How Talking to a Quaker Helped Me With Leaving the Church

It was the spring of 2019, and it had been over a year since I’d been baptized into the Episcopal church. I still felt like it was the best decision I’d ever made, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t still haunted sometimes. I was sitting in a Taize service one Sunday evening and thinking about my decision to leave the LDS faith, and I started to feel sick. Some fears are old ones; some fears are laid down in your understanding of the world before you’ve even begun to develop a sense of self. I’d been told all my life that walking away from God’s One True Church was a terrible mistake with eternal consequences, and even though my conversion had been an amazing experience, that didn’t always cancel out the anxiety, or erase the years of General Conference talks given in ominous tones by human leaders who were one hundred percent positive that they spoke for God. I wanted conversion to be more straightforward, cleaner; I wanted it to be a light that was so blinding that I could no longer even see the past, and I had no choice but to go forward. But while it was undeniably life-changing, my past was still there, a part of me to be reckoned with.

Was the sick feeling a message from God?, I automatically wondered. That’s a familiar question for me, though I have come to believe less and less over the years that God communicates through experiences of horribleness that leave you feeling bleak and hopeless. “I feel like I am desperately clinging to the possibility that God isn’t the way that Mormons imagine God to be,” I wrote in my journal. I wanted nothing to do with a God who was “obsessed with loyalty to the institution, and quick to condemn anyone who steps out of line.” My decision to get baptized as an Episcopalian was perhaps the most radical leap of faith I’d ever taken toward belief in a different God, a life-giving God, a God of hope. But faith isn’t just one leap; it’s also a daily practice. And I still wrestled with moments like the one that hit me that evening, times when I worried that God didn’t actually care how much I was thriving in my new church, but was relentlessly condemning me for my decision to leave Mormonism. As I was driving home that night, though, I was hit by a hopeful thought: God doesn’t give up on God’s creations, something reminded me. God doesn’t just throw them away. God doesn’t just damn people and write them off forever. I held on to that bit of reassurance.

My parish brought in a Quaker that year for Holy Week. He did cool stuff like leading a Day of Silence, and he preached at Easter Vigil, which I think must have been an interesting experience for him, as Episcopal worship is about as far from the simplicity of Quaker worship as you can get. He also offered spiritual direction to people in the congregation. I was too curious not to sign up for it, but I was also very nervous. On the morning of Good Friday, I met with the Quaker in the library at Trinity, which is the church I attend. He asked what had brought me there, and I admitted that some extent it was simply curiosity. He said it was a chance for us to listen and see if God told us something to share, which sometimes happened, and sometimes didn’t. That made me worry that we were possibly just going to sit in silence for 25 minutes. That might have felt normal to a Quaker, but I’m not sure that I could have done it. I don’t mind periods of silence in general, but sitting in silence with someone you don’t know—that seems inevitably awkward.

Fortunately, though, possibly making allowance for my non-Quakerness, he went ahead and initiated a conversation, asking if anything in particular was on my mind. So I told him about being raised Mormon, and how converting had changed my life, and how much I loved Trinity. He seemed genuinely delighted to hear about that, which made it really fun to talk about it. He said that he’d heard all kinds of stories about how people ended up in this church, and he really felt there was something powerful here, and of course that made me happy to hear. But then I got to the harder part, the lingering fears about the decision I’d made. Fears of an angry and punitive God, and the question of whether I’d eternally doomed myself. I was a bit apprehensive that if I were this honest about my uncertainties that he would interpret it as some kind of message that I knew I’d done something wrong and needed to go back to the LDS church (I was fully aware that a lot of Latter-day Saints would immediately leap to that view). But he was actually very sympathetic about the whole thing, and told me about his own religious journey. He’d left the Methodist church to become a Quaker at the age of 22, largely because he was a pacifist, and it had not gone over well with his family. I could tell in listening to him talk that he was personally familiar with the challenges that can come with a decision to convert, no matter how good of a decision it is.

I brought up some recent statements from LDS leaders that were kind of getting to me, and he said something about the challenges posed by religious organizations that were completely confident that they were the only true ones. We talked about Mormonism for a while. He knew more than I expected; when I brought up the toxic policy of denying baptism to the children of same-sex parents, and making same-sex marriage an offense that automatically triggered church discipline (a policy that had recently been reversed), to my surprise, he knew what I was talking about. I was rather fascinated that it was even on his radar. I mentioned my feelings of anger, and of feeling like the church had traumatized me in a number of ways and I needed to work through that. He recommended forgiveness, but not in a glib or dismissive way. The way he talked about it was more of a process; he suggested that as I let God forgive me for my faults, that might open up some room for me to pass that forgiveness on. I liked that way of coming at it.

He told me that in listening to me talk about what the Episcopal faith meant to me, he could hear the joy, that it was just obvious, and I had to agree; even I could hear my own wild enthusiasm in the way I was talking. And I commented that when I looked at the fruits of having converted—I was experiencing religious happiness to an extent that I didn’t even know was possible, at a church that regularly nurtured my connection to God and just did so much good in my life—it was hard for me to see that as a wrong decision, even if my Mormon self still had that anxiety. He said something about going with what gives you life, and I said yes, it’s life-giving. It’s not just about happiness, which comes and goes; it’s about being more alive. I was heartened by that reminder. At the end he held my hands and prayed a bit, and as we said goodbye he said it had been a lovely way to start his morning. I felt that way as well.

(cross-posted from The Hour Before Sunrise)