This year the ward council decided that our goal as a ward would be to grow. Basically, every effort we are making and every lesson we are trying to teach is working toward growth. In Relief Society we started the year by setting some new goals based around the scripture 4th Nephi 1:15–17: And it came to pass that there was no contention in the land, because of the love of God which did dwell in the hearts of the people. And there were no envyings, nor strifes, nor tumults, … and surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God. There were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of -ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God.
To create community and build a place where all of us can bring ourselves to the table, flaws and all we have spent several Sundays using guidelines such as presuming good will. Presuming good will means believing everyone in our Relief Society is speaking what is true for her. It means accepting our differences without judgement or taking other peoples’ views personally. Presuming good-will means we don’t judge other people as unrighteous because they see things differently than we do. We are all doing our best to navigate our way through life.
Each sister is an important part of our community whether they are at church or not. Every sister deserves our attention, care, and respect. I am so impressed with the way everyone has embraced these goals and I pray we can keep it going for a long time. I love the sisters in the ward dearly and think these community values can be used by all of us, women and men alike.
One way this can play out is to work on helping build a ward and a culture where people want to participate. This means we want all of our sisters and brothers to have a place in these seats as much as they want. I study rhetoric, which is the way humans use language to say things. It sounds pretty simple when I describe it like that but in actual practice it means taking everyday words and actions and breaking them apart to see how they interact with and steer society. The reason everyday rhetoric works is because we don’t question how it works in our lives. So much is taken for granted.
I’m going to take us through three steps in this talk that can help us examine the rhetoric we use and how we can change it to help those who may not feel welcome.
- Self-reflection
- Self-compassion
- Self-direction
Self-reflection
First self-reflection means we have to reflect on the rhetoric we use and how it might interact with others.
One example comes to mind. One evening I went to tuck one of my kids into bed. He was in seventh or eighth grade. I always asked if the kids wanted me to listen to their prayers or if they wanted me to leave and come back. On this night he asked me to kneel with him, but he would pray silently. Of course, I was honored to sit at his side. When he climbed up onto his bed, he looked sincerely distraught and I asked him if he wanted to talk. He said he had promised one of his church leaders that he would pray until he knew the Book of Mormon was true. The leader had continued to push him, and it was causing him stress that he wasn’t getting an answer. I hugged him and asked him if he knew what a point-of-view story was. Basically, we only get the stories in the Book of Mormon from one author’s point-of-view, right?! Like, we hear the story about Lehi and Sariah’s family from Nephi without any input from any of the other brothers or sisters or mom and dad, or any of Ishmael’s kids. I pointed out that “true” is tricky because what is true for one person might not be the same from someone from a different vantage point. Maybe it would be better to ask our heavenly parents what parts of the Book of Mormon were true for him right now in his life. The discussion continued while he told me what he liked and what he felt like was important and I encouraged him to stop worrying about true and just worry about what he was supposed to understand for his own life. The rhetoric of “true” was sincerely problematic for my kid who tries to take in everyone’s ideas and live the best way he knows how.
I share this story because if we want all of our sisters and brothers to come and fill these benches and feel the warmth and spirit each of you offers then we may need to examine the way we talk about things from time to time. The words and phrases we use matters a great deal especially for those who might be questioning things, or who have needed to step away, or who have never felt the inkling to be baptized. All of these are our brothers and sisters.
The bishop often encourages us in the ward council to avoid using terms such as less active, inactive, or non-member. These terms make people “the other” instead of “us.” We tend to use the habitually for ease, but many of my friends who aren’t going to church right now have felt called to be active in lots of ways’ like in the community, at the schools, or volunteering in loads of other ways. They are very active and they just aren’t coming to church right now. Maybe we can look at trying to change these rhetorics in our ward for a while.
There are other ways rhetoric can make people feel unwelcome or hurt. When I was going through a significant faith transition some members of my family were in great pain from a teaching about “empty chairs at the family table in heaven” that used to come up in the 70s or 80s. For the younger folks here, it was the idea that if your family didn’t do the gospel ‘just right’ your kids wouldn’t be in heaven with you and so you would just miss them forever. We don’t use this as a tactic of explanation anymore, but it seems like if we can trust God to work our weird doctrines like plural marriage, we can most certainly trust God to make sure our loved ones who leave church will be okay and part of our family forever. Let’s stop using rhetoric to stress out parents whose children need to explore other roads.
Some people will leave, some will come back, people will learn uncomfortable history, people will ask questions, some people can follow the prophets without questions, some will find the Spirit easy to hear, and others will have to learn to lean on their best possible idea because they don’t get answers. These are all okay.
To this point I want to share my story, explain some myths that were really harmful, and share some ideas that were major wins.
First some myths that were really hurtful:
- If people would just pray harder, study scriptures more, or go to the temple more often they wouldn’t be in a faith crisis
- If they understood what “I” understand, they wouldn’t have these issues
- They just want to sin
- They need me to worry about their salvation
- or their salvation needs to look like my salvation
I’ll touch on these briefly through sharing my story. I was most certainly praying many times a day, reading scriptures and studying the prophets for at least a half-hour, often more because I get really into studying, I was attending the temple regularly, we had family prayer twice a day, and family home evening every week. I had a leadership calling and was serving like crazy. If myth number one was true, I should have been safe from questioning anything, ever.
Instead I started to see incongruencies in teachings and lived experience. I began to hurt because of things I was taught about being a woman that didn’t align with feelings I was getting from the Spirit about my own path. I got several answers to prayers that just didn’t fit the ideas and actions I had previously learned. I didn’t have LDS words and stories that described the immensity of the divine I experienced. It took several years of my life to work through a lot of the pain, and there are questions that I still hold close to my heart.
