Mormon and Gay

I've been reading people's responses to the new "Mormon and Gay" website produced by the LDS Church. There's a way in which I haven't really had the luxury of thinking about the new web site in terms of my own personal feelings about it. In my role as president of Affirmation, my first reaction to the web site was all about the impact I thought the web site would have on the community I am trying to serve (we're still dealing with a lot of trauma from the events of the past year), and whether or not the web site could advance a profitable dialog between LGBT people and straight/cis- people in the LDS Church (I think it can, though that dialog will still require a lot of work on the part of everybody, and a lot of the LGBT folks are really tired and hurting).

It just so happened that the web site came out in the midst of a very tender moment in my life, the day after my husband went through an intense day of surgery to receive a kidney transplant. Through that whole process I was very aware of his (of our) mortality, and just how extremely fragile life is and how infinitely precious Goran is to me, and the way in which over the course of nearly 25 years of life together I don't even really know any more how to separate "me" from him, from us. One of the most sacred moments in my life has now become the moment he finally started to come out of the anesthesia to a state of full consciousness.

I had been there by his side for several hours holding his hand, and even though he couldn't open his eyes, when he first realized it was me there, he started to sob. He just sobbed! And then hours later when he could finally speak, he pulled me up close to him, and he whispered, "You've always been here for me!" I replied, "Yes. I love you." Suddenly he began sobbing again. He told me he didn't feel worthy of my love. I replied that I didn't feel worthy either. We both forgave each other and then wept together, enveloped by the most incredible warmth and peace, absolutely nothing hidden or held back, absolutely nothing to come between us, and I felt like I had never experienced a more pure emotion than the total, unconditional love we expressed for one another in that moment. And I realized that love is so powerful precisely because of how it forgives, and how it teaches us our worthiness. And I felt God present there, smiling, saying: "See! You've finally understood what it is to be one with somebody!" It was this incredible, sacred moment.

The Church is where I learned the Gospel. And the Gospel taught me about grace, it taught me about repentance, it taught me about love, personified in Christ. But I didn't really fully understand these things until I had Goran as my teacher. And I couldn't be in this path or have Goran as my travel companion if it hadn't been for God, lighting the way, teaching me, protecting me, prompting me, comforting me. And then teaching, protecting, prompting and comforting us. Blessing us.

So I don't know what to make of certain teachings that are presented as absolute and unchangeable by Church leaders right now. It seems to me that there is a larger truth (of which the Church's doctrine on marriage is a subset) that encompasses not just my personal experience but the experience of countless other LGBT folks and the love that we might be privileged to share with a significant other, whether that other is of the same or a different sex. And I hope and pray that the Church's truth will some day be large enough to encompass that whole truth.

For me, that's not different than any other aspect of the Gospel as we currently have it, which, if I understand the project of the Restoration writ large, is a project of enabling us to progressively encompass ever and ever larger truths, until we're capable of comprehending everything God comprehends. We're not there yet. So I'm willing to walk with the Church for as far as it will let me, and hope we can all get there together. I'm still very imperfect, and I need the Church to continue to help me in the process of perfecting myself.

I think the new web site is trying to expand the boundaries of what people are willing to encounter and think about, and so I enthusiastically support it and embrace it. I won't condemn it for its shortcomings. I love the movement in the web site which is for the most part in the direction of listening. I hope we'll all find the grace both to tell our truths and to listen, and if the web site helps us do that then it's served its purpose.

Well Wishes for the New Year

In the last week I've been called delusional, a liar, manipulative, a giver of false hope, someone akin to Jewish Nazi collaborators, and a victim of Stockholm syndrome. I am maligned by faithful, orthodox Mormons and defenders of the LGBT community alike.

The one thing all my detractors have in common is that they think they know everything there is to know about Mormonism and being gay. Fortunately I don't know anything about either of those things. All I know -- and these things I know with unshakeable certainty -- is that I am gay, that the Church is true, that my marriage to my husband is a blessing from God, that God loves me fiercely and is the vital presence in my life, and that all will be well: for me, for my husband, for our families, and for the Church. All will be well (even when things don't go well) in this life and in the next, if we have a mustard seed worth of faith, hope and Christian mercy for each other. These things God has assured me, and I am determined to prove them, not through skillful argument but through a simple life. Whether it is proven in my lifetime or not I trust God in any event.

I wish well to all, including all of you who have said some very uncharitable things about me. I wish for you only what I wish for myself, namely, peace and love in this world and in eternity.

The New Handbook

I would not have been surprised by a change in the LDS Church's General Handbook of Instructions that required Church discipline for individuals in same-sex marriages. Many of us have actually been waiting for that shoe to drop.

I guess I was a bit surprised to see being in a same-sex marriage labeled as apostasy.

What really made my heart sink was to learn that the child of a gay couple cannot receive a name and a blessing in the Church. A child of a gay couple cannot be baptized or confirmed, ordained, or recommended for missionary service unless they are of legal age and do not live with their parents, and unless, in an interview with a Church leader they disavow the practice of same-gender cohabitation and marriage.

It is almost as if same-sex marriage has now been officially labeled an infection that must be cut from the body at all costs. If the children can't be separated from the infected tissue, then they are cut off too.

*****

A dear friend of mine messaged me minutes after the news hit the queer Mormon social media. "Talk me down," she pleaded, "Lots of angry tears right now."

For the first time, it was hard to see even a glimmer of a silver lining anywhere.

What really upset me was the children.

Surely the Church would never prioritize boundary maintenance over ministry to children.

I hear Jesus upbraiding his apostles, "Forbid them not to come unto me."

That to me was the sign that there must be something wrong with this. This can't be the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a culture of fear. It is cultural war.

*****

Shock and the hurt... I was on the phone with my husband. Verbally, he shrugged his shoulders. What should I expect? I ache right now at the thought of a husband and a son permanently alienated from the Church that I love. I am shocked that because of our love, they might be forbidden to come unto Christ.

And yet, I can't feel hopeless or despondent about this. A lot of people I know were hoping to see the Church's stance on homosexuality change gradually toward greater openness, with a first step being bishops simply welcoming same-sex couples to worship without excommunicating them. I have always known, deep down inside, that progress would not occur in this way.

There has been deep and dramatic change in the LDS Church in relation to this issue: not in terms of policy or doctrine, but in terms of attitudes. Mormons have crossed a threshold that is making it increasingly impossible for them to think of their gay family members, neighbors and friends as "other," as "apostate." A critical mass of Mormons know first hand that our love doesn't look that much different from theirs, that our families are as much a shelter from the storm for us as theirs are for them. They've seen our hopes and dreams, and our faith, our love for Jesus Christ intertwined with our love for our families. They've only just started to come to grips with the cognitive dissonance that realization is creating.

The cognitive dissonance just got a lot worse.

On Being Found

Talk given at the Affirmation conference in London, UK, Saturday, June 20, 2015

I often hear LGBT folks talk about “reconciling” our sexuality with our faith. What do people mean when they say that? Do they mean finding a way to be OK with being lesbian or gay or bi and a person of faith? Do they mean finding a way to be OK with having a same-sex relationship and being a person of faith? Does it mean we adapt our faith to suit our life choices? Or do we adapt our life choices to conform to our faith? Or is it some combination of both?

As I've matured, my concept of what faith is has changed. As a young adult, my faith consisted of a set of very clearly defined doctrines along with a set of very clearly defined rules. I knew exactly what it was, and I knew it had been bequeathed to me more or less directly from God. I wasn't aware of how every time someone taught me a Gospel principle, even if they taught it to me correctly, I was interpreting what they taught based on my own assumptions.

The other day, my husband and I were at the British museum. I saw a glass case full of a bunch of statues. The statues had been found in Cyprus buried in a pit, each with a unique, though very similar, inscription. One inscription, for example, said, “These statues are dedicated by Batshalom, daughter of Marzyhai, son of Eshmounadon, for her grandchildren... to fulfill the vow of their father Marzyhai... to the god Reshef Mikal. May the God bless them.” The pit had been full of statutes, each with their own inscriptions, presumably tossed into it over the course of centuries by many different people. The name of the god to whom these statues were dedicated changed, but the practice remained the same.

It struck me that, on the one hand, this represented a certain piety and devotion. They believed in God. They sought God's blessings. They made offered a sacrifice – in this case a statue – as a token of their desire to please God. Were the prayers of these people that much different from my own daily prayers for God's blessings on me and my family? Were they any less pious?

