Something new

No post last Sunday because I was back in Salt Lake for the Sunstone Symposium. While I was there, I bought a new triple combination from the Church distribution center in the basement of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. I'd decided that I wanted to be able to take a "fresh" look at the D&C. Up to now, I've been using the same copy I carried on my mission which, apart from being old and cracking out of its spine, has the passages from the missionary discussions marked, which often speak more to the interests of exclusivist, authoritarian Mormonism than to my current understanding. I wanted to clear away that baggage and start marking the text afresh.

So while I was in Salt Lake—on the bus, or taking a break from research for lunch, or waiting to meet someone—I started highlighting passages in my "virginal" copy where I sense the Spirit trying to speak to me. It's been good. It's felt more open to the text and less resistant. I've felt that my relationship with the text has been more affirmative, more affectionate, more loving. More like the period after 1997 when I first began to really engage with the scriptures again after leaving activity in the LDS Church, when I was discovering the Spirit's voice in these texts anew and couldn't get enough.

This week, though, back in North Carolina, I've set that aside and taken up something new I've been contemplating for a while. I've felt increasingly restricted this year by the Sunday School D&C/church history curriculum. Unlike with the Book of Mormon, where we pretty much read through the text chronologically in big chunks, leaving me free to engage with it on my terms independent of where the Correlation Committee wanted to go, the D&C readings have tended to be fragments selected to point to correlated themes, which I feel has made it harder for me to engage positively (rather than reactively) with the text—not to mention, has kept me from reading the whole D&C, since we're just reading whatever pieces serve the interests of the curriculum. So—no more. Finit. When I first started rereading the scriptures on the Sunday School schedule a few years back, it was important to me as a way of walking with, or at least nearer, the LDS community. But it's not producing the spiritual nourishment I need anymore—I spend too much energy fighting the gravitational pull of correlation.

So for the rest of the year I'm leaving the Sunday School schedule and trying out a more "ecumenical" D&C study. I've reached the end of the LDS D&C, basically. So now I'm reading from the RLDS/Community of Christ D&C. For a couple years now, I've been wondering what it would mean to identify not just with the LDS branch of the Latter Day Saint movement but with the movement more broadly conceived. And I'm feeling prompted now—"prodded" is more like what it feels, actually—to move in that direction. I'll work on articulating my vision of what I'm doing more richly as I feel my way down this path. For now, let me say that the basic concept is: I've learned to hear the Spirit's voice in the canonical texts of one branch of the Latter Day Saint movement; now let's listen in on the canonical texts of a different group of Saints trying to discern God's will for them, and let's see what the Spirit may have to say to me through those texts.

So that's what I've been doing for my spiritual reflection time this week. And unfortunately, that's all I have time to say for now, so I'll post my first reflections on the CofC D&C next week.