Reflections on the LDS Sacrament (Part I)

This has gotten ridiculously long, so I’m going to just start with the first half.

How many times did I take the sacrament in an LDS church? Weeks. Years. The sacrament hymns were almost mindlessly familiar. When I was a kid, the deacons seemed so old to me; later on, of course, they were strikingly young. As a girl who never participated in passing it, I wondered about the logistics of how they set up who was going to go where. Sometimes the experience was dominated by the awkwardness of figuring out how it was going to work, if I were perhaps sitting in the middle of an empty row. In singles wards, it was almost jarringly silent. In wards with young children, it was a dull roar.

I didn’t realize that the mechanics of taking it weren’t immediately obvious until I brought a friend to church one week. We made it through the bread okay, but she didn’t know what to do with her little cup of water, and set it back down in the top of the tray. The deacon carefully moved it to the disposal area in the bottom part. As someone who has visited a whole lot of churches, I’ve seen the logistics of Communion handled in all kinds of ways; perhaps my biggest takeaway is that it’s a good idea to have clear instructions for visitors, because it’s rarely intuitive to an outsider who didn’t grow up with it.

The sacrament, I heard more than once, was the reason why you came to church. It was the high point of worship. And I hated it.

Truly. I hated it. I hated it so much. When I talk about Mormonism, I really do try to have some complexity, and acknowledge both my positive and negative experiences, but with this one, the most positive version of it was when it was just boring, or I was distracted. I don’t remember ever liking the sacrament. As a kid, I felt guilty because I knew I was supposed to quietly sit still and think about Jesus, and often I was doing none of those things (not being quiet, not sitting still, and not thinking about Jesus). It was like Easter, the most guilt-inducing holiday of the year, when I knew I was supposed to be focused on Jesus’ death and resurrection, but what I really, really wanted was a giant chocolate bunny. The fact that a giant chocolate bunny felt so much more appealing than Jesus was clear evidence that I was a depraved sinner, but it was so hard to get my desires correctly aligned with what they were supposed to be.

And honestly, I didn’t want to think about Jesus. It made me feel bad. People talked on and on about just how much he suffered—some teachers got really into this, like describing in detail the excruciating elements involved in crucifixion. And the subtext I always heard was, this was your fault, you terrible sinner. Jesus had to go through all of this agony because you were so wicked. Sometimes I thought rebelliously, well I never asked him to. He didn’t have to do it, and quite frankly I wish he hadn’t. I wish he’d left well enough alone; I’d much rather suffer for my own sins than have to deal with these constant reminders that my sins caused someone else incomprehensible agony. (Needless to say, this was not a thought that I ever shared in any church classes.)

The sacrament, then, with its inherent message that I had made Jesus suffer, was a vivid reminder of how awful I was. A time to reflect on my shortcomings, and how deeply I’d disappointed God. I knew that you were supposed to be repenting and resolving to do better, but I frequently felt too much in despair for those to feel like real possibilities.

On top of that, I couldn’t figure out the worthiness thing. What exactly “worthiness” means in this context is terribly nebulous. Of course, there are people who are under ecclesiastical discipline who are specifically prohibited from taking it, but other than that, it’s hard to say what constitutes sufficient worthiness. I’ve heard some people say that basically, if you aren’t under discipline, you’re good to go; I’ve also heard people say they don’t take it if they come to church in a bad mood and don’t think they’d be doing it in the right spirit. I felt completely lost when it came to assessing my own state of worthiness. I usually just took it, feeling vaguely apprehensive that I might be compounding my sinfulness by participating in this most sacred ritual without real intent. In any case, the combination of all of those factors made it quite frequently the spiritually bleakest ten minutes of the week. It was something to grimly endure.

This may well sound like hyperbole. I know many Latter-day Saints who would hear this and be completely baffled, who would say that this is so far removed from their experience of the church, and in particular of the sacrament, that they can’t connect to it at all. It’s continually been a surprise to me over the years to realize that two people in the exact same church, just like two people in the exact same family, can have such completely divergent experiences that both of them will have a hard time processing that the other person’s experience could have really happened.

So do I want to say that I am well aware that not everyone has this experience. I actually know people who voluntarily go seek out the sacrament; if they miss it for some reason, they will drop by another ward to make sure they take it. On the one hand, I find that behavior utterly baffling; for me, escaping the sacrament would feel like a stroke of luck. I would certainly never make an extra effort to seek it out. On the other hand, I don’t doubt people’s genuine commitment to it, and I can only imagine that their experience must be completely different than mine. It’s clear to me that it doesn’t hit everyone the same way. But I can only talk about how it hit me.

