Administrative Note: Several of the forthcoming posts to this blog will include descriptions of the Middle Space some members of the church find themselves in. A few things to keep in mind: These posts are descriptive, not prescriptive. These posts are meant as descriptions of where some members of the church are at- not as an advocacy for the "middle space" space. This blog's objective is always to build community and foster empathy. Our ambition is that active members might better understand the members in their congregations currently occupying the "middle space" and that members in the middle might know they aren't alone.
Jakob is a PhD candidate in mathematics at an east coast university, and a sometimes reluctant member of a singles ward, where he serves as the organist.
My name is Jakob, and I'm a Mormon. (And I'm going to keep using that term, not least because much of this was written before the very strong shift in tone on the subject at Conference.)
Sometimes I wonder if I only still identify as Mormon due to inertia. So much of my personal religious practice--scripture study, prayer, tithing--has been motivated by a fear that if I let go of these things, I let go of the only things connecting me to faith. There are times when I've called myself "religious but not spiritual." Religion has been my only conduit for a connection with the divine. So I feel I have to preserve my religiosity in order to maintain that tenuous link to God. It will come as no great surprise that this attitude has not led to a very fulfilling experience. For the past while, years really, I have felt dead within the church. As Paul wrote, "the letter kills, but the spirit gives life." My participation in Mormonism has been very much about the letter, because the spirit has so frequently felt amorphous and ungraspable. And it has killed me.
One of the reasons I'm writing here is to rediscover the spirit of Mormonism, not just the letter. The space I've been in for the last few years is no longer tenable, and I need to make myself a new one--a middle space, if you will. For a long time, I told myself I was already in such a space, that I was a good, active, open-minded Mormon. The words "heterodox" and "orthoprax" were among my favorites for describing myself. This was one of the ways I clung to religiosity without getting much spiritually. To adapt a very Mormon phrase, I was living in the form of godliness, but not benefiting from the power thereof. I don't know whether it's me, or the Church, or some combination of both, but something needs to change. I don't want to abandon Mormonism, but my relationship with it needs to change.
Mormonism has rooted itself deep within me. That isn't quite the right metaphor. No, I am constructed of accreted layers of Mormonism, like a banded agate or the walls of a canyon. One layer comes from going with my father on his home teaching visits when his companion wasn't available, visiting an old man going blind of diabetes, and hearing the stories he needed to tell someone. Another comes from praying with a group of friends on a school trip after someone had been rushed to the emergency room due to an asthma attack. Somehow spending hours on end joyfully knocking on doors as a missionary forms a third.
Not all the strata are so pleasant. The turmoil of my first visit to the temple, a week before I left for my mission, asking myself how God could be so legalistic and arbitrary. Years spent deathly afraid of sexuality on pain of doing something that would require confession to the bishop. The pain of watching the Church's vociferous opposition to things like marriage equality. These experiences are just as much a part of my Mormonness as the positive, faith-promoting ones I might share in a sacrament meeting.
Some of the layers of my Mormonism are just ideas that I have absorbed so deeply that there's no way I can distinguish them from myself. Ethics of responsibility and care and service and stoicism. The notion that eternal progression is the ultimate purpose of existence. Humanity's divine potential and destiny. Maybe I don't exactly get my own planet in the eternities, but the sort of thinking that leads to that conclusion just feels right to me.
At the same time, there are fault lines that cut across these strata. Somewhere I acquired a deep strain of skepticism, or perhaps agnosticism, making it hard for me to make the kinds of sweeping declarations of knowledge Mormons are so prone to. A certain tendency toward social liberalism, to the principle that actions that don't harm others are morally acceptable, adds more tension with Mormon culture and practice. And I can't imagine a God who excludes people from eternal life on the basis of beliefs they did or did not have. Some of these tensions are present within Mormonism itself, so it's not surprising that I have absorbed them. But they fragment the bedrock of my faith, making it hard for me to feel wholly inside and committed to a church and a culture that so often militate against them.
Sometimes my attachment to Mormonism feels like something purely aesthetic, as something I can recognize the beauty of even if I am not fully invested. More often, I feel a longing for a deeper connection to and communion with the Mormonism that formed me. I want to serve and connect in ways that are both distinctly Mormon and distinctly mine, but the gap between those has seemed to be growing.
My Mormonism is service. It is love. It is community. It has little to do with specific truth claims or doctrines or ordinances. To the extent that those things matter, it is because they are a conduit for love and service and community.
I'm still working out what exactly that means for the way I participate in Mormonism. The inertia of the rigid religious practices I have maintained is waning, and I now have to examine them and find the pieces of faith that are meaningful to me. No longer can I glibly call myself "heterodox but orthoprax" without extracting meaning from my religious practice. I have to make a space within Mormonism that is uniquely mine.
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