Just over a year ago I started this blog with the lofty goal of posting once a week. Recently, I was asked if I had given up on writing since it has been such a long time since I added anything new. This question has had me pondering, not only about the direction of my blog but the faith journey that led me to start writing this in the first place. Like so many of the questions posed to me in recent years, this one has led me to more questions than answers. Here are a few:
- Why haven’t I posted anything for so long?
- Am I still as invested in the subjects and issues that were my original impetus for blogging?
- How has my faith journey changed me?
I wish I could go down that list of questions and give the one-paragraph answers, but it’s not that simple.
I have definitely gone an unusually long time without posting, but why? I’ve been busy and could write a rather long list of the events and activities that have preoccupied my time recently, but I know that’s not it. I’m always busy, and I’ve posted regularly during periods of time that were busier than this one.
Do I have writer’s block? I wish I knew enough about being a writer to judge this. What does writer’s block look and feel like? My current situation doesn’t seem like what I’ve seen in the movies. I don’t find myself sitting and staring blankly at my computer or wadding up paper drafts of my ideas and tossing them across the room at a trash can. Instead, I find that nearly every day I start out with the intention of writing and then somehow reach evening without having done it. I have accumulated a pretty good cache of posts that were started with enthusiasm and are now sitting, waiting to be finished along with a lot of other new ideas still swirling in my head.
I am on a journey I never anticipated taking. I didn’t plan it and I don’t know where it leads. I was just minding my own business, living what I saw as the typical Mormon mom life. Everything was going well until one particular day when I discovered that someone I loved and admired no longer had a testimony. It felt like it came out of nowhere and shook me to the core. How could there be so many troubling questions about the religion I had actively lived and studied for over half a century that I knew little or nothing about? I knew lots of perfect primary answers but none of them seem very useful for countering these troubling challenges. It was all new to me and I became totally absorbed in looking for answers.
About six months into my search, I had an intense desire to start a blog and write about all the new things I was learning. I was surprised by the enthusiasm I felt for this project since I have always been quite reserved when it comes to talking about religion and I never been particularly interested in social media, let alone learning to create a website. I can’t think of any period in my life that has changed me as much as the past nineteen months have. These changes may in part be the answers to the above questions.
I began this journey wanting to know the answers to all the critics’ troubling questions. I had been caught off guard and was unable to carry on an informed conversation about my own faith. I wish I could go back to those initial conversations that started me on this journey and change my responses. I can’t, but I never wanted to find myself in that position again. I felt a strong personal need to go against the excellent advice I was given not to listen to or read the anti-Mormons. I believed then and still believe that this was the spirit leading me to something I personally needed. It was the right choice for me, but I wouldn’t advocate this path for anyone else. I needed answers and I felt certain that God would work in my life as I prayerfully searched for them. At first, this led me to the internet, podcasts, and books, all of which can be contradictory and confusing—just one person’s opinion pitted against another’s. Often I felt that those on both sides were giving only the portion of the whole that strengthened their own arguments. I was looking for truth, not half-truths.
At times my inquiry has been completely academic, trying to gather and evaluate as much information as positive to inform my position, rather than only looking for things that supported my previously held beliefs. I like the comparison given by Jonathan Stapley, chemist and church historian, who, when he began researching and writing on Mormonism, found “plenty of things that I didn’t understand — things that didn’t fit with my lived experience as a Latter-day Saint.” Rather than seeing things that don’t fit with traditional Mormonism as problems he prefers to see them as opportunities. He explains:
My dissertation in chemistry was the result of finding something that didn’t fit expectations.
Scientists are trained to see such data as an opportunity.
For example, if a physicist were to find evidence that gravity behaved differently than currently understood, she would not conclude that physics was a lie. She would likely recognize that she had a chance at a Nobel prize.
I think I generally react analogously to the data of Mormon history. It was and still is thrilling to find information that expands my understanding.
While I enjoy taking an academic approach to questions, one of the strongest conclusions I have come to on this journey is that faith—like love—feels most true when it’s illogical and hard to explain. Romantic love is the easiest to justify, but the love we feel for the baby who keeps us up all night, the belligerent teenager, or the parent suffering from dementia is the most real and pure. Likewise, I believe that often the moments when the spirit most strongly bears witness of gospel truths are the hardest to explain or substantiate. I have discovered the only source of pure truth is the spirit, but there will always be those who will dismiss such truth as entirely meritless.
I started out writing about my new discoveries, feeling that I had something important to say, something I wanted others to know. Over time I have realized that much of what I have to say is old news to the many who have walked this path before me. It has all been said before and written about by people whose writing is far superior to mine. Nothing I share is likely to change the opinion of anyone whose mind is made up one way or another. Given that understanding, does it make sense to continue writing?
Over the course of this year, I have also seen my interests change. Where once I was fascinated by all the controversial topics, I now find myself much more intent on trying to comprehend the scriptures and the temple. I’ve started doing temple work for my ancestors and have become weirdly obsessed by family history.
So, as my interests have changed, does writing this blog still matter? Somewhat surprisingly I still believe that it does, although I’m not entirely sure where it’s headed. There are still many of those initial topics that I want to cover. After all, I haven’t even touched on polygamy yet—the topic I’ve spent the most time wrestling with. But it’s also highly probable that my writing may change over time and become more personal because of the strange turn my journey has taken.
I have been making curious discoveries about some of my ancestors and become fascinated with trying to uncover the stories of two particular women, my great-grandmother and her mother—women whose voices I can find no trace of. It seems that in the busyness of their lives, they never took the time to record any of their thoughts, experiences, or opinions. Now, they seem almost lost—a few pictures without any stories to go with them. I wish I could talk to them and ask them my many questions. I would be thrilled to find anything they had personally written about themselves. I don’t know if what I have to say is worthwhile, I don’t know if anyone will ever care to read it, but I still want to leave the record of my journey in my own voice, whatever the coming years bring.
