Mormonism Replaces Relationships

The joys of having both an anonymous blog and a public blog are that when you post on the anonymous blog it's an automatic clue that it's gonna be the stuff I don't want certain people to see. I miss the days of complete and total anonymity, though, because then I was free to write ABSOLUTELY anything I felt with not a single thought for who would think what or why. But alas, whatevs.

So this last Sunday I went home for dinner with my parents and two younger sisters, as I do each Sunday. I was feeling sick, so I took a little nap. I awoke from my nap to find that everyone had let except for one of my sisters, who was also sleeping, and my mom, who was sitting at the computer next to me. After I woke up she asked me what I believe, and thus ensued a difficult conversation. There's one part in particular that I want to talk about. She said that now that I disagree with the church on so many fundamental issues, she feels like we can't have as close of a connection and that there is something missing in our relationship. At first I was like "yeah...that sucks." But then I started thinking about it, and I got kind of frustrated.

Because Mormonism often replaces relationships, I think. Instead of knowing about what was actually the deepest concerns of my heart, my parents for years were most concerned with whether or not I was reading my scriptures, saying my prayers, and paying my tithing. I know that this came from genuine love based on their understanding of the world, but I can't help but feeling that all of those church things were a giant red herring that kept them from loving me. And now that I'm finally outside of my gay doubter's closet and the devout son they always knew is gone, I feel like they don't know how to have a real-person relationship with me. Because all of their relationships are framed around the church.

And what I guess that means is that I should be patient and have empathy. But it does get frustrating, too.

the ramblings of one who ought to be sleeping--also, updates on my life

It's 12:51 am, and I should be sleeping, but I tried and couldn't, and so I thought...hey, haven't blogged in awhile, so why not now?

If you haven't noticed, I go through phases with blogging, where I blog a lot of personal stuff...and then stop...and then blog a lot of thoughts/ideas/research, and then stop. Just an observation.

Ummm...so a little while back a friend posted this link on my Facebook wall to a story about a gay couple getting voted the cutest couple at their high school and commented about how it's proof that the world is getting better. Like two seconds ago my former mission president liked the post... ummm....what is that supposed to mean?

Okay, so I've been in Beijing for the summer doing an internship, and it has been quite the experience. Last time I came to China, as anyone who has followed my blog would know, was a... difficult experience to say the least (notice how the word "experience" lines up on the top and second lines...) (also notice how radically different my writing style is when I'm tired...)  (upon further inspection, it only lines up in the draft, and not the actual post. Y'all missed out on some serious word synchronizing).The first night I was here this time I had this powerful feeling that I was in the right place at the right time, and I feel like that has proven true. Three things that have happened this summer that have been interesting/cool/thought provoking:

1) Wasn't planning on being active in the church this summer, until my housing completely fell through and church was the only place I knew I could go to find a place to stay at the drop of a hat. Ended up meeting my favorite family...like...ever. Seriously. They're so freaking great. And their daughter is SO great. We started dating... JOKES. Still gay. But if I was straight, oh if I was straight... awkward. Ha ha. Anyway, so I came out to her... or rather, she added me as a friend on facebook and found my public blog and then I talked to her about it later, and she is SO liberal on the subject despite being very active. Needless to say, she's become a great friend. I also befriended a few recent converts that are YSA, and it's been really interesting and has given me a new perspective on things with the church. It's reminded me how very deeply I love the church and feel connected to the people and the spirituality involved in it. Still don't think it's what it claims to be. Still have HUGE issues with most of it... but I like the hymns :) And the people. And oh me oh my are there some attractive specimens that find their way into the doors. Again, that's the lack of sleep talking.

2) So two of my fellow interns are gay. They have been great, and the most incredible thing has been to be surrounded by people who do not care one single bit what your sexual orientation may or may not be. It's really opened my eyes to an entire world outside of Utah and outside of Mormonism that is... dare I say it? Better? I kind of almost feel like a refugee of sorts. But it's not in every way. It's definitely less stressful. But it's not home. Gasp. I just realized that pain and stress is an integral part of home! Did I just stumble upon something profound?

3) So I my dearest friend came also to China, but stayed in a different city than myself, and by a freak accident of the sort I tend to label "providence," she ended up living with a gay Mormon who was following my blog. We all met together at a YSA conference and then I went up last weekend to visit the two, and we had a marvelous time. It's been really great getting to know him and seeing yet another gay Mormon perspective. Thoughts: a) I really like to order and number my thoughts. b) coincidences can be incredible things. c) I'm leaning more towards believing that God is somehow involved in all of this. d) assuming God is real, what does he want from me? What, I ask you? WHAT!? e) as a friend once said while under the influence of alcohol at a poolside in Hawaii, "you can't throw a stone without hitting a gay Mormon." Indeed, stones thrown in China could possibly hit either of the two of us. (On an aside, if there are any other gay Mormons in China out there reading this, contact us! Though I doubt it.) It's been interesting getting to know him and learning about his story, and it's taught me that even within the small confines of gay Mormondom, everyone's story is different and equally valid. It also reinforced to me just how wrong the Mormon system of sexuality and dealing with sexual minorities is. Wrong past the point of deserving to be rebelled against.

Dear Mormon System of Sexuality and Dealing with Sexual Minorities:

I rebel against you,

Emphatically,

Me. (feel free to contact me with questions should any arise as to the particular nature of my rebellion)

Hopefully they got the message.

A few more thoughts I've been thinking:

Tonight as I was walking home from a trivia night with friends, it was raining, and my shoes, which had only just dried from the last deluge, once again found themselves becoming soaked with the muddy, disgusting waters that seem to rise in a heartbeat at the slightest threat of rain from the ill-designed and ill-cared for streets of Beijing. I was feeling quite miserable when I suddenly noticed the beauty of the fog and the trees and had a thought occur to me... each moment is filled with reasons to be angry at the world, and each moment is also filled with reasons to be at peace. It's up to me which ones I look at.

