Institutions are taking a beating right now. People are either leaving them, wishing they could, and in some cases, being kicked out of them. I’m speaking broadly here. People are leaving our political parties; the ranks of the independents are swelling; and no one trusts politicians or our government. People are also losing their religion. Those who claim no religious affiliation make up 23% of the current American population as of one year ago, a number far larger than in previous years. And no one seems to want to work for a large corporation anymore. While perhaps entrepreneurship is struggling, all the cool kids are bucking the corporate lifestyle trying to come up with the next big thing.

The internet amplifies this. At one time, we all read the same basic newspaper, watched the same television shows, and received our filtered news from the same small collection of sources. No longer. We are all journalists now. We have our own individual voice, our own platform to voice our own opinion. We are our own religion, our own political party, our own business – a nation of individuals.

I’m exaggerating here, but I see these trends.

A couple of weeks ago I talked about why people are leaving, specifically Mormonism. I have only attended Sunstone once and then only when it came to me, a few months ago in Mesa, Arizona. They commonly have a session entitled, “Why I Stay”. There they get a panel of faithful Mormons who present a talk on what keeps them engaged in their faith despite and through the challenges they face. I’m not really going to do exactly that here. I stay for the most basic reasons. I simply cannot imagine leaving. And I could, I suppose, describe all the reasons why I think this is so and perhaps I’ll get to that in this discussion.

Instead, I plan on doing something more ambitious here. I want to lay out all the reasons I still believe institutions matter broadly and why religious institutions matter in particular.  I believe it’s to our detriment when we leave them and perhaps more importantly, to society’s detriment as they diminish. Churches need to have a voice in the conversation.

What I want to do, though, is to respect and honor a person’s decision to leave the faith of their parents. I went on my Mormon mission to a deeply religious part of the country, Alabama, trying to convince people to leave their religious heritage for mine. I rejoiced when they did. I know these decisions were not always easy and many of their friends and family members left behind felt abandoned and betrayed.

A faith journey should not be easy. It is often lonely and difficult. It is also a uniquely individual experience. We are all called in our own way. What may look like abandonment to me may actually be someone called by God on a journey I could not understand or undertake on my own. Everyone’s challenges are unique to them. I honor their struggle and wish them well.

Given that, I plan on painting with a broad brush, speaking in generalities, offering broad principles. Individual application may vary.

I’m not a professional writer or theologian or anything that makes me remotely qualified for this, but I’d like to get better. I write because I want to work through stuff. I want to learn and writing is discovery. Most of my current thoughts on this subject are horribly half-baked, more like vague impressions, shooting out of me in a million different directions. I’m not sure where this project will take me or what I might learn or say a long the way. I have no idea how many posts this will take, but I hope that working through them for the next few weeks, will help me flush the ideas out and end up in a more solid place.

I think this topic is important, for me and for my family. I know people are leaving church. I know there are many in the church who are trying to convince them to stay or to return. I know we are constantly encouraging others to join with us. We are a missionary-minded church. I think most people who leave don’t do so easily. Most struggle over weeks and months. It’s not an easy decision nor should it be. The analogy I like to use for church membership is marriage – it’s not a perfect analogy but I think it applies here. Church membership is a commitment made up devotion and love. But sometimes people, through great pain, leave their marriage. Sometimes they leave their religion.

Someone close to me reminded me that someday my own children my choose to leave the church. This is a possibility. I want them to stay. I want them to be committed. Deep down I love this church and have benefited greatly from it. I want my children to have that same commitment and experience. Maybe these set of blog posts will be for them.

For tonight, I ‘ll leave it at this. I love the song by Hozier, “Take Me To Church”. It has a decidedly anti-church message, but the tune is beautiful and the message resonates. I hope to factor the ideas of this song into my argument, both to counter it and to include it.

Last week, Jeremy Runnells, author of The CES Letter chose to resign from the Mormon church to preempt an excommunication for apostasy. I tried reading the CES Letter in its entirety sometime back, tried and failed – it’s long. I did listen to his interview with John Dehlin. To summarize briefly, Jeremy Runnells experienced a crisis of faith triggered by exposure to some difficult, messy parts of Mormon history. A relative referred him to a CES (Church Education System) director to help answer his questions. He wrote a letter detailing all of his questions but never got a response. So, instead, he posted the letter on the web, which subsequently went viral and has been a trigger for others to also leave the church. Because of this, he was threatened with excommunication but instead preemptively resigned.

First of all, was this an inevitable outcome? Did Jeremy Runnells have to leave the church because of the issues he encountered? Here are a couple of my favorite responses to the letter.

First, a Mormon historian wrote this response, entitled What We Should Learn from Jeremy Runnells: Some Thoughts on His Depature From the Church:

Do I think Jeremy is evil? No. I think he began as a sincerely troubled soul who was quickly swept up in the momentum, championed as a hero by the vocal post-Mormon community in podcasts, blogs, and Facebook groups (and who have organized two vigils in his honor). From the brief interactions that we have had, I actually think Jeremy is a pretty decent fellow and I hold no ill will towards him. I feel for him and think that things may have resolved differently had the CES Director he initially wrote to responded kindly, even if he had no satisfactory answers to offer. My hope is that we can all learn from Jeremy’s story. How can we who are intimately familiar with the historical record be of better service to members? How can we be better at disseminating our research to the public, rather than keeping it within an insular community of scholars and academics? The church has taken some bold measures as of recent to improve the instruction in their Seminary and Institutes. As Elder Ballard recently implored, Seminary and Institute educators no longer have a free pass of not answering historical questions. “Gone are the days,” Ballard observed, “when a student asked an honest question and a teacher responded, ‘Don’t worry about it!’”

