Playing with God
An excerpt from Work in Progress: dialogues & poems
Below is an excerpt from work in progress: dialogues and poems. It’s actually from the Afterword.
This passage speaks to my mindset, someone who was born and raised in the LDS/Mormon religion and culture, and why I wrote this mammoth, massive book that features my former religion so prominently. I’m still immersed in it to a degree and so writing, being a writer, has been my ticket out, both spiritually and emotionally.
It’s my hope that others who felt (or feel) unmoored, due to their loss of faith, will find comfort in it. Paraphrasing one of my favorite authors, ‘good fiction comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.’
I’d like to believe good poetry and dialogues do the same.
I was Mormon for about 26 years of my life, on and off. But much of my family is still LDS, and so it feels like you can’t ever really leave. My husband’s family is even more LDS, if that’s a thing, which it is. I was a believer in God, and then the whole “New Age” and The Secret and then, eventually, a “force bigger than myself,” all the way into my late thirties.
I think the “God dialogues” in this book are my attempts to dismantle and deconstruct the vestiges of my own belief system in my mind, but they also pushed me to confront my own certainty. I wrote the dialogues with the premise that I was answering the unanswerable questions every human being must confront.
It’s my own personal scripture, my reinvention of religion, if you will — a reinvention in my own image. I take comfort in the fact that I haven’t done anything that hasn’t been the advent of every religious philosophy known to man. I’m just using poetry and satire, and of course, sacrilege. But, as [a] friend once said, “blasphemy is a victimless crime.”
Call it “pot-stirring” if you like; I prefer to say that for me, it’s a call for authenticity. If you’re going to inflict the unreasonable mythology of Christianity on me, then it’s unreasonable to think I’m not going to pervert it. Because “By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” — Joseph Smith, Jr., prophet, seer, revelator, church-starter.
I know that it begs speculation: for a non-believer to write about God so much might be a “protesteth too much” thing, like a believer, but I’m in denial.
Let me make this clear: I wish I believed in God. I mourn the loss of that belief as much as I mourn the loss of my parents. I wish I could believe. Especially in the Mormon church’s unique theological stance that we have a Mother in Heaven.
Once you’ve seen behind the curtain, you can’t unsee it and pretend it’s all true again. I can’t accept the answer “God works in mysterious ways” anymore. I certainly can’t accept the ultimate solipsism and arrogance of “blessings.” As if we’re warranted more than people born in Haiti or other horrifically “unblessed” parts of the world.
One thing I do believe in, to a degree, is immortality. But not in the sense that our souls live on after our bodies die. No. For me, immortality comes when we do things with our time here on earth that earn us immortality, whether it be in the minds of our children, grandchildren, and the people who know us, or in the world-at-large because we impact the world with something so big, it can’t be ignored — or forgotten.
If I believed in a God, he would be like the one I created. But the interesting thing about creating characters in a book or story is that you get to know them. They become sentient to you, separate beings that have a life of their own, and most importantly, they take on a voice of their own.
My character, God, has a very distinct “voice.” He has his own cadence, his own vocabulary, his own sound, his own pet phrases, his own take on things. Yes, what you are reading here should be dawning on you by now: I hear the voice of God in my head, and he tells me what to write about him.
Does this make me a prophet, or does this make me insane? Gosh, how to tell the real religious fanatics from the fake ones? It’s all in the numbers.
If I get enough people to believe in my God, it makes me a prophet. If I don’t, I’m insane. Or there’s a third option: I’m a writer. And you should all know… writers are both prophets and insane — and we are Gods. We create worlds and people to populate them; we have power over their every gesture and fate, over life and death.
So yes, I am guilty of the sin of hubris, guilty of elevating myself to the pedestal of a god, but not for profit, not for glory, and certainly not so people will think I’m neat.
I write, and wrote, because whether you’re trained by something unseen or you train yourself to do it, I firmly believe writers and poets are the scribes of the human experience. And like Cassandra, we’re doomed to deliver prophecies that will come to pass, but are never believed when we pen our tales, which is why we’ve had to make peace with our social standing — entertainers, at best, perhaps.
But when I write every day, my quest — like the quest of every religious person on earth — is for immortality. I want to live forever. I want to impact minds forever.
Quite simply, I want the power that even my God character doesn’t have: I want the power to change this work in progress — this grand, weird experiment we call the world — and as I attempt to mitigate my own pain, I want my words to echo and salve others who also suffer.
In closing, a few years back, my brother (one of the most loving, kind men I know and love) and I had a sit-down before he went to serve a mission for the LDS Church as a Mission President, along with his wife. We had a 3 ½-hour talk about why I lost my faith. I didn’t want to go into all of it, but we had a good talk and his closing argument was this:
“But Julie, what if you’re wrong?”
In short, his certainty got boiled down into the most primitive kind of emotional and existential ultimatum: fear. Because if I’m wrong? I’m fucked.
He didn’t understand.
Fear of what? Of whom? I wanted to laugh. Fear for what the afterlife holds for me has got nothing on the suffering I’ve endure in this life due to manmade certainty everywhere I look. It was the same type of certainty, the same arrogance and hubris — while benign and totally absent of malice in my brother — that took from me what could have been, yet made possible what is in the here and now and in that moment as I sat with him, I felt the rush of liberation and indescribable peace descend on me. In my response, I posed my own question.
“I’m prepared to be completely wrong about all of it. Are you?”
My question, however, wasn’t to engender fear. I genuinely wanted to know — not what if but was he prepared to be wrong?
Because writers…we pick at bones. We lift tarps to see “what in the name of GOD that smell is,” and we live in the most uncomfortable skins imaginable: our own.
But we also live in your skin, too, if you’ll let us.
Peace out all you Korihors and Korihas of Mormondom. May Nephite gold spill forth from all those expired potato-pearl cans in your food storage, and may the Angel Moroni visit you in your sleep. Or the three Nephites, whatever makes your slide slippery — no judgment.
J.A.
