A Faith for This Life

My decision to convert away from the LDS church was undeniably overdetermined. So many different factors; so many different threads. Some of them, I suspect, could have sparked the decision all on their own. And like so many life narratives of momentous events, already I note that I tell different versions of it at different times. The story is never quite the same. I imagine that I will continue to make sense of it all in new ways and with other perspectives as time goes by. So I can’t really say of any particular factor, this is the one thing that led to it all. However, when I look at major issues, one that I see being very deeply rooted is that I hit a point where I desperately wanted a religious tradition that had something to offer in this life, and not just the next one.

There were two periods of my life when I would say I felt genuinely connected to my local LDS congregation—one was a branch, and one was a ward. The former was my first experience of church outside of Utah, which was delightfully refreshing in many ways. It was a small branch, and unlike the large BYU wards where I’d spent the previous few years, in this branch it felt like we were too small to marginalize people just because they had pink hair or asked wild questions in Sunday School. It was also my first experience encountering other LDS women who were pursuing advanced education; we had five female grad students, and no one seemed to think that was weird. As I struggled with adjusting to the rigors of grad school and my first experience of moving somewhere new and far away all by myself, for the first time in my life I understood why people might talk about church as a refuge. There was a period where I actually enjoyed going to church, where it wasn’t simply an obligation to be endured. It actually meant something to me to be there.

Things kind of fell apart over a calling I was given that I could not for the life of me do, it ran so completely counter to my temperament. (They wanted me to run Pursuit of Excellence, and encourage people to set goals. I am allergic to goals. I never got a YW medallion. I am also allergic to trying to get other people to do things that they don’t want to do.) But they’d told me very directly that it was what God wanted, and I was in one of those phases of my life where I’d committed absolutely to do what God wanted. Asking to be released felt unthinkable; it wasn’t a life skill I’d developed yet. But the guilt of attending church and not doing the calling was crushing me. So my activity waxed and waned. Still, I remember that branch with fondness. It made me see the church in a very different way. The stuff out of Salt Lake still often drove me crazy, but when a particularly absurd thing was said over the pulpit at General Conference, I could look around the room and catch the eyes of people whom I knew were sympathetic to my frustration. That sort of small thing can be the difference between survival and drowning in an LDS congregation.

A second period of relative happiness was quite a few years later, when I was in the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to the local singles ward on and off for several years, with some good experiences and some bad ones, and then graduated dishonorably (i.e., got too old for the ward but didn’t get married), and decided to give the family ward a go. I was already friends with the bishop when I made the switch, and looking back, that was definitely an education in the reality that yes, it does matter who you know. If a lot of your friends in ward leadership, it makes a lot of things about church easier. They had me teaching Relief Society within weeks of my arrival, and I appreciated that, both because I enjoy teaching and because the experience of being seen as someone with something of value to offer was really lovely. Also, very unusual. I felt like I had a place, maybe. They also regularly asked me to substitute in Gospel Doctrine and give sacrament meeting talks, and feeling like people were interested in what I had to say was a bit heady. And when I said completely unorthodox things, people didn’t freak out. And sometimes some of us had alternative Sunday School at the coffee shop across the street, and arrived at Relief Society afterward smelling of coffee. And when I had numerous psychological breakdowns, my ward members came to visit me in the mental hospital. I have good memories of that ward.

And yet, even in that ward, I was only going to church twice a month, at most. Because it was not uncomplicated. Because even with having friends there, it still beat me down in ways I could hardly explain. Because if you are a single woman, the entire structure of church conveys that you are a failure and your life is kind of meaningless, even if the individuals with whom you interact are loving and accepting. Double that for being gay. Messages from Salt Lake were once again mediated by a local congregation that served as a kind of buffer, but they still sometimes felt exhausting and overwhelming and made me regularly question what on earth I was doing in a church that seemed to have a completely different worldview from me in so many ways. And while my ward was definitely on the progressive side, that just meant that horrifying and sometimes deeply hurtful things being said over the pulpit didn’t happen quite as often; not that it didn’t happen. Add in other factors that I found challenging, and a lot of the time I was barely holding on. I finally struck a deal with my bishop that I would come once a month, to teach Relief Society. And some months, that’s all I did. I didn’t even always make it to the first two hours of church those weeks.

