Finding God Again, Except Not Really;  An Overly Long Narrative of My Recent Spiritual Journey

It was about two years ago that I decided I was done, that I was giving up on religion. This wasn’t just another predictable development in my on-again, off-again angsty relationship with Mormonism, which for a long time I half-heartedly claimed I was going to leave at least a dozen times a year. This was bigger than that. I felt done with religion altogether. After spending a huge chunk of my life absolutely obsessed with it, to the point of getting a PhD in the subject, I found myself thinking that maybe it was time to move on. I’ll find a new hobby, I told myself. This is over.

And it wasn’t just religion that I wanted to get away from. More fundamentally, it was God. I felt so completely and utterly betrayed by God, so distant from having any kind of relationship with the divine, that I really thought it might be time to just stop trying. I was in the psych ward that year, as in so many other years before it, and they had a religious service. I didn’t attend. That might sound like a trivial thing, but if you know me, you’d know that that was very strange behavior for me—I mean, I’d never seen a religious service that was held on a psych ward. How could I not at least go see what it was like? But I skipped it. The thought of going made me feel sick. (Though I did agree to talk to the chaplain. I informed him that I hated God, that God had abandoned me, that my faith was most definitely not something that was getting me through this dark time; on the contrary, it was deeply intertwined with what was so wrong in my life. To the chaplain’s credit, he just listened. He didn’t try to talk me out of anything I was feeling.)

I imagine that many if not most people have particular religious issues that are just visceral for them. I have a couple of them, and one of them is favoritism. I’ve spent much of my life struggling with the problem that God seems to play favorites. It’s pretty much undeniable that some people have incredibly better life circumstances than others. I don’t know what to make of that. But there were periods when going to church regularly made me ragey because so often those inequities were attributed to God. God placed you in the exact right circumstances that were best for you, I heard on many occasions. Which felt off for many reasons, not least of which that it seems like an awfully convenient thing for someone living in an affluent first-world country to believe. But while it would sound more noble if I’d only been upset by the way circumstances were unfair in my direction, I actually spent a lot of energy raging about the ways in which it seemed that God had a special club of people who were his favorite children, and I wasn’t in it. Those favorite children got up in testimony meeting regularly and thanked God for giving them things like miraculous healings and protection from danger and committed spouses and amazing children. Over the years I listened to countless numbers of those kinds of testimonies, and a black hole of bitterness in my heart grew larger and larger.

And I have to admit that sometimes Mormonism as a whole just felt to me like a set of smaller and smaller circles of God’s favorites. First of all was the church itself. God’s one true church. God’s special church. One might even say, God’s favorite church. The subtext that God cares more about Mormons than other people was something I picked up on regularly, sometimes as overtly as in the rumor going around after 9/11 that all the Mormons in the twin towers had been miraculously inspired to stay home. Then, in a more inner circle, were those who were temple-worthy. My sense that the temple was basically a special club of God’s privileged children was something I could never quite shake, as I listened to people rhapsodize in Relief Society about how those who went to the temple had access to spiritual knowledge and power that outsiders could never dream of. (Given that this has been such a troubling issue for me, you can imagine how I felt when I learned about the second anointing—that there was yet another inner circle for the people who were the most special of all.) There was also a way in which it felt like the LDS worldview was intensely bleak. I mean, the story starts out with everyone in the presence of God, and ends up with the vast majority of God’s children being eternally cut off from God’s presence, with only the very elite passing the test of mortality with flying colors and achieving the Celestial Kingdom.

If you’re thinking wait, this is kind of a caricature of Mormonism, and at the very least not the only interpretation of the tradition, that’s completely fair. This sort of thinking was not a charitable interpretation of church teachings; it was a bitter one. Though I do think the exclusivist elements I mention are genuinely there, I also have to acknowledge the possibility of seeing things quite differently. In my own theological work, in fact, I really was trying to re-think a lot of this. I spent an enormous amount of time and energy working on a pluralist worldview that was grounded in LDS theology, and I came to believe that was more than possible, that you could be very Mormon in your beliefs without writing off the value of other religious traditions. I learned that the question of progression between kingdom was not something on which every church leader in history had agreed, Bruce R. McConkie’s well-known views on the subject notwithstanding, and that was a real relief to me, because it offered me a vision of a God who wasn’t giving up on anyone, ever. I dabbled more and more in universalism, and was pleased to discover that this too had roots in church history, that in fact Joseph Smith had been criticized for being excessively universalist in his outlook. And this all helped, a lot, as I wrestled with the aspects of the LDS tradition that I found so off-putting.

