October 16, 2011
My Life of Faith or Lack Thereof
There’s a reason I don’t answer my door. There’s a reason I pretend I can’t hear the sound of knuckles gently tapping against the entrance to my home. A reason I pretend I’m in my bedroom, napping, or that I’m in the bathroom. A reason other than my innate introverted personality.
Footsteps sound on the deck outside our home. Thump, thump, thump. Creeeek. The screen door opens and there is a gentle rapping on the front door. I’m babysitting for a friend, so there are now four children, instead of only two, running back and forth the length of the house, giggling wildly. It is impossible to pretend I didn’t hear the knocking for as soon as the rap-tap-tapping is heard, my four-year-old daughter yells, “Mommy, somebody’s here!”
I consciously take a breath, exhale, and pull open the door. Two young men in black suits over paper-white shirts, each with a neatly knotted tie smile at me. I don’t have to glance at their name tags to know who they are.
“Sister Shelton, hi!” one of the young men addresses me.
“Hi, guys.”
All four children stand beside my legs, peering at them curiously.
“I’m Elder Young and this is Elder Dunham.” I cordially shake hands with both of them. “We were in the area and thought we’d stop by and see how you guys were doing.”
“Oh, we’re doing well, thanks.” Another smile, this time with a slight nod of my head. “Jonathan’s not here right now, though; he’s at work.” I know they aren’t allowed to be alone with a married woman.
Elder Young, who does nearly all the talking, says something about seeing us at church this coming Sunday.
“Well, you can see Jonathan and the kids. I don’t go to church.” If I had thought before I responded, I simply would have agreed with his statement.
“Oh, why’s that? Just too busy or something?” he casually inquires.
“Umm…no,” I say, inflecting my voice upward on the word, “no”. “I just don’t go.” I shrug my shoulders slightly.
“Oh…that’s cool.” As a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, my husband’s church, of course, this is not “cool” to him, but he is taken aback by my frank response to his question. “Is there a particular reason?”
That question. Of course.
“I just don’t really believe in it. I wanted to, and I tried to convince myself that I did…but I don’t. It started getting to the point where I really didn’t want to be there, and I didn’t want to begin resenting it. And I think I made the right choice by not going anymore. Otherwise, it could have gotten to the point where I didn’t want to allow my children to go either. And that would have been a really bad thing for our marriage.”
“Oh, I see, I see.” Several nods of his head. “Maybe we could come over some time and talk with you. It sounds like you have a lot to say.”
“Not really. That’s pretty much it,” I lie.
When I was eleven, I wrote a poem with the title “Judgment Day”, under which I wrote “A Dedication Unto God”. I had been pondering what might happen when I died, and imagining that angels would stand solemnly waiting at the gates of Heaven to ask me to confess my sins. The response I imagined myself giving produced the words: I shall not lie, but look at them and say, “The sins I have committed are innumerable, I am sure. For all my wrongs, I must pay. So if you must, then send me to the blazing pits of Hell on this Judgment Day.” Reading those words makes me wonder, at only age eleven, what “sins” could I possibly have been referring to in this poem? What could have caused me to ponder the outcome of my life at such a young age? Did I really believe God would even consider sending me to Hell?
But then I am struck by something else entirely. I believed in God. I can only assume this poem took shape based on my very limited knowledge of the Bible. I obviously must have had the idea that all people were sinners, and therefore I, even at eleven, was no exception. And, I suppose, given the dedication of the poem, I must’ve been trying to somehow “give myself unto the Lord”. My parents didn’t take us to church; I wasn’t raised in a religious environment. We had very few spiritual conversations, and none that even come to mind. Yet, somehow, I firmly believed in the presence of God.
A year or so before I composed the poem, when I was ten, I became so “God-curious” that I actually asked to go to church. I started attending church with a good friend of mine. The children only actually stayed in the chapel for the beginning part of the service, after which we moved to the basement for Sunday school. But it’s sitting in the chapel I remember most clearly. At ten, I’m not sure I understood the sermons, or that I even actually listened to them, but I remember feeling God’s presence. I’d sit in the wooden pew, and often I’d look around, wondering at the beautiful stained glass depictions of Jesus, and a warm feeling would seat itself in my chest. It was a feeling of comfort, much like my mother’s embrace, but a comfort that went deeper, to what felt like my very soul. I knew in those moments, felt sure, that the Lord was there. That I would never be alone. That he was watching me. The ultimate father and friend.
So what happened? Where is that child-like faith now?
It has been broken by time and by age. It has been broken by logic. It has been broken by my adult realization that there is not only good or bad, sin or virtue. That there are grey areas in almost everything. That there are flecks of grey in even the few places I once believed were either black or white.