Damn you, elusive specter of tranquility, I choose the anger. Wet shoes deserve nothing but fury.

And fury is also deserved by the idiots who thought it was a good idea to not pave the road to my house, leaving me with no choice but to traverse daily through the mud so that I can return to my hovel where I can't even sleep.

Well that was a positive thought turned wrong...

Ha ha. Sometimes I wish I could just record these blog posts instead of writing them so that people could here the voice in my head that comes out as I write... Oh how dearly I hope that sarcasm translates over text.

Another thought. Why do I care? Seriously, though. Why do I insist on caring? Who cares if my shoes are wet or if I have to walk through mud on the way back to my house? Who cares if I'm gay? Who cares if when it comes to the church I'm like a hopeless addict who wants nothing more than to quit but can't control the habits that keep him from descending into an environment that has proved to be little else than harmful to his sanity? And who cares if I'm rambling, exhausted, and ought to be sleeping? I often tell myself that I'd be better off dancing through life as if nothing mattered but knowing nothing matters.

But then a little part of me rebels, and screams out that things do matter, and that I matter, and that life matters. And maybe that's just dear Eckhart's worst enemy, the ego, trying to rob me of my zen paradise where things neither matter nor don't matter, but simply exist in a state beyond descriptions. Or maybe it's "intimations of immortality" whispering to me that I'm from elsewhere and come trailing clouds of glory on my walk through life. Maybe it's the Holy Ghost. Who knows--but it exists and happily plays its role of keeping me from becoming the subject of a Russian novel. 

I'm going to close this most random of posts with one of my favorite quotes of the last few months:

"The bad news is that you're falling through the air with no parachute and nothing to hold on to. The good news is, there is no ground."

Can't remember who said it and I'm not going to bother to look it up.

Now I'm off to sleep...and perchance to dream...

A History of Fire:

The Sin of Sodom and an Exploration of Goodness

I remember vividly the first time I heard the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was sitting on a wooden chair in the primary room of a chapel in St. George. One of my friends had been asked to prepare a brief talk that week to share with the primary and had brought an illustrated book of the story of Lot and his family to read out loud to the rest of us, showing us the colorful pictures inside as he did. The part that struck me most was the very end when Lot’s wife, overcome with sorrow, looks back at the city and is transformed into a pillar of salt. In the book there was a picture of a family on a hill walking away from the city in the background, leaving behind what looked like a mound of white sand.

Whenever I heard about Sodom and Gomorrah I couldn’t help picturing Lot’s wife turning back to look at the burning city; the illustration of its flames from my friend’s book burned in my mind. It wasn’t until a few years later I learned that the great sin that had incurred the fires of heaven to reign mercilessly on the two cities was the sin of homosexuality, one which had been known for hundreds of years as the sin of Sodom, or “sodomy.” In fact, it was encased in this parlance that homosexuality was first mentioned in an LDS General Conference in 1897 when George Q. Cannon asked of sodomy,

How can this be stopped? Not while those who have knowledge of these filthy crimes exist. The only way, according to all that I can understand as the word of God, is for the Lord to wipe them out, that there will be none left to perpetuate the knowledge of these dreadful practices among the children of men.[1]

Reading this, one cannot help but feel that Elder Cannon was unacquainted with the history of the fire of Sodom. He couldn’t have known of history’s brutalities towards gay men, how many times those in power had tried to “wipe them out,” or how many more times they would.

In his essay “Self-reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “he who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness.” The story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the history of its use to justify atrocities against gay people forces us to do just what Emerson advocates—to truly question our definitions of good and evil and be sure to assign the right labels to the right actions. We too often allow attitudes formed by cultural history and institutionalized prejudices to shape our definitions of good and evil rather than engaging in a true exploration of goodness.

“Sodomy” first gained popularity as a word to describe homosexual acts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,[2] but growing condemnation of homosexual relationships began nearly a thousand years earlier in the fourth and fifth centuries AD as the first laws prohibiting homosexual acts were enacted in the Roman Empire.[3] Despite these laws and a growing cultural distaste for homosexuality, gay literature and homosexual relationships continued in Medieval Europe. In times of difficulty, however, gay people were rounded up with Jews as the scapegoats for disaster, and were often burned or driven out. (To apply the term “gay” to people of the past is perhaps an anachronism, but I use it for conversational convenience as well as modern applicability.)

During the Inquisition the story of Sodom began to be used in more abundance as justification for the harsh treatment of gay people. Peter Canisius, a leading Jesuit intellectual of the late 16^th century updated Aquinas’s teachings on the morality of homosexuality in his Catechism with an inclusion of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, warning that men “should not deal carnally” with each other “because it was an abomination” that would be met with the same fate as the men of Sodom.[4] Tragically, in the absence of God’s punishments, the men of the Inquisition seemed to be determined to enact this fiery fate themselves. It was as “sodomites” that gay Chinese couples were rounded up by Jesuit priests in the Philippines in 1588 and put to death for practicing marriage among gay men. These executions, to the Chinese, were an attack on the traditional family. The inhabitants of the Fujian Province area in China who made up the primary Chinese population in the Philippines at the time had long practiced gay marriage, and gay couples would often together raise children of their own.[5] During his 1581 visit to Rome, Montaigne noted that a few years previously several marriages had been celebrated between men in the church of St. John and that the couples “went to bed and lived together” for quite a while before being burned at the stake.[6] Jesuit fathers leading missions in China and Japan repeatedly condemned those kingdoms for their open acceptance of the “sin of Sodom,” and men were burned as “sodomizers” throughout Christendom.[7]

And so with that same fate of the vivid fire painted on the pages of my friend’s book, the lives of countless gay men were brought, burning, to a brutal end, and as Lot’s wife was turned to salt when she looked back to mourn Sodom’s fate, so the sympathizers of “sodomizers” were equally condemned.[8]

The sin of Sodom also began to be used as an explanation for the downfall of past empires.  The fires of Pompeii were said to be a punishment for rampant homosexuality, and Rome itself was said to have fallen because of its lax moral attitudes and open acceptance of gay relationships. This same argument was echoed by George Q. Cannon in his 1897 conference address when he said that the “crime” of sodomy “was practiced by the nations of old, and caused God to command their destruction and extirpation.” This argument has continually been mentioned by LDS church leaders in the last century, and survives to this day. In fact, an article was just published on October 15, 2012 in the USU Statesman in which the author once again repeated the age-old and still-ridiculous claim that the Roman Empire fell because of its open acceptance of homosexual relationships.