But for all of that, on a kind of core emotional level, the question of God’s favoritism still plagued me. And church regularly exacerbated it. Listening to people thank God for essentially micromanaging their lives became more and more painful, especially when my own life started to seriously unravel. Even if I could theologically question the premises underlying the things people said, it still hurt. Because so often it felt to me like God just cared about other people more. I feel like I’ve blogged a rather ridiculous amount over the years about my mental health challenges, so I don’t want to get too much into all of that here. But the catalyst for my years in and out of the psych ward was finishing a PhD and being unable to find an academic job. (Obviously there was a lot more going on, including a definite predisposition to mood disorders,  but that happened to be the triggering event.) And unemployment became a more and more painful issue for me over the years, especially as it became apparent that it wasn’t just that I couldn’t get an academic job—I wasn’t able to land any job. Chronic unemployment is emotionally brutal. It beats you down. For a while, though, it felt like everywhere I turned, people were sharing stories about God’s miraculous intervention in their lives to—you guessed it—get them jobs. (I find myself hesitant to share this for fear that people will dismiss it as a trivial concern. But the overwhelming stress of being in that situation, the sense of utter failure, and the deep shame on top of it all because virtuous people have jobs; let me just say, it is not trivial.)

So back to two years ago. All of this—the unemployment, the ongoing mental illness challenges, the regular sense of being a failure at church because I hadn’t managed to have a family (you’d think that the gay thing might be a kind of get out of jail free card on that last one, at least, but it really wasn’t)—was in the background. And then, on top of everything else, I felt like God stopped communicating with me. (I actually blogged about that at one point.) Despite a lot of really hard things in my life, over the years I had had moments of spiritual connection that had sustained me. Sometimes it had felt like barely enough to hang on to, but it was still something. And then that was gone, too. At that point religious things, even ones I’d liked in the past, all started to feel utterly awful. When people testified of God’s love, I was not reassured. I was enraged. What kind of fake love is it, I kept asking, that takes off when things get hard, that watches from afar and can’t be bothered to do anything at all to ameliorate the situation? I wrote in my journal, “I feel like God has completely abandoned me, while making sure that everything works out for other people. The disparity makes me crazy. People talk about how their faith gets them through times like this, but I apparently don’t have much faith, because I’m just furious. God’s thrown me to the wolves, and he doesn’t talk to me anymore. I just want to say, I’m done with this. I wouldn’t stick with a friendship if a friend treated me this way.”

I’d struggled with chronic suicidality for years, but this context made it even more intense. I was irritated when my therapist pointed out to me that part of what was fueling my desire to kill myself was rage at God, and a desire to send a message about just how I felt about  the way God was handling things. But my therapist wasn’t wrong. I was so incredibly angry at God, about so many things, and giving up on life felt like a satisfying way to say to God, look, you gave up on me, and I’ll show you:  now I’m going to give up on everything.

When I began this post, I was imagining that I’d write about the experience of finding God again. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve thought that this isn’t the best description of what happened to me. Because the God who was supposed to intervene and do something about all the problems I was facing, the God whose inaction felt like such a profound betrayal? That God is gone. I read a piece in the Guardian last year written by someone who came back to Christian faith, but of a very different kind than the one he was raised with. He relates some conversations with an Episcopal priest, who shared the sentiment, “God has to die . . . The God of our childhood has to shatter in a thousand pieces, die, disappear or change, if we are to have a spiritual life beyond our childhood.” When I look back on everything, I realize that I never did find that God again, that God who micromanaged people’s lives and doled out extra blessings to his favorites, that God who cared more worthiness requirements than about having relationships with his children, that God who was decidedly male and insisted that men be in charge, and was fine with throwing gay people under the bus to protect the straight ones. The spectre of that God had cast a long shadow over my life, even as I had occasional glimpses of something different. But even though that image of God had caused me tremendous pain, it was incredibly difficult to really let it go—I think because of its familiarity, because I’d internalized it so deeply, and also because it felt like it offered a kind of desperate hope; yes, everything was awful, but maybe I could still somehow persuade God to come back and fix the mess.

I can’t explain what’s happened to me in the past 15 months. I look at where I was, and where I am now, and I wish I knew how I got from one to the other—not least because then I might have some sort of plan for the future, the next time I find myself in such a dark place. The short version is that I emerged from a severe depression, that I decided to give the church thing another try (even if not LDS church specifically), and I unexpectedly fell back in love with religion, to the point where I went a little wild and started trying out every church I could find. And ultimately, of course, I decided to convert. But while I don’t want to downplay the significance of changing the religious tradition I’m affiliated with—that decision was a huge one for me; I think all the readers of this blog appreciate the extent to which leaving Mormonism for a different church is a really big deal, a much more profound change than something like switching between two Protestant denominations—there’s a way in which that aspect of it almost feels like a side story to the more significant conversion I experienced, which I can best describe as a conversion to a different sense of God.

In some ways, I feel less sure about my beliefs about God than I ever have been. There are ways in which God as conceptualized by the LDS faith and God as conceptualized by traditional Christianity are wildly different, so it doesn’t seem intellectually or theologically coherent to claim that I’m holding on to elements of both, and yet I feel like that’s where I am. I’m of course joining a church that is explicitly trinitarian, and I haven’t one hundred percent sorted out what exactly that means to me. On the other hand, given that I’d been playing with a somewhat more trinitarian way of thinking, even in a Mormon context, for over a decade,  that hasn’t felt like as of radical a jump as it might. But while I’m still very interested in these sorts of theological questions, there’s also a way in which they don’t seem to matter as much to me. I don’t feel particularly troubled by my uncertainty about the exact nature of God. It seems increasingly unlikely to me that humans in any religious tradition are going to definitively have a handle on that.

