The Faith of My Parents

(FYI: this is a long and Mormony post about very Mormony things, so feel free to skip it if you're not interested in that sort of thing.)

 

Imagine my mother:

A small, blonde girl with ringlets in a white dress, pale pink pinafore, bobby socks and patent-leather shoes. She’s walking down a tree-lined sidewalk on a Sunday morning in spring, one of those days when color has finally come back in the world and everything feel full of hope.

Her blonde curls bounce as she walks, and sometimes a skip makes its way into her stride.

Where is she going? To church.

Why is she alone? Because her parents—my grandparents Florence and Fuzz, who I love dearly and miss desperately, the two people in my life who taught me the most about unconditional love—didn’t believe in the church.

(Actually, I don’t know: did they not believe? or did they just not go for some reason?)

Her parents didn’t take her to church. Her brother didn’t join her. She just went—by herself.

This is one of my favorite imaginings of my mother, headed off to church by herself. I don’t know why she went (we don’t often talk about church), if she had friends there, if other families took her into their pews or she sat by herself. But it teaches me something, this image of my mother, about being faithful, about finding your own way.

She kept going to church. She grew up, went to BYU, got married in the temple. Then, two daughters and three years of miserable marriage later, she got divorced.

And she stopped.

Stopped going to the church. Stopped going to the temple. Stopped living an LDS life.

She met my dad and married him. He adopted her daughters and they had two more together. Sometimes we went to church, but usually not.

I don’t know what happened in her first marriage to make her turn away from the church—it is another thing we don’t talk about. But later, when her dad died and the steel mill closed, she went back to the church. She started wearing garments again, started praying, started going to Sunday meetings.

My dad was a different story.

He, too, grew up with parents who didn’t go to church. But his mom, unlike my maternal grandma, was vociferously agnostic. She taught him to question—the kind of questions shaped to poke holes rather than build knowledge. She taught him doubt and disdain. He was baptized, although I don’t know why: they never went to church; they didn’t believe.

Not going to church, he grew up. He lost his dad when he was far too young—only sixteen. He stopped playing football, he gave up his baseball dreams, he partied and ran wild and started working at the steel mill. Then he met my mom. He adopted my sisters. He gave up smoking after I was born. He taught me to love reading, being outside, and flowers. He was kind and gentle, an animated (if rambling) storyteller unafraid to tell a dirty joke. He blessed us when we were born and he baptized us, but he mostly ignored the church until he was in his sixties, when he decided to read the Book of Mormon and then to go to the temple.

He was ill with Alzheimer’s not three years later, and he never fully explained to me his change of heart. I don’t know why, exactly, he reached out to Christ, except for his worsening depression. But during those last years before he got sick, he lived the gospel.

These are the faiths of my parents.

And I could no more disavow them—all their imperfections and inconsistencies, all their leaving and staying and changing, their questions and their calm indifference—than I could disavow my own faith. My imperfect, shaky faith.

In our little Utah town, I grew up ostracized—baptized a member of the church, but not really Mormon. When my mom decided to go back to church, I went too, but only for a little while. When I sat in Young Women classes with girls who had never really been my friend and treated me like I wasn’t good enough, I felt a dissonance I didn’t have any words for, and I poured every bit of it into my adolescent rebellion. I challenged everything, sharp questions meant to poke holes. I was full of disdain for the church.

And then, when I was seventeen and at my darkest, I turned toward the church for light. I went back to church, as the saying goes, even though for me it wasn’t exactly a return. I’ve been a member my entire life, but I feel more like a convert. Like my mother, I found a reason to return. Like my dad, I have never stopped questioning. Perhaps not poking holes, but my faith isn’t the kind that automatically accepts everything. Instead, I question. I have to learn for myself why a thing is true or not true. My faith is restless and wandering, a doubting and troubled sort of thing.

It doesn’t always bring me peace, but I am accustomed to that. I have learned that I will likely never have a usual Mormon response to most things, will never intrinsically think like my lifetime-member friends do.

I have learned that this is a strength I bring to the church. My knowledge of truths does not come from blind obedience, but from using the truths. Trying them out, pondering them, seeing how they work in my life. Or don’t work. What I believe I believe because of my own tests and trials, not because someone told me I should believe it. I think this is a strength because it lets people see that having questions and pursuing answers doesn’t lead to rejection of the church but a deep and living knowledge.

But here I am, trying to understand a policy I don’t want to understand. Because I don’t want to think the way that someone would have to think in order to agree with this policy. It’s twofold:

1. Gay people who are married are considered to be apostate by the church. (“Apostate” meaning, basically, that you knew the truth but rejected it.)
2. Children of gay people who are married are not allowed to be blessed as babies nor baptized until they are 18 and willing to denounce their gay parent’s lifestyle.