At the same time, it struck me as presumptuous and even superstitious. How would God be pleased by a statue being tossed into a pit? What kind of god were they praying to? Who is Reshef Mikal? Apparently, according to one scholar, he was a god of “smiting,” often portrayed as armed and menacing, his name meaning flame, lightning, heat, pestilence or inflammation; redoubtable, awesome, terrifying or fearsome; a great god, a god of the sky, an everlasting god; a lord of arrows and pest. Were their ideas about God any more superstitious or presumptuous or idolatrous than mine?

As I have matured, I have grown in my yearning for an authentic relationship with God, not with a god of my understanding or suppositions or presumptions, not a god I could serve by making up some sort of offering intended to appease or bribe or please him, but a real, living God, who might ask difficult and unexpected things of me if I seek him “with full purpose of heart, acting no hypocrisy and no deception before God, but with real intent, repenting of [my] sins” (2 Nephi 31:13).

While we were in the British Museum, I saw a bust of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and next to it a bust of his male lover Antinous. I was intrigued by the inscription under Antinous' bust: “Antinous was Hadrian's lover. He was in his mid teens (the normal Roman marrying age) when he met the emperor in the 120s AD. After his Mysterious death in the Nile in AD 130, Hadrian publicly mourned him. He erected shrines and statues of him as youth, man and even as a god – the Greek Dionysos or the Egyptian Osiris.”

I am intrigued by this evidence of a committed gay relationship in ancient times. At one time, I might have considered this story as a kind of validation of my own relationship with my husband, as proof of the existence of homosexuality in all cultures and periods of history, as evidence of tenderness and devotion among individuals who love each other in this way. But of course it is not a validation. Even though Hadrian is considered one of the “five good emperors,” and his relationship with Antinous appears to have been free from corruption or abuse – it seems to have been truly loving – Hadrian was no more nor less a sinner than I, not more nor less capable of being mistaken about something truly important than I. No one else's life can serve as a validation or justification for the choices I make in my life.

There have been points in my life when I have felt truly lost, when everything I thought I knew seemed to be turned upside down; when all of the fixed points in my life no longer seemed fixed; when I didn't know who to turn to or where to go or how to proceed. There was a point in my life where I genuinely, honestly felt angry at God. It was in that moment of anger and pain and darkness of the soul that God reached me – in a way that I knew it was real, and I knew it was God. When people ask me how I knew, I could try to describe the experience. But I think the best thing to say is to confine myself to the statement that God spoke to me in a way that I knew it and I could not deny it. And God spoke to me insistently and persistently, demanding my attention and demanding a decision. I could choose to do what the Spirit was guiding me to do – which in this case was to start attending the LDS Church again after 19 years away from it – and as long as I listened to the Spirit and continued to follow it, I would continue to hear and to have the Spirit with me. Or I could ignore it and dismiss it, and the Spirit would depart from me. It was my choice, but I knew what I needed to do.

This moment of grace in my life, when God spoke to me, is the starting point for me. Everything comes back to this. In the last ten years of my life's journey since then, I have learned important things.

First, I couldn't take it for granted that there was a way of reconciling my sexuality and my faith. I realized that faith, if it was anything worth having, was all encompassing. It could demand anything and everything of me. It is about taking up our cross and following the example of a Savior who taught that if we seek to save our lives we will lose them, a Savior who did not withhold his own life, to join disciples who gave their lives in order to follow him. Perhaps my sexuality can't be reconciled with my discipleship. I can't know at the outset of the path. I should be prepared to cut off a hand if it offends... A metaphor for avoiding actions that would alienate me from God. I should be prepared to pluck out an eye if it offends... A metaphor for changing my perspective, my point of view, if my view of God is distorted. There is no reconciliation with anything that turns me off of the path toward God. That has had to be my starting point.

But from that starting point I understand that I can't know in advance what those offending things will be. I can't assume that just because some leader has said something, or even because many leaders have repeated that something, because everybody thinks a certain way, or because a scripture says something that strikes me a certain way, I should take any of that at face value. There's a discernment process that is life-long that needs to take place within the context of my relationship with God, within the context of discipleship to Christ.

I could talk about my relationship with my husband and my relationship with the Church. But in talking about these things I couldn't talk about any sort of resolution or reconciliation. I am blessed in both relationships. I love my husband more now and am more happy in our love now than ever before in my life. It is a blessed relationship. We have found so much joy in raising a foster son, and watching him mature to adulthood and find his way in life. My family is a blessing from God and is blessed by God and I thank God for them. I have a testimony of the Church. I believe in the restoration of the priesthood and I believe our leaders are called by God. I've had profound experiences with that, and I can't deny it. I've met with an apostle of the Lord and counseled about my situation, and he has counseled me to continue to do what I am doing, and he's laid his hands on me and blessed me to continue to follow the Holy Spirit in my life and to fulfill my life's calling. My stake and ward leaders and the members of my ward have been a blessing to me. They love my husband Göran and they respect our relationship and they have never said or done anything to detract from it or to discourage us.

But I remain excommunicated from the Church, so that conflict in my life remains unresolved. There are different ways the seeming contradictions between the blessedness of my family life and my testimony of the Church could be reconciled. For example, my father is utterly convinced that the prophet will inevitably receive a revelation that would permit relationships like mine and Göran's to be sealed in the temple and become part of the great chain of families that connect all the families of the earth. My dad has a testimony of that. And many indicators in my life and many personal experiences point in that direction. But those types of reconciliation are contingent, they are uncertain, until such a revelation has been received. So I live my life in a kind of limbo at the moment.

On Wednesday, Göran and I drove down to Mont Saint-Michel in France, and we hiked up to the abbey there. And in the main sanctuary of the abbey, I saw an ancient bas relief portraying Christ's descent into “limbo” during the time between his death on the cross and his resurrection. I meditated deeply on that image, which portrays Christ fending off demons as he stretches his hand out to lift up souls who are buried and crushed under fallen rocks and beams. I think many of us LGBT folks are crushed by broken cultural expectations and religious beliefs and are by oppressed by political campaigns motivated by animus and misunderstanding. And we're still waiting for Christ to rescue us from that.

But I don't feel hopeless about the lack of resolution or that “limbo.” During a hike around downtown Caen during our trip to France it was cold and damp and cloudy almost all evening. But just as we reached the Church of St. Pierre – the oldest Church in Caen, whose original structure was built by the Normans – the sun came out and covered the entire Church with golden light. It was beautiful. And that sunshine is very much like the Spirit in my life, which continuously breaks through the dark clouds and fills me with light and joy so long as I am willing to follow it.

There was a point in my journey where I felt a sense of dread because I worried that God might ask me to give up my relationship with my husband, which is the greatest source of joy in my life. And when I prayed to God and when I put that on the altar, what God told me is that I needed to focus on anger and on learning to forgive the individuals or the groups of people who had hurt me, including the two bishops whose handling of my situation in 1986 sent me on the downward spiral that almost led to my suicide. I needed to focus on learning to put others before myself, and my relationship with my husband was the context where I had opportunities every day of our life together to practice that. I needed to learn discipline by living the Word of Wisdom and studying the scriptures daily and observing the Law of the Fast (which includes using my material means to help the poor). There were so many things in my life that needed work, so many ways I could improve myself. And I needed to focus on those things, before I worried about finding some ultimate resolution around issues related to my gayness and my faith as a Latter-day Saint.

I believe that resolution is known to the Lord and I believe it is coming, and I believe it will be glorious. And until then, I continue without resolution, one step at a time, trusting the Lord to lead me where he needs me to go.

In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.  

What Is My Story?

I've been participating lately in a "Circle of Empathy," a practice whose goal is to "[help] LGBTQ/SSA and straight Mormons manage sexual/gender/relgious conflicts." This is actually the second time I've participated in a "Circle of Empathy." It's been a powerful thing. The practice involves bringing together a small group of people (10 maximum), who then think out loud together, answering a series of questions that are ordered and structured in a way that is intended to help participants find greater clarity.

The first question is "What is your story?" Working with that question last night (and thinking about our discussion of that question) gave me greater awareness of how my understanding of the basic underlying narrative of my life his changed at crucial turning points.

Here's a story of my "stories"!

Circa 1971. "I am a child of God, and all I need to do in life is follow all the commandments God has given me so I can live happily together with my family and with God for all eternity."

I remember once asking my dad, "If eternity is forever and ever and ever, won't things get boring up there?" I also at times remember feeling overwhelmed with a sense of everything I needed to do to achieve eternal bliss. I remember going for walks in my neighborhood going over the list of all the commandments I could remember, and doing a personal inventory of my success in following them. This remained my basic narrative until some time toward the end of my mission, though a "twist" was introduced sometime circa 1977 when I realized, at about the age of 14, that I was "homosexual" and that that made the job of following all the commandments a bit more complicated than I had hoped or expected.