For those of us who are actively engaged in Mormon history and social media, and still remain actively-engaged in the Mormon faith, we can all do better at sharing our perspective in a sympathetic and charitable manner. We have nothing to be afraid of with the history of the church, but we should be humble in acknowledging that the history is not always flattering. As the church continues to extend its hand towards the refugees of war-torn nations, let us continue to extend our hand towards those who may feel like refugees of the war between apologists and critics.

Critics to the Mormon church have been around since the beginning. I understand the impulse toward such criticism. History is always more messy than the polished shine our history books often portray it to be, more-so when that history comes from the church trying to encourage faith and commitment. Reality is more complex. We’re all human beings dealing with difficulties in a flawed world. Messiness abounds. Joseph Smith, perhaps more than most recognized this. In D&C 93:24, he wrote:

 24 And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come;

Nobody should be afraid to study history, science, anything really. We should all be ready to deal with things as they really are, as they really were and as they really will be. Truth. But this is a difficult, longer than a lifetime pursuit. And it’s also why Jeremy Runnells’ website does Mormonism a disservice.

His letter is basically a survey of every problem ever conjured up about the church. The rub is that it’s largely accurate, though speculative at times. He drives this point over and over again, asking anyone to correct any errors and he’ll promptly correct them.  I believe he’s sincere in this. The problem though is different. It suffers, desperately, from the lack of proper context, historical and otherwise. It comes from a place of criticism so lacks a lot of grace, always assuming the worst. In large measure as a response to this letter, Brian Whitney is trying to address this lack of context by providing the information in a manner that’s easily consumable by a non-historians. The website is appropriately called  “Mormonism in Context”.  I’m not sure if this website will be helpful for someone who might otherwise leave the church or might push someone out. It still portrays church messiness and makes a lot of the same points found in CES Letter, but he does it from a place of scholarship and fairness and with much more background material in hopes of providing a why with the what. And I think it provides someone with enough information to make sense of the messiness, provide a footing for those who choose, to find a way to deal with it and remain faithfully involved. I recommend it.

But maintaining religious faith should not require a history degree. My 13 year old daughter, for example, who has yet to show interest in history to this degree, should still be able to find a path toward faithfulness.

To that end, I love Adam Miller’s much different response to the letter in this essay entitled Letter to a CES Student.

You are like this man, the Buddha tells his student. You are suffering and dying. And you can demand answers to all these speculative questions if you like — but if you do, you’ll die before you ever get any answers.

Regardless of how your questions get answered, the Buddha tells him, still there is suffering, still there is sickness, still there is aging, still there is worry and distress and fear, still there is death. It is the work of addressing all this in this very world that I teach.

And also

Mormonism cannot bear the weight of itself. If you ask Mormonism to be about Mormonism, the weight of that inward turning and the redoubling of that self-regard will stifle it. Mormonism will collapse under its own weight and you’ll have lost the very thing you had hoped to find.

You can only save Mormonism by losing it. You can only save Mormonism by connecting deeply with what Mormonism is itself aiming at. This is the only way to be faithful to what Mormonism itself is trying to do.

Here Adam Miller changes the subject. Rather than looking at Mormonism, we should be looking at what Mormonism is looking at and then deciding if that’s where we should be looking as well. In other words, Does Mormonism work? And if it works, if it makes our lives better, then the past messiness matter less – though it still matters.

So, why do people leave religion? The real question, perhaps, is why do people choose to stay? Why do Mormons put so much of their time, energy and resources into this church? Are they afraid of the consequences if they choose another path? This is possible and for some likely. Living forever with your family and with God is what is at stake in some people’s minds. If losing your faith has eternal consequences, I can see why so many people feel shunned by their faith community when they start to question. No one wants to be led down a path that leads them toward apostasy. I can relate to this to an extent. For someone prone to anxiety, I’ve held onto Mormonism with this kind of desperation – with a tight fist rather than an open heart. It didn’t work. It was  a far too stressful way to live religion, and more importantly far too selfish. Faith based on self-preservation is no faith at all.

It’s also a faith built on an incredibly fragile foundation. Again Adam Miller in an essay entitled The Body of Christ.

If your life itself depends on the question, then ask a question that is rich enough to cover the whole rich span of that (messy, unfinished, broken, vulnerable) life.

Don’t ask the thin question: “Is the Church true?”

Ask the thick question: “Is this the body of Christ?” Is Christ manifest here? Is this thing alive? Does it bleed?

This is a load-bearing question. This is a question properly fitted, by Christ himself, to address the existential burn that compels its asking.

If a person belongs to Mormonism only because they believe it’s literally true in some hyper specific and narrow sense of the word, exposure to messiness and flaws inherent in every single human being, including Joseph Smith and every leader of the church since, and in the earth-bound institutional church, that’s the kind of faith that can crumble, and perhaps it’s the kind that should.

