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I would like to apologize to the new convert that I embarrassed over ten years ago during GD in a college ward, talking about Fore-ordination. I used Alma 13, and after looking back on the experience all those years ago, not only got it wrong but probably severely offended the guy. I said something to the effect that “to think that way was wrong and stupid and that’s not how it works.” I had to be right and everyone had to know that I knew what was going on. I’m a idiot. This comes up because of some of the first posts given on this thread by Ray. Ten years later I still regret it.
Justme, you need to realize Ray has not walked the sterotypical path of many of those of us who come to Stay LDS. The stereotypical path is a permanence in Stage 3 well beyond our personal capacity to be in other stages. Then a “sudden” delayed propulsion to stage 4 with attendant severe confusion, disorientation, and danger. Ray, on the other hand, I’m guessing, was in Stage 3 and Stage 4 more at the normative periods of his life. In other words, the LDS widget factory never quite worked on Ray to begin with. Therefore he has no TBM image to gently smash. His image is what it is, and it is decades old, and only gradually changing. Of course that isn’t very helpful to you, but I think seeing the full picture will help you relate to Ray. For example, to Ray, he has a testimony, the general same one he had last year. To you, what you have sure doesn’t look like what you have called a testimony for decades. So Ray may see things the same way you do, but he is just more accustomed to it and sees it more as the normal way to be.
Ray, please clarify or correct anything I may have misrepresented or misunderstood.
Tom
Richard Bushman describes his journey that way too Tom. When he was a student at Harvard in his early 20’s, he said it was very normal for him and his peer group of friends to kick around controversial topics and push the envelope. He went through this shift in a positive and academically challenging environment at about the right time in his life. Subsequently, he lived the rest of his adult life without having to go through that SNAP! we experience when our internal rubber band breaks from the cog-dis pressure. Thanks for the clarification, Tom. My experience was much like Bushman’s, but it actually started at an earlier age than college in my 20’s. For example, I knew by the time I was baptized at age eight that my opinions about some things I had read and considered (like Book of Mormon geography and the “American Indian issue”) were different than most of the adults around me. Luckily, that was fine – largely because my father encouraged me to think about things and form my own opinions (even though some of them were very different than his). He is not “intellectual” by ANY classic definition (and hated school), but he is a thinker with some heterodox views of his own. I say this in all humility, but adding to my sense of being “outside the norm” was the fact that I was ahead of everyone in my classes academically. I never have been “one of the guys” – and I’ve always been “different” in multiple ways. Therefore, I’m used to being different – and I’m totally comfortable being different.
Having said all of that, the process of reconciling the fact that I am and see things differently than those around me, accepting my differences and finding peace as a saxophone among the piccolos is the exact same process that all must experience. I understand the process and the perspective; I just was fortunate to learn it much earlier than most.
Anyone who wants to read what I wrote on Mormon Matters about this, the post is called “The Bright Night of My Soul”. (For some reason, I can’t access MM right now. Will someone please find the post and provide the link?)
Thanks, Ray. So to correct what I said to Justme, Ray’s experience was not perhaps so much an earlier traversing of the developmental stages, but a core early realization that he was “different”. And this core realization was made possible by a heaping helping of unconditional love from, at least, his dad. Ray didn’t have to think a certain way to be acceptable. His own way was okay to his dad. So it was okay to Ray. And it’s still okay to this day. Ray has probably been traversing the developmental stages at his own pace in a way that is difficult to liken unto those of us who live the traditional conforming path. It would be very hard for me, with what little I know of him, to guess what faith stage he might be in, for example. And I am guessing it would also be difficult for him. But at the same time, it might not be interesting to him, because he doesn’t need assurance he’s okay even as a heretic. He fought that battle long ago.
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