Twenty-two years later

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone–my name is Tom. I joined the Church in 1992 at the age of 24. My 22-year spiritual journey has been nothing short of incredible. For the first few years, I was a literal believer, accepting the Book of Mormon at face value and absorbing all sorts of LDS teachings that in 1992 were still considered doctrine by many members. By 1995, I was already going through a process of deconstruction, questioning the validity of claims of the Church. In 1998 I asked to have my name removed from membership (it wasn’t) and spent a short time in inactivity attending other churches. Around 2002, my attendance at the Temple began to really pay off in the form of spiritual epiphanies. Other things came together as well: being in a liberal ward full of graduate students, and really becoming acquainted for the first time with active Latter-Day Saints who were comfortable with questioning the Church.

Today, 22 years after baptism, my spiritual journey has led me to a much deeper and broader understanding of what I think spiritual Truth is and what the Church’s role in that is. I have not been angry at the Church for many years now, but I also have learned to be realistic about the limitations of the Church as a hierarchical institution, as social organization, and as a unique cultural phenomenon in American society. My beliefs are not outside what the leaders of the Church would consider acceptable, but they are definitely unconventional by anyone’s standards. I do believe the Church is “true” in a specific and very important sense, but I have long gotten over the need to rationalize all of its teachings as if they are all necessary.

So my purpose in joining StayLDS is to help others who are struggling with the teachings of the Church and the experience of being LDS. I hope that my background as a convert brings a degree of objectivity. My family background is Chinese-American, so I feel I am well-qualified to empathize with those who feel they do not fit in with the Church socially or culturally. I already do fellowship people in my ward who are unconventional, but I want to try reaching out to others out there who may benefit from talking to me.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for sharing and welcome. I hope that we can hear more from you. Many of us regulars are finding it hard to make it work (at least I am) so it will be good to hear how you make it work for you. Please feel free to add your 2 cents.

[Anonymous]

Welcome, Tom. You have had an interesting journey, and I hope this can be a place where we can learn from each other.

[Anonymous]

Welcome,

I hope to hear more of your insight. I’m one of those who’s finding it harder everyday.

[Anonymous]

Welcome! I look forward to hearing more of your experiences.

[Anonymous]

Welcome, and thank you for your willingness to share. I hope we can all mutually benefit from your participation.

[Anonymous]

I’m looking forward to hearing more from you! :thumbup:

[Anonymous]

I’m interested in your definition of “true” and how the church meets that definition. Would you explain?

[Anonymous]

mercyngrace wrote:

I’m interested in your definition of “true” and how the church meets that definition. Would you explain?

Thanks for asking. Basically it has to do with the Temple. Truman Madsen said the Temple is a catalyst (his word). I believe there is a potential for very powerful experiences coming out of Temple attendance. Why, I am not absolutely sure but I think it has to do with the unique environment in there. We in the Church appear to be unique in having access to this catalyst. That is why I have no problem with the Mormon mantra “the Church is true” although I am sure my home teachers have a very different understanding of that every time I say it.

[Anonymous]

convert1992 wrote:

In 1998 I asked to have my name removed from membership (it wasn’t) and spent a short time in inactivity attending other churches. Around 2002, my attendance at the Temple began to really pay off in the form of spiritual epiphanies.

Hi, Tom – If you’re comfortable, I would love to hear more about both of these things.

[Anonymous]

Ann wrote:

Hi, Tom – If you’re comfortable, I would love to hear more about both of these things.

Hi Ann, yes, I feel comfortable talking about my time in inactivity and also the epiphanies in the Temple. I was only inactive for several months sometime around 1998, but to talk about it I have to back up a bit. I got my endowment in the Atlanta Temple in late 1993. Like most people going through for the first time, I really didn’t think much of it. Within a few months I was already thinking a lot about things that I’d never pondered on before–like what the world would be in the future. I was not deconstructing yet–at this point I still took the Church’s teachings almost completely at face value–but my thinking was a lot deeper than at anytime before getting my endowment. You could say I was becoming mystical in my spiritualism.

So by 1998, when I considered leaving the Church, I was far beyond the level where someone would want to go back and “investigate” any other churches. It was so funny: I remember when the stake president asked me later why in the world would I pick a hell-fire-and-brimstone evangelical mega-church, I had no answer for him. There was nothing they taught that resonated with me. It felt like someone in high school having to go back to kindergarten–the questions and issues they raise in other Christian churches really were distressingly elementary to me. The LDS theological system is so much more sophisticated than theirs. The real reason I went to that church was to have company–just the single adult sunday school classes alone approached the population of an LDS YSA branch!

Epiphany in the Temple: at some point, I began to attend the Temple again. In 2002, I was watching the beginning of the video and I remember thinking that the music sounded a lot like science fiction music. Science fiction as a genre of movie and literature has always provoked a lot of thought in me. So at that very moment, it occurred to me that in the scientific era in which we live, we automatically accept futuristic vision while rejecting or looking down on classical/ancient renderings. When you tell people that Jesus will descend from a staircase in the sky, they naturally scoff at that; but the idea of “First Contact” with extraterrestrials is taken seriously. I am not saying that I thought that Jesus would be coming from another planet, just that I was making that comparison in my mind.

At that very moment, just having held that thought in my mind for a second, I was hit with the greatest realization of anything that I’d experienced up to that point in my life. It was like trying to drink from a fire hose, thoughts were racing through my mind faster than I could stop and think. All sorts of thoughts–like what if the Garden of Eden was not the place as described in Genesis but a vastly more advanced civilization (again I am not saying that is what it is, just that that was what I was thinking at the moment). All sorts of implications of these thoughts, far too many to remember, all going through my mind in the span of maybe five to ten seconds. The whole experience instantly left me exhausted and distracted. I wanted nothing more than to hurry up and get out of the Temple so I could finish thinking about all the implications. It became very difficult to focus on the endowment ceremony. This experience really marked the beginning of my belief, which continues to this day, that it is possible to have revelatory experiences in the form of thought that is far more profound than what we normally experience on a daily basis.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for sharing that.

[Author]

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