Another reason someone may leave Mormonism is because it stops working for them. I felt this sadly while listening to John Dehlin’s interview with Tyler Glenn of Neon Trees fame. Tyler Glenn struggled with his sexuality within Mormonism for many years. Finally, he recognized this compartmentalization was causing severe psychic pain, and so he came out as a gay, believing Mormon in Rolling Stone Magazine. However, when the church updated its policy declaring gay couples apostate and disqualifying even their children from baptism, Tyler Glenn felt unwelcome and unwanted in the faith he loved. This led him to explore the critical arguments and in process finding plenty of reasons to abandon his religion. Fundamentally, I believe for him the church no longer and possibly never really worked.

So, if you asked me, in general terms, why people leave their religion, I think there are two broad and inter-related reasons why. First, they lose belief in the church’s truth claims perhaps as they encounter information that challenges it. Unable to reconcile the contradictions, ambiguities and difficulties, their belief fails and they leave. Second, they fail to find ways to make the religion work in their lives. For a variety of reasons, they find pain when they sought solace, community and comfort. Perhaps they had trouble finding a place within the religious community or like me they felt beaten up by the demands of the church rather than comfort and support when we fail to live up to those demands.

But I think there are ways to overcome both challenges and there are good reasons to try. I believe there is something essential to religious faith in many of the same ways I believe literature, math, science and art are essential. I believe religious practice is an essential part of a balanced, meaningful life. When done well, religion makes life easier providing tools to face difficult life challenges within an eternal context. There’s something about being a part of a community of people committed to caring for and watching over you in times of need. And there’s a loss when someone leaves that religious community, both for the person leaving and for the community being left. For some, this departure is necessary and inevitable for healing and safety. I hope those who leave can either someday find a way to return or simply finds an alternative faith community that works better.

I believe religion has answers to questions that can be answered in no other way but we have to ask the right questions and have the proper expectations. I think religious observance can and should work. Faith crisis sometimes does and should lead to faith deconstruction, but can and should lead to a reconstruction toward something better.

In my nature, I have what I believe is likely a universal impulse to recoil at injustice. As a kid, my parents had a subscription to the Reader’s Digest and this became my first window into the broader world. The magazine would at times publish a piece of injustice and I would feel this anger and anguish and an intense desire to do something about it, a desire to make the world more just. This was an early memory, but there have been so many more since. As I’ve grown and read more and have become more aware, I would encounter injustice nearly everywhere I looked, all around me. I’ve felt this almost constant feeling of an impossibly fallen and broken world and a feeling of having very little power to do anything about it.

But what’s worse is to find injustice in the organizations I belong to, or the businesses whose products I consume. When I discover this, I feel this guilt by association, I feel complicit in the injustice. To solve this, at times I’ve tried to boycott. Maybe if I could stop the consumption and convince others to also stop, perhaps that would be enough to get these organizations to change. At the very least, perhaps I can feel more at peace.

My attempts at boycotts have been spotty and uneven, and eventually I would lose interest. Some examples, I’ve tried to stop eating non-free-ranged chicken after learning of the deplorable conditions, abuse, and steroids in factory farms. We have not enrolled our son in football and I’ve stopped watching the NFL because of concussions. I’ve wanted to completely boycott the NCAA tournament because I feel the players our exploited, spending hours practicing and playing in games, bringing millions of dollars into their schools, but receiving no compensation for their sacrifice. I almost didn’t vote in the last presidential election because Obama’s unjust use of drones in the war on terror and Mitt Romney’s position that Obama wasn’t going far enough. Recently, I learned about how poorly NBA cheerleaders are treated and how little they get paid and thought seriously about quitting the NBA as well.

And this goes further, nobody is free from it. Historical heroes like Thomas Jefferson repeatedly raped one of his slaves, or Christopher Columbus, guilty of genocide. And then I begin to dig into the messy history of my own church and realize how even those called to lead it struggled to lead just lives. The church’s legacy of polygamy is filled with stories of hardship, misogyny and injustice. The horrific Massacre of Mountain Meadows lead by local Mormon leaders in southern Utah. These are just two examples, but there are many more. Quite simply, you can find weakness and mistakes and examples of painful injustice everywhere and in everyone. We are all inflicted by it.

I just finished the book, The End of the World, Plan B: A Guide of the Future, and it’s been a healing balm to my soul. He speaks directly to my impulse to attempt to find peace through isolation and recognizes the sorrow we experience when we are unable.

To the extent that our identity is bound up with groups that are large and beyond our ability to control—families, tribes, communities, classes, religious or political organizations, corporations, nations—our impulse might very well be to withdraw from them all, or, perhaps, to reform them. But in the former case, our institutions continue their unjust practices with or without our consent; in the latter situation, they consistently resist our attempts to improve them since any one person’s influence has its limits.

Inouye, Charles Shiro (2016-02-08). The End of the World, Plan B: A Guide for the Future (Kindle Locations 750-752). Greg Kofford Books. Kindle Edition..

Perhaps, I need to sit still, take a deep breadth, find peace and practice compassion. I think we need to recognize injustice when we see it, really accept and feel sorrow because of it, and continue on and through it anyway.