My patriarchal blessing (a blessing given by someone in the church who holds a special calling of inspiration) says that I will seek out of the best books words of wisdom and all truth. All truth and wisdom lead me down a path of love and discovery that I didn’t see coming. There was no preparation for a crisis of faith that comes from faith, study, and prayer. I am not an anomaly, many people who take a break from church have done it for reasons that are not in the flipbook of stories we tend to tell, and many happen from a place of complete faith and understanding.
Many people tried to convince me that if I just understood better, I wouldn’t be having a faith crisis, but I knew that I understood. When people tried to explain things to me it felt patronizing and I stopped talking to everyone about what I was really feeling and going through. I would give surface explanations, because my real and important feelings were questioned or explained away. No one seemed to know what to do with me except try to explain things I already knew. We sat at an impasse—them believing I didn’t understand and needed saving and me not feeling safe or having the words to explain my new faith explosion.
I also want to quickly touch on the other two I brought up. I have yet to meet hardly anyone who leaves the church or takes a break because they want to sin and I know a lot of them. This myth about wanting to sin correlates well with the myth that their salvation needs to look like my salvation. I hardly know anyone who wants to sin, but maybe what we are seeing instead is that their road looks different than ours. Their road is okay, let it be. I promise you that coffee is not good enough to pull anyone away from the church. There is a lovely scripture in Luke 6 that talks about not worrying about the mote in someone else’s eye until we have examined the beam in our own eye. I love that because it reminds me to spend a lot of time in self-reflection before judging anyone else’s road to salvation.
I don’t share these stories because I am upset in any way and I certainly am not criticizing those who were trying to help. Everyone was doing the best they knew how to do. What I do want to show is that these stories we might share or believe about people who leave are harmful and do not create an environment people can easily return to. But it is significant that we don’t tell stories about people using false rhetoric.
We must stop using or believing the myths I just talked about, but there are a lot of really great ways to talk to people who are questioning or having serious pain about doctrine. One of the biggest gifts anyone gave me during my faith transition was not assuming anything. The friends who didn’t assume made it so much easier to deal with my questions, anger, and hurt. Another big win was my friends who were able to say, “oh man, that sucks and must hurt a lot. Do you want to get a soda and go for a drive?” This let me know that our friendships went beyond my activity or belief in the church. It gave me a safe space to feel my feelings and rejoice in real sisterhood. The third win was friends and family who still let me be an answer to their prayers. They expressed that my phone call came right when they needed it or an insight I shared was what they had been praying about all week. My belief or lack thereof did not get in the way of their belief in me as a bringer of light and spirit. Finally, and this one was huge and didn’t really happen until I moved here, was people who valued my knowledge. I have studied the gospel, the church, and our shared history both personally and professionally for about 25 years. People who let me share the things I know because they aren’t scared to know things have made church so much fun for me. Sometimes it is important that church is fun. That is why we invented “linger longers,” or as our congregation is now calling them “munch and mingles."
Self-compassion
I have just shared some of details about some really personal things that happen either to us or to people we love. If you have told these stories about people who left or taken a break, welcome to the club. None of us know what we don’t know until we do know it. If we are going to be healers to those who come through the doors, we have to first heal ourselves. In Luke 6, Jesus doesn’t say go heal others but keep that beam in your eye. He says to cast the beam from your eye. I believe that the greatest of all healers would want us to first get first aid, take a rest, give our heart and eyes time to heal. When we figure out, we’ve been wrong about something it hurts. Our heads and hearts bleed. There is not one person among us that intentionally hurts others. If you have thought of times you used rhetoric that might have hurt someone, I implore you to have compassion on yourself first. If you feel embarrassed that you didn’t know how to talk to someone who has left, give yourself space for self-compassion. Take a breath, love and forgive yourself. This is the greatest human connection, being wrong and ever-changing. Talk to yourself like you would a loved one. You are a child of heaven and Jesus loves you. That guy loves everyone, for real.
Self-direction
No matter what road we are called to take it is good to reflect, and then practice self-compassion, but in the end we have to get up and press on. When Jesus healed the woman with the issue of blood, he told her to go in peace. That rings true to my innermost core. Go. In. Peace. We have to use our new knowledge to do the work to the best of our ability. Without action faith isn’t real. Will I again learn that I am wrong about something? Yes. Will I find out that I hurt someone accidentally? Yes. Will I judge someone else’s mote unrightfully? Dang it, yes. But each time will be different and valuable. I am beyond thankful that we don’t walk any of these paths alone. I need people who can hear me when I say that I made this embarrassing mistake when I was trying to do something good, or who can give me perspective when I don’t have enough self-compassion. I need people who can sit in discomfort and try to puzzle things out. I need people to celebrate with when something goes well. We are not alone.
To comfort those who feel like maybe I am making light of accepting those who need to walk other paths, I want to share one more thought. Brigham Young claimed that Mormonism (his word, not mine) embraces every principle pertaining to life and salvation, for time and eternity. No matter who has it. If the infidel has got truth it belongs to “Mormonism.” The truth and sound doctrine possessed by the sectarian world, and they have a great deal, all belong to this Church. As for their morality, many of them are, morally, just as good as we are. All that is good, lovely, and praiseworthy belongs to this Church and Kingdom. “Mormonism” includes all truth. It is life, eternal life; it is bliss; it is the fulness of all things in the gods and in the eternities of the gods (Discourses of Brigham Young, 3). Instead of having “ites” lets just have all us working together.
Let’s be embracers and purveyors of all truth, love, and wisdom wherever we find it and from whomever we come in contact with. I testify of loving divine parents and that in their house there is enough room for all of us. Each of you matters a great deal and I’m thankful to share this space with you.
