My religious paradigm

It's a quarter to four in the morning. Either six or eight hours (depending on which part of their website you believe) before the ward in which my "member records" are located meets to begin their weekly three hour block of Sunday meetings. I'd like to get some sleep tonight.

I don't remember the last time I felt spiritually edified. If you ask my Elder's Quorum president, who tried to assign me as a home teacher sometime last year shortly after the stake president set him apart but before he consulted with the bishop, I haven't spiritually nourished anyone else for a long time. Hard to do that in this church when you're on formal probation.

My girlfriend wants me to go to church tomorrow. Not that she's warranting that somehow attending tomorrow will bring me spiritual peace. She just knows that I want to marry in the temple, and that until we can both secure recommends from our local leaders, the temple won't consent to marry us. It's almost a twisted toroidal trap: I'll end up going because she wants me to, because I want us to marry in the temple, but neither of us particularly enjoy attending or even much believe in the church which holds our membership.

In Mormon parlance, I don't have a testimony.

Yet I believe in doing good. In suffering long but being kind, in lifting the hands that hang down and strengthening the weak knees, in mourning with those who mourn and comforting those who need comfort. I believe in Jesus, who had compassion on and forgave the sinner, who fed the hungry, who healed the sick, who blessed and rejoiced in children, and who promised the world to the peacemakers, the meek, the humble, the poor.

I believe that greed is evil, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, that to live in Zion, where there are no poor, but where all are united in love, is the highest goal of this life. I believe the temple can be symbolic of that unity.

I believe I won't live to see the symbol become reality.


So much of the LDS church operates under its own bloated bureaucratic, theatrical inertia. Being Mormon means going to church on Sunday, taking the sacrament, reading scripture, conducting Family Home Evening on Monday, asking God to bless the food at each meal to nourish and strengthen the body, holding family prayer, attending Mutual/Seminary/Institute during the week, and going back to church on Sunday. Sprinkle, douse, or dump bucketfulls of leadership meetings and interviews and temple endowments and home and visiting teaching in between.

This year, for Priesthood and Relief Society, our curriculum is based on the Gospel Principles manual, though I defy anyone in my congregation to tell me the last time they actually proclaimed the good news of Jesus to anyone outside their own self-contained ward boundaries, let anyone made a child smile, or fed so much as a crust of bread to anyone genuinely hungry.

I've noted elsewhere the high rates of depression and suicide in this state where Mormonism is the predominant religion. Yet in the year since I altogether stopped going to their meetings, I've felt less depression and have gone for longer periods of time without thinking about killing myself than in anytime in the last ten years. For as much as I had a testimony of the church, the good news I heard in its walls made me feel horrible.

All my life the church called on me to serve it. Deacons Quorum president, Teachers Quorum president, Assistant to the Bishop, Full-time abandon-my-studies-just-when-I'm-starting-to-succeed-in-a-rigorous-advanced-science-program-at-one-of-the-most-prestigious-universities-in-the-country Missionary, District Leader, Zone Leader, Mission Secretary, Sunday School Teacher, Stake Missionary, Financial Clerk, Elders Quorum President, etc.

The boost to my ego always seemed to make up for the relentless, sadistic administrative demands on my time. At least for the two hours a week I spent tutoring poor kids in our law school Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, I can say I did good, as opposed to the twenty hours a week or more I also expended keeping the Mormon machine slowly rolling along.

And yeah, I finally broke my last semester of law school and failed out of school. Three trips to the emergency room with separate suicidal members of our seventy-member branch was probably what did it. Or maybe I just didn't pray enough.


But, boy, church is going to start in a few hours. The bishopric will probably meet for a few hours before that. There are new callings to be issued, old Sunday School and Primary teachers to release, little pegs and cogs and to be greased and switched around.

I'd really like to get a good night's sleep.