A Talk

The following is a slightly longer version of a talk I gave in sacrament meeting on August 30, 2015.

On Patience

A Broken Heart

Patience, I suggest, is linked to the injunction to have a broken heart and a contrite spirit. Ether 12:27 reads, “if men [and women] come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto [people] weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all [those] that humble themselves before me.” This is not a comfortable verse. I have to admit that for much of my life, I have been wary of it. I have imagined God with a long computer print-out of all my flaws, ready and waiting to show them to me. But today I want to consider the matter in a somewhat different light.

A little over four years ago, I graduated from a PhD program in systematic theology. This was a time for celebration. I seriously could not believe I had made it to the end of that difficult road. I gleefully made my friends and siblings refer to me as “Dr. Taylor.” For someone who had spent my life closely identifying myself with academic achievement, this was a real triumph.

Just two months later, I found myself in a psychiatric ward, terrified and completely disoriented, choking on my own despair. This was the only the beginning of a series of hospitalizations that on the one hand, gave me a needed break from feelings of being completely overwhelmed and unable to cope, gave me a space to breathe—but also ruptured my identity, left me wondering who I was, left me feeling lost.

In Christ, grace breaks into the world and in some sense breaks the world, allowing it to be fashioned anew. Especially in these last few years, I have thought a lot about the role of brokenness in our understanding of grace. Brokenness plays a significant role in our theology: we are redeemed through Christ’s broken body—an event we commemorate with broken bread. And in a parallel way, we are told that the sacrifice required of us is to have a broken heart and a contrite spirit.

What is going on with this notion of broken-heartedness? It can sound like an onerous requirement, perhaps an injunction to beat ourselves down to the appropriate lowly level. But I wonder whether it might be connected to having a certain openness. It is striking that the effects of sin are so often described in terms of lack of feeling, of numbness, of hard-heartedness. “To penetrate heaven,” says the poet Anne Michaels, “we must reach what breaks in us.”¹

Coming to Know God

One of our challenges with patience is to have patience in our relationship with God. This increases, I believe, as we come to better understand God and his relationship to us. In grappling with the meaning of grace, Mormons frequently turn to 2 Nephi 25:23: “by grace we are saved after all we can do.” My own take on this is that grace is a relationship with God, and “all we can do” is to be wholeheartedly in that relationship—to love God “with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.”² Salvation is not something that comes from this relationship; salvation is this relationship. John writes, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”³

For the Sunstone symposium last month, I was asked to discuss the most recent book of the world-famous religion scholar John Dominic Crossan: How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian. In it, Crossan grapples with some hard questions about the character of God as portrayed in both Testaments. He brings up the issue of justice. When we talk about justice, we might mean different things by the term. One possible sense of justice is ensuring that everyone gets an equitable share. Crossan calls this “distributive justice.” Another type of justice is that which punishes people for wrongdoing. This is “retributive justice.”⁴ Crossan makes the provocative argument that while God often gets portrayed as a God of retributive justice, God is in fact a God of distributive justice. God is not focused on reward and punishment, but in sharing his goodness with all. In this paradigm, justice, rather than being something out there waiting to condemn us, becomes a call for us to work toward a world in which all have their needs met, both temporally and spiritually.

I do not agree with Crossan on everything, but I have found it liberating to let go of the good-cop, bad-cop God of retributive justice who bribes us to be good and zaps us when we get it wrong. This does not mean that actions have no consequences. But the consequences are internal to the actions, not something externally imposed. When we sin, we harm vital relationships in our lives—ones with ourselves, others, our communities, and God. And the good news of the gospel, the message of the atonement, is that these relationships can be repaired, that there is always hope. God is not looming over us with a carrot and a stick, but is with us, offering to heal the damage we do (and that done to us), and calling us to be better. While he respects our agency, a God of distributive justice desires salvation for all. God is fundamentally a life-giving God. Our choice is whether or not to accept his grace, his offer of relationship, and let it transform us.