 In reality, the last few centuries of the Roman Empire experienced a dramatic decline in the publication of gay literature, the popularity of gay relationships, and witnessed the Empire’s first laws passed against gay relationships.[9] If correlation equates with the will of God, then it could be much more persuasively argued that the rampant praise of gay relationships in the first two centuries of the empire’s founding and the repeated occurrence of gay marriages[10] caused God to give a long life to the empire until the Romans angered God by removing legal sanction from the intimate relationship of those of the same gender.

Clearly Sodom’s sin provides no explanatory power at all to the rise and fall of nations.

As we know, the Inquisition period did not end the dealing of death to gay men and women. It is often forgotten that the tradition of a common fate between gay men and Jews was continued into the twentieth century as over 100,000 homosexuals were imprisoned alongside the countless Jews that met their end in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.

A history such as this leaves one pondering the true nature of sin and exploring what it truly means to be good. It seems quite apparent to the modern reader that the fiery inferno imposed upon “sodomites” in the past millennium is by far the greater sin. This brings us to the ultimate question we must ask of the story of Lot’s family and their encounter with angels, fire, and pillars of salt.

What, exactly, was Sodom’s sin?

The reason that Sodom has so long been associated with homosexuality is because after the angels came to Lot and his family, the men of Sodom demanded the strangers to be brought out “that they might know them.” Of the 943 times that this Hebrew verb for “to know” is used in the Old Testament, only 10 of them are used as a euphemism for physical intimacy.[11] None of them refer to homosexual acts. Overwhelming evidence points that the story of Sodom is not referring to sexuality at all.

There are numerous references to Sodom and its fate later in both the Old and New Testaments, and not a single of them mentions anything to do with homosexuality. That Sodom becomes a clear symbol for abhorrent wickedness is clear,[12] but both later scriptures and centuries of interpretation preceding the Inquisition point to an alternative definition of Sodom’s sin, and thus a different definition of what it is to be wicked.

Christ connected the sin of Sodom with the sin of inhospitality when he taught that “whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for that city.”[13] In the book of Ezekiel the sins of Sodom are listed when God announces that “Behold, this was the iniquity of… Sodom, pride, fullness of bread… neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and the needy.”[14] This proclamation supposedly by God himself concerning the sins of Sodom written by the hand of an ancient author much more intimately acquainted with the story than any of us today mentions nothing of homosexuality, but rather lists sins whose most distinguished attribute seems to be the failure to love. 

Centuries of rabbinical tradition and Christian interpretation preceding the inquisition labeled the sin of Sodom as its inhospitality to strangers, its pride, and ignoring the hungry and the needy. The two times in the Old Testament when "sodomite" is used to refer to non-gender specific sexual promiscuity it is actually the translation of a word that has nothing to do with Sodom.[15]

The wickedness of Sodom was its lack of love, not any supposed love between people of the same gender within its walls. And so it is with irony that history’s true sodomites were not the men who married each other in Rome in the 1580s, and nor were they the Chinese men of the Philippines whose traditional family structure differed from that of the Christian West, but rather it was their persecutors. The true “sodomizers” were those who met difference with inhospitality.

When I think of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, I feel like Lot’s wife turning back to gaze upon the burning city. I look back on a history of fire. I remember who the inhabitants of Sodom really are and the tragedy that occurs when people misinterpret goodness. The image that burns vividly in my mind is that of flames falling not from heaven, but from the hand of man out upon his fellow man, tormenting countless thousands and unjustly ending their lives because of the way they expressed their love. I remember that there is a “trap of tolerance”[16] and that we fall for it every time we tolerate hatred and bigotry. We fall for it when we tolerate definitions of goodness that result in realities of torment instead of exploring if our definitions of right “really [are] goodness.” We fall for it when we forget the history of fire.

---

[1] See October 1897 General Conference, pg 66

[2] See John Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4

[3] Ibid.

[4] See Jonathan Spence, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,” ch 7

[5] See Albert Chan, “Chinese-Philippine Relations in the Late Sixteenth Century to 1603,” pg 71

[6] See Montaigne, “Journal de Voyage,” p. 231 and 481

[7] Spence, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,” ch 7

[8] Ibid.

[9] Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 3

[10] Ibid.

[11] Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4

[12] E.g., Deut. 29:23, 32:32; Isaiah 3:9, 13:19; Jeremiah 23:14, 49:18, 50:40; Lamentations 4:6; Ezekiel 16: 46-48; Amos 4:11; Zeph. 2:9; Matt. 10:15; Luke 17:29; Roman 9:29; 2 Pet. 2:6; Jude 7. With all of these references to the wickedness of Sodom, it would make sense for at least one of them to mention homosexuality as the root of its wickedness if that were indeed the case. In fact, none of them do.

