"Be ready always to give an answer to everyone that asks you a reason of the hope that is in you . . ." (1 Peter 3:15)This evening I went to the office of the Advocate, the Episcopal church whose Sunday services my partner and I attend. I've been going there lately on Thursday evenings to play LDS hymns on the piano, something I loved to do while I was at BYU but haven't had much opportunity to do since (because I didn't have access to a piano).
I arrived at the office just as a theology discussion group was finishing. "We were just talking about you," someone said. Apparently they'd been talking about all the people who go to the Advocate who are "in exile" from other churches, and someone mentioned me, with my Mormon background, as an example. They asked me to what extent I still consider myself Mormon, and I said, "Very much so." I explained that I read from the Book of Mormon every day, I wear the temple garment; and the fact that I still consider myself Mormon is why even though I attend services at the Advocate, I never take communion there. (Taking communion would feel to me like saying that I'd given up on my Mormon identity and had embraced a new one.)
One of the group told me that she owned a Book of Mormon and had tried reading it but just couldn't receive it as scripture. I told her that I didn't believe the book was ancient; but having been raised to read it as a sacred text, I found that God continued to speak to me through the book, calling me to more Christlike living—to greater piety, greater humility, greater charity.
Had the conversation continued, I would have explained that I read the Book of Mormon the same way liberal Christians read the Bible: it's not all historical, it isn't even all theologically acceptable, but there's something there that still makes it God's word to us. Had the conversation continued, I would have asked her how she came to own a Book of Mormon and what she'd read from it. I might have pointed her to some of my favorite passages: King Benjamin on the Christian life, the baptismal covenant at the Waters of Mormon, Alma 7 on Christ taking on our infirmities in order to know how to succor us. But the conversation ended abruptly because a woman crashed her motorcycle on the other side of the street and everyone ran over to help. She was all right, except that she thought she might have broken a rib, so the ambulance took her to the hospital.
3 comments:
John...has your way been confirmed spiritually? Why can't you participate in an LDS ward? I would think you would have so much to give to building the Lord's (albeit partly the institutional) Kingdom. I'm committed to pushing diversity forward but without you participating its not going to be easy.
Hi, Yeti! Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.
How to answer your question . . . ? The obvious excuse for not participating in an LDS ward is that they excommunicated me. But of course, I could keep attending anyway (that's what Lavina Fielding Anderson does), and the excommunication excuse doesn't explain why I stopped attending the LDS Church a dozen years before that.
The LDS Church does not feel safe to me. As a gay man, as an authority-suspicious intellectual, and as a person with very liberal political and theological views (liberal, at least, by prevailing Mormon standards—obviously there are people out there who are much farther left than I), on the few occasions in the past few years that I've walked into an LDS meetinghouse, I've felt I was walking into enemy territory. And I still feel very, very angry toward the institutional church. I work hard to restrain, or write against, that anger when I do Mormon scholarship. The written word and physical separation help me achieve distance. I find that a lot harder to do when I'm sitting in sacrament meeting.
I'm not flashing all this as a badge of honor. If I were a more Christlike person—and if my faith were stronger, frankly (I'm much too prone to questioning myself, despite my vanity or perhaps because of it)—I would have the inner strength and composure, and the charity and patience and humility, to attend an LDS ward and participate in the community to the limited extent my status allows. I know people who do that. I've already mentioned Lavina. I know of a couple gay Mormon men, openly partnered, who attend their wards. I admire them for being able to do that. And I agree with you that "pushing diversity forward" is hard when the people who would add a little diversity to the mix aren't physically present. Chieko Okazaki made an appeal along those lines once: Don't leave. Force them to learn to deal with you.
Maybe the day will come when I can do that. But while I feel vaguely guilty about it, I also don't feel impelled to return to LDS church life, at least not now. If that's what God wants from me, he'll have to push a lot harder. (Jonah's running from Nineveh: cue the whale!)
One more thing, Yeti. Self-absorbed as I am, I forgot that I was going to ask you: I read your profile, and I'm curious to know more about your own story, if you feel comfortable talking about it in this forum.
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