Religious Experience, Memory and Reason

If I had to distill all of "Mormonism" down into one word, it would be "revelation."

Why that word?  Why not, say, "love"?  "Love" is actually the word that I would use if someone asked me to distill all religion down into a single word.  In elaborating how "revelation" is the core concept explaining Mormonism, (i.e., what precisely is revealed through Mormonism) I would hasten to add that "love" is the "what" that is revealed when we speak of what "revelation" reveals in Mormonism.

But if I were to draw a line to distinguish what Mormonism is/believes/practices from all the rest of religion, the line that I would draw is "revelation."  I would say that almost all other religion points to love as what "has been revealed."  Most Christians, for instance, would say, "Everything that God needs to reveal was revealed in the person of Christ (who revealed God As Love), a record of which we have in the Gospels.  There's no need for more revelation than that, and anything more or less than that is blasphemy."  A Mormon might say (or this Mormon says!): "What God has revealed is only part of the story, and the less important part of the story at that.  God reveals (present tense!) himself to us today in a living and resurrected Christ through living prophets and Saints.  That's why, for us, the blasphemy is to insist that the last and only time Christ could ever have revealed himself to living humans was recorded in the Book of Revelation in the ancient Near East.  We have a record of him revealing himself in the Americas, and of him announcing he would reveal himself elsewhere.  He revealed himself to a 14-year-old boy in a grove of trees in upstate New York, and in the Kirtland Temple in Ohio in 1836, and on countless other occasions to living prophets and living Saints of which we may or may not have a written, public record.  The moment we convert the present tense of the statement 'God reveals himself' into the past tense, revealed, we no longer have a living religion.  We have a remembered religion or even a dead religion.  Our definition of 'apostasy' is when we stop receiving God's current and always living revelation to us."

We understand this principle most clearly, when we pose the question, "What does it mean for a faithful Latter-day Saint to actually live her or his religion?"  And I think the best answer to that question would be: "To live our lives in such a way that we will always be in harmony with the Spirit, and to seek and to be able to receive God's guidance in our day-to-day lives."  A Latter-day Saint lives her or his faith by seeking to practice a kind of constant communion with God.  Mormons who live their faith know how to seek and receive revelation from God, and strive to live their lives in accordance with the revelation they have received.

Now there are other religions where you get some sense of this.  All religious people who have some belief in the divine seek some sort of communion with that divine.  You get a more vivid sense of this (closer to the vividness of the sense found in Mormonism) in most traditional Native American religions.  When Lakota people go on a vision quest, or prepare for and perform the Sun Dance for the purpose of seeking divine guidance for an important decision they need to make, most devout Mormons would understand exactly what they're doing and why -- though we ourselves go on similar quests through simple fasting and prayer.  When Pentecostals insist that we recognize true religion through the presence of modern day miracles and signs, they are making an observation that Mormons would universally assent to.  Though there's a line that Pentecostals are unwilling to cross: new scripture.  The fact that that's not a line Mormons are worried about gives some sense of how important a concept modern-day revelation is in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

To the extent one takes issue with Mormonism as a religious system, one inevitably deals in some way with the personal or collective manifestations of revelation.  Thus, one of the most common accusations against Mormons is that they are led by "false prophets." Personal revelation is dismissed as a form of delusion -- either satanically or self- induced.  Mormons are accused of mistaking "mere" feelings for the promptings of God, etc.  The possibility of actually receiving revelation from God is denied, either categorically (as atheists would deny it), or contingently (as Evangelicals or Pentecostals would deny it in the case of Mormonism but affirm it in the Bible or in manifestations of the Spirit they consider acceptable).

For me the question is always how do I personally recognize when a revelation is true or false?  What if I receive a revelation I once recognized as true, but later conclude that it was not?  Does that call into question the whole premise of revelation as the foundation of true religion?

My dad taught me how to recognize the Spirit by putting me in situations where he felt I was guaranteed to feel the Spirit, and then asking me to be attentive, and to observe what I felt.  I could then use that as a base-line for recognizing the work of the Spirit in my life in other situations where it might be less obvious. I've come to realize this is the closest anyone can come to "teaching" us how to recognize and follow the Spirit.  Because the Spirit speaks to us internally -- in our minds and hearts -- as opposed to externally -- i.e., in an objectively audible voice -- learning to recognize and follow the promptings of the Spirit is literally something we do on our own.

