finding my spiritual home: part 1

The concept of a “spiritual home” became personally meaningful to me last week while sitting and meditating in a church meeting a couple weeks ago.  While pondering my current spiritual standing, some questions came to mind:

Where is my spiritual home? 

What do I do there?

Is it inside me or outside of me?

This is especially significant because lately I have felt a longing to have a place I can call my spiritual home, since I left the religion of my birth and have since been defining and restructuring my beliefs for the last few years.  Perhaps it would be helpful to examine my past spiritual home to see what did and did not work for me, and then to describe my ideal spiritual home, in order to gain a better idea of what to look for. 

The spiritual home I was born into was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church.  My family is descended from the original members of the church, and Joseph Smith, the founder, is my great-great-great-uncle.  I grew up in Utah, the heart of Mormonism, and had what I think is the typical Mormon upbringing.  I was blessed at birth, baptized and confirmed (given the Gift of the Holy Ghost) at age 8, ordained a deacon at 12, a teacher at 14, a priest at 16, and an elder at 18.  I went through the temple and received the ordinances there, and went on a 2-year mission to Montreal, Canada, at 19. 

Through all that time I was a 100%, true blue, orthodox Latter-Day Saint.  I believed what I was taught by my parents, church leaders, prophets, apostles, and bishops, and from a very young age I sought to conform completely to all of the standards and commandments of the Church, which I believed to come from God through his ancient and modern prophets.  I thoroughly internalized the doctrines and beliefs of the church, and sought to be “the perfect Mormon boy.”  I pulled it off, at least from an outsider’s view.  I was often praised for being such a good, obedient, upstanding young man in the church.  That felt good for sure, but there was another side to it, a darker side that tainted my blissful Saintly existence. 

What I call my “first gay memory” occurred when I was about three or four years old.  From that time I have many memories of feeling different, of being attracted or interested in the boys and men around me, and the development of my sexual orientation was a parallel process that I saw as directly at odds with my spiritual development in the Church.  The LDS Church is not gay-affirming, as its recent political moves have so clearly shown.  However, there has been much improvement.  I remember reading the book Mormon Doctrine by Bruce R. McKonkie, in which he describes homosexuality as a sin next to murder.  There were other church materials I read that were equally homophobic and misinformed, which only caused me to heap on the denial and repression of my sexual feelings even more.  While I appeared to be the “perfect Mormon boy” on the outside, on the inside I felt like a disgusting, evil sinner who could only hope that my good works would somehow balance things out such that I would be worthy for one of the lower heavens (there are multiple levels of heaven in Mormon theology).

I suppose the culmination of my Mormon experience was attending Brigham Young University when I returned from my mission.  BYU is the gem of the Church, and the policies of the institution serve to make it the epitome of what Latter-Day Saints represent, good and bad.  It was during my first semester there that my wall of denial and repression was broken down, and I began the long hard road of self-acceptance and understanding.  My coming out process was gradual, as I first attended the reparative-oriented Evergreen support groups, and it eventually led to me finally accepting my sexuality as part of who I am, and pursuing relationships with men.  

In terms of my original spiritual home, you could say that I chose to leave it, that I willingly disobeyed the house rules and thus put myself at odds with its mission and purpose.  While that may be true in some ways, I believe I did my best for a long time to fit in, to conform and obey, and ultimately it did not work.  For me at least.  I think that the LDS Church is a valid, helpful, and even beautiful spiritual home for many people, and if they are happy there I would never wish for them to leave.  At the same time, I believe that it is better to leave if you find it oppressive, and to search among the other existing spiritual homes, or even strike out on your own and build your own (whether it be a shack or a mansion).  That is the point I am at, and in "part 2" I will attempt to describe my ideal spiritual home and posit some ways I might be able to find it.

"out" of the garden: why mother eve and i are not so different

While visitng in Utah for Thanksgiving, I saw the BYU production of Children of Eden by Stephen Schwartz. I admit, I was surprised that BYU actually put the production on, because of some of the themes it contains. However, I really enjoyed it, since it furnishes a new way to look at some of the stories from the Book of Genesis. One of the more meaningful aspects of the story for me was how it portrayed Eve and Cain. In this version of the story, they both share a thirst for knowledge, not being content with the status quo. When she was tempted to eat the fruit, Eve expressed desire to know what lay beyond the bounds of Eden, and she wanted to have Father’s knowledge. Similarly, Cain was not content to stay in the wilderness with his parents and brother, Abel, waiting for Father to return and let them go back to Eden. He eventually learns that they will never be able to return, and actually forsakes his family’s pious, innocent existence in order to find out what lies “beyond the waterfall.” It’s certainly a much more sympathetic treatment of the traditionally evil, cursed character Cain is made out to be.