Summer 1982. "I grew up a good little Mormon boy, and served a mission for the Lord, and that mission taught me that what the Lord expects of me more than anything else to is love others."

The strain of trying to "be perfect" during my mission had taught me some painful lessons. Most of my mission, companions resented my perfectionism. I wanted to get up one hour earlier for scripture study, tract one hour later, believing that that extra hour would be the hour when the Lord would bless us with that "golden investigator." I gradually learned the hard way that compassion is more important than rules.

Early summer 1986. "I am a massive failure, and this is the end of my story."

So, this was the part when all my most cherished hopes and dreams for my life seemed to have shattered. All my obedience and all my love, and I was still more homosexual than ever. And the proof of my complete failure was that my bishop had taken away my temple recommend, had denied me a ward clerk calling, and told me I needed to stop taking the sacrament until I had been masturbation free for 3 months. (And when I'd asked him how I was supposed to do that, his response was, "Get married as soon as possible." Which at that point I knew was impossible.) That was the summer I almost ended my life.

August 1986. "I spent my whole life trying to be perfect, but I didn't realize that all this time, what I had thought was most imperfect about me (my homosexuality) was an intrinsic and beautiful part of me, from 'my inmost parts,' and that God cherished me as I am. God has given me a vision for my family and for my future, and if I trust in him everything will work out for the best."

This new narrative of my life became possible as a result a series of experiences I had in which God spoke to me and reassured me, and included a vision of Heaven and clear guidance from God that I needed to leave the Church for at least a time. This remained my basic narrative for most of the following twenty years of my life. A few years later I came out publicly and became a gay rights activist at the University of Minnesota. A few years after that I met my husband Göran.

At one point, my story was published in volume 3 of The Case Reports of the Mormon Alliance (1997), by Lavina Fielding Anderson and Janice Merrill Allred. That narrative of my life ended with these sentences, "God has freed me in two ways in the last decade of my life: God freed me of the Mormon Church, and God freed me to come out of the closet and accept myself as a gay man. Thanks be to God, I can breathe again."

That narrative carried me a long way, but it started to fray at the edges circa 2003 as I began to wrestle with the sense that things were not progressing in my life as I had hoped. My spiritual and prayer life had declined, and I felt distant from God, even occasionally doubting that God existed. But if God didn't exist, that narrative that had guided my life for almost twenty years didn't make much sense any more. Doubt was creating a new narrative: "Life on planet earth is amazing and beautiful, but also terrifying and painful, and I am part of that stream of life. But is everything destined for the void after all?" I found myself wrestling with a lot of anger in my life.

September 2005. "All the challenges of my life -- coming to love myself, wrestling with faith, meeting my husband and building a family with him -- were preparation for a unique role God has for me in building Zion."

Like the basic narrative of my life that I created in August 1986, this new narrative was also the result of a series of spiritual experiences that also culminated in a vision of Christ. Both of these narratives came into being after a period of doubt or wrestling, which taught me that doubt probably actually has purgative value in God's scheme of things. It may well be a necessary precursor to faith that helps us clear cobwebs and junk away that we've accumulated along the way and that are no longer serving us.

So this new narrative has been my basic narrative for most of the last 7-8 years of my life, bringing me almost to the present. Early on, this narrative included a renewal of my testimony of the truthfulness of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my sense that the Church was Zion in embryo, and that part of my calling was to gather with the Saints and work in my part of the vineyard to build Zion. It has also included a growing sense of awe as I have come to encounter more and more gay and lesbian Mormons who fully embrace themselves as gay, but who also have strong testimonies of the Gospel. Another source of awe is the growing numbers of Church members and leaders at every level who are starting to wrestle with the traditional views of homosexuality that have caused so many like me so much pain and suicide. When I started attending the LDS Church in the fall of 2005, I thought I was the crazy, only one, but it turns out that there were lots of us that God has been calling, one by one, out of the woodwork. And I'm in awe as I see what I can only describe as a "gay Mormon revival." Not the only step in the process of God's purifying us and polishing us to become a more Zion-like people, but an important step nonetheless.

May 2014(?). "All the challenges of my life have been to teach me about the supremacy of God, that we are utterly dependent on him for all that we have and are, and if I am to be a profitable servant I need to forgive myself as well as others, and accept everything life has to offer with child-like awe and confidence."

It feels like the last two years of my life have been another kind of purgative process. This time purging not by doubt, but by challenges. It began with my bike accident and severe head trauma (leading to brain surgery in September 2012), and then continued with a seemingly endless train of health challenges and family crises. I won't (and can't) detail them all here. It's left me humbled. It's shined a spotlight on my personal weaknesses and failings in ways that have sometimes felt overwhelming. But I've also never had the sense that God hasn't been by my side every step of the way. I've never felt so grateful, joyful or hopeful. I've never had a clearer sense of my place in eternity, nor a better sense of "where I've come from, why I'm here, and where I'm going."

Maybe it's too early to know if that's a whole new narrative, or just a deeper element in the narrative that preceded it. Sometimes it takes us a while to reconstruct new narratives. But this narrative shift feels real. It's discernible. In a way, if my circa 2003 and my September 2005 narratives were analogous to my early summer 1986 and August 1986 narratives, this newly emergent narrative of my life is reminiscent of the narrative I discerned after the end of my mission in summer 1982. Which kind of makes sense, since much of my sense of my narrative since September 2005 has been about a new sense of mission in life.

Doubt Your Doubts

Göran and I have had a rough year.

It started with me still recovering from brain surgery to treat a subdural hematoma. Last summer, after a sudden, frightening decline in Göran's health, we learned that he was experiencing kidney failure, and we needed to start him on dialysis and start the process of getting a kidney transplant. (That process has ended up being longer than I had ever imagined it would be. He won't be able to get on the transplant list until next month at the earliest.) Then there were family worries. My mom's decline in health, with Alzheimer's-like symptoms. Our loss of our foster son. A few weeks ago, learning that my sister has been diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma that does not respond to chemo or radiation therapy.

Then, last night, Göran came home tired, wanting to take a nap. At about 7:30 he got up complaining about a sudden, severe headache. I asked him to rate it on a scale of 1 - 10, and he ultimately rated it at 10. He said that it was a "strange" headache -- at the back of his head and neck -- and there was a "strange" pressure. I rushed him to the nearest emergency room. (Fortunately, we live six blocks from one of the best hospitals in Minnesota, Abbott Northwestern.) When I finally left the emergency room at 1:15 a.m., they were keeping him overnight for monitoring and more tests, and they were talking about meningitis, and as I write this post he's consulting with a neurosurgeon, though as of right now (10:51 A.M.) we're still not sure what it is.

That is the latest in a series of events that explain why I haven't been blogging much the last few months... It's been one family crisis after another. But that's not why I'm blogging now. Certainly not to complain.

Still, when bad things happen, I think it is natural to wonder. Or I should say, I have wondered.

*****

Rhetoric in the LDS community has gotten increasingly vitriolic over the issue of same-sex marriage, which has made this all that much more difficult. Let me see if I can explain this.

I know the Church is true. That has been my polar star the last eight years of my life in trying to navigate a way forward. I've discovered -- partly by following very personal spiritual promptings, as well as through some very special priesthood blessings received from my bishop, from my father, from home teachers, and last fall from an apostle of the Lord -- that I have a unique earthly mission. In order to fulfill that mission, I have needed to stay close to the Church and to exercise a certain kind of faith.

I also know my relationship with my husband is true. That has been the ground beneath my feet, it has been the horizon that has made following that polar star of my Church testimony meaningful. The journey of making sense of my gayness and eventually finding and committing to my husband is a journey I have been making from the time I was old enough to be aware of my sexuality, and old enough to begin to figure out the nature of my yearnings for relationship and family. (Since I was roughly 11.)

Last October there were some strong statements issued over the pulpit by leaders I totally in my heart sustain as prophets, seers and revelators, even though I am excommunicated and don't have the right to raise my arm physically to sustain to them. They made very pointed statements about same-sex marriage. And those statements invoked a chorus of pointed "amens" from Church members. I've been reading a chorus of very pointed statements on-line from LDS Church members.

