WHY I STAY

Christian Kimball

Sunstone 2019

PART I: STORIES

In 1988 while visiting at the J. Reuben Clark Law School, filling in for a tax professor who was serving as a mission president, I received a call from my best friend in Chicago. With emotion in his voice, he told me he was a high bottom alcoholic and had entered a 12-step program. On one level he was calling to apologize for conversations while drunk where I hadn’t known. Surprisingly that hurt. I felt deceived, even though I’m not aware of any harm done except to the relationship. On a different level he said he felt the need for religion in his life and asked my advice. 

I recognized a so-called golden opportunity. We all know the script. But I was conflicted for some reason and put him off. Early the next morning I hiked up Y Mountain above Rock Canyon. I found a relatively flat place and watched the sun rise, lighting the opposite side of the valley first. Before full light I knelt in prayer and asked what I should do. I heard as clear a voice as I ever have experienced saying “tell him to return to the church of his childhood, where he will be supported as he needs.” That was the Catholic church. 

In the ensuing five or six years I came to understand that whether that voice was external—God talking to me—or internal—a creation of my own mind—the lesson was clear—that I fundamentally did not believe in a “one and only,” whether Mormon—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—or Catholic, or any other. It was not an argument. Not a reasoned debate or analysis. It was an awakening to my reality. “One and only” is not me.

So why stay?

Some years later at a birthday celebration, my friend Judy asked me in hushed tones “are you still Mormon?” Her never-Mormon-but-steeped-in-the-culture husband Jim overheard the question and laughed. “Of COURSE he is Mormon, he can’t be anything else!” he said.

Not an argument. Not a debate. Not even a question. A LAUGH. In a cultural, family-of-origin, genealogical, dyed-in-the-wool sense, I am Mormon. 

In a sense staying is to return to the church of my childhood. 

   ------------------

In 1996, shortly after orchestrating my release as a bishop of an older single adult ward at the barely two-year mark, I knelt in agonized painful prayer in the topmost room in our house. I don’t remember even asking a question. Just playing out my pain. But the consequences were remarkable in a number of ways. It was truly a life changing event.

One of the significant things that happened was my knees shaking in witness that they would refuse to walk into a Church interview. Perhaps even more remarkable is that I listened, recognizing my knees as me and not something to override by force of will. In effect I learned that I was done with the Church worthiness system. No more interviews. I wrote a note to my new bishop and walked it over with my temple recommend, saying that while the recommend was still valid so far as I knew, it was not right to keep it when I knew that I would not sit for an interview again. 

That was 23 years ago. I am in the same place today. I quizzed my knees a couple of months ago and they started shaking. Seriously. 

So when I talk about staying in the Church, it is a church without a worthiness system, a church without interviews. Maybe unrecognizable to many. Not the same church I hear others struggle with. 

To be clear, that church I stay in is not the product of analysis or new discoveries or disappointment. That church is simply where my knees have taken me. 

Like others before me, and with me, and—I am sure—in front of me, I have in practical effect defined my own church. One that happens to have The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints engraved on the front, but that is unmistakably carved in my image. 

So why stay? Or can this even be called “staying”?

I recall the Edwin D. Woolley story. After a somewhat heated discussion in their advanced years, President Brigham Young remarked caustically to Edwin D. Woolley, “Well, I suppose now you are going to go off and apostatize.” “No, I won’t,” retorted Edwin. “If this were your church I might, but it’s just as much mine as it is yours.”

I suspect they both had different meanings than I insert for my self-centered purposes, but I do in fact take comfort in my great-great-grandfather’s line, “it is just as much mine as it is yours.” 

Staying is to be in that church that is just as much mine as it is yours.

    ---------------------

In 2007 a cancer was discovered in my body, one that had grown to occupy all the empty space in my abdomen. The best treatment available was a barbaric 17-hour surgery that removed 35 pounds of stuff, including tumor but also 13 different pieces or parts that came with the original.

