I miss Star Foster. I know she's
controversial and that a lot of people found her mean spirited,
attention seeking, and so on—I still miss her over at patheos.
I used to follow patheos
regularly—probably too often. I'd check in two three times a day.
I'd look up old posts and new posts and compare. I'd look to see
what was trending, and I'd poke my head into other faith areas. What
as neat about that time in Patheos wasn't just Star Foster, there was
Theo Bishop with his very calm even kilter quiet presence, then
suddenly there was the Wild Hunt, my favorite everything, and then
the Pagan Soccer Mom joined the blog roll and it was like all my
favorite authors had got together in one big tea party session. The
site could only have been improved of Carol Schulz had a regular
column.
There are better deeper bloggers and
plenty of people I prefer to read now. I don't lack for quality in
depth pagan or polytheist reading. But something about the way Star
would dive in with this passion and red aggressive energy always kept
me coming back to read or respond to. She took everything so
personally and almost all of the time it was never about her or her
religion—a pro and con because it certainly created drama but I
always saw it as symbolic of her passion and her creative spark. She
could take things so far removed from her and make them personal and
pertinent. She had a way of writing that even when I didn't care,
she would have my full attention and thought for at least a few
minutes. It's an intensity that in person I think would be too much
but written, where I could control the time and amount it could be
inspiring. I loved how passions would just take her and spread
across blogs. I loved how much of others work she read, and wished I
could find the time to read as regularly as she does/did.
I used to think there would be nothing
worse than silence from her. I wanted to hear about her life, and
know she was doing well. I'd gotten so invested in the Star Foster
life and brand that when she left patheos it was a bit like losing a
friend. Granted, she doesn't know me. We've never met or even
written back and forth. I'm a lurker in real life and on the
internet, I rarely ask questions or want to discuss so much as hope
that people will bring the info to me in time or I'll work out the
problem on my own in my head.
There is something worse than the
silence though. Ms. Foster returned to the blog world a converted
Christian. And I want to say first and foremost that I wish her well
in her new religious journey. I totally understand religion isn't a
neat tidy thing. She isn't the first to return or go to Christianity
and she won't be the last. But for someone who fought so hard again
Jesus and God, she wrote an article entitled I Reject Jesus Christ
hard for me. I found her relationship to Christianity and Jesus
cathartic for me at the time. Her writing and the writing she
inspired about both paganism as a whole and individual blogger's and
people's interaction and experience with Christianity, Christians,
and Christ helped me work through a lot of lingering hurt I had from
my own conversion and daily Jesus-y interactions. I know it's her
path and her choice and I want to respect that. Still I look at her
writing now and her writing then and I can't reconcile the two. Two
years later, I still miss Star Foster as I knew her.
It's fall and the time for honoring the
death and granting ourselves release. I hoped that my need for some
of the combative fire, which is so double edged and perhaps Star's
ultimate undoing slowly abates. I hope there is a time where I can
look at In the Garden and just care about Star as a person and not
read what she wrote there and compare it to writings in patheos and
wonder what happened and how. Until then, I guess let me just say
that I miss Star Foster but wish her well on her spiritual journey.