All I can say about these statements is that they feel very "dogmatic" to me. Let me explain what I mean by "dogmatic." They seem to me to be made in order to sustain some doctrinal point which Church leaders and members feel is at risk here, but it's all speculation made at a very theoretical level, that doesn't take into account the full range of real, lived experience of real people. There are a handful of individuals whose experiences are being taken into account, but they are a small minority within the gay, lesbian and bi community. It's not clear to me that we're not talking about a handful of bisexual people who are projecting their experience on gay men and lesbians. And the experience of the majority is being excluded a priori from consideration. Many have been driven from the Church. And the end result is I hear a lot of people "telling" me about my life, about the meaning of my life, and about the nature of my relationship, and what they are telling me makes no sense at all to me. It doesn't resemble at all my experience of my own life. It doesn't feel respectful. It doesn't feel as if people really want to hear me or know me at all because to do so would threaten some doctrinal commitment they think ought to override everything else. Instead of listening to and ministering to real people, there's just talk being generated as grist for a misguided political adventure.

Because, bottom line, despite all the smoke and noise generated in the debate over marriage, nothing is being taken away from heterosexuals. No rights have been denied. No religion has been trampled. And I am a human being. I have intelligence. I have agency. I have sought and received guidance from God in my personal decisions and in my life's journey. And, bottom line, I have not just a right but an obligation to seek knowledge and to live my life according to the best light I am able to obtain. And, by the way, I am also a citizen of the United States and I have a right as a citizen to seek rights and protections for myself and my family, to seek equal rights and equal protections; to demand freedom of conscience, and the freedom to pursue inalienable rights endowed on me by my Creator, rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Nevertheless, when very pointed statements are being made by Church leaders I sustain, and by members of my Church, I listen. I honestly believe in their love for me. I have had occasion for doubts in the past year; and those kinds of doubts loom with a particular urgency when you are experiencing a series of health and family trials.

*****

So last night, I slept alone in my bed because my husband was in the hospital. And these were some of the kinds of thoughts I was having in the darkness of the pre-dawn hours of a cold Minnesota winter: How serious is this? Is he going to live? If he dies, what does it mean for us? Do I commit to be celibate the rest of my life and try to get my Church membership reinstated? What does this mean about our relationship? Was it all a mistake? Were we misguided to get legally married? Am I paying some price for this wrong decision? Will we be eternally alone in the next life?

So I got up this morning after about four hours of sleep. I got on my knees and I started praying. And here is what God said to me: Do you remember after you got legally married in California, in response to my direct commandment to you to do so, after you returned home to Minnesota with your husband and your son Glen, and you were praying alone in your room, and I told you that because of your obedience to me, you could now call upon the powers of Heaven as a husband and as a father -- as a head of your family -- to bless your husband and your son? And do you remember last night, when you were weeping in the emergency room and praying for help, and I told you to do the same, and you doubted it, because you thought it could not possibly be right in light of the statements by Elder Oaks and Elder Nelson at the last conference? I'm telling you now: You and your family are blessed and protected by me. Don't worry about what other people say. I will deal with them in my own way. I'm telling you again: you may call on the powers of Heaven on behalf of your family. And now is the time for you to do so on Göran's behalf.

So I prayed, and I was filled with a warmth as I did so. I prayed that he would be completely healed of whatever affliction currently has him stranded at the hospital; and I prayed for health and vigor to return to him; and I prayed for him to have a long, happy life. And I saw certain things. I saw Göran and me growing old together, and spending our old age in service together. To me we looked like missionaries; though all I can say for sure is we looked old, and we looked like we were engaged in community service to others. And I saw that there was not going to be a long period of time on earth when I was separated from him by death; I saw that I would spend all but a very small portion of my life on earth united with him. And I saw us in the next life too. I saw that in the eternal kingdom we were part of a large, extended family that cherished us; that both our families -- my husband's family and my family -- all cherished us; and that Göran and I were the link between our two families. I saw that gay couples in the next life were considered special, and that a family considered itself very lucky to have a gay couple as part of their family; and that those families that had cherished and cared for and loved their gay family members received blessings and glory not available to those who hadn't. That's what I saw.

When I got up from my knees, I realized my face was wet with tears, and I was filled with this incredible warmth that radiated from my inmost being and filled me up. And I felt the Spirit prompting me to write this all down, which I did in my journal.

*****

The last year and a half has been tough. I feel like we've been wrung through some awful mill, and I'm not sure it's quite done yet, though whatever we have to face, I'm willing to face it with patience if I know God will be with us, which this morning I can unconditionally say I know he will be.

None of the major decisions that I've made in my life have been made without seeking guidance from God. It was God who led me to resign my Church membership in 1986. It was God who led me to open myself to the possibility of a relationship with a man in 1988. It was God working in Göran that brought us together in 1992. Göran always "knew" we were "supposed" to be together, and he has been the guiding light in our relationship. It was God who led me to come back to the Church in 2005; and when my testimony of the Church and the seeming conflict between that and my relationship with Göran led me to question myself, it was God who reminded me in 2006 that I must commit to Göran. It was God who led me to insist that we get married at the first opportunity that marriage became available (in California, the summer of 2008). It was God who paved the way for that by helping us find his long lost birth certificate, and with it, his long lost family in Memphis, Tennessee (all of whom are busy praying for him right now). It was with God's help I fought for our marriage here in Minnesota last year, in 2013. These are all things I know.

And yet, I still worried, wondered and doubted... Because of health and family trials, some of which have been more painful than I can really recount here. And because of a vitriolic debate that is creating deep pain among LGBT Mormons, and much pain, anxiety and doubt among members of the Church.

When I prayed, when I turned to God, I was always comforted. God kept reminding me that this was an opportunity for my faith to be strengthened. I was still afraid. At some level, I understood. That's the nature of many of life's trials. Sometimes we have to feel our way forward on our hands and knees in the dark and cold.

But this morning, I did remember those kind, generous words of President Dieter F. Uchtdorf, that we must doubt our doubts, not our faith.

There's no faith that's meaningful or possible if I doubt myself or my ability to hear God's voice or if I doubt that God has delivered me and my husband from adversity before, or that he will deliver us again.

Some day, the faith and the stories of the many of us that the Church refuses to hear right now will be heard.

Experiment on the Word

What I am about to write here is addressed primarily to fellow LGBT folks, though straight friends and allies are welcome to read and consider!

Seven years ago, I began an experiment.  Though we often associate the word "experiment" with science, I think it is a good word.  It's a word the Book of Mormon prophet Alma uses to discuss faith, so I think it's a good word.  But I also like the word with its current scientific connotations.

I should say I was tasked with performing an experiment in an encounter I had with the Holy Spirit in August 2005.

The experiment has had to do with testing some fundamental religious principles I was raised with.

I was taught as a young man that gross immorality will completely cut us off from the Spirit of the Lord.  I was also taught that there is a difference between the work and the influence of the Holy Spirit -- which is universal -- and the Gift of the Holy Ghost, which belongs by right only to confirmed members of the Church.  My experience, from the time I first learned these doctrines till the present day, has generally confirmed the truth of these doctrines.

I was also taught that all forms of homosexual behavior constitute  gross immorality.  In the way I was taught this, no differentiation was made between promiscuous, random sexual encounters among total strangers and a chaste, loving commitment between two life-long partners.  All homosexual behavior was put in the same bucket of gross immorality, and I was promised that it would cut me off from the Holy Spirit.

This is one reason why my discovery of a homosexual orientation (between the ages of 10 and 14) created a kind of spiritual crisis for me, a sense that something had gone terribly wrong in my life.  It's taken me a long time to fully appreciate how Satan uses fear to alienate us -- from God, from others, and from ourselves.  Satan has masterfully sown fear of homosexuality -- in our churches, our families and worst of all in our own hearts -- to reap a terrible harvest of alienation, depression, suicide and loss of faith.  It's time we deprive him of that harvest by setting fear aside.

So at the time the Spirit spoke to me very distinctly and clearly in August 2005, he invited me to "come back to Church."  That's all the Spirit asked me to do.  I made all kinds of assumptions about what "coming back to Church" meant.  Maybe I would have to leave my partner?  After much heartache and wrestling, the Spirit reassured me.  "Just come back to Church."  That was in September 2005, when I finally gave in and acknowledged I would do what the Spirit wanted. 

First, I gave in to the Spirit because, after two months of wrestling, I finally realized that what the Spirit was asking me to do was quite simple.  Sort of like Naaman the Syrian, I had doubted that something so simple could really be of any benefit (2 Kings 5:13).  Second, I did it because only on rare occasions in my life have I experienced a prompting of the Spirit with as much power as I did then.  It filled me with an overwhelming sense of peace and love.  And I recognized that I wanted to keep that.  I hungered for the Spirit's presence to stay with me always, and I knew that eventually it would leave me if I resisted it indefinitely.  So I needed to do what it asked me.