I believed I would not survive the operating table. But the cancer was certain death without surgery. So my decision came down to picking a surgeon.

Obviously I did survive the surgery. (12 years! Hurrah.) And the net effect is waking to a new life. It is not far wrong to say I have experienced a near death experience and an early resurrection. And the joke is that it’s resurrection without a belly button! 

Without a navel is a fact. It’s not medically important, and not particularly rare or unusual. Major surgery in the abdomen will do that. But it serves as a constant reminder that I am not the person I used to be, not the person I ever expected to be, not the person my mother made or wanted or expected. 

I am left uncertain of everything. Not clear about who I am or what I think or know or remember. Living one day at a time.

Missing all these parts, am I still the son of Ed and Bee Kimball? Or am I better thought of as the construct of a talented surgeon? I muse on Frankenstein and his monster, where of course I am the monster. 

After six weeks on morphine and other opiates, titrated to barely manage pain, I know that I don’t know my own mind. I know altered states that feel entirely normal, states that—unlike many dreams—I cannot tell apart from what most of us think of as sane and sober. I now know that my memory is plastic, that I cannot be sure of even what happened yesterday. The Matrix is all too real, and red pill or blue pill really matters.

I no longer have an interest in heaven or the Plan of Salvation or an afterlife or even a long life. I’ve spent enough hours living 10 minutes at a time that my horizon has shrunk down to one day.

I don’t care about truth claims. I don’t care about Church history. I don’t care about Church policies. To be sure, I do care deeply about how these things affect people I love, and I have moments of black despair over the pain I have witnessed. But for myself alone, poof!

On the happier side:

Every day is precious. Relationships matter. I am surprised by joy and it is a daily occurrence. 

I am focused on the present. This earth. This life. I can get interested in making this world a garden place, in building Zion in the here and now. 

And I resonate to Tim McGraw’s “Live Like You Were Dying”:

When asked what do you do when you get that kind of news, he said:


"I went skydiving


I went Rocky Mountain climbing


I went 2.7 seconds on a bull named Fumanchu


And I loved deeper


And I spoke sweeter


And I gave forgiveness I'd been denying


Someday I hope you get the chance


To live like you were dying"

So again, why do I stay? 

The truth is that it has become almost arbitrary. This is the punch line I’ve worried about for weeks. Expecting that your reaction will be that I am a fraud. Or that this is completely not helpful. But I’m afraid almost arbitrary is almost all I’ve got.

Why do I stay here, rather than there? Sometimes I say it’s because I know the hymnal. But I think the better line comes from my grandmother Camilla (as my unreliable memory tells it), when she said “bloom where you’re planted.” 

I was planted deep in Mormon soil. This is where I belong. This is where I bloom. 

    -------------

If you are looking for the long struggle, the difficult resolution, the answers that help and support, I’m afraid you need to look elsewhere. If you are looking for reasons to stay in full fellowship in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as defined and delineated by the Prophets, Seers, and Revelators, I’m afraid you need to look elsewhere. 

For me, just for me, I stay on my terms in the church of my definition, without stress or tension, without a grand struggle, with a very light touch, on the back of three one-line aphorisms: 

>I can’t be anything else.

>It is just as much mine as it is yours.

>I bloom where I’m planted.

PART II: GOD OF STARFISH AND BLACK DWARF STARS

That [Part I] is my story. That’s the easy part. Not easy in the living, but easy in the telling. Stories have beginnings and endings and in the telling sound inevitable. 

Now let’s move to the present, recognizing that it’s a puzzle in pieces, not yet assembled.

In response to and trying to make sense of the Exclusion Policy, in late 2015 I wrote a piece titled “Anger, Marriage, and the Mormon Church.” That could be a whole separate talk, but for today’s topic the very last line keeps coming to mind, where I advocate:

“Worship a God who encompasses all of creation in all of its endless variety.”