If I never want to bump into injustice, I’d need to boycott everything and everyone, and still I would have to face the unjust life I also live. So, maybe I won’t quit the NBA, or the NCAA tournament. Maybe I’ll keep eating chicken, and I’ll keep attending church and pay my tithes, and I’ll keep voting for Democrats, going to work and shopping on the internet. But I’ll also point out examples of injustice when I see them, and feel sorrow for those hurt by it and compassion for all involved. I’m a long way from any of this, but perhaps this is a better response than fake boycotts?

My daughter is 13 years old and will be starting some of her pretty formative years that could affect the rest of her life. And she has a very similar personality to mine, tentative, painfully shy, and smart (if I do say so myself). Her situation is much different than mine, different family, different city, different cultural dynamics at play but I can already see some of the same challenges I faced affecting her. But I won’t use this post to talk about her, rather I’ll talk about me.What mistakes did I make that I hope she doesn’t.

Find Your Own Path… Socially

I spent a lot of time wanting to belong to the cool kids, obsessing over the pretty girls, wanting to do what the cool guys were doing. I authentically enjoyed sports, especially basketball. I’m thankful for the years I’ve played it. But I obsessed about sports for all the wrong reasons. I saw it as my path into the cool crowd. The cool kids were athletes. The athletes were dating the pretty girls. I thought that athletics could be my ticket to, well, these sorts of relationships.

First of all, which was pretty dumb. Understandably, if I was an amazing athlete it would have led to some pretty serious social capital. But if that’s all I had, I doubt it would have been enough. Second of all, I wasn’t an amazing athlete. I was too small, too slow, too weak naturally to ever really make it. I practiced, especially basketball, a lot. Dribbling the basketball everywhere I went, spending time in the gym on a shot that never really came. But I was shy remember, and timid. I didn’t spend nearly enough time on the playground, playing the game with kids bigger and better than me. When I did, I was too shy and timid to really take it to them.

And I did have friends, really great friends. That should have been enough.

My daughter’s social situation is different. She’s had friends since childhood, some are blossoming socially in ways my daughter isn’t. She can appreciate their friendships and make friends with other people as well. There will always be someone who needs a friend.

Use My High School Years to Experiment

There’s really nothing like being in high school. You grow and mature and develop physically, emotionally and mentally very quickly. A teenager’s capacity can be actually quite high. Many kids have the potential to accomplish more than many adults. But they have not yet been released into adulthood. They don’t (or shouldn’t) have to support a family or to even pay a mortgage.

I wish I would have been part of the chess team or fiddled with computers or been part of a debate team or canvased for a politician. I had other interests and definitely other, better skills besides sports. I was shy, but I could have leveraged some of natural skills to overcome my shyness sooner. I loved politics at a young age, I would have benefited from a debate time or a writing club. Yuma wasn’t a mecca of opportunity, but there were opportunities at school I could have done more to leverage.

My kids are in sports, but more for, stay well-rounded, get physical fitness, kind of reasons. Thanks to my piano-playing wife, they are all heavily involved in music. I want my kids to use high school to try a number of different things, find their interest and leverage the guts out of the resources to go as far as possible pursuing them.

With interests come like-minded friends which could also solve the social problems above.

Don’t Worry about Serious Dating Until College

I didn’t date, at all, in high school. That was a mistake. But I really wanted to date seriously in high school. I dreamed about having a serious girlfriend. I had crushes. That was also a mistake. High school is a time to develop social skills, it’s not a time to lock in exclusive relationships. High school is a time to figure yourself out, try different things, develop skills. It’s the time when your body is finally starting to develop into maturity, when we are preparing to become men and women, but do not yet have the responsibilities of an adult. It’s prime time to crank up our passions another notch. To try out for the orchestra or the swim team or the debate team. It’s not a time to waste hours of your time with a single member of the opposite gender.

I don’t think I missed anything by not dating exclusively and probably avoided a lot of painful pitfalls. I did miss something by not having regular more casual, eventful casual outings with friends of both genders. I had female friends, those were good. I should have spent more time with them, girls and boys, in groups, having fun. I didn’t go to prom. I regret that. I should have, with a girl I was comfortable with, attending as a group with other friends. I should have had fun.

I took these events too seriously. I wasn’t ready for the pressure I put on myself. I hope my daughter finds friends that she’s comfortable with, boys and girls. I hope none of them are especially cool – very few high school kids really are. They are all, mostly awkward and insecure trying to figure out life like everybody else. I hope they just feel comfortable enough to have fun with each other. Lower the stakes. High school is not the time for big decisions. It’s a time to have fun, to grow, to develop, to try new things, to discover talents.

Go Easy on Yourself, Take Risks and Learn Resiliency

This is a difficult lesson, but I’m inspired by a session I had recently with  Christian Moore about resiliency. At school, I did not want to fail. I stressed over every answer, fretted over every exam. A big part of my identity was wrapped up in getting a grade. But that was the easy part. I tended to pull back in other ways, far too often. I want my daughter to just try. Put herself out there. Offer an answer, ask a question even if the its a wrong answer or a bad question. The more they try, the more they’ll fail, the more they’ll learn to keep trying and to pick themselves up each time.