***

Maybe a year ago, I went back and re-read the LDS sacrament prayers. It had been a while; I hadn’t been to a sacrament meeting in at least five years. The words were still completely familiar, of course, but I wasn’t prepared to have the emotional reaction to them that I did.  I had a deeply visceral response of feeling attacked and wanting to hide. I actually felt a little sick. The phrases felt brutal, grim words that inextricably tie you to a God who is unrelenting in his standards and his judgments, who keeps careful track of everything you are doing wrong, and who is impossible to please. A God who will damn you for participating in the ritual in an unworthy state. I had the familiar, hopeless sense that the universe is a terribly bleak place, presided over by a God who is far too holy and pure for the likes of ordinary human beings. Even after several years of not participating in the sacrament, I could feel the anxiety bubbling back up. What if this awfulness is in fact the nature of reality?

But even as that all hit me, I could see that if you were to just look at the words of these prayers, with no context and no personal baggage, they seem quite benign. Honestly, maybe even bland. They don’t contain anything particularly shocking or radical. They certainly don’t seem destructive. It seems highly unlikely that someone who just happened on them would find the vision of God and the world that I just shared. So I’ve tried to step back and simply look at them as texts. And I find myself struck by a number of things, many of which hadn’t previously occurred to me.

I always learned that the sacrament was a time of repentance, a time for reflection on the mistakes you’d made, and resolving to do better. It seems to me that for those who have a more positive experience with it, there’s an element of forgiveness to it as well. I well remember the despair of having been baptized and knowing that since I hadn’t died on the spot, I was doomed, because you couldn’t get baptized again. You didn’t get a second chance to have your sins washed away. I knew I wasn’t the only one with this worry, though, because I had many teachers mention it, and then reassure us that the sacrament serves the exact same purpose as baptism. It’s a weekly ritual that allows you to have your sins washed away and start over.

However, strikingly, none of that is in the text. Not at all. There is nothing about repentance, and nothing about forgiveness. It’s just not there. I’m not saying there might not be valid reasons to bring those things in to your experience and understanding of it; I’m just noting that you can’t find anything about them in the actual words of the prayers.

I’ve heard debates over the years about whether the sacrament is meant to renew your baptismal covenants, or whether that’s an imposed interpretation that doesn’t hold up. And here I am going to go on a bit of a tangent, and make the case there are not in fact baptismal covenants in Mormonism. The reason I think this is because you don’t actually say anything when you get baptized. You don’t commit to anything. The priesthood holder says his brief statement, and that’s it. When I was baptized at the age of eight, I remember it being explained to me that I was promising to do three things, and God was promising to do one in return, or maybe I was promising to do one and God was promising to do three in return? I think it must be the latter, because I have a vague memory of it being pointed out that it was pretty cool that God was doing three things when I only had to do one. In any case, I don’t remember what any of the things were. But the fact that I forgot them is not at all surprising, because they weren’t part of the ritual.

When I looked on lds.org to discover what the baptismal covenants were, it cited Mosiah, and the language of mourning with those that mourn and bearing one another’s burdens and standing as a witness of God, and also D&C 20:37, which lists a lot of things, including a broken heart, repentance, willingness to take upon oneself the name of Christ, and being determined to serve him to the end. I think the Mosiah language is actually quite lovely. I will admit to being less enamored of the language of the D&C (unsurprisingly, since I think the D&C is Ground Zero of Mean God), but regardless, I’m looking at the text of these passages, and in neither case does it look to me like a baptismal covenant. Rather, it looks to me like a list of prerequisites for baptism.

I think it might be helpful here to bring in the Episcopal version of baptism. And here is a quick tangent to my tangent: I find myself hesitant to mention Episcopal practices, because it’s too easy for me to be like, now here is the obviously better Episcopal way of doing things, isn’t it sad that the Mormon way is so terrible? But that’s the sort of thing drove me bonkers when I was in the LDS church, people saying, isn’t it nice that we do so this so much better than Catholicism? Yay for us! So I really am trying to bring this in just because I do think comparisons can be illuminating. And of course I am super biased, since I did in the end pick being an Episcopalian, so let me acknowledge that upfront, but hopefully this comparison will still be clarifying. So here goes.

When I was baptized in the Episcopal church, I made five covenants. And by that I don’t mean, someone explained to me beforehand that there were implicitly five covenants involved, or that these were laid out as the required conditions for getting baptized. I mean, as part of the liturgy, I promised to do five things. The ritual leading up to the actual having water poured on you part includes questions such as, “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?” And you respond, “I will, with God’s help.”  It’s very clear what the covenants are, because they are right there in the liturgy, and you explicitly assent to them. A couple of times a year, on days that are traditionally baptismal days (like the Great Vigil of Easter), you renew those covenants. And again, what it means to “renew those covenants” is extremely straightforward. You get asked all of those questions again, and you answer them again.

It’s in reference to this sort of thing that it’s not clear to me that there in fact covenants involved in LDS baptism, or, getting back to my original topic, that the sacrament is a time when you renew your baptismal covenants. I simply don’t see that anywhere in the actual liturgy. So that leads me to my next question: At least in terms of the text of the prayers, what exactly is happening?

To be continued! I’m sure by the end of the second half, I’ll have all these difficult issues completely figured out . . .