The baseline my dad gave me is what I've used throughout my life to recognize and judge spiritual experiences.  Over time, those have included numerous "gifts" and different manifestations of the Spirit.  I have experienced the literal "burning in the bosom" that scripture speaks of.  I've experienced the Spirit giving me literal words or phrases that came to me as if someone were speaking them.  I have had visions, I have seen divine light, and I have had even more powerful experiences.  What I have discovered is that the intensity of the experience may vary, but the nature of the experience does not.  The most subtle "still small voice" can be just as powerful -- sometimes more powerful -- than something more tangible.

I had had many rich, powerful spiritual experiences prior to leaving the Church.  Even after leaving the Church, I could not deny the experiences themselves.  The experiences were real.  I had had them.

But there was a time in my life (which was not co-synchronous with my time outside of the Church) when I questioned the nature or the validity of these experiences.  Were the visions I'd had hallucinations?  Was the "burning in the bosom" some kind of physical or hormonal manifestation?  Were spiritual promptings I'd experienced "just feelings" or a kind of "self talk"?  Were they the result of wish fulfillment?  Did I, for example, want a testimony of the Church because, as a young child, I knew that obtaining a testimony would please my parents?  So I then proceeded to manufacture an experience for myself that could serve as a testimony?

I have found it to be true that the more I distance myself from those experiences, the less real they seem.  I could never completely deny them, but I could downplay them.  And if we can do that, isn't that as much as saying, we make anything of them we wish?  Maybe we did just manufacture them.

Questioning my spiritual experiences did lead to doubt about the spiritual experiences I'd had.  But eventually, during a time in my life that I would characterize as the most doubtful, angry period of my life, I was spiritually awakened by a manifestation of the Spirit that was so powerful and so distinct, I found it difficult if not impossible to deny or explain away.  At that point I actively fought the revelation, I tried to deny it.  But it returned again and again, persistently, I would even say lovingly, until I surrendered to it.

I feel fairly certain that had I refused to surrender for long enough, it would eventually have departed and I might at this point in my life be a confirmed atheist.  In fact, I remember that the turning point for me in my struggle with this revelation was the moment when the Spirit said to me simply, "I won't stay with you always, unless you act on what I am telling you."  At that point, I had to decide.  And I ultimately chose to surrender.

After some time of wrestling with questions of this nature, and of learning what it means to listen to and follow the Spirit, I acquired an important insight.  I can remember the very moment when I acquired this insight, because I acquired it on the verge of another, subsequent act of spiritual surrender, and the insight is related to the concept of surrender, which, I believe, is closely related to the concept of faith. It relates to a concept of faith that is illuminated by an analogy Mormons often like to use of faith being like the act of a child who leaps into a dark pit, subsequently to be caught in the loving arms of the father who had called to her from the darkness, whom she had not been able to see, but whom she trusted enough to leap into the darkness.

For me it boiled down to how I answered the question: What is the fundamental nature of our relationship with the Universe?  Is the Universe hostile to us?  Does it seek to destroy us? Is the Universe indifferent to us? Do we exist by chance? Do we thrive merely by a combination of luck and perseverance? Or does the Universe love us? Does it yearn for our happiness and reach out eagerly toward us, like the finger of God painted by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel?

How I answered this question determined how I might answer a (to me) very urgent corollary question: If some voice is speaking to me, some voice which speaks to me deep in my heart, piercing through to my "inmost parts," but seems to be not of me, seems to be coming to me from somewhere "out there," out from beyond, should I trust it?  Should I listen to it?  Because if there is some Great I Am who is capable of reaching me, of speaking to me, it could be all powerful but I should not trust it if it is not beneficent, if it wills to harm me.  And if it were indifferent to me, then I cannot imagine why it would speak to me; so I should interpret this voice as my own imagination.  But if it is all powerful and Love Incarnate, then I should surrender.  I should throw myself into the dark pit, trusting the voice of a father promising to catch me, and I would be caught.