It has been broken by the horrors of the world, and by the injustice. It has been broken because I’ve heard cries of thanks to God for saving the life of one child, while He left another child to die. It has been broken because I have not been given, and cannot find, an acceptable explanation for this.
It has been broken because child-like faith is all it ever was. Because when you’re a child, no one ever tells you there might not be a God. When you’re a child, there simply is.
But what do I tell these two young, smiling, confident men that stand at my door? Do I tell them of the guilt I felt every time I stopped at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, the guilt that stemmed not from my belief that what I was doing was wrong but because I knew I was pretending to believe it was? Do I tell them of the fear I felt that someone might see me holding that cup and know that I wasn't living the "laws" my so-called conversion demanded of me? Or do I tell them about the two women that sat in my couch, talking of "Satan's attack on the family" and citing not only as the first thing, but the ONLY thing on their list as gay marriage and how I couldn't sit in my own home and be silent? That I was disgusted when one of the women tried to compare homosexuality to alcoholism? That I told them I would never agree with such a position and that what I didn't say but thought was that I didn't believe in a god that held such a position? Should I tell them how outrageous I find it that men, and men only, hold any authority within the church and that this view further extends to the home? That again, not only do I not believe in a god who enforces such discrimination, but that I cannot believe in such a god? Should I tell them that when I sat in the temple, that place so sacred to their religion that only the “worthy” may even set foot inside it, that I did not feel the presence of the Lord? That I felt nothing?
I know what they would say, “Did you read the Book of Mormon?” And, “Did you pray about it?”
Should I tell them how I prayed? How I still pray? Not every night, but often, to a god I don’t really believe exists? Tell them that I think of my already sixty-three year old father and pray that a Heavenly Father really does exist so that I might see him again when he dies thirty, or twenty, or even less years from now? That I’m terrified that I may never see him again? That there are times I lay in bed and cry at the thought of the parents who’ve lost their children, that I cannot deny the possibility that I could lose one of my children, and that I pray to Him that I might know that He is really there so I can stop living with the fear that I might never again look upon their faces, or hear their voices, their laughs? That while I want and hope and pray otherwise, in my heart I believe just that?
Commentary This essay began as something completely different than what it is now. I began with a writing memory of writing in my diary at the age of nine. I was writing about a boy from T.V. that I was in “love” with, and reflecting on those melodramatic outpourings of anguish led me to write this, “Even as silly as it was, the emotions were real at the time. It’s funny how even as we age, sadness, broken-heartedness, feels the same. It deepens, broadens, sometimes even fills our lives, but at its base, it’s still the same ache of a nine-year-old girl in love with a boy on T.V. that she knows she will never even meet.”
I wrote the introduction that included those words in class on that first night, and then afterward, I typed it up on my computer, meanwhile doing a little revising. I realized that during my middle school years I had begun to write poems about those that I loved or thought I loved. So I moved on to the next most significant memory, which was of a poem I had written about my first real love. I included the poem, and described the memory that poem brought to mind, and how clear that memory still is, even twelve years later. After the description I wrote, “When I read those words, it confirms that even though I wasn’t even officially a teenager yet, those feelings were real. That love was real. When I read those words, I would never dream of belittling those feelings and calling it “puppy-love”.”
By this time, I had a clear idea in mind of where my essay was going. I planned on moving from my first “love” of the boy on T.V. in elementary school to the first person I ever actually loved in middle school, and then I knew I would have to move on to my first serious boyfriend in high school. I planned to connect all of this to my writing, and have it all tie back into that introduction where I write that broken-heartedness always feels, at its base, the same as it does for a little girl in pain over a boy from T.V. I was going to demonstrate how that was true, and also how my writing throughout all of the episodes is proof of that statement, and proof that those feelings were real (also, that try as I might to deny that they were real, the writing doesn’t allow me to deny anything).
So what happened? I did move on to the high school boyfriend, Tyler, or at least I tried. I don’t know how to describe it, but I felt like I had no choice and that the essay was simply “going there”. I wanted to include all or part of a poem I had written about him, as I had done with the boy from middle school. And the bulk of my paper would concentrate on the relationship I had with Tyler, as it lasted off and on throughout three of the four years of high school, and has, in certain ways at least, helped shape my life. The relationship I had with Tyler, however, was a horrible one. He was emotionally, and arguably even sexually, abusive to me. I’d written about it once before, but I found this time, once the essay wound up in “Tyler Territory”, I couldn’t move forward. I brought a draft to class for workshop, and afterward knew that I had to make the decision whether to try and keep going or to scrap it all together. I even had a fantastic suggestion, from Luis, that I try writing the essay in the third person to get some distance. Despite the good advice, I just wasn’t willing to write about it. As I wrote in a blog, writing is indeed a journey, but sometimes we aren’t always willing to make that journey. I’d just recently, before starting the essay, come to realize that I didn’t have any negative feelings toward Tyler anymore, and we’ve even become friends of a sort. I didn’t want to bring those feelings back. I chose to start a new essay all together.
