Not OK

I'm not okay right now.

I went with Chris and his aunt, Annette, on a visitor's tour of the Idaho Falls LDS temple this morning. It was recently renovated and, as with all temples that have undergone renovation or construction, is currently open to the public to tour.

Walking into the Garden Room was a gut punch. The Garden Room where I finally understood the eternal relationship of men and women. The Garden Room where I saw my dear Grandpa Johnson act in the live endowment. Where I thought the things I had learned were finally going to put my past away.

The Celestial Room. So beautiful. So peaceful. I felt like a prodigal son that had come home only to find that I wasn't welcome to stay.

The saccharine, hideously fake video we had to watch in the church next door before the tour got underway, emblematic of everything that disturbs me about the Church. If the Lord looks on the heart and not on the outward appearance, why is the Church so fastidious about how it looks to the world?

Passing by and through all those sealing rooms. With Chris. Loss in so many ways - what could have been with him. With a her. So many points in the past where I could have charted a different course. Or the Church could have charted a different course. There is no eternal increase with two males, but is that just because of rigid parameters? Can increase be measured in other ways? What about the love I feel for him?

My parents were set to be volunteers today. I didn't know what shift they were on. They didn't know either when I made the reservation. As today came closer and I spoke with them about the trip, I got the distinct sense they didn't want to be there when I was, even though it was Mom's idea in the first place to go together. It's probably best we didn't see each other there. I don't think any of us could have endured it.

Ultimately, I went through with the trip because I felt it was important to future dialogues that Chris have the experience of walking through a temple. Being in one. I'm wondering now if it wasn't a mistake.

There's more, but this is what I can put into words now.

An Impossible Dream in Texas

I blame Cervantes. And Peter O’Toole. And Sofia Loren. They taught me to tilt at windmills. They taught me I could be Dulcinea instead of Aldonza just by saying so. They taught me to see life as it should be and not as it is.

Theatre changes people. For millennia, theatre has been a sacred and profane temple for human beings to explore the meaning of their existence and be transformed in the exploration. The Greeks with their mother-marrying father-killing gouge-out-your-eyes types of plays were striving for catharsis, that purifying, cleansing renewal of the soul occurring when locked-up feelings and thoughts are given a safe, vicarious release through the evocation of pity (empathy) and/or fear. Theatre has always been a part of my life, even when I didn’t see it or didn’t want it.

A little over two years ago, I was in a production of Terrence McNally’s passion play Corpus Christi at the Old Town Actor’s Studio. Every night, I sang “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” with my cast mates…my brothers….and then was called by name, recognized and adored, given a new name (Bartholomew), and baptized on that altar called the stage. Every night, I was renewed.

What needed renewal? In the year 2000 I was disfellowshipped from my natal church. Looking back on it now, I realize the disfellowshipment had been going on years before that as I was told as a teenager to hide a big part of who I was. In any case, I spent a few months continuing to attend church, feeling like the living dead. Disfellowshipped members are asked not to lead prayer in church or participate in church discussions. They cannot hold callings or minister in any way. They are encouraged to study scripture, pray often in private, and pay their tithe. These things are supposed to help purify them until they are sufficiently rehabilitated to reenter the community. I wasn't rehabilitated and I didn’t reenter the community. Instead, I moved and dropped out of it entirely. Feeling like a failure...lost, confused, invalidated, guilty, dirty...my communion with my Heavenly Father was intermittent at best. I felt alone.

Spiritual life continued that way for me for almost 15 years. My attendance at Trinity Episcopal while serving as their organist began to revive it, but I was resistant. Parts of my soul were still shut up tight because what I was feeling was at odds with what I had accepted so long ago as truth. Of course the Spirit was there to be felt, but my life path would never lead me to be like my Heavenly Father, so what was the point? I would always be a second-class citizen in the society of God.

Then Jason Bartosic, the director of Corpus at OTAS, prevailed in getting me to audition for his show. He didn’t have to work too hard. I’d been told who else was going to be in the show and I was eager to work with so much talent. So many gifted performers on stage at one time? Sign me up, please! There was so much I could learn and experience!

The rehearsals were revelatory in themselves. So many ideas innovative by Pocatello standards! The fluidity of the set! The novelty of the writing! The brilliance of the conception and direction as a whole! And I had been right about that company of actors. It was an honor to be among them. When the run of performances began, my soul began to open, and as I said before, I experienced renewal.