It was then I realized I was beginning a potentially very powerful experiment.  For one thing, I was testing my testimony of the Church.  There had been important junctures in my life since leaving the Church when I had felt the Spirit -- particularly related to some of my experiences coming out and eventually committing to my relationship with my partner.  For a long time I had doubted that the Church could possibly be true because I became convinced that what the Church taught about homosexuality could not possibly be true.  It just did not fit with my own experience of my own homosexuality.  But in August 2005 I had received one of the most powerful promptings of my life -- distinct and undeniable -- telling me to return to the Church.  Did this mean that the Church was true after all?  What would I learn about the Church by coming back to it?  More importantly, how could I possibly find a resolution to the conflict between what I knew about my sexuality and what the Spirit seemed to be telling me about the Church?

Boiled down to the simplest of questions: Could the Church both be true, and I, an openly gay, excommunicated man in a committed same-sex relationship experience a fuller, more powerful presence of the Spirit in my life?

As of this past October, 2012, I have been living this experiment for seven years.  I once read that at the rate cells of our body die and are replaced, at the end of every seven years every cell in our body has been replaced, reborn.  Medieval mystics wrote of the "seven ages" of man, that every seven years we enter into a new phase of our lives, a new stage of development.  At the age of 42, as I was entering the seventh of the seven ages, the Spirit called me back to the Church, and now I contemplate what my life looks like as I come to the conclusion of that stage of my life and enter the next.

What have I learned from this seven year experiment?  What has happened in these seven years since I have been active in the Church?

First of all, I have learned the answer to that "simplest of questions," Could the Church both be true, and I, an openly gay, excommunicated man in a committed same-sex relationship experience a fuller, more powerful presence of the Spirit in my life?  The answer is Yes.

Some will insist this is impossible.  Satan can counterfeit spiritual experiences, they will point out.  Or we can deceive ourselves.  And I will readily concede, this is true.  It's why I've really wrestled.  The contradiction between what the Church teaches and what I know about my relationship with my husband forced me to wrestle with and validate my spiritual experiences.

And here is all I can offer.  Satan may be able to counterfeit a spiritual experience, or we may deceive ourselves.  But counterfeit spiritual experiences or self deception will not have the power to transform our lives for the better.  False spiritual experiences will not produce lasting changes for the good in our lives.  They cannot produce lasting fruit of the Spirit.  "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance" (Galatians 5: 22-23).  Surely, after seven years I am able to judge: What has been the fruit of this path?

I began by gradually incorporating more and more gospel teachings into my life -- living the Word of Wisdom, prayer, daily scripture study, tithing, and so on.  Following promptings of the Spirit, I was applying the principles of chastity to my relationship with my husband.  Those promptings included publicly committing myself to my partner by legally marrying him in California in July 2008, and fighting to prevent our marriage from being constitutionally banned in my home state of Minnesota in 2012.  It will include working to make that commitment binding and legal here in the state of Minnesota by seeking the repeal of our state DOMA law.  For me this is a profoundly spiritual task, because it is a sign of my commitment to Göran, my expression of what it means to live the law of chastity with him.

We became foster parents, and we hope to become adoptive parents.  We discovered Göran's long-lost biological family in Memphis, and have deepened extended family relationships and commitments with my family and with Göran's family.  This has included doing genealogical work.  It has included playing a role in healing broken family relationships.

I have discovered a kind of boldness in bearing my testimony to others.  Over these seven years, I have experienced many powerful spiritual experiences that have strengthened my testimony of the Church, of the Scriptures (the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine & Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price), of Church leaders, and most importantly of the Living Christ and of our Living Heavenly Parents and of the active work of the Holy Spirit in the world today, and of the gifts of the Spirit.  I have literally witnessed (and experienced) miracles through the power of the priesthood.  And I don't hesitate to share these experiences with anyone who will listen!

I have experienced a joy and peace and gratitude and love and patience unlike any I've ever experienced in my life.  So much of the fruit of the Spirit I have experienced, I have experienced within the framework of my loving relationship with Göran, and in our experiences with foster parenting.

Now if someone asked me to compare: What is my experience of the presence and gifts of the Spirit in my life now, compared with what it was during the eighteen years I was away from the LDS Church; and how does it compare with the twenty-three years before that when I was active in the Church?

And the simple, honest answer to that question is I have never, ever in my life experienced a fuller, more powerful, more constant and sustaining presence of the Spirit in my life, ever.  Not even when I was a full member of the Church in good standing, baptized and confirmed and with the "Gift of the Holy Ghost."

I have never felt fuller or happier or more blessed in all my life.  Some days I feel like I will explode!

This past summer, I attended a presentation by John Dehlin and Bill Bradshaw based on their survey of 1600 LGBT/SSA Mormons.  I was particularly intrigued by their discussion of "average" "happiness and well-being" of individuals in particular relationship statuses.  They showed, among other things, that LGBT/SSA individuals who were single experienced the greatest distress and unhappiness, that LGBT individuals who had entered into committed same-sex relationships were considerably happier (close to the norm for married heterosexual couples), and that LGBT individuals who had married legally experienced the greatest level of happiness -- at or even above the average of physically healthy married heterosexual couples.

I remember thinking: true, finding a committed relationship helped me find a greater degree of happiness than when I was single.  (Though, by the way, you have to work at happiness in a relationship! it doesn't just "happen"!)  The ability to legally marry in California definitely brought me to a new stage of commitment, and to a greater sense of satisfaction and happiness in my relationship.  All true.

But if I had to answer the question, what has made the single greatest difference in happiness in my life, I would say it has been returning to Church and renewing my testimony and living the Gospel to the best of my ability.  The increase in happiness I've experienced since returning to the Church seven years ago, in October 2005, feels almost exponential.  Nothing else even compares to it.  I consider my testimony to be my greatest, most precious gift.

I once wondered...  Will this sense of the Spirit's presence leave me?  Will I lose this peace and joy and gratitude?  Will I get bored?  Will this experiment fail some day soon, and will I some day quietly drop out of Church feeling I hadn't found what I came in search of after all?

And the answer is an unqualified No. The joy I find in the Gospel is an ever renewing source of life and happiness.  I love the Church with my whole heart.  My heart aches when I must pass a Sunday away from the Saints.  I love the special outpouring of the Spirit I can experience when I am at Church (though I feel the Spirit in my everyday life, no matter where I am)! After seven years, I have a wealth of deep friendships with my sisters and brothers in Christ.  I hunger for prayer, for scripture study.  Every time I turn to God in meditation or study, I find my whole body renewed and filled with light.  Could I give it up, turn away?  No.

Could I lose this?  Yes.  Living the Gospel is movement on a path back to our Heavenly Parents.  If we are not actively taking a next step, we get lost.  Have I taken some mis-steps?  Yes, ample.  Made mistakes?  Many! 

But I know something now I didn't know seven years ago.  It is a powerful knowledge.  My life will forever be different, no matter what I do.  And I pray for the grace to stay true to what I know.

So I'm left with a kind of contradiction, at least in relation to fundamental teachings I'd received as a youth.  While I have learned (through experience) that immorality does cut us off from the Holy Spirit, a loving commitment between two people of the same-sex -- especially one sealed by a conscious, public commitment or even by legal marriage -- does not seem to fall in that category of immorality, gross or other.  What I've learned is that not only does my relationship with Göran not seem to cut me off from the Spirit, but deeper levels of faithfulness and commitment to Göran seem to deepen my sensitivity to the Spirit.

Also, I'm excommunicated from the Church, but I seem to experience a deeper, more vibrant, dynamic and sustaining relationship with God than ever before in my life, even when I was a baptized member of the Church with the Gift of the Holy Ghost.  I have had spiritual witnesses of the Church's doctrines regarding the "first principles and ordinances of the Gospel," and so I've scratched my head about this one.  But my best guess is that perhaps I am supposed to be able to be a baptized and confirmed member of the Church, and the Lord has extended me a special grace on account of the fact that it is not my fault I am unable to be one.  And I figure the Lord just expects patience from me until he, on his timetable, makes this right.  That's all I can figure.

Despite this special grace, I do feel a hunger to be a member not just in my heart, but in the official records of the Church.  I've confided some of the pain I've felt over this with close friends of mine, and they have comforted me the best they can.  The Spirit has prompted me to pray for membership in the Church, and I have and do.  Though I've also received reassurances from the Spirit to be patient and not feel sorry for myself.  And then I realize, I have received such an abundance of grace, it is definitely wrong (probably a sin) for me to be impatient on this score, and I've even found myself having to repent for this on occasion.

I love the Church, and I pray for the Church and its leaders and its missionaries.  I also pray for the LGBT community.  I pray for the Spirit to be poured out on us.

And I pray that if you feel the Spirit inviting you experiment on the Word, you'll give it a go.

Do it in the spirit of science!  (The word "science" coming from a Latin word which means "to know"!)