Roman Catholics, as you might be aware, have the belief that God is really present in the Eucharist, or what we would call the sacrament. Sometimes this belief gets dismissed as a sort of ridiculous superstition. But the way it was explained to me as a theology student was in terms of presence. What does it mean, one might ask, to be present to someone? Such is Christ’s presence in the bread and wine of communion. I find that an evocative way of thinking about the subject.

I have thought a lot about the power of presence. In recent years I have especially thought about it when I have waited in emergency rooms, and people have come to wait with me. I have thought about it when people have come to visit me in the hospital, breaking up feelings of boredom and disconnectedness. I have thought about it when I have been struggling and people have been willing to listen. When things have been bad, sometimes I have needed people around nearly constantly, people to offer me safe spaces—and both friends and family have been there. I have unquestionably encountered grace in my life through the simple presence of others.

Once in a state of depression I was lying in bed doing nothing at all, overwhelmed by inertia. I am a slug, I thought to myself. And I am not going to talk to God, because I have not done any good in the world today, I have not helped anyone in need, I have not done something more than dream of my mansions above. And then I got the sense of God simply saying to me, “let me come and sit with you.” No condemnation. No telling me to just pull it together. Just a willingness to be there.

Yet grace can be daunting. It will inevitably turn our world upside down, call us to re-think everything in its light, push us to be different than we were. We may be required to give up those ways of thinking which were providing an illusion of safety and control. Perhaps, then, our offer of a broken heart can be described less in terms of action, as something we do, and more in terms of letting go—of our judgments of ourselves and others, our certainties, our pride, our belief that we must earn God’s love. As the theologian Paul Tillich puts it, we are asked to accept that we are accepted.⁵ In a panel I attended at Sunstone on sin and grace, someone said that we need to “claim our belovedness.”

The Church

Another important kind of patience is patience with the church. I often struggle with this. I am unabashedly a feminist; I have a hard time with the place of women in the church. I am gay, and it is not easy to hear that my desire for relationship poses a threat to the family. I often feel impatient and exasperated. People ask me why I stay, and it is a fair question. But in the end, it is because it is a place where I have had experiences with the divine.

Last week I attended a fireside given by Tom Christofferson, who is both gay and active in the church. A few of the points he made that I appreciated were that God’s LGBT children are not broken and in need of fixing, that each individual has to listen to the Spirit and follow her or his own path, and that as a church, we can work to be welcoming to all kinds of families. To LGBT members, he emphasized, “Heavenly Father knows you, uniquely and individually, He knows the whole of you, the past, present and future of you, He knows that you are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender and with that knowledge, not in spite of it, He loves you without reservation, completely, eternally.”⁶

My sister recently sent me the link to a talk given by John Gustav-Wrathall, a gay Mormon man who decided to come back to church. He says,

In that moment, the Spirit told me that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was true. The Spirit reminded me that I knew it, and it was time for me to come back. That was it.

The Spirit spoke to me not in a warning or menacing or scolding tone, but with perfect gentleness and love. From that experience, I know what King Benjamin meant when he spoke of the “enticing” of the Spirit (Mosiah 3:19). You are loved, the Spirit said, so come here where you are loved. And I realized I wanted to come back. I wanted it so terribly.

At the same time I felt anguish. I wanted to argue with the Spirit. “I am gay,” I said, “and I love my husband Göran, and we have been building our lives together for 13 years.” (At that point it was 13 years. This August 19 it will have been 21 years.) “And,” I said, “I’m excommunicated. And they wouldn’t have me even if I did go back. I’m not welcome in the Church. There’s no way. It’s too late. There’s too much water under the bridge.”

The Spirit replied that none of that mattered. I was loved. I was wanted. It was Christ himself who was welcoming me back, who wanted me. It didn’t matter what anybody else thought. And I knew that the Church was true, and I wanted to go back.⁷

He then reports the warm reception of his ward, and how they have been accepting and supportive of both him and his husband. I found myself deeply touched by this account. Some of the strongest testimonies I have encountered come from LGBT members of the church who do not pathologize or reject either their LGBT or their Mormon identities. This kind of thing encourages me. We currently have certain policies in place in the church, but there is so much we do not know. But we do know that we are called by Christ to be his disciples, and to love each other in all our differences and struggles and frailties. When I see this happening, I remember that this is the church I love.