Stay in Your Lane and Appreciate The Lane Your In

This world takes all kinds. At certain times and in different contexts, we’ll all be leaders and followers, the star and the supporting cast. We need our introverts and our extroverts, our naturally born liberals and conservatives. Our religious zealots and our secular humanists. We need all of us. I hope my kids can find their lanes, know who they are, their strengths and weaknesses. Appreciate their place in the world, appreciate the relationships they have, nurture those.

It’s maybe a lot to ask. Much of this takes maturity and a lot of stumbling. But hopefully I can do my part to make more of this more likely. I’m in the middle of a really beautiful book right now, The End of the World, Plan B. There’s a section where he re-interprets the prophesy in Isaiah:

 25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.

The author points to this prophecy as a new kind of peace. We’re not all meant to be lions, or oxen, or sheep. We, each of us, are individuals, with individual gifts and perspectives. To achieve real peace in this world, we need to learn to love and appreciate and make peace with our differences. I think the first way to do that, is to make peace with ourselves, our gives, our perspectives. To appreciate what we have and who we are. Once we do that, we can then fit into the larger community.

A third type of peace flows from compassion. It manifests itself as an appreciation of difference. Is there a clearer, simpler definition than this? Peace is a cultivated appreciation of the ways we are different. You and I are not alike. But precisely because we are not, we contribute to each other’s well being.

The fulness of the Plan B paradigm, which requires us to push through sorrow to discover compassion, eventually brings us to this third kind of peace. Beyond the reflex for retreat and isolation, beyond the demand for uniformity, beyond the call for justice, comes an expanded capacity to appreciate difference, including the ways each of us is different from all others. This third type of peace is revolutionary without being violent. It is ancient without being old. It is new without being modern.

This is what I want for myself, of course. But I hope my children can find this kind of peace much quicker, much faster than I’m able to, as I’m still working on it.

I’ve often felt stuck, stuck in bad habits I can’t seem to kick, stuck with my inhibitions keeping me from achievements just out of my reach, stuck in my inability to find just the right amount of discipline to do that one new thing regularly and consistently that, over time, can accumulate into something significant. I’ve doubted myself, I’ve not spoken up when I’ve had something to say, I’ve failed to make a connection with someone I really wanted to connect with. And once you’ve been in this feeling of stickiness for too long, it’s easy to give up hope.

It doesn’t help to belong to a culture that values competence and perfectionism. Where it’s better to know the answer than to have a question. I remember one example among many in life life, as freshman in college, taking a class in Materials Science Engineering. The teachers was droning on in a topic that was flying right over my head. The lecture hall was big, I was near the front. I scanned the audience and felt like I was the only kid in that class not getting it. In an effort to fit in, I tried to have a, I totally get this, look on my face. Afterward, to my relief, I realized, like me, everyone else was faking it too.

And that was indicative of my entire engineering undergraduate education. Professors, droning on complicated topics with little effort to really engage with students, students more interested in the appearance of keeping their heads above water. Later, in the quiet of a corner library or, more effectively, with the companionship of trusted friends, I would sweat over the material for hours until my actual competence approached my appearance.

Vulnerability is easier in the safety of dark corners.

And this battle to appear to know more than you really know has been persistent in my technology career. Computer software evolves so rapidly. There are just too many people pushing the envelope in too many areas to stay on top if it all. But at some point, far too long in my career, I realized the power of being vulnerable. I found my voice. Not always, not consistently. But somewhere along the line, a flipped switched. I can start asking questions, I can keep reading, and keep digging in, have difficult conversations, push the envelope. Expose my ignorance while I learn, connect and contribute at a deeper level.

And I find this in my religious life as well. Samuel Brown in his book, First Principles and Ordinances of the Gospel, describes how church should be both a hospital and a museum. We should consider ourselves patients looking for healing and sustaining support from a community. This requires vulnerability. However, too often, the church acts more like a museum. We are all on display, showing off our best selves, keeping our problems hidden back within the safety of the walls of our home. In this sense, church can be a painful place, going each week, realizing in comparison to those on display around you, we feel broken, hopelessly falling short of the potential we so desperately want to achieve. Not realizing, of course, that those sitting with us in our pews are more likely than not feeling the exact same way.

Most people aren’t born competent. Most people aren’t born saints. We all have to work at it. We all have to sweat it out – I know there are those who are gifted with extra talent and just get there faster than the rest of us. And I realize, we all have our own talents and special gifts. We find find our lanes, find our voice, and then engage from our own unique point of view. This is true with any skill, piano or programming, but it’s also true in our ecclesiastical endeavors as well. We don’t usually magically wake up with extraordinary compassion or an amazing ability to show empathy or connection. These are skills. Showing love and concern, being a friend, lending a listening ear, finding the discipline for regular spiritual practice. All skills that take time to develop. In Letters to a Young Mormon, Adam Miller says it this way:

The gap between theory and practice is often biggest with the simplest things. You’ve promised to pray, but you’ll spend a lifetime learning how to pray. You’ve promised to study the scriptures, but you’ll spend a lifetime learning how to read them. And you’ve promised to give God everything – your time, your talents, your money – but you’ll spend a lifetime learning how to consecrate even a part. You cannot forfeit responsibility for this. You cannot wait for someone else to do them for you. If you do not work things out for yourself, they will never be done. You must learn how to body your religion out into the world with your own fingers and toes, eyes and ears, flesh and bones. This can only be done from the inside out.

