I grew up the oldest of five spread across ten years, and Ellie did too. We’re not twins, there’s actually a two year age gap between us, but the unusual dynamic of our family and our unique sister bond reduced that gap to nothing by the time we were both older than twelve. We shared responsibility and respect between us— when our parents were gone we babysat together, and our curfew was the same in high school. Any older sibling privileges were hers as much as they were mine, at least from my perspective (you may have to check that with her).
This is going to be a blog and a story about our different spiritual journeys, but that story cannot be told without also telling the story of our sisterhood. My spiritual journey has been inseparable from that sibling relationship, and while my experiences have been my own and my path has been vastly different from hers, my trajectory has been a response to hers in many ways. I’ve felt the ripples from her spiritual journey deeply in my own life.
My spiritual life as a child and teenager was supported by our Mormon upbringing but always deeply personal to me and centered on my experiences with God rather than a knowledge that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was true. Church-led programs like Trek, seminary, and Girls’ Camp were not optional at our house, but that style of religious practice has always frustrated me and I participated because that was what we did, not because I found meaning in those programs. I don’t typically find group worship practices or programs to be spiritually meaningful, and I resent the feeling of spiritual experiences being forced or manufactured. It felt disingenuous, an attempt to create spirituality while also making sure it was within acceptable doctrinal boundaries.
My most spiritual experiences have happened while I was alone, in a solitary, meditative headspace, and I’ve come to realize this is because spirituality must be an individual, personal experience before it can be anything else. Religion can be taught, but the spirituality people associate and experience with religion cannot, and you cannot substitute religious practice for spirituality. I believe I was always going to find God, and the man-made structure of Mormonism gave me a framework for understanding and accessing God, but my spirituality was not manufactured and it started with my individual spiritual nature, not the cultural practices I was raised to keep.
I was already aware as a teenager that my spiritual life was unusually intense and emotional. I experience the world in a unique way, as someone with ADHD, and it was very clear to me as a kid as young as ten that I thought and felt differently than people around me. This was especially apparent in my spiritual life as I moved into middle school and high school, so I was forced around this time to begin to mentally separate my expansive, joyful spiritual life from my dogmatic, prescriptive religious life, because my spirituality never fully fit in the box Mormonism said it should. By the time I was a teenager I had done a lot of this separation, and I knew that the Mormon understanding of God wasn’t the perfect label for my experience of God, and more importantly my experiences were real, more real than anything else, which made Mormonism if not untrue then certainly incomplete.
However, this perceived distance wasn’t insurmountable for the first part of my life, and I was able to balance a growing understanding that some Mormon practices were cultural in origin and problematic in nature while also valuing and nurturing the spiritual life Mormonism taught me to have. I intrinsically understood at the age of fourteen when we were cutting off jeans to make knee-length (and I do mean to the kneecap) shorts for Girls’ Camp that while this was something we did as a family because my parents are especially orthodox, the length of my shorts did not affect my personal standing with God.
Some doctrines, too, I was able to discard without a sense of cognitive dissonance. The teaching that mankind is inherently sinful, wrong, and dirty is one that’s general to Christianity, but not congruent with the God I knew and loved and the innate sense of self I’ve always had. As a teenager I was not afraid to voice my belief that mankind is inherently good and worthy when I heard my peers or leaders talk about how bad they were and how much more they could be doing to be enough. It never sat right with me, so I didn’t accept it.
People observing me often couldn’t see my nuanced beliefs, because I was outwardly so orthodox. Something I was keenly aware of as a teenager was the scrutiny our family was under. Our parents are deeply orthodox, not out of a sense of duty or tradition but because they really, sincerely find fulfillment in living every part of church teachings and doctrine. Their orthodoxy has for them created a deep, grounded, beautiful faith. Both our parents faithfully held time-intensive leadership callings throughout our childhood and our father was the bishop of our ward for a significant portion of our high school years, during which time our parents were unpopular with a small but vocal part of our ward. Because of this visibility, the standards were higher for us. We were the kids at mutual every week, we were the kids with perfect seminary attendance, we were the kids who answered all the questions in Sunday School. People looked at Ellie and I and saw uptight Molly Mormons, and this drove me crazy. From my perspective, I had no other choice but to perfectly fulfill church cultural expectations, and I didn’t do these things because I wanted to seem better than everyone else or even because I thought those things were especially important, but because my dad was the bishop and there was an expectation that we not let him down. And if that was unfair, it was unfair, but I’m a loyal person and I desperately wanted to be a good daughter so I was willing to do it. No part of it was performative for me; the spiritual aspect was real to me, and the Molly Mormon cultural aspect was what I had to do to not let my parents down.