Patience and Grace in our Lives

Finally, I want to talk about patience with ourselves and our lives. In recent years, I have struggled with a deep sense of failure. I have never felt like I fit well into the Mormon mold, not since I was a Young Woman rolling my eyes at the activities centered around fashion, and wanting to know why women weren’t ordained. As a single woman without children, I am not a Mormon success story. Over the years, one way I coped with this feeling of not belonging was to work toward success in other areas, specifically academia. I felt like I fit into grad school in a way that I never did at church. And then I confronted a brutal academic job market and found only failure. I have bipolar disorder, and with that combined with these stressful circumstances, I crashed and burned. I felt like I had failed in all my worlds, that there was no hope for me. Now is the time for me to explain how things nonetheless worked out. But they haven’t. The truth is, I still feel desperately lost.

The poet Adrienne Rich writes, “I know you are reading this poem listening for something / torn between bitterness and hope / turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.”⁸ I feel that pull, that line between bitterness and hope. On my better days, I see possibility. On my better days, I remember that I am a child of God, and that identity is more basic and solid than the other, more ephemeral ones which I have frantically attempted to hold on to, only have them slip away.

But not all my days are better days. And I sometimes find myself asking whether grace makes any real difference on the ground, in the messiness and ambiguity of lived experience. There have been times when things have gotten so difficult that I have come very close to giving up entirely—on God, on myself, on everything. Grace has seemed foreign, and far away.

My dissertation dealt with the meaning of salvation, and one of the questions I kept coming back to was—how exactly do we see this at work in a concrete life? One way to think about this, I believe, lies in looking at narrative. We live by stories; we are in some sense the stories that we tell about ourselves. We draw on stories to give our lives meaning. And these narrative frameworks make a real difference in how we make sense of things—the story of the Crucifixion becomes quite a different story, for example, when told from the perspective of the Resurrection. We can find ourselves caught in narratives which take away possibilities, suck the hope out of life, stunt our imagination, distort our views of ourselves, others, and God. Grace challenges these narratives. It causes us to re-imagine the narrative possibilities of our lives, opens up new, liberating, hopeful stories.

Julian of Norwich relates a vision of a servant and a lord, which she describes as a parable. Rushing to do his lord’s will, the servant falls into a ditch. He then lies there in anguish. “And of all this,” says Julian, “the greatest hurt which I saw him in was lack of consolation, for he could not turn his face to look on his loving lord.” Instead, he focuses on his distress. Sight plays an important role in this; the servant suffers because he “neither sees clearly his loving lord, who is so meek and mild to him, nor does he truly see what he himself is in the sight of his loving lord.”⁹ One of the most pernicious effects of sin is that we lose track of how God sees us, and we imagine ourselves rejected and condemned. We find ourselves trapped in destructive stories; perhaps because of our painful mortal experiences, we find it challenging to trust in the reality and constancy of God’s love.

But grace defies these stories we tell ourselves. The scriptures speak over and over of God as one who will not turn anyone away. Nephi, in a passage in which he makes this point again and again, asks, “Behold, doth he cry unto any, saying: Depart from me? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; but he saith: Come unto me all ye ends of the earth, buy milk and honey, without money and without price.”¹⁰

The theologian David Kelsey, also grappling with the question of what redemption means on the ground, discusses it in terms of the meaning that it gives to one’s life, the ways in which it frees people from the bondage of distorted identities. If what makes life worth living is accomplishment, for example, this becomes bondage in that we inevitably fail. But if people are able to “trust that the worth of their lives is a function of God’s freely loving them in a very concrete way,” then this relation “defines their identities in ways that keep them open to the present and free from bondage to the past.”¹¹ When we experience the very real love of God, we can rewrite our stories and interpret our lives in new ways.

