A Faith that Feeds—on My Terms
My Mormon faith was a check-list, an external prescription. No one ever said I could construct my own faith that fed me—a self-prescription.
This is the fifth in a series of critical reflections on LDS theology as I navigate my shifting faith.
I offer my thoughts not as an act of retaliation, rebellion or disparagement, but as contributions to the growing community of Mormon thinkers who want the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be the best version of itself.
Previous: Suspending the Need for Truth
A Podcast Epiphany
A few months ago — right in the thick of my messy Mormon faith deconstruction—I came across Gina Colvin’s brilliant A Thoughtful Faith podcast (which I eagerly recommend (Apple, Stitcher)). I’d gone back a year or so into the archives and was listening to Colvin’s discussion (episode 266a) with social worker Sara Hughes-Zabawa about Stage 4 of James Fowler’s Stages of Faith.
Stage 4 (which Fowler terms the ‘individuative-reflective stage’) is a normal period of psychological development at which people start to question and critically reflect on their faith. In orthodox faith traditions, this is often experienced negatively as a faith crisis or ‘dark night of the soul’.
At that time, I was very definitely sloshing through Stage 4.
Hughes-Zabawa said something about people in this stage that bolted right through my soul:
Regardless of where you find yourself, if you’re still within Mormonism and you’re feeling so alone within your community, it is still your responsibility to find what spiritually feeds you. So that might be Brené Brown, or Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday—but go begin, start planting a foundation of what feels spiritually safe to you, so the journey continues. …
It’s this incredible internal permission of: can I feed my soul in the ways that allow it to thrive?
But when you come from an institution that hand-delivered what used to feed you, it is now your responsibility to find.
Hold up.… What???
Can I feed my soul in ways that allow it to thrive?
Find what spiritually feeds you?
No one—no one ever, through decades of dogmatic faithfulness and serving a mission and callings all over the bloody place and trainings and conferences and meetings and sermons and devotionals and lessons and temple worship and seeking and praying and fasting and begging and pleading and repenting—not a single person had ever given me permission to ask and choose what fed my own soul. Never.
I’d never been allowed to consider which doctrines were enlightening and beneficial or which practices were nourishing and meaningful—not if I could choose what didn’t feed me.
The Mormon Paradox
Hughes-Zabawa hit the nail on the head when she said ‘you come from an institution that hand-delivered what fed you’.
As with so many things with Mormon theology (okay, with all theology), there is a tragic paradox at play here.
One one hand, Mormonism teaches the notion of spiritual self-reliance. It’s an awkward term (and fairly new) that basically encompasses a Mormon’s responsibility to be independent and self-sufficient in spiritual terms, not reliant on external resources for growth or guidance, but to have faith that can withstand external vagaries.
But on the other hand, Mormonism is one hell of a prescribed theology. It’s a prepackaged deal. You are told exactly what will feed you, why it will feed you, what will malnourish you, why it will do that, how to be fed, when to be fed, what to do.
This isn’t really unique to Mormonism, granted, but this tradition seems more invested in it than many other Protestant denonimations.
The Mormon Subscription Package
To be admittedly and possibly unforgivably reductionist, Mormon theology posits a faith life that is embedded in daily rituals and that expects wholesale acceptance of tenets and truth claims.
The Doctrinal Subscriptions
Like most religions, Mormonism is a belief system — fairly whole and entire. (What exactly constitutes canonical truth in the church can be complex and fuzzy, but for most members, there is a belief system as presently taught.) The system is designed to be accepted in its entirety. Personal preference or uneasiness with portions of the doctrinal edifice is not generally tolerated.
In fact, because Mormonism places almost obsessive emphasis on personal conviction of truth claims, there is a sense that having a testimony of one truth claim causally confirms the veracity of all the others. This is actually a tactic missionaries use to coax prospective members into accepting uncomfortable teachings. Preach My Gospel, the official missionary training manual, gives these instructions to missionaries:
For example, sincere people might object to what you have taught about the Word of Wisdom. Help them see that their real question is whether Joseph Smith was speaking as God’s prophet when this commandment was renewed in this dispensation. You might say: ‘Having the faith to accept this teaching will require the assurance that this commandment came to us through revelation from God to the Prophet Joseph Smith. The way to know that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God is to read and pray about the Book of Mormon.’
People must resolve for themselves their concerns and objections. You can help as you focus them on what will strengthen their faith in Jesus Christ — reading and praying about the Book of Mormon. When they strengthen their testimony of the Restoration, they will have the strength to overcome their objections and concerns. (section 5)
This means that choosing to disagree with one teaching — say polygamy or the racist priesthood and temple restrictions or patriarchy in the priesthood or homophobia (I clearly have an extensive list here…) — while still being okay with others is untenable. The truths are interconnected and inter-verifiable.
A compromise to which many members find themselves resorting is ‘putting on the shelf’ those doctrines with which they privately disagree. What they mean when they say this is they’re choosing to accept the system nominally and ignore nagging issues because embracing them could trigger systemic collapse and total doubt. They wait for ‘further light and knowledge’ to resolve their concerns.
The Ritual Subscriptions
For many, Mormonism is experienced as a sequence of ordinances (sacred rituals) which form milestones along a life path and are designed to prepare one for eternal life. In between those ordinances are smaller daily practices that accumulate into a ritual lifestyle.
