All Saints

Sitting on my desk is a little square-shaped piece of bread. It's what they use for communion at the Advocate, the Episcopal church Hugo and I have been attending since we moved to North Carolina. After communion, there were a few pieces left over, and I pocketed this one to bring home to use when I administer the sacrament to myself, which I'll do as soon as I finish this post.

I've never done this before—bring leftover communion bread home, I mean. Normally I just come home and bless the sacrament for myself using whatever bread we have in the apartment. I was moved to do it this time because of the sermon, which was dedicated to the theme of the communion of saints. Today was the Advocate's celebration of All Saints Day. The service started with a litany that memorialized various saints from the Bible and from the history of Christianity—I got to chant part of that, which I enjoyed very much. All around the worship space people had hung pictures of saints they wanted to remember, including their own relatives or admired figures like Martin Luther King. The sermon focused on the idea that we belong to a communion of saints composed of all those who have confessed the Christian faith throughout history.

I've commented in some earlier posts about my ambivalence toward the fact that my spirituality is so individualistic. I identify as Mormon but in my own idiosyncratic way. I'm not interested in LDS church life because I find the institutional church stultifying and authoritarian, and I don't have the patience and charity and rock-solid self-assurance to be the openly gay excommunicant who keeps attending ward meetings week after week even though he isn't really wanted. For the past four years, Hugo and I have attended the Advocate, but going was his idea, not mine; and while I enjoy and am grateful for the opportunities that community has given me to serve, I don't think of myself as a member of the Advocate: it's simply the place where I've taken up temporary residence as a Mormon exile. I never commune there. To me, communing at the Advocate would mean relinquishing my exile status, relinquishing my Mormonism, and throwing in my lot with this community instead, which is not what I want to do. It's not what I believe God wants me to do.

So why is there a piece of communion bread from the Advocate sitting on my desk, waiting for me to recite the LDS sacramental prayer over it? I only have a fuzzy sense of why I'm doing this, and my understanding of why I'm doing it really doesn't have much to do with my relationship to the Advocate. It has more to do with thoughts that came to my mind during the priest's sermon regarding my relationship to the communion of Latter-day Saints.

As the priest was inviting us to see ourselves as part of a communion of saints, I found myself thinking about whether I could see myself as a member of a communion that included Joseph Smith along with the other historical figures I'd named in the parts of the litany I chanted. Do I think of Joseph Smith as one of the saints? Certainly I regard the revelations he penned and the rituals he instituted as channels through which God speaks to me and teaches me, and in that sense I can say that I believe Joseph Smith was a prophet, a servant, an instrument. But if Joseph were alive today, I would not be one of his followers (though perhaps I might have found a home in one of the churches founded by those who broke with him). I would regard him as the leader of a fringe religious movement—a "cult"—someone who was authoritarian and unstable and perhaps even dangerous. I can accept that he was a servant of God, but that doesn't necessarily mean he was a good servant. Ultimately the judgment is God's, not mine, but I'm inclined to think that Joseph Smith was an instrument of God more in spite of what he did than because of it.

Nevertheless. I am wearing over my kneecap a marked garment that signifies that someday every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Christ. That can be taken in a judgmental, triumphalist sense to mean that someday everyone will recognize that Christianity is the one true religion, and those who rejected Jesus will be constrained to acknowledge that his retaliatory judgments against them are just. Obviously, I'm not interested in that way of understanding it. To me, the prophecy that every knee will bow is a promise that someday all people will be drawn together through the transforming love of God into a single communion, a single community, a single family cutting across all boundaries and dismantling all barriers—including, I believe, religious barriers, though my language for expressing this vision is distinctively Christian and therefore my mental image of this community has Christ at the center of it.

But let's set aside the interfaith dimensions of this vision for now. Let's just focus on a smaller, but still enormous, challenge—trying to imagine a unified communion of Latter-day Saints. Can I see myself worshipping side-by-side with Joseph Smith? Brigham Young? J. Reuben Clark? Boyd K. Packer? None of those are people I would be pleased to stand shoulder to shoulder with; and I doubt, for their part, that they'd think I was worthy to be standing alongside them in God's kingdom. But that's the vision I understand the Knee Mark to be pointing me toward. A single communion that includes the people I now hate as well as the people I now admire—the self-proclaimed insiders, and those who became outsiders because they felt betrayed, and those who were declared outsiders against their will. Howard W. Hunter. Eliza R. Snow. Emmeline B. Wells. Dallin H. Oaks. Lavina Fielding Anderson. Michael Quinn. Queer old Evan Stephens with his boy chums. Louie Felt and May Anderson. Sonia Johnson would be there—at least I hope she'd want to be. The same with William Law. Emma. Joseph Smith III.

I'm about to bless the sacrament. As I take it, I'll be imagining myself as part of this future LDS communion, where all have at last been reconciled to one another and all of the lost sheep have been gathered back to the fold. Taking the sacrament together, with Jesus, like in D&C 27. And why am I using leftover communion bread from the Advocate? I guess because it helps evoke for me that sense of partaking, not on my own, but as part of a communion of saints, forged by the transforming love of Christ, who suffered and died and rose again in order to make us his forever and to be able to draw us to him, no matter how long it takes.