Category Archives: LDS

Congrats!


Hot off the press: the latest issue of Sunstone magazine with John‘s prize-winning winning essay, “Saving the Dead: A Comparative Study of Post-Funerary Rites in Japanese and Mormon Culture.”

A few quotations to whet your appetite:
“The simple ritual act of stepping through the veil profoundly influences the way [Latter-Day] Saints view death. Mormons who receive their endowment in the temple have already experienced death symbolically. They realize that their essence does not change when they have pass through the veil. Death is merely a flimsy barrier to be pushed aside as one enters into a brilliant reunion with loved ones.”


“Through a series of [Japanese] rites, the spirit moves from impure association with death to ultimate assimilation into the pure and godlike ancestral spirit… Following key ceremonies, a wooden ancestral tablet representing the spirit is sometimes moved to higher platforms, a symbolic gesture that recognizes the ancestor’s increasing status and refinement in the afterlife. The final state of the spirit represents an anonymous amalgamation of all of the spirits of family ancestors, whose purpose is to ensure the prosperity of their line. By taking care of their dead, the living Japanese are entitled, in return, to the protection and helpful intervention of their empowered predecessors.”

honesty

Sure there are moments when it’s best not to be too honest–when doing so would offer undue criticism that would hurt another person.

Yet it seems that in telling one’s own experiences honesty is an admirable thing. Over the past few years, as I’ve written much about my experiences as an amputee, as a cancer survivor, and as a Mormon woman, I’ve tried to be unflinchingly candid and honest. I want to tell my stories truthfully and sincerely. Because truth staves off fear.

However, I was talking with some friends recently who challenged my need for honesty. They asked me why I had informed my LDS leaders that I was no longer planning to attend church. Why hadn’t I just drifted into inactivity or gone my own way without need to ‘inform’ people of my choices? It’s a good question, one that I’ve been muddling over.

And, honestly, I have had many moments over the past few weeks when I should have just lied a little to make it easier. Told a few falsehoods to smooth over the difficulties, or just kept my mouth shut and pretended that everything was okay.

So it’s when I have a night like last night, that I wish I’d never been honest. That I wish I was a liar. That I wish I’d just said nothing and pretended that I was complicit.

And I wonder where my honesty has gotten me???

Casting Faith

On Thursday during my casting appointment there was a group of four people involved in the process—two prosthetists and two interns—each taking a different role in wrapping my residual limb in a flexible fiberglass shell, then shaping that shell into a form that will both conform to my anatomy and will also best contain the tissue, muscle and bone as I walk. This is an intimate process, as the socket of my prosthetic leg interfaces with the major bones of the pelvic girdle—holding in the ischium and pressing against the ramus.

It is an odd feeling to have two male prosthetists shaping the casting material between my legs and around my hip. Realizing that they are interacting with the most personal spaces of my body. Knowing that it is their job and this is a necessary process for getting a good fitting socket. Me, trying to remain a bit aloof and distanced from the process, yet at the same time having such high hopes that they will get a good fit—that the socket will work well and not cause pain and the suppurating sores that I’ve suffered with for the past few years.

On Thursday evening I experienced a different form of intimacy. I gathered around the kitchen table of a Friend, holding hands with three Quaker women who agreed to serve on my Clearness Committee. We sat in silence, in prayer, until I felt moved to speak, to tell them of the turmoil in my heart in the process of leaving Mormonism. I spoke hesitantly, nervously. Their role was only to ask open-ended questions. Not to judge. Not to guide. After 90 minutes of speaking and silence, they mirrored what I had spoken back to me. They told me what they had heard me say. They discussed how my body language revealed the truths of my heart. Most of all, they shared their concern for the burdens that I am carrying.

Perhaps ironically, the Clearness Committee experience was far more discomfiting and intimate than the casting for my prosthesis. For I don’t readily share the thoughts of my heart. Yes, I do this daily blogging, but I speak primarily of mundanity here. I’ve only very hesitantly shared the steps of my spiritual journey with anyone. I suspect that most just can’t understand. Within the Mormon community I feel censure and distrust. I have few friends who can empathize with the loss of faith. Who can grieve with me through this process?

Outside of Mormonism, I am flummoxed by trying to explain what leaving the church means. That it is a complete change of worldview. Is it, perhaps, like having to relearn to walk?

There is a popular LDS song called “I Walk By Faith” that I sang often during my teen years. I identified with this song as a young Mormon who was developing faith in Christ and as an amputee, because each step involved trusting my prosthesis in hopes that it would support my weight. So now on my spiritual journey away from the LDS Church I am learning what it means to walk by uncertainty, to walk by doubt, to walk into completely unknown territory as my heart leads me onwards. Ironically, this seems the biggest leap of faith thus far.