[13] Matt. 10:14-15, see Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4

[14] Ezekiel 16: 48-49

[15] See Boswell, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality,” ch 4 for more information and for analysis of other Biblical teachings on the morality of gay relationships

[16] See Boyd K. Packer’s most recent conference address

Water Lilies and why I Love Jesus

One of the most exciting parts of learning a foreign language is the moment when you find a concept you love expressed elegantly and beautifully in a way you never knew possible. I had one of those moments one night on my mission. I was eating dinner with my companion, a native Chinese speaker, and we were discussing Chinese literature. He started telling me about one of the most famous pieces of ancient literature that nearly all Chinese students were required to memorize. It’s a short essay called “On Water Lilies” (爱莲说). The author, Zhou Dunyi, begins by saying that there are many flowers in the world that could be loved, but that he only loves the water lily. The most famous line in the essay comes as he describes his first reason for being enamored with the water lily. He says it 出(chu—arises from) 淤泥 (yu ni—the dirt/mud) 而不 (er bu—but is not) 染 (ran—dirty).

Elder Shi explained to me that it was meant to symbolize a person who chooses to stay as a member of society (which Zhou Dunyi contrasts with another flower to symbolize hermits in the essay), but who doesn’t give in to the pressures of society (which Zhou contrasts with yet another flower). I realized that this one sentence about coming up from the mud, but being clean beautifully expressed one of my favorite teachings in the gospel—that we should act for ourselves and not be acted upon. That we should love those who hate us and do good to them who despitefully use us. In essence, it symbolized Jesus.

I love Jesus. And I have to be clear—I really don’t know enough to know if Jesus of Nazareth was God, or the only begotten of the Father, or anything like that. What I’m converted to is the concept of Christ. Of all the endless possibilities, the Jesus portrayed in the New Testament is probably my favorite contender for God of the universe. And I want to explain why.

My favorite scripture in the Book of Mormon describing Christ is in 1 Nephi 19:9. It says,

“And the world, because of their iniquity, shall judge him to be a thing of naught; wherefore they scourge him, and he suffereth it; and they smite him, and he suffereth it. Yea, they spit upon him, and he suffereth it, because of his lovingkindness and longsuffering towards the children of men.”

During the Cultural Revolution in China there was a girl named Lin Zhao. At first, she was an ardent Communist. As she realized exactly what Mao was doing, she started opposing him. As soon as she began openly criticizing his regime, she was thrown into prison, where she continued to write criticisms of the Party until they took her pen and paper away from her. In the end, she wrote poems on the walls of the prison in her own blood. Before they executed her she said, “If one day we’re allowed to speak again, don’t forget to tell people: there was once a girl named Lin Zhao that they killed because she loved them too much” (如果有一天允许说话，不要忘记告诉活着的人们：有一个林昭因为太爱他们而被他们杀掉。)

I love Jesus for the same reason that I love Lin Zhao. Both persisted in love at all costs, and were killed for it. They stood in resolute opposition to systems that were harming people. Both arose from the mud, but didn’t let it make them dirty. Jesus let the people hate Him and returned their hate with lovingkindness and longsuffering.

I love the idea of a God who created everything and recognized the pain he caused by creating it and so became one with it as an atonement. He suffered with the world, and died the same death that he imposed upon creation. I love the idea of a God that loves unconditionally. But there is something difficult in accepting a God of unconditional love—when He asks you to love Him back, it’s got to be unconditional, too. And you know what; I don’t think God conforms to our standards of perfection (assuming He even exists). Maybe He exists somewhere beyond our conceptions of good and evil. But unconditional love goes beyond the discrepancies between our understandings and the world He created. He says He’ll love me no matter what. And so even if I’m gay and people think that’s weird, I’ll love Him, too. And even if my family’s religion teaches that I’m a sinner, I’ll still love Him. And even if I feel like the vast majority of my prayers go unanswered, I’ll go on loving Him.

Because the point in believing in a God that loves unconditionally is so that I can try to do it, too. I love Jesus because I want to come out of the mud and be clean. I love Jesus because I want to look reality in the face and say “Yeah, life, you freaking suck sometimes. But damn you. I’m going to love anyway.” I love Jesus because I want to be like Him. And I want to be like Lin Zhao, and Socrates, and Gandhi, and the rest of history’s wonderful array of water lilies.

Ultimately, our individual belief in deity cannot change the facts of whether or not God is real. But it can change the way we live our lives. I accept God into my life not as an explanatory power of how the universe came into being and nor as a justification for the way I think or live, but rather as an inspiration for the direction I want walk, not in my material journey, but in my journey of becoming. As a reason to change. I love Jesus because He taught me the most profound truth I’ve ever known: that happiness is made, not found. And that God has made us to be free because our purpose isn’t to have. It’s to be.

There’s nothing we can possess that will bring the happiness we desire. Including circumstances. It must come from within. Our happiness is our own creation and our own responsibility.

Jesus is the most beautiful water lily I’ve found so far. And so even though I don’t know whether or not He’s real, I love Him.

Me and God: A brief history

Me and God:

A Brief History

My first encounter with God was in a tree. Well, the first one I remember, at least. I couldn’t have been more than five years old. I had been playing in the yard, and decided that I wanted to climb the tree. I kept going higher and higher—it was the furthest up I had ever been when I suddenly got stuck. I couldn’t go any farther up, and I couldn’t seem to get down safely. I started to panic. But then I remembered a song we had just learned in primary. The only line I remember is the first one, “genealogy, I am doing it, my genealogy.” The song went on to talk about how genealogy could help us. I knew that stuck there in that tree in that moment I was in desperate need of help, and so I prayed out loud and said “dear Genealogy, please help me get out of this tree.” I honestly don’t remember how the story ends. I’m obviously no longer in the tree, so I’m assuming I got down somehow, but I do remember the feeling of desperation and reaching out for help to some distant power. I clearly misunderstood what genealogy was, but I remember the deep trust that there was a being out there who could hear me and who wanted to help me.

Every morning when we got up, my parents would have us all come together for family prayer. Every night we would kneel in a circle again, and pray, and then read a chapter in the Book of Mormon. Every time we prayed we had a little family tradition. Once the person praying said “amen,” we would all put our arms around the people next to us and say together “Our family!” and then put our hands out in the middle of the circle and say “I love you!”             

