Today is Christ the King, the feast that marks the end of the Western liturgical year. Next week comes the first Sunday of Advent. I finished the Book of Mormon this week so that I can dedicate the four weeks between now and Christmas to Advent reflections.
Given that today celebrates Christ the King, it seems even more especially appropriate to focus my final Book of Mormon reflection for this cycle on the theme of coming to Christ. That theme also sets me up well for Advent, which is fundamentally about waiting for the coming of Christ. I like the symmetry there: we come to Christ, Christ comes to us. "Draw near to me, and I will draw near to you" (D&C 88:63). I like that image because it doesn't require everyone to end up in one spot. If we move in Christ's general direction, he'll meet us somewhere in between. He'll meet us where we're at. That image best reflects my experience of the presence of Christ in my life.
Like last week's post, this is going to be an autobiographical entry. Last week's entry focused on the significance of the scriptures in my life. This week I want to construct a narrative—a testimony—about the significance of Christ in my life.
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My parents converted to Mormonism from different brands of Protestantism, so in our family we celebrated Advent, we held family sunrise services on Easter. Our family's Mormonism was distinctly Christ-centered, somewhat before Christ-centered rhetoric became so prominent in Church discourse.
As a teenager, I discovered the concept of grace while I was reading the letters of Paul. Again, this was before Stephen Robinson had rehabilitated that concept in LDS discourse: I grew up hearing in church that "salvation by grace" was an apostate concept, that Paul's teachings about the abrogation of the law referred to the higher law of the gospel superseding the lower law of Moses, etc. When I began to actually read the letters myself, I became convinced that the texts didn't support those interpretations. Paul was making a more radical point about how Christ's grace sets us free from law in the abstract—from judgment based on works righteousness. Christ enables us to do God's will, and his grace covers our inevitable failings.
As usual with me, this probably all sounds really cerebral. But it was hugely important to me. I'm a ridiculously perfectionistic person. Sometime after I was ordained a deacon, I got on my knees one night and vowed to God that I would never sin again. A week later, I realized I'd botched it (forgot my prayers, yelled at my brothers, etc.). In a panic, I renewed the vow—"I'll do it this time, really"—and then quickly I botched it again. I felt terrible because all the LDS discourse I'd been raised on, about commandments and obedience and becoming perfect, had given me the impression that I ought to be able to be perfectly obedient. Paul taught me that this perfectionism was hopelessly misguided. The concept of being transformed by grace was also important to me as puberty finally hit and I began to experience guilt about my sexuality.
What I'm trying to say is that embracing teachings of grace was an important part of how I embraced Christ in my life. But... this was happening at a time when embracing this way of understanding salvation through Christ's grace meant disagreeing with doctrinal authorities like Bruce R. McConkie and with the majority of the Latter-day Saints around me. So from early on, coming to Christ meant, for me, standing at some remove from the community of Saints and their leaders. That reality changed once Stephen Robinson and then Church leaders started speaking more about grace—which I found very exciting. But the pattern would recur: a relationship with Christ and a relationship with the Church have not been synonymous for me in the way Mormon orthodoxy wants them to be.
Perfectionism was a big problem for me during my mission—missionary culture encourages it, constantly pushing you to work harder, to produce higher numbers, to be more perfectly obedient, etc. In the midst of one depression, a letter from a friend serving her own mission inspired me to kneel in the corner of the bedroom and pray to feel Christ's arms around me. And I did—which may well have been psychosomatic or suggestion or whatever; but it's an experience for which I still thank God.
Dramatic change of scene: In the midst of the academic freedom controversy, during my last couple of years at BYU, I vented my anger at one point by setting next to my desk in my dorm room a postcard-sized copy of Del Parson's famous red-robed Christ with the slogan "Down with Big Brother!" (from Orwell's 1984) pasted over it. It wasn't really that I was rejecting Christ—I was attending the temple every Thursday—but it was a protest against an institution and a hierarchy that claimed to act as Christ's uniquely authorized representatives.