How do we have patience in the dark times of our lives? “Even believers,” says the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, “can and often are made to experience the fact that God appears as someone rather unreal, that God is mute and silently rejecting, as if he were framing our existence only as an empty, distant horizon in whose labyrinth of infinity our thoughts and the desires of our hearts are utterly lost.” But when this happens, he proposes, “Do not despair when experiencing despair: Let the despair take all away from you, since what is taken from is only the finite, the unimportant, even if it may have been ever so wonderful and great, even if it may be yourself with your ideals, with your smart and detailed plans for your life . . .”

I have been thinking about that. Do not let your despair lead you to despair, but rather let it break down the superficial things of your life. And what about those moments when you feel trapped, when the exits seem to be closing in? Rahner says, provocatively, “your sense of having no exit is only the immeasurability of God to which no paths are needed because he is already here.”¹² You need no exit, no escape plan, to find a God who is already here with you.

I’d like to think I’ve learned from failure. It has made me think hard about what I really value, what really matters to me. It has forced me to take my limits more seriously. After years of feeling like I had to be special, I had to be extraordinary, in order to have any worth, it has opened up the powerful possibility of being ordinary—of just being human—and that being okay. I don’t have to be an overachiever for God to love me. It has made me appreciate other people more. I hope it has given me more empathy, more of a sense that we’re all in this together.

My relationship with God has often been turbulent. I’ve sometimes felt so betrayed, been so angry, that I’ve struggled to put it into words. And I have felt, deeply, that God genuinely wants to hear it. That he wants to interact with me where I am right now, with what I am feeling right now—not in some imagined future in which I have developed a more angelic disposition. As Chieko Okazaki beautifully put it, “He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He’s not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief.”¹³ I have come back again and again to that. And it is in working through my negative feelings that I have come to more deeply appreciate his love, that I have been able to let things go and have more patience, more perspective, more hope.

A poem by Mary Oliver ends with the lines:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.¹⁴

I love that call to appreciate grace, to let it into your life. To let the world amaze you. To truly be alive.

Returning to the scripture with which I started—”if [people] come unto me, I will show unto them their weakness”—I find it interesting to juxtapose this passage with that found in Matthew: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”¹⁵ What are we heavy laden with? One possibility is a belief in our self-sufficiency, our belief that we can do it alone. If we bring this burden to Christ, he will show us our weakness—he will show us our need for him—and this will give us rest. There is a freedom in acknowledging the reality of our brokenness. Christ’s grace is sufficient, he reassures us. He does not leave us alone in our weakness, or condemn us for it, but meets us there in order to help and heal: in the words of Isaiah, “to bind up the broken-hearted and proclaim liberty to the captives.”¹⁶

When it comes to religion, I am agnostic about a lot of things. I am ambivalent and sometimes unsure about the church. But I do powerfully believe in the reality of God, and of his love for us. It is a love, I believe, that stubbornly and continually seeks us out. We come to it broken, and it re-makes us.

 

1. Anne Michaels, “What the Light Teaches,” Poems (Knopf: New York, 2000), 129. [↩]
2. Mark 12:30 [↩]
3. John 17:3 [↩]
4. John Dominic Crossan, How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian (HarperOne, 2015), 17. [↩]
5. Paul Tillich, “You Are Accepted,” The Shaking of the Foundations. [↩]
6. Tom Christofferson, “In that Quest, All Are Needed and Wanted,” August 26, 2015. (some of my points come from the Q&A, not from the text of the fireside) [↩]
7. John Gustav-Wrathall, “Salt Lake LDS LGBT Mormon Social Devotional, ” August 5, 2013. [↩]
8. Adrienne Rich, “Dedications,” An Atlas of the Difficult World (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 26. [↩]
9. Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans., Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 270-1. [↩]
10. 2 Nephi 26:25 [↩]
11. David H. Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 71. [↩]
12. Karl Rahner, “Lent—My Night Knows No Darkness,” The Mystical Way in Everyday Life. [↩]
13. Chieko Okazaki, Lighten Up, (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1993), 176. [↩]
14. Mary Oliver, “When Death Comes,” New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 10-11. [↩]
15. Matthew 11:28 [↩]
16. Isaiah 61:1 [↩]