You are a pioneer. Life has never before been lived in your body. Everything must be done again, as if for the first time. You are an aboriginal Adam, a primal Eve. You are a Mormon.

Linda Rising makes similar empowering points about development and growth in a technology context, that we can still learn and grow no matter our age. “We have some limitations, but we can always get better.” As a parent this is the message I want most to pass on to my kids: this idea that we can improve in any area as long as we continue to work at it, with patience and perseverance. We can improve. We are not static beings, forever trapped in our labels.

And this, for me, is the message of Easter, a holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Christ. It comes at the beginning of spring every year, just as the days are getting longer, the air is getting warmer, our plants are getting greener. It’s the season of renewal and rebirth. Every year is a new year, every day a new day. I love the idea that each night is our opportunity to lie down as if dying and to wake up to a day of new possibilities.

And each day, each year, day after day, month after month, year after year, we can continue to make the same resolutions, the same desire to quit something old or start something new.  I think we can keep trying, keep probing. At some point, the lightbulb will go off, the switch will be flipped, we will take a quantum step in growth.

And I agree, the Easter story doesn’t make a lot of sense. Easter is a season where we celebrate a brutal, violent death. We take our family each year to watch a really impressive retelling of the story. My little children watch Christ getting whipped, they hear the nails getting pounded into His flesh, and they see Christ struggle and die on the cross. Then, they see his triumph over death. The story concludes with a resurrected Christ floating upward towards heaven. It’s universal event, a singular moment in history and the foundation for all of Christianity. The straight forward application of this story is to reduce it to single moments in a person’s life. At some point, they need to be converted. Then, at some point, they will die and be judged. Then resurrected, redeemed and saved.

But this interpretation simply doesn’t work for me practically. I prefer to see it happening in the micro-moments of my every day life, applying Christ’s grace in the minute decisions of my day. More than anything, I think for me, at its core, it’s a message of hope, a vote of confidence and an injection of faith that at some point, I can change and improve. That eventually, I’ll get unstuck. That I’ll accomplish, I’ll connect, I’ll belong. That eventually, I’ll find renewal, restoration, for myself individually, but more importantly, in my relationships.

In my religious faith, children are not baptized until they reach age 8, the age we feel like they are old enough to take ownership of their faith journey. We have a seven year old now and next fall, she’ll be baptized. But is she really old enough and mature enough to mourn with those that mourn; to comfort those who stand in need of comfort; and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that you may be in? So, it’s doubtful, but it’s also not the point.  She’s Mormon because we’re Mormon. I’m Mormon because my parents were Mormon. They were Mormon because their parents were Mormon. This is my legacy, my heritage and it’s something I’ll pass on to my kids.

What does this mean for me in my faith journey? What does this mean for my children in theirs? It doesn’t mean I’m obligated to remain in this faith tradition the rest of my life. I can leave at any time. Though, it’s not just me that would be affected by that decision. I married someone also committed and faithful to the church. I made commitments to her. My journey is intertwined with hers.  There’s obligations in that.

Nevertheless, I don’t think I’m chained forever to my church nor are my children. Every Sunday, I remake my baptismal covenants. As my children develop, their commitments and covenants with the church will have a chance to be nurtured. And they will also have to make and re-make these same commitments and covenants.

Heritage

About a month ago, I attended a conference on Mormon intellectual thought.  One of the presentations really stuck with me delivered by Jon Hammer  entitled “Stepping Back from the Dead-End of the Belief/Disbelief Dichotomy and Recovering the Path to Meaningful Spirituality.”

In the presentation, he describes a tree with roots similar to the picture above. Where we collectively stand has everything to do with  the efforts and the sacrifices of those who walked the paths before us, like the tree that finds strength and nourishment from its roots. We have a tendency to simplify the stories of our ancestors. We dismiss them as naive or evil or dumb. History deserves nuance. Our ancestors legacy deserves consideration. And perhaps that also means the religious institutions they’ve passed on to us should not be so quickly abandoned.

This obviously doesn’t mean that we should not move on from the mistakes of our past. My ancestors made plenty of mistakes, even egregious ones. My point is to be careful not to throw all of it out. We need to grow like the tree, drawing strength from our roots.

Finding Meaningful Spirituality

But this should not mean we give up our own responsibilities for our own unique spiritual journeys. We all have a role to fulfill, special unique talents and spiritual gifts. We should dig in and seek ye out the best books of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and by faith. This means, yes feasting upon the words of Christ but it also means learning as much in this world that we can, with an open hand and an open heart.

And we may learn things that can cause a faith crisis. In his book Stages of Faith, Martin Fowler channels the spirit of the clinical psychologist, Jean Piaget in a fictional dialogue with a two other psychologists,  Erik Erikson and Lawrence Kohlberg.  In Piaget’s voice he offers this definition of a developmental stage:

When a novelty or challenge emerges that cannot be assimilated into the present structures of knowing then, if possible, the person accommodates, that is generates new structures of knowing. A stage transition has occurred when enough accommodations has been undertaken to require (and make possible) a transformation in the operational pattern of the structural whole of intellectual operations.