And I hit him across the other cheek, too

[Note: this is a re-telling of an incident that happened about 8 years ago]

It was late, the kids had gone to bed hours before, and I was sitting on our upstairs balcony in the dark, waiting for John to come home from the airport. He’d been traveling on one of his many business trips—to Chicago this time, I think—and I was anxious for his return. I was weary of the days spent caring for our young children by myself and I yearned for some adult conversation. He came home, sat down next to me and began telling me about his disbelief in Mormonism.

I had counted the hours till his return home, and I was so tired, and so hungry for some affection from him. When John spoke about his doubts, a huge anger welled up in me. I realized that these ‘faith issues’ that he’d been having for a few years weren’t just going to go away. And in that moment my mind flashed backwards and forwards in time—remembering the dutiful and faithful Mormon missionary John that I corresponded with for two years; I thought of our children and my desires for them to have a strong Mormon father; I thought of my dreams that we would, as an elderly couple, serve missions to Japan or to Africa. As all of these thoughts raced through my mind and surfaced in rage as I reached out and slapped John across his right cheek, as hard as I could.

Then John took off his glasses and turned his left cheek to me, tears welling in his eyes. And I hit him across that cheek, too. Hard enough that it left a red welt on his skin. And then he bowed his head, ready for me to hit him again. Which I didn’t. I stopped, overcome with sobbing. So shocked that I had struck the person I loved most in the world, but also aware of the way I also hated what he was saying to me, that I felt betrayed down to my deepest core. This was my John. But it wasn’t my John. It was someone who was telling me these things that I just couldn’t believe, that I couldn’t reconcile with my understanding of who I had married.

As I write this I am crying. I can’t think of another time in my life that I have hit someone so intentionally, so full of anger. I had no precedent in my life for lashing out like that—I had never seen my parents hit in anger, John had never hit me, we had never spanked our children. I was hurting so badly inside. I was so upset that John’s changes were affecting my future, too. That my life wouldn’t necessarily proceed with the script that I had written when we were married. [And John, may I say once again, I am so, so sorry for hitting and hurting you].

In the months and years that followed that awful night, I have still sometimes felt anger and frustration with John’s changing religious beliefs. But I have also realized that I am not the same person that John married fourteen years ago, either. I have certainly grown and changed in ways that might surprise my 21 year-old self. And I have come to realize that these changes are okay. That life is about changing. About learning and experiencing and adapting and evolving. And while these changes sometimes bring risk–even the chance of failure–that that’s okay, too.

In the past eight years or so, as John and I have navigated the waters of Mormonism together, and as his Mormon belief and practice has waxed and waned, I have learned many important lessons. Most importantly, I have learned to appreciate the value of the journey, of the struggle to find the right path to follow. I would like to think that my relationships are not based on my idea of who John or others should be, or how they measure up to a standard that I have in my mind. Rather, I have tried to listen and learn from others’ journeys. As I interact with my students, grad school cohort, fellow freecycle moderators, Sunstoners, cyberfriends, my kids’ teachers, Mormons, Quakers, gardeners, democrats, UCI employees, or any other number of people “that I meet when I’m walking down the street,” I want to seek to understand their journeys, to learn from them. I want to make sure that I don’t react in anger to another whose beliefs differ from mine, that I can separate my expectations from my desire to affirm and love them as individuals.

More than anything, I want to learn a lesson from the time that I hit John. I want to learn not to react in rage, not to make others’ choices be about me. I want to learn to love even when I am blinded by anger, even when my ability for compassion is at a breaking point. I want to see the divine, the godliness, in each person. To understand their struggle to find it within themselves.

hats, hats, hats

Right now I wear the following hats in the ‘intellectual’ Mormon* world:
1) Member, Sunstone Foundation Board of Directors
2) Book Review Editor, Dialogue Journal
3) Founding Contributor, ExponentBlog

I’m not sure how long I can maintain the momentum of so many different roles to play. But it is quite exciting to be so embedded in the world of Mormon Studies and Mormon inquiry.

*whoa–have you ever googled “intellectual Mormon”? There’s some pretty interesting stuff to be found, and interestingly, one of my SunstoneBlog posts is hit #3 🙂

on blogging and balance


from my recent Xblog post:
“I was at lunch with a friend last week and she asked me what I’d been writing lately, and did I have any recent publications? Rather sheepishly, I told her that I’d been investing most of my creative energy into writing for blogs. And I haven’t had much left over time for writing stories, poetry, or academic articles.”

pray for me…

What I found when I reached down to put my laptop into my shoulderbag this morning on my way to class–

A note, written in bright green ink:

For Jana,
Pray for me–I’m an atheist, too!
All Best,
William Shunn

For a split-second I stood there, gap-jawed, contemplating how & why Bill Shunn had crept into my house and placed that note on my computer. Then I quickly remembered that John told me that he’d had Bill sign a card for me when they met at WorldCon.

Whew….For a moment there I was sure that I really _had_ listened to a few too many podcasts lately.