The milestone ordinances are, in order:
- Baptism
- Confirmation
- Ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood (for men only)
- Endowment
- Sealing to a spouse for time and eternity
Added to these, and considered just as significant, is the weekly sacrament or eucharist. These ordinances regulate a covenant relationship between the human and the divine. Confessedly, they can be beautiful ceremonies and moments of genuine faith formation.
Filling in the gaps between these moments are the daily practices, very much prescribed as commandments:
- Personal prayer (formally at least twice a day)
- Family prayer
- Personal scripture study (reading the Book of Mormon is emphasized)
- Family scripture study
- Family Home Evening (a pseudo-ecclesiastical meeting by some interpretations)
- Monthly fasting
- Regular attendance at a temple
- Keeping the Sabbath ‘holy’ (the exact practices involved here shift over time, but generally involve not working or shopping)
There are more, but these are the most significant.
The Prescription
This belief system and ritual life are absolutely prescribed from church headquarters. Right from the first lessons prospective members receive from missionaries, they are instructed in Mormon daily prayer practice and scripture study, and are enjoined to begin observing the rituals immediately. In particular, they are urged to gain a ‘testimony’ of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon to ease their acceptance of all other doctrines, even those they have yet to encounter. Bishops and other ecclesiastical leaders even use a member’s profession of testimony and adherence to the practices as measures of faithfulness.
Now, this does allow Mormonism to cultivate a very definite cultural experience. Once initiated, a member can thrive in the near absolute commonality of belief and the routines of ritual life. Indeed, what constitutes Mormon ‘culture’ derives in many ways from these acts and undeviating perspectives.
But, the prescription is relentlessly exact. Every Mormon is expected to adhere to this faith life and find it fulfilling. It is the only way to develop and keep faith. Blessings are predicated on it. Darkness follows those who depart from ‘the path’.
But One Size Does Not Fit All
This is where Hughes-Zabawa’s comments struck me so sharply. She said that people in Stage 4 begin to deconstruct and dismantle their faith, their practices and their world views. This means they actively and independently decide what aspects of their religion they wish to keep, which to discard and which ideas and practices of other faiths (or none) to incorporate.
Throughout my membership in the church, I found some elements of Mormonism to be deeply invigorating. My Mormon faith life was very much experiential. I was sustained by feelings of spirituality, sensing ‘the Spirit’, going through the rituals of temple worship, blending sacred music (by the church’s definition, of course) with church worship to create reverent spaces, inviting the sacred into the trivial moments of my life.
Holiness was temporal and spatial and tactile; Mormonism was my access to sacred living.
Then there were things that didn’t click with me. I never found fasting useful; it was a chore. Tithing made little sense to me and I saw little payback. I got the idea of prayer and yearned for it to be a launchpad to divine encounter, but the Mormon prayer style was so clunky and routinized that it frequently became an irritant and a chore. I could do without sermons, especially those given by lay members who lacked nuanced understanding of their subject matter. Sunday School and other meetings were a bore, particularly when lessons were being taught on anaemic doctrines with pithy lip-service paid to ‘practical applications’ of the scriptures ‘in our lives’ (and don’t get me started on the historical revisionism and censorship). I also never saw the point of all the testimony bearing. And the Word of Wisdom (with its restrictions on alcohol and coffee in particular) was a stupefying requirement whose justification I had never been able to parse doctrinally or practically.
But, because Mormonism was a prepackaged deal, I ploughed through the things I didn’t enjoy or accept because I thought I had no choice. They were theoretically always going to feed my soul one day. Even though they never did.
Choosing Only What Feeds
As I progressed through my faith deconstruction, I found myself gravitating to only a few morsels of my past Mormon experience that I wanted to keep.
I knew the music of the church still enriched my soul. And I knew I wanted to continue as my ward’s organist. While I found the rest of sacrament meeting to be irrelevant, my playing was a form of devotion to my community and to music itself that felt right and nourishing.
I knew I still wanted to continue some aspect of sacred experience. I couldn’t go to the temple anymore and sacrament meetings were getting dull, but I knew I wanted some sense of holy space and holy time. These I found in meditation and in the rich musical traditions of other faiths and secular art in general. I saw much in art, music and literature that was elevatory and transcendental. I didn’t need ‘truth’ to feel the divine and the divine was available in so many places that resonated with my personal spiritual aptitude.
Could There Be a Mormonism of Diverse Spiritual Proclivities?
I get to sit on the stand every Sunday at church, right behind the organ. I get to see how the members of my congregation experience the sacrament meeting. Some appear in bliss. Some are blissfully vacant. Others look they want to bolt for the door. It makes me wonder: why can’t Mormonism ease the reins just a little bit to allow people to engage in ways that are meaningful to them?
If some people can’t stand scripture or find anything of value in it, why do leaders gasp in horror at hearing that people haven’t read the Book of Mormon? If members find the ‘standard’ prayer vernacular limiting and cold, why can’t they speak from the heart without having their pronouns critiqued? If someone thinks temple worship is oppressive, demeaning and frankly soporific, why is he or she harangued over not attending regularly? Why does the institution get to dictate what works?
The problem with prescribing what feeds the flock is it never feeds everyone the same way. People’s tastes and predilections are different, so catering for them as individuals should be natural. I mean, isn’t this the gospel of the one, the outcast, the poor in spirit? It seems sometimes Mormonism gets so caught up in maintaining cultural cohesion as an institution and enforcing conformity that its efforts just fail to reach those who would otherwise participate wholeheartedly — just differently.
