Posts tagged ‘Community of Christ’

Reflections, Part 3

Note: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is also known as the Mormon Church. Therefore, I’ll use the name Mormon in this post. For definitions of terms included in bold type throughout this post, please see the Definitions section at the bottom.

I’m nine years old, and I’m sitting in the middle of the chapel at the Irvington building in Fremont, California. I’m a Mormon girl with low vision and hearing loss. It’s a Wednesday afternoon in 1968, and the chorister is teaching the senior primary children a song about the earth, and how Heavenly Father created it for us, and there is all this nature being described in the song. All I can think of is, I’m not like the rest of the kids in this room. I don’t see and hear like they do. I think a seed got planted that day: my exit. For me, this was not an odd way for what played out in my Mormon membership to begin. It was such a simple and subtle act.

How, at the age of nine, might this have happened? Mormon doctrine on the disabled is, I think, something the church—like with race and the priesthood—would rather forget and bury deep. The problem with this is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. It hits you in the face like a bold neon sign that reads: “It’s OK to hate these people.” Here is where you can focus your anger and hate, and here is where you are allowed to create the most vicious of theodicies: they got what they deserved for being fence-sitters in the previous life. If race doesn’t get you, being born with a disability will. In many ways I had to come to the second half of life (see Falling Upwards by Richard Rohr) rather early. I understood at age nine that something was terribly wrong: I didn’t have the words for it at the time, and yet I knew. It felt like the unscratchable itch. So it goes with those of us on the margins within the Mormon Church. We are placed in a situation where we must think through some essential life stuff before we should have to be thinking in second-half-of-life terms. It forces us to come to a mature world view earlier than normal. We have to sort out our values and thoughts, and then come to an understanding of how life works.

When I was between ten and eleven years of age, I was told by three girls who claimed to be friends that they were no longer going to be friends. I saw it for what it was: bullying, and wrong in the sight of God. That day, after our primary class, they got told by me that I understood it for what it was: wrong. I left the church building in tears and walked to the car where my mother waited. The damage they inflicted was done even before they began to inflict the large-scale damage that would happen until I was eighteen. BUT, it was OK because I was who I was: disabled, despite my father serving as the stake president at the time.

My adolescence was spent in loneliness, as any time I tried to make a friend, these girls made sure it didn’t happen. They carried their actions into the schools we all attended. Eventually, I reached a compromise with my parents around church: Sunday was mandatory, and nothing else was required.

Yes, the parents of the girls knew. One family condoned it, the second must have ignored it, and the third, well, when the parents of that girl met with my father, they spent too much time apologizing to my father. They said they couldn’t change her thinking. It didn’t matter; I knew how people felt about me. Very few adults took the time to get to know me. The person who did became a friend for life. 

The damage this did to me socially was that during the years I should have been developing peer relationships, they were non-existent. I thought leaving town would help—it didn’t. It made it worse.

At what is now known as BYU Idaho, certain things are required. Church attendance is mandatory. By my second year studying there out of state, I was overlooked for church participation. When I asked our bishop why I hadn’t been given anything to do, or what Mormons term a calling, he replied: “Nobody asked for you.” I moved that next semester and kept quiet with study and a service sorority, sleeping most of the weekend. By the time I graduated with an Associate of Arts in General Education, I was depressed, twenty pounds heavier, and miserable. I needed the sunny place of California once again. While Idaho created environmental depression, getting back to California and home didn’t help much. It would take a huge change to fix the depression.

Church wasn’t working for me even though I tried. I really tried to be a good Mormon. I wasn’t happy in my life. When you’re raised Mormon, that is all you know. It’s a high-demand religion. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Mormon was thought of as weird. And I didn’t know enough to explain it to the therapist.

The problem with being an adult woman in the Mormon Church is that you’re supposed to get married and start having babies. This is the entrance ticket to being viewed as a real adult woman. And full admission happens when you pop out a child. I know, it is strange. And all this is traditionally done as early as eighteen, and well before twenty-five.

Moving into my twenties and seeing family and others marry, I knew that marriage wasn’t in the cards. Not being wanted for service told me a great deal. Not being considered dating material also could be seen as “not good breeding stock.” This is a view accepted by many in society. However, disabled doesn’t mean defective. I knew it at the age of sixteen and had it confirmed to me as I moved into full adulthood.

I did serve a Mormon mission, returned, and found employment in Provo, Utah. I didn’t last a full year in Provo. I went back to California, and on to grad school for a master’s in clinical psychology. I knew from a young age that I needed to work, as I wouldn’t be baking bread and popping out kids. I’d wanted to pursue a degree in clinical psychology in my teens. I was drawn to the work of doing therapy.

After graduating, I met Jon, and we married five years later. In January of 1999, he made the official move to Germany, and I followed in February of that same year. We settled into church and life in Europe. The Germans in Bavaria are surrounded by lovely mountains, and we lived in them. Jon set up a little website that we called An alp of our own, and we maintained the site while we lived there. I loved the stars and the night sky. It was, as one church member said, “Heidi country.”

We moved to The Netherlands in April of 2000 and settled in the eastern part of the country. Good-bye, stars—and hello, flat land. It was six years later that things began to change for us churchwise.

All this time, little seeds were dropping in my life. It was time to realize that things were changing.

Jon began reading and learning about what we’d been taught our entire lives, discovering that what we were told was wrong. He struggled with what had been withheld. I put off listening at first, until I heard another woman say that to support the marriage, she needed to stand by her husband and understand what he was saying. That comment made me think about how not learning could hurt our relationship. There is no harm in learning what one’s partner is learning. In 2008, I knew I needed to listen to what Jon was learning, and so, my own journey began while talking with him and doing laundry up on the top floor of our home. I remember looking out the window and hearing him talk. I realized the truth of the words made me more sad then angry. Down the dark rabbit hole on the slippery slide I went.

Next week, I will explore what I found inside that rabbit hole.

Definitions:

Primary: The Mormon organization for children, split into junior (ages three to seven) and senior (ages eight to eleven).

Mormon doctrine: Mormons believe that we came from a previous life known as the pre-existence, where we had to choose to follow Jesus or Satan. Whites were valiant and born white; blacks were fence-sitters and did not take a side readily but were allowed to come to earth and get a cursed body. This doctrine changed in 1978. The disabled were lower than the blacks and begged for a body—even a disabled one—so that they could get to earth. The exception to this is Down’s syndrome children: they were the spirits that kicked Satan out of heaven, and so to protect them, God made them Down’s children.

Fence-sitters: See the above note on Mormon doctrine.

Stake president: Comparable to a diocese, a stake consists of eight or more congregations called wards. The stake president presides over all the wards in his stake.

Calling: An assignment of service that is given to adult members. You can serve anywhere in a ward or stake to help the organization run smoothly.

Environmental depression: This was discovered in 2010. It wasn’t dealt with as such before then.