One night in particular, that renewal penetrated the most carefully guarded cells of my soul.

I believe it was during the second or third performance of Corpus, I was in the middle of my first exchange with Joshua (another name for Jesus and one actually closer to what he was called while on Earth). I looked into my brother Mitch’s eyes (the guy playing Joshua) and I saw instead my Savior looking back at me. The love, compassion, and acceptance filled my heart beyond its size. I felt like I had come back home.

Home! The home I knew before this life. The home that was waiting for me after it. Home! I wasn’t alone. I had never been alone! I had been denying myself my Savior’s love, my Father’s love, a love that wasn’t conditional on my being in good standing with any particular church. A love that wasn’t conditional at all. I walked with my Savior the rest of that performance, aglow, radiant with the love I felt. I supped with Him in the upper room. I kissed His feet. I wept from my heart as I watched Him die on the cross. It was all very, very real...and I was once again in real communion with the Savior I had shut out so long ago.

Science would say it was a trick of conditioning, a trick of the mind. Life as it is, indeed, Mr. O’Toole. Mr. Stephenson. Mr. Murdoch.  I’ve spent plenty of the last 17 years wondering if all the spiritual experiences I’ve ever had were just the result of brainwashing. It’s a harsh possibility to face that at times has left me desolate, hard, and angry. It’s what I often see in others disconnected from their faith, from their Father, from their Home.  However, gifts are only gifts if they’re accepted. Obi wan wisely and a bit smugly told Luke the truth was all dependant on his point of view. The gift of love that God continually and patiently offers me can only be received if I’m willing and ready to accept it. In that moment on that stage, I was ready and I will never be the same.

That said, I still struggle to accept the gift I was given that night. I struggle because I’ve been told repeatedly that I’m not worthy of it. I struggle because I tell myself I’m not worthy of it. I struggle because I wonder from time to time if it’s real. I struggle because I know the dark corners of my own soul. Last year, as I was facing the wrenching conflict of choosing between family and family, I often was too disoriented by stress and grief to remember what I’d seen, too blinded and scared to grasp the hand still reaching out to me. That struggle continues as I deal with the consequences of the choice I made.

But the gift is still there to be accepted, and I’m grateful.

I’m also grateful for the musical and theatrical gifts that led me down my own road to Emmaus. (Perhaps it’s because of the potential in those gifts that darkness has always tried to separate me from them.) Thanks to them, Mr. McNally, Cervantes, my brothers in Texas (and my sister - I love you, MFP!), and above all my Father who in His infinite and unconditional love gave them all to me , I’ll continue tilting at windmills, claiming my noble heritage as a son of God, and seeing Life as it should be.

Camazotz, Here I Come?

Many years ago, I read Madeleine l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I was fascinated by the idea of the tesseract and identified with Charles Wallace's empathy and intuition. I was terrified by IT, ruler of the planet on which their father had been held for so long. At the time, I interpreted the enforced order on that planet, Camazotz by name, as a metaphor for the Communist regimes like the Soviet Union or East Germany that I was taught threatened the American way of life. It was the 1980’s after all, the era of Reagan and renewed flag waving and the last big run of the nuclear arms race. It was only as I got older and pondered on the novel that I saw it as the epitome of any repressive system that squashed individuality and stifled personal liberty. Those systems are everywhere, especially in places that say they grant freedom. Who wants to live like that?

Apparently these days, I do. I’m finding myself longing to live on Camazotz.

This recent realization of a longing for order shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’ve always thought I believed in individuality and championed the cause of liberty. I’ve always stood for the oppressed and the marginalized. I’ve always fought for people to be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do...up to a point.

Being raised LDS, there’s liberty and then there’s liberty. What I thought was liberty as a child seems much less so when viewed through more experienced eyes. And yet, reality is subjective, and within that youthful reality, there was a lot of room to breathe as long as one didn’t push past the limits, the boundaries explicit and implicit. In so many ways, I flourished in that structure. It allowed parts of me to grow straight, tall, and upright. But, as anyone who has read this blog knows, I was also severely bruised by that structure. Why would I crave it again?