Ordeals

So in the immediate aftermath of my bike accident, I experienced a rush of gratitude.  First of all, I was very aware that the accident could have been much, much worse.  I could have experienced severe brain damage or could even have died.  And yet, here I was, able to get up and walk out of the emergency room with my faculties intact.  Yes, I had a bunch of staples in my head, yes I ached from head to toe, and was on heavy meds to stave off pain from a healing concussion, and yes, I still couldn't remember much of the preceding eight hours.  But I was fundamentally sound, and was fully confident that I would achieve a full recovery.

Also, as soon as I was lucid enough to check out my Facebook account and my email, I was immediately aware of an outpouring of love and support from near and far.  My husband and our son Glen found numerous ways to remind me how dear I was to them.  I received very concrete support from close friends in the form of rides to and from the hospital and elsewhere, babysitting for our foster son, a loaned car (to help with getting our new foster son to and from school while we wait for the school system to sort things out with the bus), and meals brought by sisters from the Relief Society in my ward, by a brother in my ward, and by an old friend.  Friends came to visit, bringing or sending flowers, cards, chocolate cake and chocolate (!) and well wishes.  People called or emailed to let me know they were praying for me.  A friend of mine in my ward communicated my desire for a blessing to other members of the Priesthood, and so, shortly after the accident two brothers showed up to administer to me.  I can't begin to express my gratitude for all this: the very concrete physical and spiritual assistance, both for me and for my family, as well as the expressions of love reminding me that I actually matter to people.

All of that support became increasingly important because, despite a vivid awareness of how lucky I had been and how blessed I was,  in the days after the accident I also found myself fighting creeping stress, guilt, anxiety, and depression.

It began first in the form of literal terror, as vague memories of the accident and aftermath began returning.  These memories are still dream-like, but they are terrifying -- perhaps the reason they were blocked out in the first place.

In the immediate hours after the accident, I had a distinct feeling that God had spared me, God had protected me from the consequences of my own stupidity, and that was a good (though humbling) feeling.  God had even spared me from memory of the accident itself, and instead filled me with a sense of being cared for and sustained, and with knowledge that all would ultimately be well.  But in the following days, as memories of the accident filtered into my consciousness, I began to experience doubt.  Hadn't God also allowed this terrible, potentially deadly accident to happen in the first place?  Healing was going to be a longer, more difficult process than I had anticipated.  What if this were a punishment or a warning of some sort?  Had I done something to deserve God's anger?

Then there were the feelings of inadequacy that began to crop up.  My weakness and tiredness in the healing process has hindered my ability to function as a husband or a foster father.  Not only has meeting very basic needs taken literally everything out of me, but we have had to rely on the generosity of others to help meet basic needs -- like food and transportation.  That was undermining my sense of self-sufficiency, of competence.  I found myself wondering, "Why did this have to happen just after we became foster parents?"  I wondered if we should have become foster parents of a ten-year-old boy in the first place.

Yes, I kept telling myself the injuries were only temporary, and I would quickly experience a full recovery.  But I even began to experience doubts about that.  I began to encounter information on-line about concussions, and started learning about people whose recoveries had literally taken months or even years.  Some who had never recovered from all of the negative effects.  I began to worry.  I couldn't afford that.  What about work?  What about my teaching in the spring?  What about our foster son?

There were even moments when my primary support -- my relationship with my husband -- seemed to be breaking down.  For one thing, I became aware that there was a moment through this whole ordeal where Göran really believed that he might have lost me.  So he had had to deal with the terror of that potential loss, and his immediate response had been expressions of overwhelming relief and joy that I was OK.  I received from him some of the purest expressions of love I've ever received from him.  Which I really needed.  But then in the aftermath, he also began to experience feelings of potential abandonment.  I had almost left him.  Which started to come out in expressions of anger and blame.  "How could you be so careless as to ride your bike without a helmet?"  How dare you almost die and leave me?

Of course my recovery was putting extra pressure on him to pick up the slack caused by my inability to take care of things.  He took the day after the accident off work, to stay home and care for me and our foster son.  But then he went back to work the following day, and I remember feeling a kind of despair, thinking: "I'm not ready to deal with this on my own yet!"  Meanwhile, he was back at work, but with extra errands to run, extra work at home at the end of a long, stressful day. He dealt, I dealt, we have been dealing.  But it's been stressful.  There have been points where he felt like he'd been thrust into a "single-parenting" role.  And he expressed that in a way that I interpreted as blame.  And we've actually argued, and some words were said that probably shouldn't have been said.  And of course when I'm already feeling overwhelmed and physically exhausted, those kinds of arguments feel especially crushing.

And so the accumulation of terror (even just remembered terror), stress, guilt (including blaming myself for my own stupidity for not wearing a bike helmet), anxiety, fear for the future...  All of that started to simmer like some poisonous witch's brew, condensing into depression.  For the first time since my junior year in college, when I was at the low point in terms of dealing with my homosexuality, I was starting to have very dark thoughts.  Not full-blown suicidal ideation, but just passing thoughts like, Maybe it would have been easier or better if the accident could have been just a little worse.  Or, Life is just a little bit too hard.  The worst moments were the moments where I was starting to doubt the very things that matter most to me: my family and my faith.  What if God were punishing me for building my life around a same-sex relationship?

This accident has been harder than I ever could have expected it would be.

So, if I'm writing this now, it's partly because the worst is past.  (At my really low points, I couldn't even really write, which for me is pretty terrible, since I write basically like I breathe.)  If I'm sharing this, it's because I want this out there for anybody who has to go through this kind of trauma.  I feel it's my duty to just reassure anyone else who has to experience this that after an accident like this, it gets worse.  But then, miraculously, after the healing gradually starts to pick up steam, it gets much, much better.

Saturday, Göran and our foster son and I went on our first major family outing together (and my first major outing period) since the accident.  We went to see The Odd Life of Timothy Green.  The movie was suggested by our foster son.  And if you've seen the movie, you know that it's basically about being a foster parent.  And I was a sobbing mass through about 50% of the film, which reminded me that life is all about the love that we give to others, and it doesn't matter if I had to completely rearrange every other priority in my life -- give up my writing, my teaching, my whatever -- just so I could be a parent, it would be worth it.  I was beautifully reminded, life is worth living.  It is worth whatever it costs, just to love and care for whomever God sends us during our short time here.

Later that day, I also went on my first bike ride since the accident.  It was only four blocks, to and from a local food market to pick up a needed dinner ingredient.  I wore my helmet and rode exceedingly carefully.  And it felt a little bit weird.  But it was proof of my recovery.  Scabs have been falling off of my head, my elbows, my hips, my toes.  I haven't needed my pain meds since before the weekend.

Yesterday I went to Church for the first time since the accident.  My bishop asked me to report on my recovery in Priesthood Meeting.  I received many gentle hugs and hand clasps and expressions of love and gratitude from old and new friends in the ward.

One of the sisters who had brought food, and her father, who had also brought food, each bore their testimonies.  Here's the thing: I knew their testimonies of the Gospel, not from what they were saying over the pulpit, but from the concrete acts of compassion they've performed for me both before and after the accident.  And I just wept.  The Gospel is most real in the loving action it inspires.

And, in the final analysis, this accident, and the healing process it has required, have sounded new depths of my own faith, and shown me new aspects of my own testimony.  My scripture study the last few days has focused on 1 Corinthians 12-14, about how there's a unique, valued place and role for each of us in the Kingdom of God, for each of our gifts, but how -- regardless of what our individual gifts may be -- the higher law toward which we are all striving is that Pure Love of Christ.  This was a message I especially needed to be reminded of.

In my need, there's been an added depth in prayer, a humility before God it took this accident to teach me.  Sometimes we learn best how to trust God when reminders of how weak we are in ourselves make trust in him our only choice.  Sometimes we learn best how to love others through our own pain, which reminds us what it means to hurt, and how it feels when others reach out with hands of healing.

And in response to my doubts, my fear that God was punishing me...

In the aftermath of the accident, I found it extremely hard to remember my dreams.  It's not that I wasn't dreaming...  I was having very vivid dreams.  That much I knew.  But because of the concussion, I was waking up in a sort of fog, and I was forgetting my dreams much more quickly, and not feeling energetic enough to actually grab my laptop or a notebook to write them down.  The first dream I remembered clearly enough, and had enough energy to write down was on September 1.  It was one of those dreams where I had a very clear sense that it was a spiritual dream.  After I woke up, I prayed, and the Spirit spoke very clearly to me.  Following instructions I received during the blessing that was administered to me, I reread my patriarchal blessing recently, and the Spirit spoke to me through that as well.  And while the personal revelation I've received through the dream, and re-reading my patriarchal blessing, and more directly through the Spirit is very personal, I will say any lingering doubts that this accident was a divine punishment of any sort have been laid to rest.

