Praying Like a Mormon

I’m in something called Education for Ministry, which is a four-year program run by the Episcopal church in which you study the Bible, the history of Christianity, and theology. (It’s somewhat confusingly named; it’s actually for laypeople. The idea is that everyone is called to a ministry of some kind, and this is supposed to help you discern and develop it.) My group has eight people, who come from a fun variety of religious backgrounds, and we meet every other Sunday afternoon. The others frequently express curiosity about Mormonism, and ask me lots of questions. One week they wanted to hear me pray like a Mormon, so I obliged and offered a closing prayer that would have sounded perfectly normal over the pulpit in a sacrament meeting. My classmates were underwhelmed, perhaps expecting something weirder. They said that I’d just sounded like a Baptist. (This amused me because I suspect neither most Mormons nor most Baptists would appreciate that comparison.)

But, it occurred to me recently, this is why I cannot leave the LDS church entirely behind. Because I pray like a Mormon. It’s the way I learned to pray, at an age too young for me to now remember, and it’s the style of prayer that has been connected to many of my most powerful experiences of God over the years. What do I do with that? I pray like an Episcopalian now, too, and encountering the wide of variety of written prayers that are out there has been absolutely delightful. I use the Book of Common Prayer, of course, and I also frequently pray from a book of Celtic prayers that I find quite lovely. (“In the busyness of this day / grant me a stillness of seeing, O God / In the conflicting voices of my heart / grant me a calmness of hearing / Let my seeing and hearing / my words and my actions / be rooted in a silent certainty of your presence.”) I find written prayers grounding, and particularly useful when I’m experiencing emotional turbulence and finding that extemporaneous prayer will jump the tracks and drive into a pit of rumination before I even know what’s happened. As I’ve said before, adopting other ways of praying has been like learning a second language, and has opened a new world to me.

But I still pray like a Mormon as well. I value extemporaneous prayer as much as I ever did, and the style in which I talk to God is deeply bound up with my Mormon roots. Years ago I dropped the “thee” and “thou” language in personal prayer, because it felt like it was a barrier to communication, and I don’t pray for anything I’m eating to “nourish and strengthen” me, so it’s maybe not over-the-top recognizably Mormon. It’s chatty and informal and meandering and often awkwardly phrased. I imagine that plenty of people with no Mormon connections might pray in similar ways. But for me, I think this sort of talking to God will always be deeply tied to my experience of growing up LDS.

And right now, that’s a complicated thing to navigate. A major reason why I decided to formally leave the church is that I felt a deep need for more distance. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life freaking out because LDS leaders said such-and-such thing. I’m okay with having a lot of anger to process and giving myself time to work through that, but I don’t want to be there forever. I want to let it go. I want it to matter less to me what the LDS church is up to. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and energy arguing with straw Mormons in my head. I want to move forward. I imagine this will be a gradual process, and I’m trying to be patient with that. But that’s the trajectory I want.

I imagine that every path out of the church has its challenges, but sometimes I do wonder whether this might be less complicated if I’d given up on religious belief altogether, and decided that none of the experiences I thought I had with God in the church were ever real. It seems like it would be less messy, less ambiguous, less of a tangled knot to sort out. For whatever reason, though, I’m still a believer. Not only that; I’m very deeply in the tradition of specifically Christian belief. That means that I can’t simply assert that all the stuff I learned in the LDS church was totally ridiculous and I no longer buy into any of it, even if some days I wish that I could. I was absolutely and unapologetically a cafeteria Mormon while I was in the church, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m going to have to learn to be a cafeteria post-Mormon as well. But it hasn’t been easy.

This is what I find most challenging. It was the LDS church, mediated of course through my family and church leaders and teachers and other significant people in my life, that taught me about God. That taught me that God cared about me, and that I could talk to God and get answers. That taught me about faith, about there being more to the world than you could immediately see. That taught me about the value of being connected to something bigger than yourself. That taught me that the universe was a place of meaning and hope, and that relationships mattered. That taught me about forgiveness, and the possibility of trying again when things fell apart. That taught me the richness of connecting everyday mundane choices (whether to drink coffee, whether to shop on Sunday) to a life of faith.

But it was also this tradition that taught me to be afraid of a God who had very high standards, a God who demanded a nebulous state of “worthiness,” and then used that as a way to set up circles of exclusion. Who would condemn you for your not just your deeds, but even your thoughts, who was wrathful and vengeful and always watching in disapproval, unable to look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. A God who was fundamentally unable to stick around, because your deep flaws would offend his holiness. A God who valued women only as accessories to men (and even distributed virgins as prizes to righteous men), and who set up a plan of salvation that only really works for straight people. I absorbed a worldview in which obedience was the first law of heaven, and the greatest sin you could commit was disloyalty to authority or making the institution look bad. I learned that there was one right way to do everything. That the same life path (heterosexual marriage with children) was the right path for everyone, and if you weren’t on that path, at best you were in a rather bleak holding pattern until you could finally get there after death. And again and again, I learned that if something about the church just didn’t seem to work for you, the flaw was in you.

And the thing is, it’s not like this was all neatly separated out, so that I only heard the positive messages on alternate weeks. It was all hopelessly mixed together. I think it’s a valuable exercise to reflect on your belief system and push back on aspects of it that are doing damage in your life (this is true in secular as well as religious contexts), but it’s not an easy process, and at least in my experience, it entails far more than addressing questions on an intellectual level. It’s a lot of work. For me, conversion was a huge leap of faith: perhaps above all, faith that God really is about love. I’m not saying I didn’t learn that as a Mormon; of course I did, and I deeply value that. But the message came with an overlay that made it very hard for me to trust. What do you do when, for example, you hear a heartfelt testimony of God’s love intertwined with an equally heartfelt testimony that patriarchy is the eternal order of things?

That’s the challenge for me now. Because not only do I still believe in God, I still pray like a Mormon. As I said above, I feel a need for more distance from the institution, for my own peace of mind.  But I’m also fully aware that Mormonism will always be in my DNA, and will inevitably play some role in my spiritual life and my vision of the universe. Even though lately I’ve been in an angrier place, I’d still like to, in the words of Thessalonians, “hold fast that which is good.” The church broke me in so many ways. But it also played a very significant role in connecting me to God, and to others. I am so relieved to be out, and to my own surprise, I really don’t miss it. But nor do I disbelieve everything I learned there. I have no idea how to hold this all together. I keep praying, though—sometimes like a Mormon, and sometimes not—because I believe, I hope, that God is big enough to manage all these contradictions, even the ones that sometimes feel like they might break me.