprooted from the only home she had ever known. She was also struggling spiritually, feeling that her given faith of Catholicism was lacking. Unable to ignore her strong belief in a spiritual realm, a world of God and ghosts separated from our own by the thinnest of veils, she sought out a more self-meaningful experience. She searched Google for various faiths, researched them and considered Buddhism and Judaism, but she eventually found her fit as a pagan.\nThe modern version of paganism has its roots in 19th-century Romanticism, although the publication of books on the subject of Wicca by Gerald Gardner in the 1950s jumpstarted the movement in Europe and the United States. \nAdherents.com estimates there are 1 million pagans worldwide. The American Religious Identification Study of 2001, conducted by the City University of New York, found 307,000 Americans identify themselves as pagans. The Covenant of the Goddess.org estimates 65 percent of pagans are between the ages of 26 and 39 and three times as many women as men practice paganism.
A new sensation\nDespite the growing number of adherents, Burke felt she alone had discovered a new magical elixir of being. Excited and empowered as a reborn, seventh-grade Wiccan witch and proudly wearing a drawn black pentacle on her hand for all to see, she was confronted with slings and arrows from intolerant and skeptical classmates, until, fortuitously, she sat down next to a girl with a matching pentacle and entered into a group of like-minded peers. She has been part of a pagan community ever since.\nBorn to an Irish Catholic father employed by the Pentagon and a free-spirited agnostic mother who spent her days crafting a novel, Burke grew up an only child in rustic Great Falls, Va., a 30-minute drive from the nation's capitol. It was in the woods surrounding her home that she first felt what she later realized were pagan stirrings. With her father at work, her mother immersed in her writing and the nearest neighbor two miles away, Burke was a child of the forest.\n"I played by myself in the woods a lot. I actually developed a sense of someone in the woods with me, someone watching over me," she said. "Looking back, I feel it was a forest spirit, The Green Man, who protects the forest and dwells in all nature."\nBy the time she was 12, everything had changed. Her parents had separated, she was being prescribed anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications, she turned her back on God and moved to Indianapolis to attend a private school for gifted children.\n"I had trouble making friends and I couldn't understand why," Denning said. "So I looked through the different aspects of my life, and thought, 'Huh, maybe it's because I've forsaken God and God's punishing me.'"
A life-changing book\nShe returned to her rosary and Catholic prayer books but found only emptiness in return. \n"I didn't understand why I wasn't feeling any fulfillment from it, even though I was putting my heart and soul into it," she said.\nEnter Borders bookstore and "Teen Witch." \n"The teens on the cover were all beautiful, and on the back it read, 'You can invoke the power of the goddess and be a strong person too,'" she said. \nShe read the book cover to cover, drank it all in and soon after knew she was pagan. The realization arrived with perfect timing. Reading about incorporating the Goddess into herself, Burke began to deal positively with her parents' divorce. During one such meditation, she came to understand that life's events aren't about pain, but growth. Right then, her healing began.\nOver time, she shared her newfound identity with her parents. Final acceptance has only come recently. Traveling through Ireland this past spring with her father set the scene for an effort at understanding. \n"I told him that I'm still pagan, and that it wasn't a phase," Denning said, "and he said that he had figured that out and he was proud that I believed in something so strongly with a power in faith that he himself didn't have."\nToday, both her father Dan and her mother Candace support her religious vocation.\n"It's not my first choice, but I'm comfortable with Burke finding her own way in these decisions," her father said. "If it's what she's comfortable with, then I'm comfortable too."
Pagan and Proud\nBurke is a proud pagan, serving as the events coordinator for the IU Pagans Club and still learning about her chosen faith. With the support of her parents and a welcoming pagan community in Bloomington and at IU, she feels she has been fated for it. \n"People in the past have said to me, 'You were going through a big change, you'd been really unsettled, you didn't have any friends, your parents were getting divorced, of course you turned away from God, of course you turned to paganism,'" Denning said. "But I answer that, 'Yes, that's part of it, but what makes paganism right for me has always been there. It was there the whole time.' If someone had shown me that book when I was younger, it would have happened sooner. It fits me like a glove"