Between primary, family prayer and scripture study, and weekly family home evenings, I put together an image of God at a young age. He was a father different than my dad. He lived in heaven, which was somewhere up in the sky. He could answer my prayers and help me get what I wanted. After watching Disney’s Pinocchio for the first time, I realized that just like you could pray to God for things, you could also wish on stars to get things that you wanted. And so that night after going into my room to sleep, I went to my window and patiently waited for the first star to appear. When it came, I made my wish. It must not have been too important, because I don’t remember what it is I wanted. But I remember wanting it. And I remember having complete faith that the star, like God, could grant my wish. And I remember the disappointment I felt the next day when it didn’t happen. And then I began to wonder, if the stars can’t give me my wishes, then will God really answer my prayers?

Santa Claus also played a big role in my early thoughts about God. I believed deeply in Santa Claus. Every Christmas season I would beg my older sister to tell me stories about Santa Claus, and she would recount incredible tales of life in the North Pole, and my imagination would light up with scenes of Santa’s workshop and of all of his elves making hundreds of toys. Christmas was my favorite time of year by far. It was magical. So much of the magic and mystery was created because I believed in Santa Claus. And when my dad told me he wasn’t real, it was hard for me to rebuild the magic of Christmas. I remember sitting on my mom’s bed, and I asked her if dad was right, that Santa Claus wasn’t real. She confirmed it. And my next thought was, well then what about God?

Part of me could sense, though, that while stars and Santa Claus were kind of trivial, that God was something far more serious. And that He wasn’t to be questioned. By this age I was beginning to get the feel of prayer. We ask for things, but we don’t always get them. We pray for knowledge, but it doesn’t always come. And sometimes, when we’re lucky, we’ll feel something incredible as we pray. One time after family prayer, my oldest sister started crying and said that she felt the spirit. I tried so hard to feel it, too. I wanted to feel it so badly, but I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.

When I was six or seven an aunt and uncle came to visit us. My mom and dad went out to eat and go to a movie with them, and they left our cousin to babysit me and my brother and sisters. We had a great time, and our cousin, Andrea, took us out to the park across the street from our house for a few hours to play. We went back to the house a little while before the sun started to set. We found, to our horror, that someone had locked the door on the way out, and that no one had a key. We knew our parents wouldn’t be home until a lot later that evening, and we were scared of staying outside after it got dark. We played games for a while to distract ourselves. But we couldn’t get off our minds the question of what to do. I suggested that we say a prayer. We all knelt down in a circle in our driveway, and I said the prayer. I remember feeling naively certain that God would help us. And so I asked God outright to please unlock the door. After saying amen, we stood up and walked over to the door. Each of us had tried the door before, and it had definitely been locked. This time, it was open.

I wanted to tell everyone about what had happened. The next few weeks in primary, I could hardly stop talking about how God had opened the door for us. It was a miracle. It was proof that God was really there and that he really would answer our prayers. I was so sure of it, that a few months later when I got home early from a scouting activity to find no one home and that I was locked outside in the cold, I confidently knelt down on my knees, and uttered a quick prayer to God, asking him to open the door, and knowing full well that it would open. I stood up, but my hand to the door knob, and turned it. It was locked. It hadn’t worked. I sat outside for what felt like hours, but was really probably no more than fifteen minutes, until my mom got home from shopping.

I kept praying. I didn’t always get what I wanted, but sometimes it would happen. I didn’t pause until many years later to ask the question of why God would bother working the miracle of opening a door for a few kids from a middle class family so that they didn’t have to spend a few harmless hours in their front yard in the dark but leave countless hundreds of thousands of children to starve to death in distant places. I hadn’t yet stopped to contemplate the complexities of a God that claims to care, but brings his children into a world where they can’t help but experience pain. But those questions came all too soon.

As time went on, I began to recognize the feeling that everyone was calling the “spirit.” It was a bright feeling. It was a feeling of comfort. It felt like when I was little and I had a bad dream, and I would run downstairs and fall asleep in bed with my parents, feeling like their warmth was warding off the terror of my nightmares. Oddly enough, it was through nightmares that I first came to start feeling God. A few months after moving from St. George to Cache Valley, I started not being able to sleep at nights. One day near Halloween I heard people on the radio recounting their encounters with ghosts. Every night for months afterward I dreaded the time when the lights would be turned off, because I thought that if I closed my eyes I would see the pale white glow of a ghost coming to haunt me. I was bitterly frightened of the night, but was too embarrassed to tell anyone. And I prayed and prayed each night that God would help me to not be scared, but the terror persisted.

One night after family scripture and prayer, my mom told me that she wanted to talk to me. She said that the other night she was sleeping and had a really bad dream. She woke up, but the dark feelings wouldn’t go away. She prayed for them to leave, but they wouldn’t. And then suddenly she felt like God was telling her that this was how I was feeling each night, and that I was having troubles sleeping. And then she told me that if I prayed that angels would guard me from evil spirits that I would be able to sleep in peace. I was crying. I felt like my heart was on fire. I had spent months of lonely, frightened nights pleading with God to help me to no avail. And here He was answering my prayers in a moment through my mom. That night when I went to sleep I prayed that the angel Moroni , and Nephi, and Alma would all be in my room to guard me from evil spirits. And I prayed for specific angels to watch over each of my family members. And for the first time in months, I slept in peace.

 After that night, I never had problems with nightmares again. If I ever got scared, I would pray for angels, and the bright, warm feelings would come back to my heart.

I started to recognize those same feelings when I would read certain parts of the scriptures, or when I would pray, or sometimes during church. And I started to bear my testimony sometimes, and then I would feel it even more. And I wanted more of it. I wanted so badly to know more about God and to have more faith and be closer to Him. When I was fourteen years old attending my first EFY session, I remember sitting down and opening the Book of Mormon. It felt like the words on the pages that were on fire while Lehi testified that his soul had been redeemed by Christ that he was “encircled about eternally in the arms of His love.”