This is a time of political and personal turmoil, when people steal books from libraries and cheese doodles sporting bad hair are in serious contention for the presidency of the United States, when All Lives Matter even though they don’t really seem to. This is a time when people steal your kidneys in public parks, when men are becoming women and vice versa and other people are taking advantage of the uncertainty this has caused society to push their own agendas. This is a time where people don’t push in their chairs and don’t ask if you’re available before they start barraging you with demands. They don’t say “please” and “thank you”, or “excuse me, do you have a moment?” Breaking “the rules” is now the norm. Whatever happened to everyone following the rules instead of being the exception? (Was there really ever such a time?) Where are the unquestionably good cowboys, the ones with the white hats that Paula Cole sang about in the ‘90’s? Where is the freakin’ Lone Ranger?

I think my own rule breaking has something to do with this longing. This summer, I married Chris, breaking one of the biggest rules taught me about life. I permanently put myself outside the protective ideological circle that once supported me and I’ve never felt more vulnerable, more precarious. It permanently altered my relationships with people I care deeply about. My entire world has changed and now I’m looking to find any vestiges of the order I knew. When they don’t materialize, I get angry, sometimes even hostile. I become the tyrant I say I despise. I think mean things about people, straying far from the Christian ideals I endeavor to espouse. It’s harder than ever to let people be who they are and to love them regardless. I should be grateful for the spiritual exercise, but I’m just tired. Tired of difference and division. Tired of discussion. Tired of variation and diversity. I want us all to walk lock step according to the stride I set forth.

I guess you could say I’m the devil.

I hope to come through this with an increased ability to love unconditionally. I also hope the world will wake up and realize we need both liberty and liege, freedom and restraint, if we are to cohere as a society of siblings, children of whatever lord of light we choose to acknowledge. Because really, who wants a giant, pulsating brain taking the choice away from us? Or my mediocre, sometimes active one calling everyone names when it doesn’t have its way?

Prophets Are People, Too

The apostle Paul and I disagree on a few things: the length of a man's hair, keeping women silent in churches, celibacy of priests, and so on. It seems to me the ways and thought patterns of the Pharisees didn't completely desert him after his conversion. Perhaps I'm judging his first-century teachings with a twenty-first century eye, but many of his words have led to strange rules about who is accepted of God and who is not. Only certain right-behaving people can belong to the God club, you know. (Many of these patriarchal, appearance-careful rules can be found among Latter-Day Saints behind the Zion Curtain.)

It is for that reason I was pleasantly surprised a couple of days ago while choosing music for upcoming services at Trinity to find a new and very helpful insight in the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians. Easily dubbed "The Charity Chapter," Paul proclaims that charity, or pure love, is everlasting and the only thing that really matters. This idea is a "golden thread" of truth to which I cling and is not new to me. What I'd never really seen before now was one of the things that Paul said would not last.

In the eighth verse, according to the King James version, Paul says that "whether there be prophecies, they shall fail..." The Jerusalem Bible translates this passage "if there are gifts of prophecy, the time will come when they must fail..." He then goes on to call all human gifts of knowledge or foreknowledge imperfect and fallible; the limited perceptive abilities of humans make all our knowledge fallible.

Why was this such a gift? In light of recent events, especially Elder Russell M. Nelson's address to the LDS church, it was a reminder that prophets are people. They see through a glass darkly, perhaps not as darkly as others but their vision is still limited and distorted by their humanity. Fasting and prayer can alter the normal human state, but it is debatable whether this actually brings more clarity or just changes the lens.

I've been reading a short biography of Joseph Smith written by a noted biographer and non-member, Robert Vincent Remini. It makes a good attempt at interpreting the available facts fairly, giving the prophet the benefit of the doubt where many merely condemn. What has become clearer through this is that for all of his notable qualities and actions, Joseph Smith was a man, and a fallible one, who was likely seeking for something divine while dealing with his very human nature. I do not doubt he had experiences of a transcendent nature, and I do believe he encountered God. It was really only with the advent of Brigham Young's presidency that he was canonized as some kind of perfect saint, unquestionable and infallible.

So many prophecies have not come to pass; so many policies have proven changeable. Does that make the quest for the divine ridiculous? Does it make the search for the mind of God a quixotic endeavor? Not entirely, because amongst all the attempts to know the mind of God, the many prophecies made and the visions reported, there is one golden thread that weaves through the fabric, the one Paul wove into his first Corinthian epistle: love is what lasts. Love is what matters. Choosing to love will be our salvation in the end. Jesus's message of peace through love, even when filtered through the millennia, gleams golden and it's okay for everything else to crumble away. No need to be afraid or angry that Elder Nelson made that speech in Hawaii. No need to throw my love of friends or family away to mock or ridicule those that are still members. No need to bring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to its knees by trying to keep their guest artists from performing with them. Love is what matters because love is what lasts. When one is love, all the attributes of love Paul mentions are in evidence and there is, ultimately, peace.