It’s striking now to look back at that and note that even in a place where I felt like I was thriving, relatively speaking, I was still only showing up at church sometimes because it was just do dang hard to be there, and for so many reasons. When I started going to Episcopal church on a whim two years ago, and fell wildly in love with it, and before I knew it found myself enthusiastic about going every single week—that was completely disorienting. And sure, some weeks are better than others, and some weeks I am kind of restless and not as engaged, but it literally never leaves me feeling increased despair, or even just spiritually exhausted. I have yet to not be glad that I made the effort to come, and I’ve genuinely missed it the few times that that hasn’t been possible. Before I decided to get baptized, I was talking with my rector about my experience, and he said something like, you just sound so surprised that church could be a positive thing. And I said, you have no idea.

Of course, I am well aware that many Latter-day Saints would see this decision as my having given up on eternal blessings for temporary happiness. Mormons talk a lot about “enduring to the end,” a phrase that for me has always had rather grim connotations, suggesting as it does that life is most fundamentally something to be endured. Especially if you happen to be gay, the message is fairly straightforward: this life is going to be a terrible challenge, but stick it out, and God will reward you in the eternities. But I think that’s only one very visible manifestation of a rather pervasive approach to life in which thorny issues and hard questions are deferred to the next one. I never found any of this particularly reassuring, but as I’ve hit middle age, I think it’s become even clearer to me that I don’t want to live a life that basically consists of simply hanging on until the end, when things finally get better. That I need a faith, and a God, that make a real difference in this life. Dangling an eternal carrot simply isn’t enough.

I’m very much still in the process of sorting out my beliefs and my relationship to Mormonism, and I’m okay with that taking some time. But in making the decision to convert, the thing I kept coming back to was fairly simple: attending this church makes me really happy. It makes me want to be a better person. It makes me feel more connected to God. It gives me more hope than I’ve ever had that God is good, and loving, and reliable. If you use the New Testament criterion of judging something by its fruits, it’s a no-brainer. But after a lifetime of thinking in LDS ways, it’s not all that simple to simply shrug off that worldview. Sometimes on dark nights I still have the worry: what if none of this matters, because God is really all about obedience and submission and sacrifice, and whether or not a church is feeding you spiritually or sucking the life out of you is irrelevant? I write those words and both think that it’s a very troubling worldview, and still feel its tug. When I decided to get baptized, my therapist observed that I was in essence deciding that it was okay for me to be happy. There’s a way in which that is still completely terrifying.

When I heard some of what was said at Conference this weekend, about meager roofs and eternal regrets and final judgment, it really struck me that I had never quite appreciated before how much this whole system is driven by fear. How much of my own spiritual life, quite honestly, has been driven by fear. I can’t say that I’ve now achieved a state of perfect tranquility where I’m not still affected by such messages. Of course I am. But conversion, for me, was profoundly an act of hope. I want to hold on to that hope. I want to keep nurturing it. Because going to church and wanting to do better as a result of feeling loved and accepted as I am, rather than because of feeling anxious about not being good enough, is a powerful and healing experience.

I can’t evaluate anyone’s claims about the next life, of course. My church expresses a traditional Christian hope (we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come), but doesn’t get into a lot of details, or even focus a lot of energy in that direction. I’m good with that. But I do feel like I have to acknowledge that I can’t say definitively that the LDS church has it wrong on this one. It’s possible, as I said earlier, that I’m trading eternal blessings for happiness here. I’m deeply skeptical that anyone knows for sure how eternity works, but taking such a stance means that I can’t completely rule out the possibility that the Mormon view is accurate. But I can say, with much more confidence, that much of what I learned in church about things in this life has turned out to not at all be accurate. And that’s raised some fairly serious questions of credibility about claims regarding the world to come.

But more importantly, I don’t want a faith that makes life more difficult and miserable now with the promise that in the hereafter things will be better. Life is freaking hard, crazy hard, all on its own, and I want a faith that can help me through that—not add to the burdens. My sense from talking to members of the LDS church over the years is that many of them legitimately find that there. That their participation at church gives them meaning and identity, and nurtures their connection with God. So I’m not at all saying that I don’t think that’s possible in Mormonism. For some people, it clearly makes their lives better (and in the here-and-now, not just in the offer of eternal reward). I have a lot of complicated feelings about the institution and I’m in a bit of turmoil right now, but I respect that. Still, it’s weird for me to hear my decision to leave described as a rejection of God. Because the choice feels like nothing so much as a leap of faith. As acting on the possibility that God is good, and that this life is for living, and not just enduring.