Inextricably connected to the history of my interactions with God was my experience with being gay. When it first dawned on me that the feelings I was having for other boys were what I was supposed to be feeling for girls, I turned immediately to God. I asked him to take it away. I asked him to fix me. I asked him to comfort me. I begged to know why I was this way, and why it was that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t feel anything I was supposed to for girls, while at the same time I couldn’t rid my heart of the feelings I had for boys. At first, God met my constant tears and prayers with silence.

One night during my junior year of high school, I was especially distraught. I fell asleep crying. Once I was asleep, I started to dream. In my dream, I was in my house at the kitchen table. My face was in my hands, and I was sobbing silently to myself. Even in my dream, I felt incredible despair. Suddenly and unexpectedly, I felt a hand on my shoulder. And I felt an electric, piercing feeling through my heart. Even before I turned around, I knew whose hand it was. When I did turn my head, I was surprised by His face. There was one picture of Christ that I had always disliked. It made him look so unappealing and weak. Staring back at me with eyes that pierced my soul was the face from that painting. I suddenly woke up, but I was still completely surrounded by a feeling of warmth and comfort that completely drove out all thoughts of despair. And I fell back asleep in peace.

During high school my thoughts of God matured. Instead of the magical being in the sky that listens to my thoughts and gives me things if I ask hard enough, God became an explanation. He became a purpose. I became deeply persuaded that God loved me and that He loved everyone. Pain, I learned, brought me closer to Him and taught me how to love people. For a time, it seemed like everything made sense. But no amount of dreams, warm feelings, or insights could take away the reality of my deepest secret. I felt like I was wearing a scarlet letter underneath my clothes. No one else could see it, but if they could I would be branded as different, and I would be hated. And no matter how much I felt God loved me, I still felt like this part of me was wrong. It wasn’t what He wanted. I had to change.

I left on my mission more sure of God than I had ever been before. I was so excited to share with people the love that had come to mean so much to me. I wanted so badly to teach people that they could personally communicate with God, and that He would answer their prayers, like He had so many of my own.

And I loved my mission. But in moments of honest reflection, I would often wonder just how many prayers of mine God had actually answered. At least eighty percent of them, I knew, could easily be coincidences that just interpreted as being from God. Most of the feelings I’d ever felt could just be positive emotions that I gave the label of “the spirit,” but really no different than I’d felt reading the seventh Harry Potter book. But try as I might, I could never explain the unlocked door. And remnants of the piercing feeling in my heart as I dreamt of Christ still lingered within, so I found the strength to go on.

As a missionary, I experienced many moments of clarity and closeness with God, but perhaps even more of deep loneliness and questioning whether or not God was really there. And when I got home from my mission, those questions continued. The spiritual experiences I had before my mission seemed to never come back to me, try as I might. And as I moved forward in confronting my sexual orientation, God seemed further than ever before. There were a few bright moments, such as when I finally asked God if I was okay the way I was, and felt peace. But the dark moments were manifold.

One night, all by myself in a hotel room in Changzhou, China, I couldn’t handle it anymore. I broke down into tears, lying on my bed. I started shaking and hyperventilating, and praying out loud. I was begging God to send me someone. Anyone. I needed something, because I couldn’t handle the pain on my own. I begged and pleaded, but the depth of emotional pain continued coursing through my heart and bursting through my eyes in the form of an endless stream of tears.

And a few months later as I travelled with classmates in Europe, I would pray and pray, but only ever felt enveloped in my loneliness. After a while, I felt completely abandoned by God. It was far worse than my nightmares as a child, because if it got too bad, I could always run down to my parents room. But there was no hand to be held in the depths of this new agony. There seemed to be no place I could go.

And as I returned from Europe and began questioning Mormonism, and everything I had ever believed, I found that so much of what I had experienced could be explained away. I began to doubt God’s existence more deeply than I had at any time since discovering the truth about Santa Claus. And I didn’t know what to think and what to do.

Looking back at this brief and incomplete history of my interactions with God is to me like looking out at the night’s sky. My experiences are like stars—seemingly random, chaotic, and senseless. God will open doors for me at one moment, while simultaneously leaving millions exposed to hunger. The vast majority of prayers I ever prayed were left unanswered. And yet He came to me powerfully in a dream. He was willing to alleviate the agony of my nightmares, but not the later agony of my nihilism. A starry night sky of experiences.

But we know what humans do with stars. They make constellations. They tell stories. And so I look at the random mess of my own experiences, and with them, I put together a constellation. I tell a story. My story is the story of a God who is a mystery. He is a God who may or may not exist, but if He does, I feel like He loves me. When I connect the dots of my own experience, I’m left facing a God as deeply complicated and paradoxical as the reality He created.

I now know that wishing on stars is useless. And I know that genealogy is not a mystical being that will help me get down from trees. But I also know that my life has been touched by the transcendent and is marked with the incomprehensible. I think I’ll choose to keep loving this God, this constellation born of my life experience, because doing so gives me meaning. Just like when I was a missionary, standing out on my balcony feeling lonely and so far from home, staring at the stars and feeling comforted by the sight of Orion, so, no matter where I go in life, will the story of God continue to give me meaning and inspire me to try to be a more compassionate person.

