anarchival

I’ve been subject to a good deal of religious training over my twenty-eight years. My great-grandfather was a founding Elder of West Nashville Heights Church of Christ. My uncles and cousins were deacons and elders there. I went to their pre-school, and then attended services with my family every Sunday and some Wednesdays until just before my seventh birthday, when my mother and I converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our family told my mother she was taking me to hell in a handbasket. I remember sitting on the couch between my two great-aunts, and one of them asking me, “Why do you want to go to that church with your mother, Amber? Don’t you love Jesus anymore?” To which the six year old replied, “Of course I love Jesus! I’m joining his Church.” They disowned us.

I was a faithful Mormon for the next twelve years. My religion was the most important thing in the world to me. My relationships with Heavenly Father and Jesus were the one thing that really gave me comfort and peace. I took joy in reading the scriptures, in going to meetings, even in keeping the moral standards. I earned awards in Seminary. I wrote talks for the high priests. I did genealogy and went to the temple whenever possible. I received my patriarchal blessing. I also went to Catholic school.

I started out looking forward to the experience – some of my extended family was Catholic, and it’s the largest Christian denomination in the world, so naturally I had some curiosity. Joseph Smith had an ecumenical bent, even if the LDS Church never acquired it, and I took his teachings over theirs even then. I enjoyed religion class and Sodality and the retreats at the St. Cecilia Mother House. Mass was a welcome respite during the week. When I returned to public school in college, I felt the lack of a chapel on campus. It had always been a refuge for me to go in there to pray. Unfortunately, the Sisters didn’t always appreciate my fervor. In fact, the more I expressed my agreement with them, the more agitated they seemed to become. I tried taking different tacks with them, but none of them were successful. Soon, my Mormonism again became a problem. I wasn’t entirely surprised at it by then, but it was still a disappointment.

After high school my faith changed drastically. As you might expect, I’d been a strict conservative up to that point. Unfortunately, my life experiences didn’t exactly fit within a conservative paradigm, and I was growing up. I was beginning to see the disconnect between what I thought and what I believed to be true. It took a number of years before the disillusionment was complete, but eventually I left the LDS Church. Ironically, it was not for the same reasons my family thought I should do it. I still shake my head sometimes when I think of my first step-mother, who also went to Church of Christ, showing me “The Godmakers” when I was nine years old. I would sit there and refute the entire thing point by point with her. If only she had taken the time to actually get to know the religion (and open herself up to a little liberalism), she probably would have gotten a lot further along with my deprogramming.

After I left the LDS Church, I joined a feminist Seminary. Part of my motivation was to study religion from a different viewpoint for a change, and another part of my motivation was to seek a new community where I didn’t feel I had to check my evolving faith at the door. After about three years, I earned a doctorate in theology and accepted ordination as an interfaith minister, and eventually the Director put me on the Board. Not long afterwards, she invited me to join her family in polygamy. I decided I didn’t want anything else to do with cults after that.

That was a little over a year and a half ago. It’s felt like a lifetime. I’ve been reading a lot of books on atheism and staying as far away as possible from anything having to do with religion or spirituality. In a way, it’s been good for me. One of the major problems with the previous 26 years was that I didn’t practice nearly enough skepticism, and ended up with some really kooky beliefs in the process. Relativism didn’t help at all. I needed to take a break and a fast to figure out where I actually stood. Recently, the fast has come to an end. It had to. It was driving me into some very dark places.

I am, evidently, the type of person who needs faith in her life. I will be the first to admit that it’s a drug, but it’s a drug that keeps me sane, so I’m not going to refuse it. My belief system has been subject to a major overhaul about once every seven years, and I just turned twenty-eight. I’ve decided that it’s time to determine exactly what I want to keep, and what isn’t worth having. The past seven years of searching have given me a pretty good idea of what’s available, and the fourteen years before that have taught me exactly what doesn’t interest me. I plan to whittle down and smooth away until I have a faith that I can truly live.

The most important thing I’ve found in my faith is healing. Religion is nothing if it does not transform us moment by moment into our better selves. Religion is nothing if it does not give us the power and the right focus to make our world whole. This is at the heart of every religion, really, but the problem is that so much of the rest of it is taken up with the theology and rituals meant to open us up to that idea in the first place. When we idolize those things instead of seeing them as the means to an end, we miss the point of religion entirely.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.