This has been a lesson about trust, for which it's taken me time to become grateful (!!).  Probably my best lesson has been that busyness does not make us good people.  I could only learn that by being forced into quiescence.  Trust, patience, hope, caring and awareness of our interdependence do make us good people.  The very best kind of people we can be.

Still plenty to learn.  Wish me luck!

A Gay Mormon Spiritual Autobiography

I've shared different parts of my story in detail on my blog.  These are the major milestones in my spiritual autobiography.
__________
 
I was born in Provo, Utah in 1963, though I didn't really grow up in Utah Mormon culture. On my dad's side I am a fifth-generation Mormon, but my dad's parents moved from Utah to Pennsylvania during the Great Depression, and my dad was born in Pittsburgh in 1936. My mom was from Finland, and was a convert to the Church. I was basically a BYU baby. When I was four, after my dad finished his graduate degree in Chemistry at "the Y," we moved back out east.  I grew up in upstate New York, a few miles from Palmyra; near the Sacred Grove, the Joseph Smith Home and the Hill Cumorah.

The Church was everything to me growing up. My family were very active and very committed to the Church. Growing up in an area where Mormons were only a very small minority (I was usually the only Mormon, or one of two or three other Mormons in my school), we didn't take anything about our faith for granted. I did experience some teasing and bullying in junior high – first for being Mormon, later for being perceived to be gay.

I first became aware of my feelings of attraction to members of my same sex at about the age of 10 or 11. It wasn't till I was 14 that I consciously made the connection between these feelings and being a “homosexual.” (I looked that word up in a dictionary, and concluded that that was what I was.) At about that time, like many gay boys in the Church, I became much more serious about my faith, hoping that my faithfulness would help me overcome or banish my feelings of same sex attraction. I became a star seminary pupil and began seriously studying the scriptures and praying every day. At the age of 16, I started going on bi-weekly splits with the missionaries and began preparing myself mentally and spiritually for a mission. When I was 18, I went to BYU on a Kimball Scholarship. I majored in history, having prayerfully come to the conclusion that one of my callings in life was to become a Church historian.

I served my mission in the Swiss Geneva Mission. My feelings of attraction to my companions were a source of anguish at first. My first night in the mission field I wept as I prayed to God, asking him how I could possibly serve him with these feelings. The Spirit reassured me, and I made it through my mission, serving honorably and baptizing five new members in a mission where the average at the time was one baptism per missionary per mission.

After my mission, I came back to BYU, where my first BYU bishop informed me that my number one duty was to get married and start building a family. Basically, that's when things started to fall apart for me. My feelings of same-sex attraction were stronger than ever. I had no interest in dating. I did essentially force myself to participate in the BYU dating scene, and dated a number of women. But I slowly sank into a depression. In my junior year, my bishop took away my temple recommend, denied me a ward clerk calling, and told me to stop taking the sacrament until I could be masturbation free for four months. When I asked him how I could possibly do that, he told me to get married as soon as possible. After that, I basically gave up. I couldn't bring myself to pray any more. I went through the motions attending Church, but didn't think I believed in anything any more. By the time I went home for the summer at the end of my junior year, I had a plan to commit suicide.

I was deterred from this plan by the loving attention of a next door neighbor who was an Episcopal priest. Later that summer, while on an internship in Helsinki, Finland, I felt the Spirit inviting me to pray. I got on my knees and poured my heart out, and essentially “came out” to God. God told me he already knew I was gay because he knew me from my inmost parts, he knew how I was made. There was nothing wrong with me, and he loved me and was pleased with me. After that, I began to pray and read the scriptures and attend Church with a renewed sense of hope. Though later that summer, I had another experience in which, as I wrestled in prayer with what to do about my homosexuality, what my place was in the Church, I had a visionary experience, in which I was standing with my ancestors before the throne of God. The Lord told me I needed to leave the Church for a time. I was astonished and upset and wept, and was worried about my family, but the Lord reassured me my family would be taken care of. Later that summer, I resigned from the Church. I also left BYU, fearing that if I went back, I might become suicidal again. In response to my letter resigning from the Church, a formal Church court was held on my behalf (in absentia) in my home stake (at that time, in eastern Massachusetts), and I was excommunicated from the Church.

My Finnish heritage led me to become active in the Lutheran Church for a time. I finished my undergraduate degree at Northern Michigan University, and then went on to grad school at the University of Minnesota, completing a Ph.D. in American History, with an emphasis on religious and social history.

In the fall of 1987, during my first semester in grad school, I began a fast. I told the Lord that I would drink water, but I would not eat until I had the answer to a question: Should I seek to marry a woman, or should I be celibate for life? (Being in a same-sex relationship was not on the table in my mind.) The answer came to me on the third day of my fast, as I was crossing a foot bridge over the Mississippi River on the University of Minnesota campus. A voice speaking in my mind and heart very clearly said to me: “Be open to all your options.” I wasn't entirely sure what that meant, but I felt a sense of peace, and I accepted it as the answer I sought from the Lord. Later that evening, after I had broken my fast, I met an openly gay man – the first I had ever known. I was attracted to him and realized I was interested in dating him, and it was at that point I understood the full meaning of what the Lord had told me about being open to all the options.

A few days later, I began coming out publicly to friends and colleagues in grad school, and at the Lutheran Church where I was a member.

Despite the fact that I was now open to dating men, I took the “all options” part of the revelation I had received seriously. I had continued to date women at the University of Minnesota. There was a woman who still showed interest in me even after I had come out of the closet to her. We were on a date one evening, and we talked about the possibility of a relationship. I could tell in the way she spoke that she felt a kind of intensity of desire toward me that I knew I would never, ever reciprocate. My heart broke. I went home that night and thought about it, and then, later that week, hard as it was, I told this woman we could not date again. I scratched that option off the list.

I made arrangements to spend the following summer in a Roman Catholic monastery in France, where a former missionary investigator of mine had become a brother. I realized that if I wanted to consider the possibility of life-long celibacy, there would be no better place to learn about it. I got dispensation from the head of the order to ask any brother any question I wanted, so I talked to them about their sense of call (what led them to want to join the order), and how they managed the celibacy requirement. All of them told me that celibacy was not for me if I were “running away from my sexuality.” Life-long celibacy would only work if I had it as a gift, if I literally felt called to it. At the monastery, I had 4-5 hours a day of prayer, scripture study and meditation, which was ample opportunity for me to petition the Lord and seek my answer about this option. By the end of that summer, it was clear to me that if celibacy was a gift or a calling, I did not have it. Shortly before leaving the monastery, I went for a walk with my friend and former investigator, and we had a conversation about this. After I described to him my sense that celibacy was not my calling, he shared with me that he agreed.  “You have a more apostolic calling," he told me.

Having explored the first two options, and feeling convinced that they were not right for me, I decided it was time to explore the third and final option: a same-sex relationship.

Dating in the gay community was messy. At that time, more casual attitudes toward sex were prevalent. A lot of guys basically initiated a dating relationship with a hook up. You saw someone you were attracted to (at a bar or at some other social event), you'd go to bed with him, and then, if you still liked each other, you'd exchange phone numbers and see where it went from there. You could take a more traditional approach – go on a nonsexual date first. But, basically, if you hadn't fallen into bed with a guy by the second or third date, he was starting to wonder if you were really interested in him.

In all my time dating, I met and dated one guy who seemed to have a more traditional attitude. I was very attracted to him – head over heels infatuated with him. We used to go out country western dancing every Sunday night. We dated for a few months without it ever getting sexual. I began to wonder if he was really attracted to me. Ultimately, he ended up moving to Washington, DC, and we lost touch without me ever really knowing if he reciprocated my feelings at all.

I ultimately entered into the gay dating scene with the attitude, “If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this.” So I accepted and played by the rules as I understood them. Basically, it sucked. It was jarring to share myself with someone physically, to open myself up totally in this sense, only to have my need for a spiritual or emotional connection spurned. To call someone I thought I'd connected with, only never to get a call back.  It left me feeling really empty much of the time. In order to go on, I had to kind of desensitize myself to the emptiness.  I had to start thinking about sexuality more casually.

I was essentially “saved” from this scene by my husband and life partner, Göran. Göran and I met in the expected way – at the Gay 90s, a major gay bar in downtown Minneapolis. We'd seen each other around. I'd been attracted to him and he to me, but neither of us had acted on it until he invited me to dance one night. We went home together.