I wrote that line as a plea, then discovered it was my journey—where my heart is taking me. I puzzle about God. I think about theodicies. I don’t have answers, at least not answers I can talk about. From an orthodox point of view the most likely label at the moment is agnostic. But this I can say: 

My imagination requires that any God worth my time and attention is also a God of Starfish and Black Dwarf Stars. 

Starfish because their true pentamerism—fivefold symmetry—is an easy reminder of the incredible variety of life, and puts to the question any privileging of bilaterally symmetrical upright hominids with heterosexual inclinations and particular skin color and facial features. 

Black dwarf stars because they are a reminder to me of the size and time of creation. A black dwarf is a theoretical stellar remnant--basically a white dwarf that has cooled sufficiently to no longer emit significant radiation. It is estimated that the 13.8 billion years of this universe is not yet long enough for black dwarf stars to exist. 

Any God worth my time and attention is that big. Big enough to be a God of Starfish and Black Dwarf Stars.

One problem that weighs on me is that I am finding it hard to talk about these things with a Mormon vocabulary. Despite being planted deep in Mormon soil, native and fluent, more and more often now I can’t sound Mormon.

It’s a kind of forced silencing. Not by mandate from above but by structure and language. And a real challenge to the whole concept of “staying.” 

It might be most appropriate to stop there with puzzlement. But I’m inclined to take one step further, to share my musings on where do I go from here?

One direction is to reflect on one of the most profound experiences of my life, what I would label a “god experience” if I wanted to package it for a Mormon audience. Without describing my particular experience in detail, let me put it in a class of experiences that I read and hear about. Experiences that are reported as an encounter with something greater, that are described as an overwhelming sense of being Loved or being Known or being Connected to all living things. A really big picture experience. 

What’s important for this forum is the reaction—my reaction, and the reaction of others as shared with me—to come off that sort of experience with an "I don't care" attitude. I don't care to explain. I don't care to analyze. I don't care where it came from. I don't care to pick it apart. I was there. It has changed me in ways that feel permanent. I am happy to simply rest in the peace and joy and discovery of the moment.

So one possible response to forced silence is acceptance—that’s how it works and I don’t care. In other words, my god-experience, my explorations and understandings and puzzlements, are almost entirely unrelated to institutional churches or my Mormon traditions, and if words fail me that’s just fine.

A second direction is to reflect on what the Church has come to mean in my life, in a functional sense rather than an intellectual sense. 

I consider myself a Christian who practices with Mormons. As a Christian, I am moved to find community and communion.

 

In the Mormon practice, among my people, people who remind themselves regularly of Alma’s call to mourn with those that mourn, to comfort those that stand in need of comfort, to stand as witnesses of God, among these people I find community. 

In the Mormon practice, with a Eucharistic sharing most Sundays, the Sacrament with physical tokens, the bread and the water, with people who go out of their way to see that I can participate . . .  in this Christian Mormon practice, I find communion. 

Community and Communion. It is enough.

 Where I am in Belief

Posted at ByCommonConsent 17 December 2018

There has been an unusual flurry of talk lately about “Middle Way Mormons.” The Salt Lake Tribune (Peggy Fletcher Stack); By Common Consent (Sam Brunson); Wheat and Tares (a series); and even Times and Seasons ran a piece.  I commented, I provided background, I was quoted, but I have resisted doing my own “how it is” counter-essay.  Until now.

I’m a “Middle Way Mormon” by everybody’s definition.  It’s not my label—I prefer “Christian who practices with Mormons.”  But it’s better than the alternatives on offer. This is not a to-be-wished-for designation—a high ranking Church leader sympathized with me about “living on a knife edge.”  It’s just a label for a modern reality.

Somewhere in the middle of all the commentary, George Andrew Spriggs observed that “successful Middle Way Mormons . . . undercut the traditional boundaries and truth claims about the church.”  This observation challenged me to describe the church I belong to.  I have tried this before, and the reaction has been “no—doesn’t exist, you’re wrong, that isn’t a thing—just no.” Because of this history, exposing myself this way is scary.