At the same time, I feel much more grounded in other beliefs. I’ve already mentioned letting go of a micromanaging God, who keeps things running smoothly for some children while allowing others to fall through the cracks. Additionally, I grew up with a belief that God was incredibly volatile. God was not someone you could trust to be reliably present. God was easily offended; even the tiniest of sins would cause the Spirit to take off in a hurry. God would regularly lose his temper at sinners, and smite them. I was frequently convinced that my various screw-ups had made God so angry with me that he would never talk to me again, that I’d destroyed any chance I had for redemption, that damnation was inevitable. Somehow the Christian teachings about sin took deep hold in me, but salvation, not so much. And when God felt distant, I felt like I had to figure out how to be repentant enough and righteous enough to coax him into coming back. It felt like the relationship between us was entirely contingent on my efforts, that my only hope for a spiritual life rested in my achieving what felt to me like a completely elusive state of “worthiness,” one that would make God finally feel like I was worth bothering with.

Obviously there were particular teachings in Mormonism that were deeply intertwined with all of this, and I do think there are some genuinely damaging ideas in the church that can be spiritually disastrous for those who internalized them the way that I did. That said, I’m not at all meaning to assert that LDS beliefs inevitably lead one down this track; for one thing, I know plenty of Mormons who don’t share my particular spiritual neuroses. Something I’ve thought more and more about Mormonism (and really every other religious tradition with which I’m familiar) is that it’s easy to underestimate the amount of internal pluralism, the extent to which people are having radically different experiences in the context of the same general organization and religious framework. So while I think that for me personally, taking the admittedly drastic step of joining a whole new church was enormously helpful in getting to a spiritual healthier place, I don’t want to say that I know what path would work best for anyone else.

All I can say is that this is how it happened for me, and that there are elements of the religious outlook of the church I now attend that I’ve desperately needed. It only slowly dawned on me—and most of the people who go to my parish seem to take this for granted—that the default assumption of our worship is that God is always present. Always. Doing things like prayer and meditation is understood as a way to open yourself to a deeper sense of that presence, as opposed to the more transactional view that I’d picked up in which prayer is essentially the currency you pay to (possibly) convince God to respond with blessings, or even just with communication . God’s unfailing presence is viewed as utterly reliable, and not at all contingent on human worthiness. (No one ever talks about worthiness, in fact, except as something God’s grace bestows on human beings.) I cannot tell you how life-changing it has been for me to even begin to internalize that belief. I once asked about the contemporary Episcopal policy on excommunication, and the answer I got was that they don’t do it, because they don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to be cut off from God’s love and presence. Excommunication is actually a complicated issue that I have some mixed feelings about, but I have to admit that I found that sentiment to be personally reassuring.

I generally tell the story of my conversion by talking about how much I love the liturgy of the Episcopal church, or how it feels to be in an inclusive community, or my appreciation of the high tolerance for ambiguity—and that’s all true. I don’t talk as much about finding God there in a new way, because that’s a more personal thing. But in the end, if that element hadn’t been there, I’m not sure the other things would have been enough. I had a number of reasons for choosing to get baptized, but one of the deepest meanings for me was that in doing it I made perhaps the most conscious decision I’ve ever made to opt for belief in a God who is loving, who is present, and who isn’t going to be scared off by anything I feel or think or do.

I must confess to more than a bit of giddiness in the past year. This conversion thing has been really heady stuff. And to appreciate what it’s meant to me, I think you have to know the backstory of despair and rage and giving up on religion that preceded it. I feel like I unexpectedly made it out of the Dark Night of the Soul. And yet I worry about over-confidence. As someone who’s dealt with bipolar, I’m acutely aware that when you’re up, it’s seductive to believe that it will last forever, that the down times won’t come back. I’m undeniably in a religiously up place at the moment. But while I want to allow myself to be in the moment and experience that, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be more difficult times ahead, quite possibly in ways I can’t even predict. I feel like it’s important to at least hold that in the back of my mind. And as I said, I don’t have a clear sense of how things turned around this time, so it’s not like I have an instruction booklet about How to Handle Your Next Spiritual Crisis. I also suspect that if the me of two years ago could read this post, it might very well annoy the heck of me; like really, you’re going to fall back on the oldest trick in the book and tell the story of how God was there all along, and all those challenges enabled some necessary spiritual growth? That’s the best you can do? It would be a fair complaint, and I don’t feel like I have a good answer.

But today, I will go to church, like I do every Sunday. Often the priest says an invitation to communion that includes lines about the table being “made ready for those who love God, and for those who desire to love God more; for those who have been here often, and for those who have not been here in a long time; for those who have much faith, and who those who have little—come, because it is the Lord who invites you, and it is the Lord who will meet you here.” That is my hope, such as it is. That wherever I may wander from here, I will not forget that invitation, from a God who will meet you when you come.