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Posts tagged ‘Faith crisis’

Jul 30

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Reflections, Part 4

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.

In 2008, I knew I needed to listen to what Jon was learning about the Mormon Church (please read my previous post here), and so, my own journey down the rabbit hole began.

Ultimately, I began to realize that it wasn’t what I’d been taught that bothered me as much as what the church represented, and how people were treated by each other. Could I remain in an unsafe place? At this point in time, Jon wanted to quit church over academic issues. I wasn’t ready to quit yet. The struggle for me was values.

People of different races, LGBTQ people, the mentally ill, and the disabled were not treated well. Women weren’t treated well. It was a Jesus thing with me. Jesus the street preacher would not only be present—he’d be calling it all out. I’m big on calling it out. Jesus would be ministering to the people on the margins and expect that others would do the same. Where were the ministers? They were in the main crowd. I found myself thinking about how exclusive Mormonism was, and that Jesus wasn’t running a country club for the exclusive use of some. Church is a place for all who want to be present, and for those who need to be welcomed in as they are. This is when what I’d been taught really hit me: Mormonism was not the exclusive club I should live in. Jon had told me I had a privileged Mormon upbringing, and he was right. Despite the mistreatment, I had access to people most Mormons don’t have access to. My father had been one of them. OUCH.

With Jon’s suicide in 2016, I stayed put and didn’t make any major life decisions. Going to the US in 2017 would send me down a new path. I had not thought about leaving my faith of birth, and I wouldn’t for several more months. Sunstone altered my thinking. Sunstone US is the grandmother of all things that people of the restoration faiths can gather at, and several faiths come together there. Mormons, former polygamists, and Community of Christ all gather under one roof for a long weekend of exchange. I went to see friends and made some new ones. I returned home, and the events of the conference kept nagging at me in my petite mind. I had attended two sessions that touched me deeply, and one of them was being put on by Community of Christ. Finally, I wrote a letter to someone who belonged to another church. I told her, “I don’t normally do this, but I need to write this.” 

I started attending an online group for those in Europe, and I liked what I was hearing and learning. And no, don’t ask me to join your church or do anything like it. They didn’t ask me anything; they let me sit and explore to my heart’s content. Slowly, I wanted some involvement, and they were glad to have me participate.

In March of 2018, while sitting on my pretty blue bed, I realized that I’d have to leave the Mormon faith. I sobbed. It wasn’t all bad, was it? I’d learned the value of service, and that sometimes we’re stretched to do things, and doing so can causes us to grow in ways that we wouldn’t grow otherwise. I’d also learned the basics of public speaking as a very young child. I’d gotten to sing in the choir and enjoyed it. It was the culture that tore me apart, the good stuff and the negative all bundled up together, and I had to leave it behind.

What about my eternal marriage to Jon? As I thought this, the words came into my mind: “I have your back on this.” The words were clear, and I understood it was OK to leave for a new something. It still took me six months to make the move. In September of 2018, I was rebaptized as an adult, and then confirmed into my new faith. I flew home that Sunday evening and got online and resigned my Mormon membership.

At the time of the exit, I thought I understood why I needed to make the move out of the Mormon Church. Like so much in our grief and life journeys, we never see it all until we’re on the river and navigating something new, and then we turn around and gasp a “WOW! Did I really do all of that?” The answer is always a resounding yes. I’m still in the gasping place. It is a good place to be.

In 2026, I think back to the woman who sat at her dining table, who didn’t know how she’d do one year, let alone ten years.

Doing an exit from the Mormon Church was one very unexpected twist in my grief journey. I’m thankful for what I’ve learned, and thankful for how I’ve changed and grown over time.

The great thing about life is that it greets you with the unexpected, and that it teaches us, and molds us in new ways. The discoveries are the best, and the thrills are around all the corners. It’s just that sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the surprise until we’ve gotten through the hell that it takes to get to the wonderful center. Oh, and I do love my creamy centers.

I’m glad I said yes to this change. I’ve expanded in ways that have filled my life in new ways.

Definitions:

Mission: Women serve eighteen months and men serve two years, at the missionary’s expense. Missionaries are sent out to convert others to the faith. Presently, both women and men can go at age eighteen.

Leave: You can’t just leave the Mormon Church. You need to resign by writing a formal letter to Salt Lake City to have your name taken out of the Church database.

Marriage: The Church doctrine on marriage espouses the belief that a man and a woman can be married in this life and the next life. A marriage done in a Mormon temple is done for time and eternity. To leave the Church means you are no longer “sealed” together, and the bond is broken.

Baptism: Mormons baptize children at age eight. Children are not equipped to understand the commitment they are making at eight. Community of Christ offers the option of a redo, to show commitment to Jesus. It is not a requirement for membership but can be a step towards it. I had a redo as an adult and was then confirmed into Community of Christ.

May 1

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Author’s Pick: Velvet Deconstructions

This is the last in a series of “author’s picks” of posts from the last few years. This one was originally posted on August 10, 2022.

In 2006 my husband fell down the rabbit hole of a faith deconstruction process that would last until his death in 2016. In 2006 I listened and supported, but didn’t follow down into the rabbit hole of Mormonism. I didn’t feel I needed to know what was and wasn’t down there. It wasn’t my time. It has to be the right time to fall down that hole.

At the beginning of this tale, I should state that I was raised in a home where reason and logic were present. This would come in rather useful in the years to come.