I did have experience to rely on.  The Spirit had told me that the Church was true, and so I had trusted the words of scripture and teachers and begun to learn love and service and patience.  And all these things had been good.  And, yes, I had learned homophobia in the Church too, and the homophobia hurt me.  It almost destroyed me!  But before it could destroy me, I had received another prompting through the Spirit reassuring me that my gayness was a good part of me, which gave me the courage to begin to work that out over the course of the years.  And this was a very, very good thing!  So even where the Church had failed me, the Spirit had not.  In other words, the Church is not perfect, but God is.  Every Sunday School child knows that truth.  The Spirit prompted me to leave the Church for a time, which I did, and learned many important things in doing so.  The Spirit prompted me to seek out and find my husband, the man I have loved for over 20 years now, and who has helped me to grow and become wiser and stronger than I was before I met him.  And that is also good.  So the Spirit did not lead me astray there either.  And the Spirit has so often comforted me in grief and given me courage in fear, and the more I reflected on it, the more I realized that the Spirit had always been a light to me in the darkness.  I could look back over the arc of my life and see the Spirit leading me from good to greater good to greatest good.

So now that the Spirit was prompting me to believe in God again, and to trust in God's goodness, and to come back to the Church and be faithful, what was most reasonable for me to do?

And even the very most rational, most skeptical part of me could look at that and think: Maybe there is no God.  But even if this voice which is speaking to me is nothing but my own subconscious, somehow it has never significantly led me astray.  Maybe even if this voice is just me talking to myself, it seems to be the best part of myself, the part of me that I should trust and follow.  Faith could be what we choose to believe.  Maybe it is all just inside of me.  Maybe God is like the God of Alcoholics Anonymous: whatever we make him.  Maybe, maybe.  But even then it still seemed wise to just trust, and see what happens.  And I have, and incredible good has happened.  The greater the trust, the greater the good.

And I could just continue in trust, suspending belief in God.  I could just say, I don't know what this is, but I'll continue to follow it as long as it leads me good places.  But there comes a point where you realize that what you are learning is principles like faith (trust), love, compassion, patience, hope, strength, and you are learning that there is a power greater than you that gives you strength greater than you imagined yourself capable of, and you begin to realize that what you have is something like a copy of the Sacred Word, an internal guidebook of life like the Standard Works, written and guarded in your heart, and that points you toward the same thing that those external paper and ink Standard Works point you to, namely God.  So why not just give it up and call it God?

Because ultimately what you also learn is that the longer you tread in that path of goodness, the one feeling that comes to overwhelm all the other feelings is simple gratitude.  Which makes no sense if the Universe is just emptiness and indifference and non-entity.  We can only be meaningfully grateful to Some One.  So God must exist if only to be the One To Whom We Give Thanks.

There are moments of darkness and anguish in life, when the view is obstructed, when faith seems naive and stupid.  Sometimes those moments seem to stretch out into something like a life time.  I'll grant that.  And we can always choose to curse God and die.  I choose the alternative.

In relation to remembered spiritual experiences, what I have found is that we can dismiss or downplay spiritual experiences from our past much in the way that our memories of someone we once knew many years ago can become distorted caricatures of the real person.  When we remember a person, we focus on certain traits of that individual that we remember to the exclusion of other traits we actually experienced but choose not to remember.  The longer time separates memory from the actual experience, the more distorted the caricature.  But when we know and interact with a living person on a day to day basis, our memory -- our internal image of that person -- is constantly challenged by the reality of that person.  Our memories never surprise us.  But a real person often surprises us, as we learn more about that person we didn't know before.  So it is with God.

And this is why, for me, a True Gospel is always about revelation in the present tense.  Yes, God is the God who was with me yesterday, and last year, and ten years ago, and who was with my ancestors a hundred and a thousand and ten thousand years ago.  The God of our memories is God, which is one reason God commands us to remember.  The scriptures are the collective expression of our obedience to that commandment: "Remember me."  But the God I know best is the God who is here with me in the now.  The God I turn to every day, whom I know through obedience to the commandment, "Pray always without ceasing."

It is through the understanding granted by that present God, the God who never ceases to surprise me, that I am able to make sense of memory and enter the future with hope.