The Mormon Dilemma

Mormonism is not a mere set of beliefs that one adopts. It is a heritage. Weekly worship is almost meaningless without the Mormon Story, the vibrant narrative that colors and gives meaning to the life of ritual and service pursued by the faithful Latter-day Saint. This narrative and its heritage create a deep-seated sense of identity, allowing individuals to understand their position in relation to their community, the broader world, and with God. The uniqueness of Mormonism lies in the concepts of priesthood authority, which gives the organization its imperative as the “one true church,” and in continuing revelation, which is available to living prophets and apostles as well as to the individual. The belief in the ability of their leaders to ascertain the will of God creates a climate that allows for the canonization of culture and puts the mandate of God behind social norms. The Mormon Story creates a perceptive lens that shapes the contours of the world of the Latter-day Saint. This framework alters the way reality is approached, enhancing life for many, but not all. The dilemma of Mormonism is that it creates a world that does not live up to its own teachings and fails to take responsibility for its failures.

The Mormon Story is paradoxically rigid and loose. The words of church leaders (referred to authoritatively as “the Brethren”) are taken as the mandate of God, and to question them is to question the Omnipotent. On the same token, Mormons admit belief not only in what God has revealed and is revealing, but that “he will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” The veneer of flexibility adds justification to inflexibility. What is being done must be right, because if it were not, God would simply change it. And so the Latter-day Saint accepts with joy that the current state of affairs is the way God ordains things to be, and that if they need changing, it will come from the top down, originating from God and being subsequently transferred through his leaders, who are not to be questioned.

The story that guides Mormonism is the story of a God who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son to set up a church for its inhabitants, and then to give his life for them. And in Mormonism, it is the institution of the church that takes precedence over the doctrine of the atonement. Mormons believe that like the prophets of old, Christ established an institutional church for the good of mankind. He ordained his followers to be leaders of the church by the laying on of hands, bestowing a priesthood authority upon them.  On the cornerstone of prophets and apostles, Christ laid the foundation for the work of salvation which is to be accomplished in and through the workings of his church.

Any good Latter-day Saint would immediately critique this thought, proclaiming that the atonement of Christ is the centrality of the Mormon Story, and that it is His death and sufferings are at the heart of the religion. To an astute observer, however, the center of Mormonism is not the sacrifice, but the covenant of which the sacrifice is a portion. The end goal of Mormon theology is exaltation, and while the atonement of Christ is a necessary step for its occurrence, the path walked to its obtaining is the path of covenants. The sentiment of Joseph Smith that all aspects of the church are only appendages to Christ’s atonement is not completely accurate in the modern church, because salvation is achieved through covenant making.

In Mormonism, a covenant is believed to be a two-way promise between God and man that is undertaken in some sort of ritual. The first covenant that one makes is the covenant of baptism, in which one is fully immersed in water to symbolize the death and resurrection of Christ, and likewise the death of the man of sin and the resurrection of the spirit into the life of His redemption. Further covenants are made in the temple, including the covenants of the endowment ceremony, and the highest covenant of marriage. Covenants are undertaken in rituals, and rituals demand officiators. The priesthood authority is therefore central to acts of ritual and central to the process of covenant making. Without covenants, one cannot receive the remission of their sins, attain salvation, nor achieve exaltation, which is believed to be the greatest possible eternal attainment of the human soul. Covenants are the steps on the path to salvation.

Christ’s atonement enables covenants to hold their power, but the nature of the covenant places the necessity of a worthy priesthood holder at the forefront as a requirement for salvation to occur. In Mormon theology, an individual cannot simply pray their way to exaltation. Priesthood rituals must occur, and covenants must be made. In Mormonism, the priesthood holder is as requisite to the salvific process as is the atonement of Christ, for each are necessary elements without which salvation cannot be obtained. In essence, priesthood holders stand between a person and God, officiating the rituals that open the door to their salvation.

The church is the organization of the body of the priesthood, and is therefore the vehicle of salvation for the people. The story of Mormonism is that God sent His son to establish a church, and then to die for it. Both steps are necessary on the path of salvation, but emphasis is most clearly placed on the necessity of the church, its priesthood, and its rituals, for they come a priori to accessing the atonement of Christ. The most ornate symbol of Mormonism, the temple, is a monetary enshrinement of the importance of covenants, and therefore of priesthood and of the church. These temples built as the home of a God who “dwelleth not in temples made of hands” are more clearly the home of a ritual celebration of priesthood authority than of the God that proclaims “heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool” and poses the piercing question, critical of a pillar of Mormon theology, of “what house will ye build me?” (Acts 7: 48-49)

The Mormon Story continues in an understanding of the “great apostasy,” in which Christ’s church, following his death, fell apart and lost the priesthood authority, disintegrating into bickering factions that each holds only a portion of the truth. In the 1840s Joseph Smith claimed that in 1820 God appeared to him in response to his prayer of which Christian sect was the true church, revealing to him that none of them were true, but rather that they were an “abomination in [his] sight.” Joseph restored the church of Christ to the earth, receiving the priesthood authority that is requisite to salvation, setting up the institution of the church to continue on after his death, and translating the Book of Mormon as the ultimate expression of his prophetic calling. The Book of Mormon is the key stone of the religion because if it is true, then everything Joseph Smith taught was true, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is God’s true church and the “Brethren” are called of God to speak for him.

Mormonism is the deification of an institution.  Its leaders are the doors to salvation, because they are windows into the mind and will of God. The Mormon Story is the story of a mandate from God communicated to mankind through voice of prophets. Emphasis is placed on obedience and obeisance to positions of priesthood authority, because they are our access to God and to salvation. This story holds not merely the weight of personal conversion, but of the sacrifices of thousands who died at the hands of mobs in the early days of the Church and those who died trekking across the plains on their journey to establish Zion.

Mormonism is not simply a set of rules. It is a heritage. The mandate of the one true church is shaped into the identity of every child who grows up into the church, and they know that it is their responsibility to continue the pioneer trek of their ancestors in establishing the kingdom of God on the earth. Mormonism is both a message and a mission, and it shapes the framework through which every Latter-day Saint sees their world.