It took me six years to go there. I’m sure that seemed like a long time of waiting for Jon, waiting for me to dive rapidly into that same hole. When I did, it was scary, sad, depressing, and full of questions, culminating in a process of mourning what could no longer be. In 2012 I entered what I now look back on as my “velvet deconstruction.”

I’ve never written about this because, to be honest, I haven’t seen—or felt—the need to do so. That has changed. What changed?

This year I’ve read a series of books that began with delight and quickly turned to needing to rethink, reframe, and reconstruct the Western Jesus. I realized my journey had challenged me in ways I hadn’t seen coming and left me feeling as if I was splayed on a spiritual floor. This time around it wasn’t velvet: it was brutal. As of the time of this writing, I’m healing, looking back, and wondering why I missed this until I was so deep within the process that the mess was ginormous.

Having a crisis of faith should be normal for everyone who is on a healthy self-development path. James W. Fowler researched and wrote about personality and faith development in Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Stages is a classic and outlines our cognitive development throughout life. This is an academic work of research. What I really love about Fowler is that he illustrates that we never fully arrive. We cycle through all the stages over time, arriving at a higher level, only to begin the process over again. As with all things in life, learning never ends, and we’ll be doing it until our last breath.

So, I should have seen a second deconstruction coming, and I didn’t. I’d settled into a sweet spot, and when it ripped me apart it really tore at my soul!

How did this all happen? The simple answer is that I moved from one stage to another. The more complex answer is that I began to explore my values, my beliefs, and my life in new and deeper ways.

While I began to explore faith, I was enrolled in a rehab program for people with vision issues. It began as a five-day residential process, and during this time of my life I was confronted in a bold manner, asked to face my visual realities, and supported on multiple levels. And, in the end, I was able to confront myself. Looking at my religious life became an extension of that. For fifteen months I reconstructed my visual self; I wrote about it in Living With Disability. It was a life-changing experience.

Because of the work I was doing in this part of my life, it followed that I would look at the rest of my life. I began to allow myself to feel the sadness and pain of understanding that things are seldom what they seem. And so, it happened on a Sunday morning as we drove to church that I uttered the words that altered everything: “Can I make this church a place to stay and do good things?” That was in 2013, and I was trying to figure it out while realizing my husband’s need to stay away from it all. By 2014 I was still in place to try and a find a path to change. That all ended in November of 2015 when Salt Lake City announced what became known as “The Policy.”

This policy was set to discriminate against children who had an LGBTQIA+ parent in a relationship that was not heterosexual. That evening at dinner I lost it. How could a church deny baptism or anything else to a child?!!! Up until that moment I had thought I could make it work. Now I realized that I could not support such thinking. (The policy was reversed in April 2019 and the damage that was done couldn’t be undone or unseen.)

Suicide alters everything in the way you think, and in 2016, when Jon decided that the pain and suffering, he’d been enduring for the majority of his life needed to end, I was changed. I began to realize that I couldn’t go back to that church, and slowly during 2017 I drifted into nowhere land. I wasn’t making any major life decisions. I was moving to something, and someplace, new. I didn’t understand what it was—I just knew I was changing.

I was traumatized from a suicide, trying to re-establish a life. In the fall of 2017, I was discovering that another faith home was calling to me. I had to check it out. Certainly, I could look and still stay LDS. October of 2017 rolled around, and I found myself in a Starbucks at the Utrecht train station, having a conversation with someone whom I would come to love and respect. He wanted to know what I thought, not what I felt! It was in that realization that I knew I had a problem. Everything in me had been raised to be LDS. I was dealing with multiple generations of Mormons in my family. How could I even think of leaving? It wasn’t doctrine so much as other things that were tugging at me, calling me out to something that felt so different, so new, and where I needed to be. I told myself that I could attend this church service on Sunday evenings and it didn’t mean I was going to do more than that. Why would I ever leave? I didn’t need to do that.

I began to read, to learn, and to discover new ways of thinking. Growth is about freeing the soul and giving it permission to walk into new paths. By the spring of 2018 I was no longer feeling I could stay LDS and realized my value structure had shifted or rewired itself. I let go and relaxed into the process.

Looking back on all of it, I can see that this entire process was velvet. While there were tears, trauma, and fear involved, the process was gentle. Considering everything I went through from 2006 through 2018, it really was velvet. How could this be? As I look back, I think I view it as gentle because I wasn’t trying to force tings. I allowed the questions to surface, didn’t panic, and the few difficult situations didn’t last that long. The most difficult week was a conversation with my mother, and it ended with her apologizing to me. My mother and I could talk about most anything and giggle over life. We had a mutual respect, and she was open to many things that many LDS would have flipped out over.

I’ve come to the conclusion that faith transitions or journeys are more about a rethinking of a value system. Many people who choose to develop and leave the safety of certainty can remain in the same faith and approach things differently. For others, the choice to stay in one’s faith of origin is not an option. There are times when what we need changes because our ladders are sitting against a new wall. Sometimes the search can take years. The search for a new faith home can lead us out and to something completely different.

As I complete the last few months of my spiritual direction certification, I’m amazed by the paths that people are finding that bring them peace. I look back with my new understanding, and the new tools that got put in my toolbox, and offer up gratitude for both the velvet, and the not-so-velvet of the past few years. My new home is just what I needed.