Gay, Mormon, Hopeful, Faithful, Excommunicated and Called

This past Sunday, Sacrament meeting felt particularly poignant for me. As an excommunicated member of the Church I am not permitted to physically partake of the bread and the water, but I do partake of the sacrament spiritually by reflecting on my life, on what kind of person I want to be, and how I can more effectively follow in the footsteps of Christ. I often feel the Spirit as I do this, and receive great comfort from my Father in Heaven, so I really value being able to participate in sacrament meeting as often as I can.

During Sacrament meeting, one of the speakers talked about how actually physically partaking of the bread and the water, and having to reflect on whether he could do that worthily, provided a particular impetus to work harder on the issues that he needs to work on in his life. I realized that, while I am able to use the Sacrament as a sacred occasion for reflection and communion with God, I do miss out by not being able to physically partake of the bread and water. I was feeling a little bad about that.

I was sitting with a brother and a sister to whom I feel a particular closeness, who had given me a ride to Church that morning. Worshiping with them, and participating in the Sacrament with them – even if I could not participate fully – was comforting to me. I felt very grateful for my fellowship with them.

Afterwards, the husband gave me a ride home. We were silent in the car for a while. Finally he spoke up. He said, "During Sacrament today, I felt a particularly strong desire to share the Sacrament with you." He apologized if his words in any way minimized or trivialized what I as a gay, excommunicated Latter-day Saint have to go through. He then shared with me his hope for us to someday be able to share the Sacrament in full equality as brothers in Christ. By the time he finished sharing his thoughts with me, we were both weeping.

I shared with him some of my current struggles, including some of the difficult reflections I had experienced during the Sacrament talk.

There was a time in my life, when I would have doubted the possibility of two human beings to completely understand and empathize with one another. There was a time in my life when I believed that human beings are doomed to existential loneliness. But the Spirit was there. And I felt something of a foretaste perhaps of the Celestial Kingdom, when our communications with one another will be perfect and when we can dwell in total harmony with each other and with God. In that moment, I experienced better than I have ever experienced before, what it means for the Saints to bear one another's burdens, because in this moment this brother helped me to bear mine.

I am writing this post to my brothers and sisters who are gay and Mormon and excommunicated. I am writing this because I want you to know that it is possible to be all of those things, and it is also possible to be faithful, hopeful and called by God to be a light to the church and to the world.

On Being Gay and Excommunicated

OK.  For starters, let's discuss being gay and excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

I used to think you couldn't be openly gay and not excommunicated.  Now I'm not so sure that is or ever was true.  I think very, very many (perhaps most) gay Mormons have just quietly dropped out of activity in the Church, but have formally stayed on the membership rolls.  Many of these value their church membership.  Some (like Buckley Jeppson) have fought to keep their membership when it was threatened.  (And Buckley, somehow, mysteriously succeeded, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the high media profile he attracted.)

Despite the curious case of Buckley Jeppson, the general rule was gay Mormons could only get excommunicated by getting "on the radar" somehow.  Some, like Gay LDS Actor, and like Lis and Jay, while loving the Church and desiring to remain members, forthrightly informed Church leaders of their decision to marry the ones they loved, and were (sometimes hesitantly and regretfully, sometimes more harshly) excommunicated.  The saddest excommunication cases, in my opinion, have been individuals who were involuntarily "outed" to Church leaders and whose excommunication proceedings were used to shame and alienate them.  I learned of a tragic case earlier this summer of a gay Mormon man who years ago was excommunicated shortly after his partner died.

My personal case is rather curious, and for the purposes of this discussion the oddball details are worth elevating.  In a prayer in which I broken-heartedly confessed my homosexuality to God, God spoke to me and told me that he "knew me from my inmost parts" and that my gayness was a good, inherent part of me.  Later that summer, I followed a prompting of the Spirit to resign from the Church "for a time."  Though this was very difficult for me to do (perhaps the most difficult thing I have ever done), I followed that prompting.  At that point, I had committed no offense worthy of excommunication by the Church's standards.  Furthermore, I simply wrote a letter to my bishop, asking that my name be removed from the Church records.  My bishop, apparently in contravention of Church rules, initiated excommunication proceedings against me and had me excommunicated in absentia.  So it is technically correct for me to describe myself as "an excommunicated gay Mormon," though my excommunication was probably not proper and had nothing to do -- so far as I know -- with me being gay.

But then, every one of us has a unique story.