It was incredibly important that Ellie was there with me. I’m not a naturally submissive person, and it’s in my nature to buck against being told what to do, but with her subject to the same pressure and expectations, family loyalty felt even more critical, and even more worthwhile. She understood our parents and she understood me, and I believed at the time that we shared the same perspective on which things mattered for salvation and which didn’t matter, but were required because our parents were our parents. If she hadn’t been right there next to me reminding me by her presence that I needed to follow through for her and our parents I think I would have been much more rebellious than I was.
When I left home I felt free to finally explore such rebellious things as wearing leggings to school and watching PG-13 movies. I became even more conscious that the way we were raised was an exceptionally orthodox (though still mainstream) way to live Mormonism, but even as I began to individually deconstruct the patriarchal, sexist structure of the church, I still felt oriented against Ellie’s experience. Her deconstruction didn’t start until long after mine, so for a time I felt grounded in our shared history and faith even as I questioned. It wasn’t conscious, but I think there’s a reason my deconstruction began slowly and didn’t fully take off until Ellie left. I believed our experiences were the same, and when I needed a reminder of why we stayed and what we believed, all I had to do was look to her and her steadiness.
When she left, that was all upended. I had to ask myself why I was staying, when this organization had hurt my closest friend so badly. I’m still asking myself those questions, and untangling which parts we shared and which I only thought we shared. The answers are complex, and I hope to keep answering them for the rest of my life, but for now it’s enough to say that there would have been no deconstruction without our shared sisterhood.
That said, my journey is my own, and I am at my core an individualist. Like I explained above, it was natural for me starting from an early age to separate my personal spirituality from the religious practice I was raised in. I gravitate towards pushing boundaries, and I chafe against labels. I don’t consider myself ex-Mormon or fully Mormon, and for the sake of clarity in this project I’ll call myself post-Mormon, in that my spirituality and understanding of God is larger and deeper and more expansive than fits in a single religious box (and I mean that in the least pretentious way possible). I attend LDS sacrament meeting still, nearly every week, because I love the people there and I love being part of a community, and frankly it’s good for me to be around people who believe and vote differently than me. Spirituality is a solitary endeavor, but religion is a communal experience, and an experience I still value deeply.
Some things I believe (articles of faith, if you will), to finish out this introduction:
I believe in God as Mother and Father, and I believe in the Christian Jesus, but I also believe in the divinity of the female body and that traditional Christianity is a stunted version of itself without a full understanding of and respect for femininity. The feminine God has been amputated from Christianity, and that wound still bleeds.
I believe that any organization which resists criticism and refuses to acknowledge wrongdoing is inherently suspect.
I believe that the concept of worthiness, the idea that grace and heaven must be earned, is a twisted, troubling misreading of Christ’s gospel of mercy.
I believe that the value church brings is in the immediate community and experience of learning to love people that are different from you, and that the greater organizational structure is a (somewhat clumsy) appendage to what church is intended to do: teach us to be with God and be with each other.
There are even more things I don’t know. I don’t like saying “I know” anymore in the way we were taught, because I want to live a life full of openness and wonder and reaching for God, and I want to be able to find that everywhere. I want to trust myself. And trusting myself means I must be willing to doubt organizations and people when they don’t align with my inner voice.
I consider this blog a project of questioning, of discovering which questions to ask rather than answering the same questions organized religion tries to answer. I want to be challenged, and to challenge other people. This may not be the space for you if questions feel triggering or scary to you, and if that’s you and you don’t stay, I hope your journey is rewarding and takes you where you need to go. Maybe you resonate with the things I said, or maybe you don’t, or maybe you’re just curious, but wherever you stand you’re welcome here. Welcome to the conversation. We’re glad to have you.
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