Mercy

We’ve all known the feeling of living simultaneously through events of community and personal significance, times when the public and the private terribly converge. September 1993 was a time like that for me. Again in recent days I’ve reflected on what that time meant to me as a Mormon coming of age, and what it means to me now, more than twenty-two years later.

In the summer of 1993, after nearly a year of wrenching deliberation, I embraced a personal, almost irresistible call to serve a mission. I finished my undergraduate work at the University of Utah, turned in my papers, and received my call in August. I was working at an LDS girls’ camp, but I quietly took time off to attend Sunstone. September brought me to my final preparations to enter the MTC, including the temple endowment.

Many hard things coincided during that time. My friends in college included a number of variously alienated Mormons. I had been one of them, but in deciding to serve a mission I found that I had abruptly set myself apart. Some of my professors were openly incredulous. I was on a strange and lonely new path.

I received my endowment the week after the excommunications began. Every night the Provo Daily Herald had arrived on my parents’ doorstep with more unbearable news. I didn’t know any of the September Six well, but I was acquainted with several through the small Mormon progressive-intellectual world of that pre-Internet time. I was devastated. I could not reconcile it. How could God so vividly and so personally call me on a mission for this church that was excommunicating people for saying things that I too believed? I had lost friends; the church was excommunicating people I had actually met; I found the temple almost unbearable; my immediate family was undergoing its own crises. Things were bad. And yet somehow I knew, as I have known few things in this life, that God had called me on a mission. So in naive faith and loneliness I went.

On a brilliant October day I entered the MTC, where the real loneliness began. I was carrying burdens of confusion and grief I could speak of to no one. Under the best of circumstances the MTC is a world apart, but I was reeling from the excommunications, the temple, and the gulf between the liberal world of college humanities and the MTC culture of unquestioning obedience. I will never forget the desolation of getting up in the pitch black every Saturday morning to attend the Provo temple with my district, crossing 9th East and trudging up the grassy hill to the in the cold, seeing my breath as the sky gradually lightened behind the enormous mountains to the east. I found the ceremony harrowing. I don’t know if I ever made it through without breaking down, as quietly as possible so that my companion would not see or hear or guess the depths of my hurt.

Nine weeks later, not long before Christmas, we left the MTC and flew overseas. My first companion spoke no English, and I was plunged into culture shock and homesickness. The MTC, the September Six, and the temple began to fade in the face of more immediate challenges. Mission life is always difficult, but for me it was largely a redeeming difficulty. Immense graces came to me. My mission president and I were not close, but he was a kind and generous man, and he wisely allowed us certain humane liberties, including access to the full range of classical music. For most of my life I had endured the Wasatch Front’s stifling winter inversions, and I found the sunny Mediterranean climate a revelation. I adored learning a foreign language by complete immersion, a process which gave me a confidence and happiness in linguistic knowledge that I had never before known. My first area was a small town with panoramic views of ancient ruins and of the sea. On winter p-days we explored those ruins, or the old city, or went to the deserted beaches and watched the waves crash on the rocks and wrote letters home. Above all, I encountered people I grew to love very deeply–companions, other missionaries, investigators, even a virtual stranger I will never forget. My mission changed me forever. It was the beginning of adulthood, the beginning of quiet daily devotion, unselfishness, and sacrifice. It was, also, improbably, the beginning of laughter. I began to learn from several longsuffering and lighthearted companions not to take myself quite so seriously.

