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.
