This week’s installment of “Leaving the Garden” (a weekly series in which we ask someone to reflect on their encounters with religion and uncertainty) comes to you from wren, a long-time member of the Mind on Fire community and fellow Obama-ite!
Wren aka nee who blogs at The Waiting Line. She lives in the twin cities and can usually be found with knitting needles or a camera in hand, somewhere in the midwest.
“How do I get to where I’ve come from, now?
How do I paint this garden I’ve destroyed, green?
Can I get back to where I’ve come from?
Cause there are people, who believe it.”
-Seal, “People asking why”
At one time, I saw that song as emblematic of the truth I believed I’d found as an LDS convert at age 25. When I left the garden at age 36 that song took on new meaning for me.
I was raised as a casually active Lutheran. I was a seeker much of my life. Religion offered a promise of something better in the hereafter and that was better than the misery I often was experiencing in this life. I read books and visited churches frequently. At times I was angry with God but I didn’t doubt he existed. Eventually I became a member of the lds church and embraced it fully. I wanted certainty. I didn’t want ambiguity. The church filled in the blanks of Christianity. It provided a way for everyone to be saved. It had very specific rules. I needed these things. I needed to believe. Despite bouts of inactivity and the struggle of being single and later married and childless in the lds church, I stil believed.
I left my marriage of nearly 5 years because my husband, then elders quorum president (the men’s group in lds wards), made some terrible choices I couldn’t abide by. That could be a whole other post and isn’t the point of this one. I bring it up because the devastation was the catalyst for my journey out.
My Relief Society president had invited me to go to the temple in the days to follow. I didn’t feel I could sit through an endowment session so I suggested we do initiatories. The Initiatory was something I’d valued. It’s one of the few times women act in a position of authority in the church rather than merely an auxilliary unit that exists to support the priesthood which only the men hold (a fact which never bothered me as a member, I just fell in line.). During the initiatory, a temple worker bestows blessings upon you as you move from station to station with a small room, passing through veils.
That day as I listened to those promises of blessings I heard them with fresh ears. Like nearly everything in the church, the focus of the blessings revolve around family. I had done everything that had been asked of me and my family was not working out. I thought about all the covenants I’d made at the temple. There was a lot of commitment from me but not much return on that and it was all predicated on devotion to a righteous husband. As I continued the initiatories, I felt as though blinders had been removed. I was confused and troubled by what I began seeing. I felt sick when I left. It was the last time I was in the temple.
I began to question the fairness of this unrelenting pressure to be in a family. There are many people for whom a model family isn’t going to happen in this life and they have zero control over that. The church’s response is that you’ll be given a spouse in the afterlife. Well, would he be better than the one I had in this life? How about the people who’d truly rather be alone or with the same gender? There church taught that we take much of who we are in this life to the next life. So wouldn’t these be issues in forming an eternal family?
I spent the next weeks and months doing what I knew I was supposed to do – I read my scriptures, I prayed for comfort and answers. It didn’t help and this was devastating. I wasn’t losing my faith specifically in the lds church, it was in Christianity as a whole. The things that gave me solace and comfort before weren’t working because I was the one giving them power in the past. Never underestimate the power of wanting to believe in something. During that time, I remember watching the Narnia movie. I felt myself getting angry. To me, it underscored what I was coming to see as the absurdity of Christianity. This idea that salvation was dependent on someone being killed just because that’s the way it is… The Law. That kinda goes against the “spirit of the law”. In the Book of Mormon, I used to love 2 Nephi chapter 2. I reread it before writing this post and saw it as a specious justification for the plan of salvation. If one believes, it supports that belief. However, it goes back to this hardline value of The Law. When my belief in that cracked, this didn’t hold up anymore for me. The concept of the need for an Atonement was senseless and somewhat sadistic.
Early on in this journey, I requested my name be removed from the church records. I felt it was important to have my actions and beliefs coincide. Plus, I’ve been one of the people who had to call on inactive members. That’s a pain in the rear for all parties. After I decided to join the church, I was a member less than a week later. In trying to leave, I encountered roadblocks that equated to nothing less than systematic deflection with the intent to deter me in my efforts. It took 9 months. Again, something that could be another post. Ha.
That’s the highlights. There’s so much more to the story as is the case with everyone. The path out of the garden has been lined with sorrow, anger, joy, and peace. Above all, I gained a lot of new knowledge about myself and the world. These days, I view the concept of god as the good in all of us. I don’t know if there’s a life that we’ll be conscious in after this one. What I do know is we need each other in this life. I believe compassion and mercy not from an unseen deity but from each other is our salvation in the here and now – and the here and now is what matters. It is all we really know we have.
13 responses so far ↓
1 wren // Mar 21, 2008 at 2:39 pm
It looked much shorter in notepad! I wrote most of that while on call for work and it was difficult to narrow down the things on which to focus. I stuck with a couple primary thoughts that kicked me out the garden gate. A lot has pushed me further down the path since, not the least of which is recognizing that the Spirit or God tells different people a lot of different things, many of which hurt people and contradict other things said. I have little choice but to go back to it being about the power of what one wants to believe.
One of the things I love about Mind on Fire is the discussions that prompt me to further mull over what I believe with others finding their way on their own journeys. Thanks for the opportunity to share, John.
2 John // Mar 21, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Thanks, wren, for sharing with us. I’ve always found your responses particularly thought-inducing. Your essay has a lot of good stuff in it, but the following really jumped out at me:
Never underestimate the power of wanting to believe in something.