And this can and should happen with our faith. Rather than resist new information, we should continue to discover and learn new truths and find ways to accommodate these truths into our faith paradigm. This is not a journey for the feint-hearted. It might mean opening ourselves up to contradiction, finding more questions without answers, and discarding previous ideas we once held onto with unflinching certainty. We may have in this journey the dark night of the soul and experience a very real crisis of faith.

When You Disagree with Your Faith Tradition

If we take our spiritual journey seriously, as I think we should, we may discover points of conflict between truths we discover and the theology and teachings we hear over the pulpit on Sunday from our religious leaders. We may find points of theology or doctrine in our religious institution that we no longer agree with.

Ross Douthat makes an interesting point that cognitive dissonance can be a path toward spiritual growth in its own right. Here, he defends the rigor of Orthodox Judaism practice while making allowance and room within the tradition for those who can’t or won’t comply.

But Gordis is actually making a more subtle point, which is that Modern Orthodoxy has held the line while also allowing space for the cognitive dissonance of the sabbath drivers and non-kosher-eating vacationers to persist — and that dissonance, that tension, has often been a spur toward spiritual growth and more serious practice, rather than curdling into either an outraged critique or a Trish-esque indifference.

Now for a variety of reasons this may be an easier wire for Judaism to walk than Catholicism. But Gordis is raising an issue that any tradition-minded religious body needs to think through: Namely, how to make its hardest rules seem like aspirations rather than just judgments, and how to deal with the many fine personal gradations that can exist between orthodoxy and apostasy, fidelity and dissent. And I suspect there are many Catholics who would be classified as “liberal” who want something like what he’s describing in Modern Orthodoxy from their church. That is, they want room to dissent from a teaching or fail to live up to it in practice, but they don’t necessarily want the church to change that teaching so that the dissonance or tension they feel simply goes away.

For one thing, in any institution, to the degree we actually decide to dig in and think, act and feel for ourselves, we will always arrive at different conclusions on some issue than the institution we belong. In church, we could use this as a reason to leave. Here, Douthat offers another approach, to expect and welcome this tension, this dissonance as fuel to drive greater spiritual growth.

Final Thoughts

I’m not making the case that we should tie ourselves up to the traditions of our fathers and mothers here. We shouldn’t be chained to our church. I think membership to a church is a lot like my marriage with my wife.

In Letter’s to a Young Mormon, Adam Miller puts it this way:

When your faith falters and you’re tempted to run, stand up and bear testimony instead. A testimony is a promise to stay. A testimony gives form to your great faith, it gives direction to your great doubt, and it publicly commits you to the great effort of trying to live what God gives. It is less a measure of your certainty about a list of facts then it is a mark of your commitment to bearing the truths that, despite their weakness, keep imposing themselves as a grace. In this way bearing a testimony is like saying “I love you”. A testimony doesn’t just reflect what someone else has already decided, it is a declaration that, in the face of uncertainty, you have made a decision. Saying “I love you” or “I know the church is true” commits you to living in such a way as to make that love true.

It doesn’t mean I stay with my wife or she stays with me no matter what. And it certainly doesn’t mean my soon to be eight year old is having to make an equivalent to a lifelong marriage commitment when she steps into the waters of baptism. The analogy is not perfect. There are legitimate reasons people choose to leave a faith tradition. I went on my mission in Alabama talking to many people in many faith traditions, encouraging them to leave theirs and join ours.

It’s at its heart an individual decision, an individual journey. My goal is to respect yours, my hope is that you’ll respect mine. My goal is that I can support you in your journey, my hope is that you’ll support mine in mine.

In the end, though, I think our religious heritage, our institutions, our churches have played and should continue to play an important role in our culture, our community and in our lives. For me, balancing my own, personal, individual faith journey, within the larger context of a faith tradition passed down to me from my ancestors, for me, this is my path, it’s what I feel called to do. I have found and hope to continue to find joy in that journey.

I keep coming back to this topic because I think it’s a topic that deserves to keep coming back to. The conversation has rightly taken up a lot of oxygen in political and religious conversations because the shift on this issue has been dramatic, rapid and consequential and  the church I belong has been a major actor in this conversation both politically and theologically.

I have previously spent a lot of time focusing on the policy and political aspects of this issue, but the theology of gender, sexuality and marriage is also incredibly important. While the first debate focused on various legal benefits granted to same-sex couples, the second debate gets into, for some, even more significant issues of morality, salvation and eternal life.

Before I get into that, I want to lay some groundwork.

Today in church service, one of my quorum members took a deep dive into the parable of the sower where Jesus describes the three types of ground and how that effects the seed’s ability to grow in Mathew 13:3-8 here:

3 And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow;

4 And when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up:

5 Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:

6 And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

7 And some fell among thorns; and the thorns sprung up, and choked them:

8 But other fell into good ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold, some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold.

In verse 8, the thorny ground may represent those people who are seduced by the cares and enticings of the world, cares that can choke out the good word of God. What I wanted to ask but wasn’t able is that what should you really do when you come you experience this conflict. Should you always reject the cares and concerns of the world? Should you always assume what’s offered as the word of God takes precedence?