A few days later, while walking with a friend who had attended the musical with me, we discussed the story of leaving the innocence of the garden for a life of knowledge, which is both beautiful and painful. He shared a completely new application of the story of Eve’s choice, based on what we had seen in the musical the week before. Based on what he shared, this is how I conceived it for myself:

I grew up in the safe, innocent, even idealistic atmosphere of gospel doctrine and Mormon culture. The Church was my life—it formed the foundation of my views on everything, and I took everything it gave me without question, seeking only to do what was right and please my parents, church leaders, and ultimately God. The Church was my Eden. And just as Adam and Eve were given certain limits to what they could do (in being forbidden to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil), I was given similar instructions to avoid certain substances, behaviors, and ideas. The part of those instructions I internalized most revolved around sexuality. I was then unaware of my own sexual orientation, though it began to manifest itself in some ways from an early age. But because of what I was taught, I sought for my entire adolescence to not only avoid anything sexual, but to actually annihilate my own sexuality, because I thought it was evil and wrong. I was not only trying to avoid the forbidden fruit, but actually believed I needed to chop the tree down.

As we know, Eve eventually spoke to the serpent, who convinced her that by eating the forbidden fruit, she would be wise like God, knowing all things. He conveniently did not mention that such knowledge would result in both joy and pain, and that knowledge, when misused, is dangerous. Even more, Eve would gain the knowledge of her own death and the death of her loved ones. Instead, the serpent played up the positive aspects of eating the fruit: gaining wisdom and becoming like God.

In my case, I would say that the serpents who told me the half-truths about being gay were our greater culture as well as the gay culture itself. From the popular, Western/American culture, I heard messages about the danger of being gay, that I would contract HIV and die a lonely and miserable reprobate. From the gay popular culture, I heard idealized messages about beautiful men, out-of-this-world sex and Broadway musicals. I even heard about the possibility of having a long-term relationship with a man.

Yes, these messages were seductive, and like Eve, I partook of the forbidden fruit. In the Genesis account, this was a single event, but for me it was a process that took a few years. I didn’t bite down all at once, but I took my time, tentatively tasting what I had for so long feared and avoided. I do remember the sweetness of my first kiss, which was just as innocent and earth-shattering as when Eve’s teeth pierced the skin of the fruit. That was the first time I had tasted affection from a man, and it changed my world forever. I felt fulfilled in ways that I had never felt before, and I finally understood why people cared about “love” and “sex” and “dating”—concepts I hadn’t ever really understood. Finally, I felt in touch with the deepest part of my humanity, and the prospect of finding fulfillment through the expression of my sexuality and pursuing relationships was delicious to me, and very desirable.

Some would say that was my Fall. Once I gained a clear and more perfect understanding of who I was, what I felt, and where that could lead, I found it increasingly difficult to stay in my Eden. God himself told Adam and Eve that they needed to leave, but in my case it was a combination of God, the Church, and my own volition. In the church, I felt increasingly uncomfortable as I realized that I would never be fully accepted or seen as worthy unless I denied the precious part of myself that I had so recently discovered. My whole goal as I evaluated my beliefs and tried to make important choices was to stay close to God, and let him guide me where I needed to go. I have indeed felt that guidance, and even to this day I can say that I feel that I am where I need to be, doing what I need to be doing. I ultimately came to the conclusion to effectively leave Mormonism, and venture into the “lone and dreary world,” full of hard work, grief, suffering as well as joy, love, fulfillment, and beauty.

There are some days that I do still yearn for the simplicity of Eden. That was a time when I had all of the answers, when I felt sure of my destiny and secure in my beliefs. I now live in a world that does not have easy answers, and I don’t know what tomorrow, let alone eternity, will bring for me. But I am content with my decision to be in this place, and knowing what I know now, I could never go back to Eden. I now see that in Eden I was incomplete, and that now because I have experienced both deep sorrow and profound joy, I feel fully alive. Similarly to what Adam and Eve expressed years after leaving the Garden, I can also say that “were it not for [my] transgression [I] should never have [known what it is to love and be loved in return,]…and because of my transgression, my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy” (Moses 5:10-11).