In my own personal page of revelation, given long ago when I was a teenager, I was told that the devil would tempt and try me in insidious ways, desirous to take me for his own. That meant he was going to be sneaky about how he led me away from the fold; if I wanted to stay faithful and maintain access to the atoning gift of the Savior, I needed to cling to the words of the prophets, being as obedient and subservient as I could. I needed to question any other idea or voice with deep suspicion of the motives behind it. Thus, my entire mission was one big offering of as perfect an obedience as I could muster. I worked very hard to burn away sinful thoughts and impulses with the fire of the Holy Ghost. It became clear after my mission that I just couldn't stay away from the tree of knowledge and it's corrupting fruit. I was miserable.

I understand now that what I had really been doing was putting my trust in the arm of flesh. It has taken me a long time to arrive at the point I occupy now, largely due to my extreme caution that I not be led astray. It could be argued that the devil has won, but I don't think so. Little by little, my trust has shifted from the arm of flesh to the heart of love, and with all due respect to the brethren, I think that's where God can really be found.

Did You Think to Pray?

The last week has been a gathering storm full of blackening skies and threatening winds. The consequences of my foibles have boomeranged back to me in various ways and seemed to outweigh anything I might have to offer in compensation. Yesterday was so intensely dark, it was physically hard to breathe.

Felicitously, Chris and I had a counseling session last night and light broke through to displace the gloom. Of the many things we discussed, our counselor suggested we include a daily mutual meditative ritual to help us get in sync whenever we settle in together at the end of the day, or in other words, that we pray together.

I used to pray on a regular, regimented basis. I would have been one of those Athenians Paul addressed when he told them that in all things they were too superstitious. Religiosity pervaded my life, draining the vitality from spiritually-centering rituals, and I struggled to find my spiritual self. Many potentially helpful acts were abandoned. The counselor’s suggestion last night was the equivalent of reminding me I needed a spiritual V-8. Cautious hope stirred.

This morning, before I left to go running, Chris and I knelt down to pray. The sweet relief that flooded my soul from our simple prayer was immediate and profound, soothing my life-scalded consciousness like sweet salve. Tranquility distilled upon the both of us and, in that moment, concerns we expressed last night lost their urgency. As this day progresses, peace centers my soul and forgiveness for myself and others lightens my heart. Amazing grace, indeed.

“Ere you left your room this morning, did you think to pray?” queries a hymn from my youth. “In the name of Christ, our Savior, did you sue for loving favor as a shield today?...

When your heart was filled with anger, did you think to pray? Did you plead for grace, my brother, that you might forgive another who had crossed your way?...

When sore trials came upon you, did you think to pray? When your soul was full of sorrow, Balm of Gilead did you borrow at the gates of day?

Oh, how praying rests the weary! Prayer will change the night to day. So when life gets dark and dreary, don’t forget to pray.”

Day of the Dead was Yesterday!

You're a day late. Ghosts are supposed to be back in their graves by now. Your voice on the phone is untimely. Why is it that every single freakin' time I hear your voice my being responds like it's been hit with an electric charge? It takes me hours to calm back down and forget again.

Yet, you are never gone. You color everything - my thoughts, my decisions, my feelings. I was reborn through you and then you left me to fend for myself. There are times now that I want to see you again and say and do all the things I had repressed in the hopes of getting you back. I wonder if you would still haunt me like you do if I had gone ahead and purged you like everyone told me to. It's only in moments like these that I become aware of how bitter I am. I chose not to hate you so my soul wouldn't be cankered with your betrayal but the feelings are still there regardless of my ignorance.

Go away now. Sleep now. Leave me with my hollow peace.

Blue Light Special

My first official relationship was really rocky. He pulled me out of the closet kicking and screaming, thinking I'd be grateful for the liberation he offered me. As he began to realize I wasn't going to give him what he wanted, he started saying things to me, trying to break me open - trying to break me, period. At one point, he called me 'damaged merchandise.' It was the first time I'd heard that expression, and the truth of it stung.

Like most of us walking around Battlefield Earth, I am indeed damaged, a screaming Kmart blue light special. This damage has left only pieces of me that are functional; I rarely function as a whole unit, especially when pushed to full throttle. I'm entertaining at times, but ultimately frustrating or deeply disappointing. Buyer beware!