But Göran early on made it clear that he wanted much more from this relationship than just sex. He still insists to this day that he knew from the beginning I was “the one.” It took me longer to figure out. We dated for a couple of months. Then I broke up with him. Then we started dating again less than a year later after a chance encounter on the University campus.  We've been together ever since. By the time we started our second round of dating, I realized that I was ready for a relationship, and I knew he was the one too. We moved into an apartment together after we'd been dating for a few months.

After living together for a couple of years, Göran insisted he wanted to “get married.” So in 1995, we had a commitment ceremony that was attended by my parents, a couple of my siblings and my grandmother, as well as Göran's mom, stepdad, and siblings, and about a hundred other of our friends from all walks of life. A year later, we bought a house together, the house we currently live in.

Göran and I created a stable life together. Shortly after moving into an apartment together, we started attending Church at a neighborhood UCC congregation. Over the years, we found better and more stable work situations, though, after completing my PhD in 1994, I was unable to find a full-time teaching position, a source of great personal disappointment. Both our families accepted our relationship, and we participated fully in family reunions and holiday celebrations and so on.

I published my book, Take the Young Stranger by the Hand (a history of gay men and the YMCA) in 1998 with the University of Chicago Press. After that, I began to work on a variety of creative writing projects. I was struggling with depression, and my way of working through my depression was my writing. Even though Göran and I were active in a church, I was also struggling with doubt again (as I had been as a young student at BYU), not sure if I believed in God. I couldn't deny the various spiritual experiences I'd had in my life, though I wondered if there were purely psychological explanations for them. My fiction writing dealt with religious and spiritual themes, at first in a very abstract way. But as time went on, I found myself wanting to deal explicitly with my heritage as a Latter-day Saint. As a form of research for my fiction writing, I started reading non-fiction: Mike Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, his books on The Mormon Hierarchy, and Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History. I was self-publishing some of my creative writing attempts (and some autobiographical essays and sermons I had preached in my UCC congregation) on a web site on line.

In late 2004 and early 2005, I was contacted by a former missionary companion of my Dad, who had found me through the web site. We started corresponding on the subject of Mormonism. Actually, our correspondence was mostly in the form of an extended argument. He was encouraging me to consider Mormonism again, and I was explaining to him all the reasons why, as an out gay man in a committed relationship that would be utterly impossible.

In August 2005, on a trip to Utah, I learned that a former BYU professor of mine, Mike Quinn, was going to be speaking at Sunstone. Mike Quinn was one of the few Mormons I'd stayed in touch with more or less continuously in the 19 years since I'd left BYU after almost committing suicide. I had always liked and admired Mike. As a student I had confided in him about some of my spiritual struggles, and I had always been inspired both by his testimony and his historical scholarship. Mike and I agreed to meet at Sunstone, and I decided to attend some sessions of the conference while I was there.

At Sunstone, while attending a session where Lavina Fielding Anderson was speaking, I had a spiritual experience that was so powerful, I could not explain it away in terms of "feelings" or "psychology." There was an undeniable presence of a being I had recognized from childhood as the Holy Spirit. Only a few times in my life had I felt it so strongly. The Spirit spoke to me very clearly and distinctly, and told me it was time to come back to the Church.

I was very troubled and angry about this revelation. I wanted to argue with God. Why now, when there was so much water under that bridge? Furthermore, the Saints would never accept me back. What would this mean for me and my relationship? And so on. I argued for several months after having that experience, but I could not deny the experience. And the Spirit continued to press me. I felt such a sense of peace and happiness when the Spirit spoke to me, and I wanted more of that. And ultimately, I realized, my desire for that peace of the Spirit in my life was greater than my fear of going back to Church. So I started attending the LDS Church again in October 2005. In January 2006, at the prompting of the Spirit, I began to read the Book of Mormon again. By then I had also begun to incorporate prayer back into my life.

I met with my bishop, to discuss my situation with him. I was afraid to meet with him at first. I called my parents and asked them to fast and pray with me before my first meeting with him. (By this time, I had come out to my parents about my renewed testimony.)  It turns out I had nothing to be afraid of. My bishop responded to me with great love and encouragement. He did not pressure me in any way to leave my relationship with my husband. He encouraged me to be as faithful as I could in living gospel principles given the constraints of being excommunicated. That I have done ever since then to the best of my ability.

For some time, after I'd begun attending Church, I continued to wrestle with the question of my relationship with my husband. Each Sunday I attended Church in my ward, I was having powerful spiritual experiences. The Spirit was present in my life in a way I had never, ever experienced before. I realized, I had a profounder testimony of the gospel than I'd ever had in my life. I had a testimony of the Book of Mormon, of Joseph Smith, of the Restoration, but also of the fact that those leading the Church today were called by God. And yet, my relationship with my husband – which I'd entered into as the end result of equally powerful spiritual experiences many years before – seemed to fly in direct contradiction with what those divinely called Church leaders, of whom I had a testimony, were teaching. This created a new kind of spiritual crisis for me.

At first, when I would pray, if my mind wandered into that area of concern or doubt, the Spirit would simply nudge me away from the question. The Spirit would say: Don't worry about that. Just keep doing what you're doing, attending Church, studying the scriptures, praying, living the Word of Wisdom, and so on. That's what the Lord asks of you right now. Don't worry about that other stuff.

There were times when I also had prayed to the Lord and said, in essence, “Thy will be done. I'm not sure if I could leave my partner, but if you require it of me, I trust there will be a way for me to deal with that.”

But at a certain point, I could no longer live with ambiguity and uncertainty. One night we were having a party, and Göran had sent me on some errands, to pick up food for the party. As I went I was in agony. I began pleading with the Lord, and I said, “I need to know. If I'm supposed to leave him, I need to know. I just can't put this off any more. I can't remain in uncertainty.” And at that moment, the Spirit spoke very clearly and unequivocally to me. It told me: Do not, under any circumstances, leave your partner. To do so would be a great sin. Be faithful to him. Take care of your relationship with him. Do everything you can to nurture and care for him. Do not do anything that would push him away or cause him to leave you. That is your duty and your obligation.

In the spring of 2007, Göran and I decided to become licensed foster parents, and in December 2007, our foster son Glen was placed with us. In February 2008, I began to teach American Religious History at United Theological Seminary in New Brighton, Minnesota, finally fulfilling at least in part that sense of calling I had had as a freshman at BYU. In June 2008, Göran made contact with his biological father (and the rest of his biological extended family) in Memphis, Tennessee – an answer to prayers both on my part and on his family's part. (There's a long story behind this, but the short version is that at the age of four, Göran had been kidnapped by his mother, who took an alias and denied Göran any knowledge of or contact with his biological family. She passed away in 1996, and in 1999 we began a search for information about his past that nine years later led to this discovery.) From the time that the California Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage legal in California in the spring of 2008, Göran and I knew we wanted to go to California to be legally married, which we did in July 2008, at a religious ceremony that was attended by my entire immediate family. In August 2008, we drove to Memphis, Tennessee where Göran and I experienced a joyous, very emotional reunion with his family. At the time I was distinctly aware that all these tremendous blessings that were poured out on me and Göran were a direct result of my willingness to exercise faith and follow the promptings of the Spirit to be active in my ward and to bear my testimony of the Church.

I have continued to grow spiritually as a result of my commitment to my husband, and my commitment to the Church. It has not always been easy to reconcile the contradiction between what I've experienced personally in my relationship with God and in my relationship with my husband, and what Church leaders currently teach about homosexuality. I have sometimes wondered, for instance, if the Lord was holding me to the commitment I'd made to my husband, because it was wrong for me to break a promise, even though being in a homosexual relationship would mean that I could not achieve exaltation in the next life.

I've sought answers to these questions from the Lord, and have gotten nothing specific. Sometimes I got a very specific answer that the Lord would not give me specific answers to such questions!  However, though the Lord has not answered all my questions, he has given me very specific assurances. My relationship with my husband is blessed by him and is a blessing from him. Our efforts to build a family as a couple and with foster or adoptive children who come into our life will ramify and continue to grow and be blessed in the next life. We will not be disadvantaged in any way in the next life as a result of being excluded from Church membership or other ordinances. If I have faith and am patient, the Lord will work all of these things out eventually, and all I need to do is trust and wait on him. These things I know.

I feel incredibly blessed and encouraged by the tremendous growth of understanding, and what seems like a geometric growth in dialog around the place and role of LGBT people in the Church that is happening among Latter-day Saints today. In June 2012, I marched with a contingent of Latter-day Saints in Twin Cities LGBT Pride. I continue to see signs of hope, as members of the Church who were once closed off around this issue are opening up and experiencing changes of heart and mind.

I think the best is yet to come.