What My Faith Journey Taught Me

What My Faith Journey Taught Me

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A blog post offering some reflection and encouragement for those who desire to stay but are struggling.

I think as you are aware we like to discuss things on this forum and discourage posting links to other sites by themselves without discussion points.

I particularly related to the following, comparing my faith/belief to an edifice (actually a church building in my own mind):

One day something shifted in my mind. Some new idea entered in and it pushed an old idea out. Rather than continue the compulsion to make the pieces fit, this new idea which was almost a living breathing thing… It was the permission to take it all down. To disassemble everything. To deconstruct my faith piece by piece.

There are still pieces of rubble laying around, most of which it seems at this point will not become part of my reconstructed faith; there are new pieces of the building which were not part of the old one; and there are parts of the old faith that are intricately incorporated into the new (they might be referred to as cornerstones, foundations, or keystones). The core principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ are those key components.

When I say Gospel, I don’t mean Church. They are very different separate things… even unrelated or polar opposites at times.

This was an important part of my faith journey – the separation of the gospel and the church. It’s more like spaghetti with sauce than it is like a cake. They are are very much related and “all over” each other, although with great effort they could be separated (unlike a cake where the ingredients cannot be separated). Other churches/belief systems are just a slightly different sauce.

I also agree with this:

The trouble is that the Church has created a rhetoric and a culture which makes you to feel as though you lost something when you really are gaining things.

Many of you know my story more or less. Our third child was stillborn. The shock from that loss changed my worldview. I just was not prepared for the idea.

Non-religious people are also often unprepared. We live in a first world country where premature children are born and treated all the time. We do not tend to talk about it when this does not work out well.

The LDS prosperity gospel just added another layer of denial. I felt that God would personally intervene for us (at least on big things like health and safety) because we were faithful tithe paying Mormons. It really did feel like my entire internal structure of how I ordered, catalogued, interpreted, and perceived the world was falling apart.

In talking to our bishop, he revealed that he too had had some sort of a faith crisis. He was shocked by some of the things that happened in the history of the church but he came to rest on the church having divine authority. If the church has it, then there can be all sorts of impropriety, none of that would change that this church is the only saving game in town.

It was so interesting to ponder. He too had a faith crisis and had his assumptive faith structure fall to the ground. It was just that his ground seemed to be so much higher than my ground. It felt like we had both once been on the top floor and he fell down to the 30th floor when I fell all the way to the bottom.

Some after a faith crisis, come to rest on LDS authority, some upon Jesus and Christianity, some become agnostics, still others become atheists and reject any religion. All of these seem to fall exactly as far as they need to in order to regain what seems to be a firm footing again. How far down do they have to go before they are steady on their feet again?

The subconscious mind seems to dive down searching for a firm foundation with which to rebuild.

He was shocked by some of the things that happened in the history of the church but he came to rest on the church having divine authority. If the church has it, then there can be all sorts of impropriety, none of that would change that this church is the only saving game in town.

The one true church claim can sometimes we a license to kill when it isn’t tempered with humility, and apology from church leaders when there is wrong doing by its leaders or the institution

At the same time, I’m thankful for the apologies that do exist. I just wish it was part of our culture.

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. – C.S. Lewis

While I like what he says in this passage, I think it can also apply to seeing our faith as a living house. Generally, when people come to church, they bring with them the general outlines of their faith houses. To me, a faith house is composed of touchstone experiences that the owner keeps going back to. These can be testimony/belief statements about God, Jesus Christ, J.S, scriptures/inspirational writings, and personal spiritual experiences. I think part of a faith house also includes an inventory of individual strengths and weaknesses (both real and perceived), and individual progress reports on those strengths and weaknesses. It also includes internalized rules such as the 10 commandments, or the 2 great commandments. It also includes tradition rules such as dress code, Word of Wisdom, etc.

Eventually, the faith houses are toted into the light and examined. Sometimes this happens because of a specific event in a person’s life – I think it is usually tied to a loss of some kind. Sometimes it happens because people compare faith houses to see how similar they are to each other and try to define the standard of what the perfect faith house looks like. I think that Stage 3 people focus on building the perfect one-size-fits-all faith house, with conformity at the root of it’s success. However, just as not all real houses look like each other all over the world (different weather conditions to stand up in), our individual faith houses are not one-size-fits-all. I think this contributes to the disconnect between people because some people are drawn to or driven to building an unconventional faith house, and some people are focused on building the “safe” generic faith house – until they hit a point in their path when they realize the “safe” option is no longer viable for whatever reason.

I think it is more important to look introspectively and work with God (if you feel He is interested in being involved) to design your unique individual faith house. I also think it is helpful to see the faith houses of others – but only if you are capable of making a distinction between blindly adding to your faith house because “everyone is doing it” and adding to your faith house because the faith house plan requires a similar feature to what is being presented.

For my own faith house, I am still figuring out what I have. For me, the catalyst for my current faith transition was I learned something integral about myself that I had never seen before. It is like being nearly blind and all of a sudden getting glasses. I am doing a lot of wandering around my faith house going “Holy Cow! That’s what that looks like.” and marking it on the blue print. There is also a lot of “I did not know this was here – do I really need this, or does it get carted away to the dump?”. There is a bit of looking at the blue print and realizing that the design needs work too because some things are being re-designed.

I think sometimes the house can’t be altered for the better until half of it or more is demolished.

It took me back to my beginnings. I believe it brought me closer to God and truer self.

In the past 6 months I have heard 2 different direct family members speak at church (none of us expected me to be in the audience) both times they referenced the New Testament and Jesus Christ as needing to be the light in your life. That was my family reference point. If I talk to them they are still LDS TBM, but from that home came a hope of the Christ life from the four gospels.

When all the bricks fell, I found my heart still bound to those teachings. The beatitudes, etc.

The rest may come and go, but the New Testament Jesus Christ is buried deeper in my heart than I realized.

For what it’s worth, I would say close to half or more of the original church structure, culture, and even doctrine has been dismantled and replaced at this point – and I see that as a positive thing.

I agree. I read once an LDS scholar apologist explaining that one of the criteria for church doctrine is essentially the voice of the people over time. Therefore Adam-God is clearly not doctrine because it was never completely enmeshed in LDS theology and has certainly fallen out of favor in the sense of it not being taught in orthodox circles for over 100 years. I feel there is some wisdom in this. The church body tends to move away from objectionable or strange doctrines on its own.

However, it also seems to be a form of self fulfilling prophecy. As if as to say,

“What we teach now is authoritative. What we taught then is not. How do we know that what we taught then wasn’t authoritative? Because we eventually stopped teaching it.”