The bottom line is, excommunication for gay Mormons is rarer than most people think. Also, excommunicated gay Mormons who desire a continuing positive connection with the Church are probably more common than most people would believe. 

It seems to me that most leaders and members of the Church would assume that the proper course of action in the case of a same-sex partnered individual (married or not), whose case is known to ecclesiastical leaders, should be to excommunicate them.  That assumption may be false.  Leaders of the San Francisco and Oakland Stakes of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have publicly made the case that that assumption is false. It is no longer clear to me whether Church policy requires this, nor that there is unanimity within the governing bodies of the Church that this should be the case.  It seems to me that the Church is feeling its way forward into new terrain in relation to the place of same-sex partnered, gay members in the Church.

Nevertheless, the specter of excommunication hovers over all gay Mormons -- whether they have actually been excommunicated or not.  This past summer, I had a number of conversations with Randall Thacker about the reaction of his bishop to him and other gay Mormons in same-sex relationships who have been coming back to activity in the Church, who have been welcomed and informed that they would not be excommunicated.  Randall admitted that a change of leadership in his ward or in his stake could result in his excommunication.  When Randall's story drew media attention, he was contacted by LGBT Mormons and family members of LGBT Mormons from all over the world who saw his story as a hopeful sign. Randall's response has been to encourage LGBT Mormons who feel so called to return to activity in the Church.  But at the same time he worries, "Am I giving people false hope?"

For what it's worth, I do not think Randall is giving LGBT Mormons false hope in encouraging them to come back to the Church, and I join him in encouraging all people to "come and see," to learn the breadth and depth and goodness of God's love within the framework of a people taking Christ's name upon them and working together to establish Zion.  That's always been the mission of the Church, and I claim it as my own personal mission.  But the hope being offered has nothing to do with avoiding excommunication, which we may or may not do.  It has to do with entering into a journey of faith, living a life guided by eternal principles, and encountering God.

Hope In the Stories of Excommunicated Gay Mormons

Toward that end, the stories of those of us who are excommunicated -- who are typically offered no hope within the framework of Church -- may be particularly instructive of what hope and love mean within the eternal framework of faith in Christ.

I'm not going to share more of my story here -- I've done that enough elsewhere in my blog.

But I invite you, if you are excommunicated and have a testimony and are active in the Church, please share your story here or post a link to your story on your own blog or elsewhere.  Or email me.  Perhaps I can persuade Affirmation to devote a web page to a collection of such stories, where people can find hope in what we've experienced and what we have -- through much pain and struggle -- learned  about ourselves and about God and about the Church.  It's time we start building a canopy of hopeful, faithful, loving stories.

I invite you, if you are gay and Mormon and excommunicated, and feel the least stirring of the Spirit calling you back, but you're not sure how to take that next step, email me, friend me through Facebook, call me, join Affirmation.  Take some next step.  You won't regret it.  Weave your story back into the story of Jesus Christ's Church.

While I'm not sharing my full story here, I want to make a number of true statements about what it means to me to be gay, Mormon, hopeful, faithful and excommunicated.  I'll just call it as I see it and let the chips fall where they may.

I spent many years outside of and far away from the Church.  Leaving the Church helped me find happiness and health that had been impossible for me to find during my last painful, nearly suicidal years in the Church.  But since I have renewed my testimony and returned to the Church, I have found a depth of happiness I literally don't have the words to express.  I have found a depth of companionship and communion with God I never imagined possible.

I believe this is because God calls us all to build Zion.  The Church is the vehicle to accomplish this.  Without the Church, we cannot fully live the Great Commandment to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves, because the Church is the collective expression of loving one's neighbor.

I value membership in the Church.  When friends have asked my advice in relation to their Church membership, I have advised them to be true to themselves, and do what they feel called to do in relation to a possible intimate life partnership with someone of the same sex, but to retain their Church membership if at all possible.

If for whatever reason my relationship with my partner ended, I think I would choose to remain celibate and make every effort to be re-baptized.

I would not remain celibate and seek re-baptism because I think my relationship with my husband was wrong or a mistake.  I was guided by the Holy Spirit to seek out and commit to my relationship with Göran.  It would be solely because I feel I've established the family the Lord wanted me to establish, and I value Church membership for the blessings it could afford me in this life.

