Originally posted by Eve, on May 29, 2006. You can read the original post and comments here.
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The Church has brought me both the most profound and beautiful and some of the most heart-wrenching experiences of my life. The place of my earliest Church memories is the Bay Area ward my family belonged to until we moved to Utah the summer before I started fourth grade. That ward was a place I still associate with peace and security. I remember wearing a dress to school on Primary day, learning to sing the books of the New Testament in junior Sunday school, attending monthly stake baptisms with my CTR class, being confirmed the same day my sister Elbereth, who was born two days after my eighth birthday, was blessed, marching in the Primary parade on Pioneer Day in my bonnet and long dress my mother had made me, participating in the cake walk at the ward carnival, watching _The Rescuers_ and eating popcorn with my family at the Young Women’s camp fundraiser, swimming with my Sunday school class in the pool at our teacher’s house, trick-or-treating at ward members’ houses on November 1 when Halloween fell on a Sunday, and going on day trips with families from the ward to the pool, to the beach, and to Golden Gate Park. I remember nervously saying my lines into the microphone at the annual sacrament meeting Primary program, being interviewed for baptism, attending the dedication of the new building, and countless sacrament meetings and Primary and Sunday school classes and activities. I felt loved by my teachers and by God and a deep sense that I belonged.
In time all that changed. After two moves, I spent the next eight years in a ward where I never managed to find my social footing among the five or six girls my age, who were occasionally cruel but mostly indifferent. I grew older and started feeling profoundly dissatisfied in ways I could hardly articulate with the platitudes of well-meaning adults. I remember, when I was nine or ten, sitting in the back of senior Primary, listening to a member of the Primary presidency ask in the bright falsetto in which some adults so unthinkingly speak to children, “Do we want to go to the celestial kingdom, hmmm?” and deciding then and there that the celestial kingdom was not for me, not if you had to talk like you’d been sucking on a helium balloon to get in. For years my Sunday school class couldn’t keep a teacher for more than a few weeks, and the teachers we did have generally showed up unprepared and did nothing more than chat with us about their own high school memories. Some weeks no teacher materialized. There were the seminary and class issues I’ve already described. I underwent a severe episode of depression in early adolescence that no one recognized, in those days when mental illness was just beginning to be discussed. For all of these reasons, and for others, I spent years feeling deeply ill at ease and out of place, socially and doctrinally. I learned to dread and despise church. I felt that God had turned away from me and as if the Kingdom of God had no place for me. How could it, when the Church clearly didn’t?
A lot has happened in my religious life since then, of course—inactivity in college, singles’ wards, a mission, marriage, a two-year stint in a BYU Wymount ward, and six years in a small branch in a rural area, an experience that was an absolute gift. And yet so many years later, I now live in a ward that has again brought me face to face with the familiar, stinging sensation of being, at best, politely tolerated and with that old message that has never really ceased haunting me: You don’t belong. It’s not that anyone in the ward is deliberately unkind, just that it’s a highly transient ward of young marrieds, that the rapid turnover does little to breed trust or push us beyond pleasantries, and that I feel like a complete alien, as if I can’t even begin to speak the common language, as if my words are the gibberish on their ears that their words are on mine. I feel again that old loneliness of being an outsider to the kingdom of God, a loneliness I would guess I’m far from alone in.
Although I’ve been spiritually exhausted and low these past months, and although it’s taking everything I have just to continue to show up for three hours on Sundays, I have recently had a rare moment of clarity and spiritual direction: forgive the Church. For me, forgiveness is a grace, one that I have to seek long and hard, with all the energy my heart can sustain. I wonder how many of us here on the Bloggernacle struggle to forgive the Church as I do, struggle with the wounds of misunderstanding and exclusion and prejudice sometimes inflicted in God’s name. I imagine that all of us, whether we are in or out, whether we leave or stay, crave peace. So tonight, in the name of peace, I remind myself of the gifts the Church: my marriage, the spiritual experiences and labor of devotion on my mission that changed me forever, the quiet constant of the Spirit, the knowledge of the atonement of Jesus Christ, the grace of saving ordinances, the comfort of priesthood blessings, the chance to play the piano and sing badly and be loved anyway and to give my heart to others and know something of God’s love for them, and at times, even that old, unmistakable sense of community and communion I first knew in my the ward of my childhood, deep, sure, and absolutely true.