That was all more than half a lifetime ago. Now there is a similar crisis in our community, and many of us feel again that old, terrible pain of loss to the body of Christ. If anything, I know less now than I did then, and I am far less confident in the earthly availability of ultimate answers to wrenching questions. Reasonable people are coming to vastly different conclusions about how to act, what to do in the face of uncertainty and pain–what to hold fast, what to let go. I myself don’t know what to do but hold fast to all the contradictions of my life, to deny none of my experience. The church is the September Six and successive crises for various of its members, sometimes searing institutional blindness and sometimes casual, unthinking injustice and cruelty. It is also where I’ve learned the most about faith, hope, and pure love, where my views of eternity have been the vastest and freest, where I have most deeply encountered the divine. I cannot leave this church that has so utterly constituted me, and my very conviction of this church’s authority forms the basis of my sure hope that it will become more just and more compassionate–and above all that we who are the church must become more just and more compassionate. My sure hope is for mercy–mercy, first and foremost, for the LGBTQ Mormons and former Mormons devastated by recent policy changes, mercy for the church’s leaders at every level, and finally and above all, mercy for our ideological enemies. I believe that the body of Christ is most deeply broken when we love our righteous ideas more than our inconvenient, shrill, and sinful neighbors, when we caricature them cruelly in our social media echo chambers, refusing them all generosity and understanding and attributing to them nothing but evil motives and ill will. But we are the church; we are the covenant body of Christ. For us, wherever on other ideological spectra we find ourselves, there can be no justice or righteousness without mercy and humility.

As many have observed, hard days are here and ahead. It is my uncomfortable conviction–uncomfortable because I often fail to live up to it–that we will not outlast these days without the highest work of Christian life, the work of extending mercy to and loving our enemies. I have no choice but to love this hard doctrine of mercy because I can see nothing else that will save us, as persons and communities and as the church itself, the broken, bleeding body of Christ.

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A few addenda:

I don’t here presume to tell anyone whether to stay or leave. That’s well beyond my stewardship and pay grade; I have my hands more than full working out the contradictions of my own little life. I do mourn grievously to see so many leaving. As a church we are smaller and poorer for their loss.

In the pattern of Christ, mercy goes first to the communally peripheral and the wounded. We Mormons are a deliberately hierarchical institution, and many other social hierarchies obtain among us. On this earth we do not come to the pews before the sacrament table as equals. If we are to be Christ’s, we must be one, and if we would be Christ’s and one, we must attend first to the despised and the dispossessed. Here and now, those are our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, their children, their current and former spouses and family members. Now more than ever, these members of the body of Christ are disproportionately bearing the burdens of our institutional self-definition. It would be a sin to lay on them further burdens grievous to be borne that we who are not bearing such burdens cannot touch with one of our fingers.

The hope of mercy does not preclude pain and anger. As a church culture we often don’t metabolize anger well. We sometimes abuse our most sacred ideals of love and mercy by duct-taping them over wounded people’s mouths to get them to be quiet about their inconvenient, disruptive, doctrinally incorrect grief and rage. The fissures in the body of Christ begin when we make no place for people to be where and who they are, whether progressive or conservative, libertarian or communist, gay, queer, or straight, doubting or believing, and then shrug when they depart mortally wounded and either blithely cite passages about wheat and tares, the very elect being deceived, and Jesus bringing not peace but a sword—or on the other hand, in alternative spaces, reduce them to shameful caricatures of their privilege or politics and then berate and sneer at them. (For myself I choose to trust that Jesus can handle the sword just fine. He doesn’t need me to steady the aim or drool over the dangerous, gleaming edges. I don’t trust myself with Jesus swords. They too are well beyond my stewardship and pay grade.)

But although mercy begins with the dispossessed, it cannot end there. As Christians we can never draw a line in the sand before any of our brothers and sisters, and say, here and no farther will Christ’s redeeming love extend. Who among us has not ached for understanding, compassion, generosity in the interpretation of our motives, charity for our weaknesses and failures, a simple recognition of our common humanity? We who bear the name of Christ should never use that name to place someone outside His care.

Finally, I don’t understand mercy to preclude integrity. Indeed I believe that mercy requires integrity, and I would urge no one to abandon any deeply held, carefully considered conviction, now or ever. Mercy is not silence or acquiescence; all of us must sometimes take difficult stands that put us at odds with family, friends, or church communities. But a searching consideration of our convictions requires us to take account of the overwhelming evidence that all human views are limited if not downright wrong. If we are committed to following the truth wherever it may take us and whatever the cost, the views of our enemies may be our most important correctives.