The first part deserves its own blog post, but it is the second part that has me (and so many, many members) troubled. I don’t know what breaks my heart more:  children being denied blessing and baptism, or adult children being forced to renounce their parents. This doesn’t feel like my church. It feels like putting the sins of the father (or the mother) onto the child, which goes against every basic tenant of the church I know. It feels like punishing children. It feels like a statement: only the perfect are wanted here.

I know what someone else might say: that my response is too extreme. It’s not all imperfect families not welcome in the church. It’s just the gay ones. By saying that people in gay marriages are apostate, the church is saying, in effect, that they are unforgiveable. And their children barely redeemable. Which is untenable to me. How is having a gay father more wrong than having, say, a father who abuses his wife? Or cheats? Or drinks himself silly far too often? Or what about a heterosexual mother who is herself apostate, actively involved in teaching her kids to hate the church? Why would any children be denied entrance into the church because of what their parents do?

If my entrance to the church was based on my parents’ faith, would I be admitted? Because their faith was imperfect. Their parents’ faith was also flawed, if it even existed. What about my own children—if we are basing their acceptance within the church on my faith, they, too, might not be acceptable. Where will we draw the line at who is good enough? If it is only the children of gay people, that says one thing about the church. If gayness is just a beginning, and soon others also won’t be good enough, that is another.

But neither is good.

I don’t understand. I don’t know how to fit this into my faith. Strike that: I don’t want to fit it into my faith. I don’t want to think that only the perfect are wanted at church. And I don’t want to devalue my own parents’ imperfect contribution to and shaping of my faith. If I had to disavow them because of their mistakes, I don’t think I could, because, yes, their good choices influenced me, but their mistakes did more. How they dealt with their questions and struggles was a living example to me that in the church are experiences and truths that are worth the rest of it, the judgement and small-mindedness and the refusal to see that there isn’t always one right answer. The combination of their faiths taught me that faith is an imperfect thing that weakens or grows strong at different times and with different experiences, but is always also a choice.

And always before me is that image of my mother, walking to church all by her small, brave self.  She was imperfect, too. She came from “faulty” parents who smoked and drank and cheated and had coffee every single morning, tea with lunch, gin with dinner. What if she hadn’t been made to feel welcome? What if someone’s idea of her parents had made her feel less than, and she had stopped being brave and going to church on her own?

Without her imperfect faith, I wouldn’t have my own faith.

This wouldn’t matter to me at all if I didn’t love the gospel. The church is one of the frames I have built my adult life on, and I did that consciously. Not because it’s what you do where I live, but because I actively chose, and I chose because of the good in it. It brings me good things (as well as frustration) and it brings my family good things. This is not the first policy I have grappled with, it will likely not be the last one I cannot make peace with. It is, though, a thing I will have to love the gospel around. Despite of.

I thought writing this might bring me some sort of resolution, but it didn’t. Last night, late, I stood in front of the picture of Christ I have in my living room. Just looking at it and thinking, and a thought came to me: what would Christ want me to do? Does He want me choose obedience? Or does He want me to choose His example of loving others? That is a pair of spiraling questions, a gyre leading nowhere. Obedience should bring me to a place that allows me to love others.

And I don’t know what to do with this policy that makes it otherwise.

Comments

[Becky K]

I am having a hard time, too. I think of what you wrote, and I think of my family, and I wonder. It's tough. A lot of the phrases and things that people say don't feel like they are authentic to me. I'm muddling through this. I have good moments and bad moments.

Hugs....I wanted to say more, but I don't know what. So. Big hugs.

[Anne-Liesse]

Thank you for your candid thoughts. I appreciate the effort you took to put a matter of faith into words. I find that hard to do sometimes.
Anne-Liesse

[Vickie]

Frankly, I think the majority of us are confused and bewildered by this policy change. I just keep telling myself that it's a policy- not a doctrine. Wait. Wait and see.

[Wendy]

These questions are plaguing every church, so I feel the issue as deeply as you. While I believe that the act is unnatural and against God's design, like you, I see it as no different than any of the other ways we depart from God's best intentions for our lives. I believe it is my responsibility to love these individuals just as much as I love any other person with faults and failings.

I have recently been so aggrieved because I have two teacher friends who are a lesbian couple. I think more highly of them than I do of most teachers I know. I love them dearly. One used to read my blog, until I posted a review of Fangirl, where I said that the fan fiction felt all wrong. I was trying to say that it felt wrong to shift the events of a real story to fit the patterns a fan fiction writer chooses to impose. She took offense and hasn't read since. I feel such a deep sense of loss over this. I want desperately to let her know how much I value her (and tried to express it in my Christmas card), without having to compromise my belief that the act is not in keeping with God's design.

Surely we are called to love and not stir up division. Isn't there some way we can stand for truth, without trampling the hearts and lives of others? I don't know what the best resolution to this problem is, but like you, it leaves me with a bitter taste in my mouth.