The Mormon identity is so essential to the Latter-day Saint, that intellectual questions that bring doubt are deeply emotional and frightening. When Mormons are first exposed to historical facts that contradict the story that shapes their world, it feels as if the pillars that hold up their world are quaking and threatening to crash down around them, leaving their relationships with family and friends as casualties to their questions. Basic questions, such as whether or not Joseph Smith really translated the Book of Mormon and if modern prophets are actually receiving any revelation at all open the windows of despair, and can only be whispered about. To discuss them openly is to incur the wrath of testimony.

The idea of testimony plays a powerful role the life of a Latter-day Saint from the very beginning. Every first Sunday of the month, the central church meeting is focused on sharing testimony. The pulpit is open, and any member can stand up and share with the congregation what they “know” to be true. To the believing Latter-day Saint, such an event is strongly faith-promoting and is accompanied with the “feelings of the Spirit,” which manifest to the heart that what is spoken is true. Children are often taken to the pulpit by parents, who whisper in their ears the words they should say. Testimonies differ, but the most consistent variable is the inclusion of the declaration that “I know the church is true.” To an outsider, the event can seem bizarre, repetitious, and deeply boring. To the questioning member, it only serves to feed the fire of doubt.

A testimony is gained by personal witness from the Holy Spirit, a feeling that cannot be explained. As one commonly told story puts it, to explain how the Spirit feels is like explaining how salt tastes. Testimonies are most often born in reading and praying about whether or not the Book of Mormon is true, but also often come at other moments and other times, and they are deeply connected with prayer and the idea of direct revelation from God. Over time as an individual begins to learn how to recognize the spirit, however, it seems that emotions turn into messages from God, albeit emotions guided by the canon of the scriptures and the words of the prophets. If you feel positive feelings associated with anything contrary to the teachings of the church, it is most likely false revelation, because “even the devil can, at times, appear as an angel of light.” Negative feelings towards the church are ignored, because obedience is more important. Mormonism teaches you to rely on the feelings of the spirit, but only when they tell you that the church is true.

Testimonies of friends, family members, and church leaders only very rarely have their intended effect in the case of a sincere questioner. Often times, testimony only leads to further questioning, such as asking how it is that someone can claim to “know” anything based only on a feeling. If one experiences the same feelings of the spirit by which they came to “know” that the church is true telling them something that is contrary to the church, then how can they really know they ever knew the church was true in the first place? Can emotion really be trusted as a guide in what is objectively true and false? If we cannot know, then why are we basing our entire lives on what our emotions tell us?

Important questions concerning testimony are most often unasked by Latter-day Saints. For example, few people pause to question if the past experiences they label as revelatory could have any other explanations. It could be possible, for example, that a loving God was merely affirming his love for them, and they interpreted it as a revelation that Mormonism is the one true church. It could also be possible that there is no God and that the experiences were culturally induced. Mormons fail to ask this key question: all else held constant, if God did not exist, would it be possible for the experiences upon which I base my testimony to be explained by other factors? Another factor rarely considered is the role that incentives play in their testimonies. It is very easy for a person who stands to lose social standing in their community if they did not believe to interpret any positive emotions as reasons to believe. A cautious interpretation of past experience is commendable, but cautious interpretations are not what are being shared over the pulpit each month, but instead declarations of knowledge. Indeed, the oft repeated advice that to gain a testimony one must bare a testimony, beyond being an advocacy of openly bearing false witness, is confirmed by psychology to be a means of self-deception. Mormons regularly ignore the wealth of equally plausible explanations for their experiences, and instead translate them into a mandate for following the line of priesthood authority and upholding the deification of their institution.

Questions become even deeper when one looks at the fruits of the Mormon Story. On the one hand, it helps people to understand their place in the world and provides a sense of stability. But if we assume for a moment that the Mormon Story is not true, and then look at the ways it influences gay and lesbian members, members who, at no fault of their own, have not been able to get married, or whose families have fallen apart, or members who, for the life of them, cannot feel the spirit, then it becomes clear that the Mormon Story incurs psychological damage. The teenager growing up who discovers that they are only attracted to people of their own gender knows that if they follow those feelings to any degree, they will be disobeying the teachings of the church—disobeying the very voice of God. Who they are, must then be a mistake, or at least a temporary hiccup, or maybe a divine mandate for them to suffer through a life of celibacy because their natural feelings of love were not good enough for God. The member who never has the chance to get married must weekly go to church and be reminded that families are central to exaltation, and often face judgment and ostracization from other members. For the member who has no desire to get married it is even more so. Those whose families fall apart cannot escape the guilt and pressure created naturally by a system that tells stories about how a family ought to be, and that if one is righteous enough they can obtain it.

And so, the questioner of the church is faced with the world of pain caused by the Mormon Story and is forced to ask one ultimate question: is it true? Or is it just a story? The more one looks into the historical facts, the clearer it seems that prophets make false prophecies, change past revelations, and revise history. The more one looks into sociological facts, the more one finds that Mormonism seems to oddly create the very things it teaches against (such as the ridiculously high rates of pornography consumption in Utah). The more one really pauses to question the truth of the claims of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the less it seems to be true, and the more it seems to just be a story.

The question remains of what the thinking person is to do. Should they abandon intellect and embrace a faith that perhaps transcends reason? Should they continue activity in the church because of social reasons? Or should they throw up their arms and be done with it all? When missionaries teach about prophets, they proclaim that it is by their fruits that you will know them. The fruits of the Mormon Story are diverse, and many of them are good, incredible in fact, while many of them are devastatingly tragic. In order to decide, one must answer the question of where your loyalties lie. For myself, I have determined that my loyalties are with people who suffer and are marginalized, many of whom are not even mindful of their marginalization because of the depth of their indoctrination to a system whose framework is resulting their daily despair. And so I abandon the world of covenants, church, and priesthood, and embrace compassion and advocacy. 

The Need for Change

I just posted a follow up to my coming out blog post about the need for change within church culture with regards to homosexuality.

http://perplextinfaith.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-need-for-change_23.html