When I went through those old poems to write the original essay, I came across a poem I wrote when I was eleven which I had entitled “Judgment Day”. The poem was about what I imagined might happen when I got to Heaven, presumably based on my extremely limited knowledge of the Bible. I imagined that angels would ask me to confess my sins and that I would be truthful and hope for mercy. At first I was wondering why in the world I wrote the line, “The sins I have committed are innumerable, I am sure” at eleven. I quickly brushed it off, as I imagine I was assuming, based on that limited knowledge, that I was a sinner because all humankind are sinners. After brushing that thought aside, I remember that back then I actually believed in God. Now, I consider myself to be agnostic and lean far more to the side of doubt. My husband is Mormon, or LDS, and thinking it would be the best thing for our family if I believed too, I gave it a chance. It didn’t work out. In fact, if anything, that is the reason I now lean more to the side of doubt than ever before. I attended church for about three and a half years before I finally admitted I didn’t believe and stopped going last October. Still, it remains something that is on my mind daily, and especially so lately. With this in mind, I knew I had found something I could write about, something I wanted to write about, and maybe even needed to write about.
The first draft of this new essay began with the aforementioned poem, “Judgment Day”. I went on to describe that I wrote the poem at age eleven and the thoughts reading the words now brought to mind. I reflected on what it was like, how it felt, to actually believe, without a doubt, in God. And I ended the writing at “So what happened? Where is that child-like faith now?” I had planned on continuing my story from there, but I had a sudden realization that this was not the introduction to this essay.
The nice thing about having had so much time to work on an essay is that I’ve had so much more time to think about it. It seems like it just sort of “happens” in my head, and then I write it. I had been lying in bed, trying to go to sleep and thinking about how earlier that day a couple of LDS missionaries came to my door for a friendly visit to the family. My husband wasn’t there and since male missionaries aren’t allowed to be alone with married women, one of them said something about seeing all of us at church at the end of the week. I stupidly told them I no longer went to church, which of course prompted the question of, “Why?” This you have, of course, already read in the essay itself, so I’ll stop here. My point is that as I was replaying the scene in my mind, words started to form in my mind as well, like I was writing an essay in my head. I suddenly knew that this was the beginning to my essay. And, I think, it makes for a much more intriguing introduction than starting with a poem.
So I wrote out the scene that played in my head, and the words that begin the essay are very similar to the ones I “heard” in my head as I tried to fall asleep. I wrote out the scene and ended with “But what do I tell them?” I left it there at only two pages, and when I came back, I wrote about all the things I’ve considered saying in response that that question of “Why?”, and what I would really say, if I were being honest. I really wanted to include what I began with, which was my reflection on the faith I did have as a child, and so I put some white space and just tacked on what I had started with. In a way, it did somehow work. I liked the way it still ended with a question, “So what happened, where is that child-like faith now?” I brought a draft of this to class, but I already knew that I didn’t like including that entire poem. It didn’t transition well, even with the use of white space, and wasn’t as interesting. After talking with my group members, I confirmed my thought to drop the poem from the narrative. It was suggested to try and weave the poem into the narrative, but I opted for just a brief mention of a line of the poem to give me a segue to what thoughts reading that poem provoked in me. I didn’t need the entire poem to do that.
Also, I decided not to have this section be the last section of the essay, but to break up my thoughts during this brief encounter with the missionaries into two sections. I didn’t want to end with, “What happened, then? Where is that child-like faith now?” when I realized I already know the answer to that question (and therefore added some answers to it too). I thought it made a good contrast to place the section where I reflect on my feelings, as a child, of the surety of God’s presence in the chapel right before the section where I say I did not feel, as and adult, God’s presence in the LDS temple.
I then decided to pick back up with the narrative about my thoughts on my meeting with the missionaries. I think the ending is much more poignant now that it reads, “That I lay in bed and cry at the thought of the parents who lose their children, that I cannot deny the possibility that I could lose one of my children, and that I pray to Him that I might know that He is really there so that I can stop living with the fear that I might never again look upon their faces or hear their voices, their laughs? That while I want and hope and pray otherwise, in my heart I believe just that?”
