Lost and Found

By way of brief bio, let me say I was born 65 years ago and raised in the Church in a tiny farming community in Southeastern Idaho. I served a Spanish-speaking mission in Texas and New Mexico in the mid 60’s, married in the temple and became the father of five children born in the covenant. Intensely active until my early 40’s, by the late 1980’s after requesting release as the High Priest Group Leader, I was serving as the Ward Primary Pianist – because at that point, I no longer felt I could teach or preach the things I had come to doubt. Primary was a safe haven where all I had to do was play that charming children’s music.

By 1991, my discomfort and sense of alienation was too painful and I requested action from the bishop, who ignored me. In 1999, after 8 years of repeated asking, and living in an entirely different community, I succeeded in terminating my membership in the Church when the local bishop took the requested action.

Over the subsequent years I’ve come to understand that for those who come out of childhood and pass into adult life – with it’s demands of personal responsibility and accountability – a strong cultural background and heritage-based values can be an asset of enormous worth.

I’ve also learned that an attempt to turn one’s back on such a culture and heritage is made with serious risks involved. I had been born and raised in a culture based on a heritage ripe with history and habit of sacrifice and achievement. It’s a culture that has always placed a high value on personal responsibility, loyalty to community and mutual compassion.

The source of these values has a direct and obvious connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Without the Church and the living LDS awareness its history, growth, doctrinal evolution, persecution, and ultimate spectacular social survival, there would be no cultural or heritage-based LDS American citizens such as we have today.

It is my confession that years ago in rejecting the faith, I attempted to reject then the culture and heritage … and suffered for that. For me the loss of identity and a sense of no longer being aware of who I really am as a human being seemed to spawn a toxic loss of self that only increased over the years. These of course for most people are internal wars of identity and do not publicly reveal themselves in the lives of all who attempt to turn their back on the spiritual or philosophical basis of their upbringing.

But for me, having attempted to exit one’s community of origin, the sense of who you used to be versus who you are trying to become is no casual endeavor. In my case, I coupled abandonment of my religion with abandonment of my culture and collided with disastrous internal consequences.

My very wise wife (after a temple divorce I married an incredible human being who was not LDS) and companion saw this conflict in my heart years ago and warned me about having tossed the baby with the bathwater. She has been so on the money with this. In her own spiritual style and practice she for many years endeavored to get me to go find that baby before it was too late. She spoke not about a child of religion, but a child of culture and identity.

At some point then as our relationship moved well into its second decade, her own long-time awareness of an absence of strong cultural background and sense of membership in an intimate community of like-minded friends and family left her, I suppose, fed up with chasing my lost child for me.

She began nudging me gently and patiently – but firmly – toward my people.

Here’s how she described it recently in her own blog:

We decided to pay a visit two Sunday’s ago. We set the ground rules for ourselves, that we would attend the general meeting and leave before the other two meetings that follow.

The purpose of visiting the church was to introduce ourselves to Mormons within our community. I found myself quite taken with the speakers at the meeting, a husband and wife team in the function of missioner presidents. Meaning to the best of my present understanding that they assist and help the young missionaries in performing their functions.

She spoke with depth and feeling to the Book of Ruth (biblical), he told an engaging story, and it did not feel to me like ‘preaching’ in the traditional sense of the word.

As I looked around at the people in attendance, I had moments of appreciation that they were people, neighbors living in the region where we live, trying to make their way in the world to the best of their varied abilities.

I said to my husband, that I would like to stay and see how the rest of the meetings develop.

At the end of the meetings, I said to my husband that I was ready to take the next step towards moving inside, and that step is baptism, so I was ready for baptism.

He was startled and quick to recover, knowing our walk is one together, not separate and his appreciation for the male role of attendance to his wife, indicated he would be baptized, he first, and then he would be in position to baptize me.

Thus began for us a new aspect to our journey together.

What did I really feel at that moment when my wife suddenly up and announced her intention?

It was ethereal – a throwback to thoughts and emotions that had not entered my mind and heart for more than 20 years.

This was really happening right before my eyes. I had no control over what was going on. The Spirit was talking to her without my help, without my approval or agreement.

I knew not if it was the LDS “Holy Ghost” or the more familiar “spirit” of love and holiness that had been part and parcel of the spirituality we have fashioned over the years as a couple. It has been astounding and marvelous, mysterious – and in some ways unreal for one such as I. As this unfolds, the hymn I learned as a child echoes in my heart, “I Stand All Amazed.”

She has learned truths about my church, my culture, my heritage and my religion that are not filtered through me. She has listened to literally hundreds of podcasts; Mormon Stories, Mormon Matters, Mormon whatever. I’m just glad the Spirit is not telling her to stay away from her proud and stubborn husband with his overrated intellectual prowess..

These are both joyful and painful times.

The spirituality that has always been alive and practiced in our home is not at risk nor under danger of being replaced by conversion to some higher faith of greater significance and importance.

That particular evangelical stereotype is not at play here.

What matters most now is her work in helping recover the baby as we merge with my culture and identity in a very real and participatory way.

What matters most now – even more than my own recovering sense of identity – is our more mutual love of Christ and personal testimony that has very little to do with a formula or scripted revelation.

It has everything to do with joining a community of souls with a like-minded faith and spiritual practice that invites participation, offers opportunity for service and unabashedly proclaims the living Jesus Christ.

It is – with my wife and her unveiled spiritual strength at my side – a return to my people.