When I stopped attending the LDS Church, I retreated from orthodoxy and rejected even moderate versions of the claim that Christianity is the only true religion, the only way to salvation, etc. When I talked about my spirituality, I did so in terms of my relationship with God, not my relationship with Christ, because that seemed more ecumenical. And yet, in a paradox I wasn't entirely comfortable with but which seemed to be where I was drawn despite myself, I was worshipping with an Episcopal congregation where each week I affirmed faith in Christ by reciting the words of the Nicene Creed and participated in the sacrament of Christ's body and blood. For a few months in 1997, I served in the Dominican Republic with a Catholic program; the nun who ran the program often described our work as touching the wounds of Christ, which was an image that resonated strongly with me. In the years after I withdrew from LDS Church life, it remained (and still does today) extremely important for me—indispensible—to celebrate Christmas and Easter by attending Christian services, even if I didn't have a language for explaining why.
Grace, by the way, had become much less important to me as a concept or an experience once I'd gotten away from BYU and the LDS Church and started coming out of the closet and stopped feeling so guilty all the time.
I still tend to talk more about "God" than about "Christ." But I remember a moment at the end of the 1990s when I heard someone from the United Church of Christ talk about how her Christian faith called her to work for equality for gay/lesbian people; and the thought came to me, "Maybe it's time for me to start reclaiming a Christian voice. Maybe it's time for me to start speaking again in the name of Christ."
I need to wrap up and move on with my day. God—and for me, that term basically functions as a synonym for the Spirit—is integral to how I experience life in this world. I experience God's presence and guidance in ways that I understand as immediate. My experience of Christ is admittedly more abstract. "Christ" is a particular way of talking about the realities I more readily tend to call "God" or "the Spirit." I'm not comfortable talking about a personal relationship with Christ in the evangelical style that has become common among Mormons. That language doesn't really feel that it matches my experience, nor do I buy intellectually into the orthodox worldview that makes the Fall and the Atonement and the Resurrection straightforward, literal realities. Christ is not, for me, the bodily resurrected Jesus of Nazareth who looks down on me from another world. Instead, for me, Christ is "the revelation of God"—which is obviously a much more abstract concept (albeit one that can be found in the accumulated body of Mormon teaching). You can't relate to that kind of abstraction in the same way orthodox Mormons relate to someone they believe is an embodied human being who bled and died for them in places you can go visit in Jerusalem today and who now reaches out, unseen, to touch them through a veil. I don't relate to Christ as a person in that sense because I don't believe Christ exists as a person in that literal sense. I relate to stories about Christ, images of Christ, teachings attributed to Christ, rituals in which Christ is a central symbol. I relate to Christ as a particular way to envision the invisible God whose presence I detect in my life.
But still, even if abstractly, Christ is central to my spirituality. And not just as abstract theological concept, not just as language. My commitment to a Christ-centered spirituality is embodied concretely in the bread and water I bless each week, in the cross I'll be carrying in procession later today, in the Christian icons that hang on my walls, in the Nativity scenes I'll be setting out over Thanksgiving weekend, in the services I attend on Christmas Eve and Easter. I speak my prayers in Christ's name; I study texts that are said to be Christ's words. I take certain actions because I understand myself as being under a mandate to follow Christ's example, to serve Christ in others. Because my spirituality is Christian, rather than something else, it has a particular texture, particular emphases—most notably the fact that everything for me boils down to love.
Something's not feeling right about this reflection. There's something untrue about what I'm saying. I think I'm making my Christian commitments out to be more abstract than they are. Let me try to get closer to the truth by finishing with this story:
A year or two before we moved from Salt Lake to North Carolina, I walked down to Temple Square on a January evening. The Christmas crowds were over, and they were allowing free access to the Christus, so I sat in front of it for a while. They were piping in Tabernacle Choir music and periodically played that recording they do in different languages of a male voice reading selections of Christ's words from the various standard works. I was unhappy about the music and the recording because I resented the attempt at manipulating visitors emotionally and then trying to identify that as a testimony of the Spirit to the unique truth of Mormonism.
But then I thought, "Just ride through it." So I kept sitting, and after a while I got past my annoyance and began to feel meditiative, and I ended up having a rather long, intense, silent conversation with Christ as represented in front of me by the Christus. (The way Mormons construct a devotional space around that statue is so uncharacteristically Catholic—thank God!) I have no recollection what the conversation was about. All I know is that when I left Temple Square, I felt peaceful and emptied and yet at the same time overflowing with goodwill... so much so that I gave money to someone begging at the gates, which I never do.
That's what my relationship with Christ looks like in concrete terms.
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