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After my introduction post I said I was re-constructing what I believed in again. I asked for good luck. This site is a great place to do that and again thanks everyone for all the great posts everywhere. I hope this isn’t too bad of an example but a brick seems to be as good as analogy as any. I started with what do I believe in now… now that I have had my crisis of faith, what is on the other end? What are the bricks in my new set of beliefs? Can I build a new foundation?
Maybe I should also call this confessions of a binary thinker. For so many years I had to have the belief that it was either/or. The church had to be either totally true or not. This kind of thinking can be really tough! I have slowly realized that I have been like a juror in a court case. I was carefully reading all points in favor and against, trying hard to uncover more facts, more insight and finally come up with a verdict – “your honor, the church is true or the church is false!” As a side note do any of you remembering reading “Day of Defense” by Melvin McDonald? This book made the rounds when I was a missionary and was great ammo for binary thinkers.
So for me, brick #1 is it doesn’t have to either/or. What a revelation! This might seem amusing to some of you but if you tend to have a binary thinking approach you can really go crazy trying to deal with absolutes. Of course, it is not like absolutes are not promoted in the church… most recent that comes to mind is Hinckley’s PBS interview, but you hear it all the time.
It seems odd and will always be hard for me to hear someone definitively say something is true in church. I wish they would say instead, “I believe this and that” or “I have great faith in this and that”. It is wishful thinking because it is so ingrained in the LDS culture and I don’t think it will ever change.
Still, in the back of my mind I entertain the idea of why can’t we just have a showdown like Elijah in the OT with the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18:21) and just settle the whole thing. Can you imagine a challenge like Elijah’s today? Let’s settle the BOM issue once and for all…. let’s have a get together and have the Lord himself tell us all what is true with fire from heaven…
So I now have brick #1 of my foundation – don’t get hung up on knowing. Feels good. Is the church true? I can’t say… how can I ever know? I never will. But I can say that I have faith that it has many truths that help me be a better person. Isn’t faith is the first principle of the gospel anyway? Maybe I have been thinking backwards this whole time.
Would love to hear what other’s foundations are now after going through a crash and burn of your faith…
I don’t know if I’d call it a brick, but I concluded that all the stuff, especially the history and even the BOM actuality, had occurred almost 200 years before my life. Yet in that time, in all innocence I had experienced wonderful spiritual, life sustaining experiences through lessons I had learned in the church and in reading the BOM. So I let myself keep using those tools to keep building. If they were so wrong wouldn’t I have been blocked from the experiences. I don’t know. I’m not really going to puzzle it, but I chose to keep pressing on. I guess then that was my first brick – pressing on, relying on the experiences that were my own in connection to the church, it’s history, it’s unique scripture. I like your post. Good luck brick making
I think for me, there are some constants. The church is a vehicle to help me be a better person, a place to serve others. The church is concerned with the church being true. I’m concerned with becoming the best version of me I can be. Those two things can be at cross-purposes. Thanks so much for posting your experiences ElCid! It’s great to hear how other people work their way through things, and start to come out the other side of the dark tunnel into a new view. It’s one thing to say that prophets are fallible (when not “speaking as a prophet” as we say), that Church isn’t perfect, that people make mistakes, that scripture can have flaws or even perhaps be totally made up, that we can be divinely inspired by ideas that are flawed, etc.
It’s another thing to really start to feel comfortable in your skin with all the messy contradictions and paradoxes, yet still be able to move on and use what we find to be inspired and to grow as human souls.
For me, it was disappointing at first to realize what a mess everything was. But then at some point, it turned around. As an example, I find the human and deeply flawed (and I mean truly falling down sometimes) Joseph Smith to be much more inspiring, much more someone I can connect with than the former epic superhero caricature I had in my mind. I find scripture much more useful and practical when I let go of the need for every microscopically parsed word and punctuation to be direct dictation from God.
I also think that contradiction and paradox are some of the most powerful and transformative elements in religion. They create a tension that generates spiritual inquiry and energy. It makes us stretch and think, to wrestle with God like Jacob.
ElCid wrote:do any of you remembering reading “Day of Defense” by Melvin McDonald? This book made the rounds when I was a missionary and was great ammo for binary thinkers.
Hehe, yeah. I had that and a couple other cool documents that were being passed around like Cleon Skousen’s “The Atonement” and had them bound together when I was a missionary. I still have that somewhere I think.
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