I do not believe my excommunicated status is representative of my status in the Kingdom of God on the other side of the veil.  Helmuth Hübener was excommunicated from the LDS Church for joining the anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany during World War II.  He was posthumously reinstated into the Church after the defeat of Adolf Hitler.  There are lots of errors that have been made on this side of the veil that will eventually be fixed, if not before the millennium, after.

God has poured out his Spirit on me, and communicated his love and approval of me directly, and has blessed me and my family.  I know where I stand with God.

My family is part of an eternal family, with eternal potential.

In the Kingdom of God, the way things look on the surface here below seldom resembles the way things really are.

I love and am grateful for faithful individuals in situations that are seemingly the inverse of my own -- individuals like Ty Mansfield, Josh Weed and Steven Frei. I am grateful for the love and support they've shown me. I regard our faith in Christ and our testimonies of the Church as weighing more in the scale of life than our different life choices. I don't see their marriages to their wives as proof that my marriage to my husband is wrong, any more than anybody should see my loving relationship with my husband as proof that their relationships are somehow inauthentic.  Each of our stories and each of our journeys is unique.

So long as we do our part and are faithful, I trust God to work things out for all of us in the next life, regardless of what our situations are in this life.

I've decided I don't like the term "reconciling my sexuality and my spirituality."  This has no theological meaning to me.  Theologically, when we speak of "reconciliation," we are speaking of what it means for human beings to be reconciled with God.  We are speaking of the Atonement.  So the only "reconciliation" that is meaningful to me has to do with repentance.

However, I do believe that God created this earth, and gave us this Grand Opportunity called Life so that we could learn more about our true natures, so that we could become more like our Heavenly Parents, and so that we could grow into our fullest, most authentic potential.

I believe I am able to accomplish this goal through my relationship with my husband as effectively as any of my heterosexual brothers and sisters can accomplish this goal through their marriages.

Being active in the Church has filled my life with unimaginable blessings.  I experience a depth of love and support from the members of my ward I never would have imagined possible.  I feel more supported and loved by my LDS ward than I have ever felt in any religious community anywhere.

There are gifts of the Spirit I have experienced that go beyond anything I've ever experienced in my life before, even when I was a member in good standing, things too powerful and too sacred for me to share here.  And I experienced them because of my willingness to exercise faith, and go to a Church I was once convinced it was pointless to attend because they would not have me.

I share my testimony whenever I can.  This past Sunday, my bishop asked me to work with the missionaries and meet with an investigator who feels she has a testimony of the Church, but who is hesitant to join the Church because of its position on homosexuality.  I plan to share with her what I have shared with others in her situation.  If you have a testimony of the Church, trust that the Lord will work this out for your gay and lesbian brothers and sisters if we are all of us -- gay and straight! -- faithful.  Do not deny yourself the blessings of Church membership on my account.  The Lord is taking good care of me, and if you are faithful, perhaps you can help move forward the Lord's work on behalf of his LGBT sons and daughters and others who need to be gathered before the Great Day of the Lord.

Is it frustrating being excommunicated?  Painful? Do I sometimes feel discouraged or wonder why?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

Do I find it painful sometimes to see other gay Mormons in same-sex relationships who are allowed to remain members of the Church, when I must remain outside the formal fellowship of the Church?  In moments of weakness, yes.

But I realize, I am where I am because this is where the Lord directed me to be.  It was the Spirit that prompted me to resign from the Church "for a time," leading to my excommunication, however odd the circumstances of that particular excommunication.  It was the Spirit that prompted me to enter a faithful, loving, life-long committed relationship with my husband, and for us to become foster parents.  It was the Spirit that prompted me to come back to the Church even in spite of the fact that it would be almost impossible for me to be readmitted to full membership under the present circumstances.  This is the Lord's hand in my life.  I trust that he has a plan.  And I know he has a purpose for placing me where, when and how I am placed.

I am grateful that some are granted the grace to find and build faith as members of the Church.  But I consider myself privileged to find myself in an (albeit painful) membership status that must ultimately be resolved before the status of all LGBT Saints can be finally and satisfactorily resolved.

I am called to a unique work in God's kingdom that only I can do.

So are you.

So if you feel the Spirit tugging at your heart, take the next step.  Begin on the path so that you too can learn what your unique calling is.