Well, when worded that way, the answer is obviously yes, but where this goes awry is that God is everywhere and works in and through the world for the benefit of all mankind. Additionally,  church is situated squarely in this world. In other words, we don’t have a clear demarcation, always, between the cares of the world and the inspired word of God.

To explain this point better, let me use Adam Miller’s words from “Letters to a Young Mormon” in his chapter on science. In this quote, he tries to find a way to reconcile the tension between the Genesis creation story and evolution and other scientific discoveries and theories.

I believe in a literal reading of this text. I believe the Hebrews literally thought the world was like that, and I believe God literally ran with it and revealed his grace at work in their lives through it. More, I believe that God is just as literally showing himself to us in and through that continually rolling revelation that is science as we know it.

This is the point, that we are making discovery after discovery, advancement after advancement. God is in this. In many ways, this is our form of modern day revelation as we discover new truths that must be reconciled with older truths.

How does this relate to gay relationships?

Recently, I listened to this podcast interview between Bill Reel and Daniel Parkinson describing the latest science on homosexuality. At a basic level, they believe what drives homosexuality is a combination of genetics and the hormonal environment in the womb as the fetus develops during certain parts of maturation. The classic case of nature verses nurture, but in this case, the nurturing is biological. As a result, homosexuality is baked in at birth. I’m not sure how universal this is and there is fluidity and ranges in sexual attraction. It’s not binary at least not as I understand the latest science.

None of this is my area of expertise, but I’ll happily defer to scientific consensus on this subject. The temptation here is when science contradicts or pushes our theology is to reject the science based on theological beliefs. I think this is the wrong approach. Rather, it’s our job to reconcile the science with our theology.

So, assuming we assume this is all true, that homosexual desire is biological and non-changeable, does this work with or against Mormon theology on homosexuality. The clearest, most official summary of the Mormon position on this issue can be described in The Proclamation on the Family and on the Mormon and Gays website. In the first, the church lays out its position on the eternal nature of gender, how gender affects our role in this life and in the eternities, the importance of confining sexual relationships between a legally married husband and wife, and the eternal nature of such relationships. There is no room for gay relationships in this proclamation. In the second, the position is staked out clearly here:

The experience of same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them. With love and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, including our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.

 What’s not clearly explained but surely implied, is that in Mormon theology there are no gays in heaven.

Now this is tough stuff for a gay Mormon. If one is gay but wants to live a faithful, Mormon life, the church encourages either celibacy or mixed-orientation marriage, living a life of discomfort and sacrifice now for a promise of more in the life to come. Neither options are desirable or easy for most in this situation. Now there are people who never marry and live happy and fulfilled lives. But to be told that your natural desires for intimacy and relationship are sinful would be counter-intuitive at an existential level. To be told to reject and avoid opportunities of intimate, life-long loving relationship is a cross too heavy for most to bear.

There are those who can make a mixed-orientation marriage work but I’m imagining this population mostly inhabits the bi of the LGBTQ acronym family. For most who try, divorce is the likely outcome.

But you know, I’m not an expert on any of this. Nobody is asking me to come up with the church’s policy or theology on sex and family.  That is not my job. Nor can I really speak for a gay Mormon person who is trying to navigate their lives through this. The only person I can speak for is myself. How will I react, who will I advocate for, what kind of change can I or should I try to push for?

To be honest, I don’t know. I have no idea what sexuality means after death. I have faith that my relationships will continue with my family and friends beyond death. I have faith that my marriage will last forever. So, I’m invested in that.

What I do know for sure are two truths that I think are relevant:

1) God’s love for His children is infinite and beyond human understanding. Any time you hit a Mormon and most Christians with problems without good explanation the usual default is that God will sort this out in the most loving, just way possible.

2) Our job is to love others, unconditionally, without judgment.

I feel strongly that this is a hole in our theology. I think our first priority is to find a sense of peace, fulfillment and purpose in this life. Our specific knowledge of what will come in the next life is so limited and prone to error. I believe what gives us peace, connection, and a transcendent connection to God now is a good harbinger of what will lead us to God in the next life. Figuring what brings us to God is an individual, lifelong struggle.

Again Adam Miller, again from Letter’s to a Young Mormon:

 Eternal life is God’s kind of life. Rather than just checking a life span, “eternal” names a certain way of being alive, a certain way of holding life as it passes from one moment to the next. Life itself involves the passage of time and, in order to be faithful to it, we must bless rather than dam flow. We must do as God does and allow the world and our parents and our children and ourselves to grow and die and start again.

In a word, we need to live our lives and make our decisions for the here and now because there aren’t two lives, there are one. This life and the next, merged together to make a single life that is eternal. If something doesn’t work now, it won’t work then. With that, it’s impossible to ignore stories of gay men and women who feel led and inspired to enter into gay relationships. I support and sustain them in these important decisions.

And for now, in my Mormonism, all I can do is to hold out hope that there will be further light and knowledge. If Mormonism is anything it’s a gospel of restoration and renewal. We have an open, growing and expanding theology. The heaven’s are not closed, nothing is forever decided. We will work this out.