I can testify to this! My skepticism is all the stronger for having withstood my at times overwhelming desire to believe in Mormonism.
3 Lessie // Mar 21, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Wren, I remember the first time I read Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas” (or something to that effect). The atonement ceased being an answer after reading that. It’s a good thing I read it my last semester at the church university, otherwise I would probably have ended up leaving without a degree.
I also have to join the praise for the phrase that John mentioned. Sometimes it still seems like it would be so easy to just slip back into my old mold (I was raised in the church and those things run deep in my psyche). It’s so good to know that others have felt similar things.
Lastly, this really struck me as well:
Well said and right on!
4 Lessie // Mar 21, 2008 at 3:35 pm
Sorry, I’m new to html. Sigh.
5 xJane // Mar 22, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Namaste, wren, thank you for sharing
6 John // Mar 23, 2008 at 3:47 pm
No worries, Lessie, I still miss those closing backslashes all the time.
7 wren // Mar 23, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Hey, thanks for the comments. Lessie, I’ll have to check out Ursula LeGuin.
8 Jonathan // Mar 24, 2008 at 7:59 am
Wren, thanks for this post. You’ve been though some very difficult things.
Never underestimate the power of wanting to believe in something.
Like John, this phrase jumped out at me too. (sorry for commenting late on this, but I think this is something that has tripped me up too.
When I had bad experiences at multiple churches, I began to hate all churches. I believed them all to be hopelessly corrupt and immoral. I think I believed this and continue to believe this because I was really hurt and wanted to believe it, even though such a belief is unprovable (I’ve never been to every church in the whole world to see if they are all immoral).
So my question is, knowing this reality about ourselves, how do you in fact determine what is true and what is not ? Do our motivations and desires behind our beliefs hopelessly cloud our rational minds? Can we with certainty say that our motivations are only purely objective when finding truth, or must we admit that we believe what we do because we are angry or hungry for something?
It sounds like we’re all screwed. We move from one irrational belief to another based on life experiences, and not on cold hard logic. We do not run our lives or find truth like an objective scientific experiment – I personally cannot objectively analyze was it true or not in my life because I’m too emotionally involved in it and end up believing what I want to believe most of the time.
How have you dealt with this problem on your own journey to find what is true? It sounds like it is one of your biggest obstacle, and I’m sure it hasn’t gone away.
9 Jonathan // Mar 24, 2008 at 8:01 am
And one day I’ll grow up and be able to spell too.
10 wren // Mar 24, 2008 at 8:14 am
I think it’s an obstacle for everyone, for sure. I’ve probably commented over here before how god seems to talk to a lot of people and tell people contradictory things. So who is to say who god’s really talking to? God seems to have told some people some great stuff. And then there’s Jim Jones. So I have to go back to it really being what we want to believe.
Because I know I can’t be fully objective, though I believe there are universal truths, I have to have considerations:
-Is it harming me or anyone else?
-Does it feel right?
-Is there significant evidence against it?
The answers to these inform what I choose to believe.
11 Jonathan // Mar 24, 2008 at 8:43 am
Awesome – Point taken about god. But more importantly however, apply your principle to the people that think they hear god – along with believing what they want to believe, they hear want they want to hear. God is treated like a tool to get what they want or to believe what they want.
I just saw a special on Jim Jones and the people’s temple. Thoroughly frightening. Made me sick to my stomach. I hate religion.
I like your first consideration. I like your next two as well, but I’m sure you know with experience as well as I do that they are highly susceptible to our original problem. What “feels right” when I am angry may be terribly wrong in reality. I can conjure up all kinds of evidence to support a belief that I want to believe in. Even worldviews will be at my disposal – switching between them like tools to build the edifice of a belief whose foundation is rooted not in logic, but in desire. As I said before, we are screwed.
12 wren // Mar 24, 2008 at 8:48 am
That’s why this: Is it harming me or anyone else
is my first consideration.
13 Jonathan // Mar 24, 2008 at 9:24 am
Ah – I didn’t realize you ranked them in order! I have been leading you to my final point, which I’ll say and then shutup and stop bothering you
Your 1st consideration is one I would say is also motivated also by desire, but unlike the next two is motivated primarily by a wonderful part of yourself that has not been destroyed by your bad experiences – love, true love. Love that is chosen and not felt.
I am very sure based on our discussion so far that our beliefs are rooted in desire, not logic. So if this is the way we are, I think we have to accept it. If this is the case, can we at least be cognizant of our desires? If we can, can we also willingly choose to formulate beliefs based on desires that are the most beneficial to accurate belief while ignoring for a time beliefs that come from desires that cause us to believe what we want to believe?
Anger has been a powerful desire and motivator in my life, but after seeing many years go by trying to examine it’s effectiveness, I have concluded that it’s motivating purpose is for movement or action, not for the incubation of new belief. It can lead you away from bad belief, but it cannot help guide you to a new belief. I wish it did fullfill that duel purpose, but it is blind to all but movement away. It is reactive, not creative.
I think love should be the desire that guides us to new beliefs. It takes the baton from anger and finishes the race.
- Love should guide us to help us do what “feels” right.
- Love should examine the evidence for or against a belief, regardless of if it appears overwhelming.
You sound like you’ve thought though this a good deal, but as for me, I am still angry. Because of that, my belief in a pervasively corrupt church (which is born out of anger) cannot be believed as reality. My anger will not show me truth, only tell me what I want to hear because I have been hurt. So the jury’s out until I can learn to love again.
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