This is long.  This is personal.  This is my opinion.  For today.   (It may change.)  This is also my life, the real stuff.  Reportage, not polemic.  You should not be like me.  You have been warned.

* * *

As a Christian who practices with members and at the meetings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes my choices come down to tradition and a hymnal. At the same time, I am officially a member of the Church.  I haven’t resigned.  I value my baptism.  I take the sacrament with intent.

So what is this Church I belong to?  As I see it.  As I live it.

I view Joseph Smith as one of the religious geniuses of the 19th century, a man who had a theophany, from whom and through whom several books of scripture came to be, who experimented and collected and assembled a religious vision. And a prophet, in the sense of receiving the word of God and a charge to speak it.

Not necessarily a good man.  Not right all the time.  Not necessarily true to his own insights.  Not always consistent.

I view founding a church, restoring priesthood, organizing ordinances and sacraments, and developing temple practices, as 19th century syncretic work by well-meaning men choosing from among existing Christian traditions.

I view the Book of Mormon as a 19th century creation.  I read it as scripture.  I find the subtitle “Another Testament of Jesus Christ” the most correct and useful description.  The Church uses the Book of Mormon as a ‘proof of history.’  I don’t find value in that approach.  The Church does not (very much) rely on the Book of Mormon for administration or theology.  But I do read the Book of Mormon for theology and Christology and more.  What I read impresses me as certain versions of New Testament Christian, Pauline, and even Trinitarian traditions, with flourishes.

For better or worse, I don’t find much value or spend much time with the Doctrine & Covenants or the Pearl of Great Price.  I try to remain conversant, but in the limited sense of staying relevant in the community and not as a religious or devotional practice.

My understanding of prophets is that their job is to speak the words God gives them (not to speak “for God”).  In that vein I consider Joseph Smith and other Church leaders as prophets.  My operating assumption is that when a person is called to be a prophet, a tiny percentage of his or her words will turn out to be God’s words, they won’t necessarily know which are which themselves, and they may not understand the meaning or relevance of the words they are directed to say.

As a practical consequence, I apply a 50/50 skepticism even to statements labeled “the word of the Lord,” which looks like a cafeteria approach to General Conference talks and to the Doctrine & Covenants.  For example, I view D&C 1:30 as an exaggeration, D&C 22 as the natural human expression of a restorationist mindset, and D&C 132 as a mistake—a confusing version of a Joseph Smith insight driven by a mixture of Bible study, wishful thinking, and domestic conflict.

Because I understand prophets (historically) to be mostly misunderstood outsiders with a revolutionary message, I think the Church’s practice of combining the prophet and president roles is problematic.  I look for other prophets in addition to Church leaders.

I do not have a sense of divine destiny about the Church.  The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the survivor of a series of existential crises.  A succession crisis.  A crisis over polygamy.  A crisis over financial viability.  A crisis over the participation of men and women of relatively recent African descent.  We tell the survival story after the fact, but I don’t view survival as predetermined.  I can imagine the Church failing any one of the past crises. I can imagine the Church failing the next one.

I see the Church in crisis now.  Its dealing with challenges to an identity myth built on a heavily manipulated white-washed history — alongside a theology built around eternal gender essentialism which makes it difficult to incorporate principles of feminism and to include non-binary persons in the Plan.  I do not know whether the Church will survive. More accurately, I don’t know what the survivor will look like and how I will relate to it.

The Church offers a rich selection of Sacraments (ordinances) and a variety of rituals, which belong in a Christian practice and which I appreciate and celebrate.  Not as unique or indispensable, but as valuable and inspiring.

On the other hand, embedded in Church practice are secret loyalty oath covenants, and an interview and disciplinary system serving up bishops as judges, that make idols of the institutional Church and its human leaders.  I reject and avoid these parts of Church practice.

I view the institutional and administrative practices as built on good intentions (“guided by the spirit”).  Most leaders are sincere and trying to do right.  I have seen some frauds and some thieves, and too much abuse—ecclesiastical, emotional, sexual—but the most common sin of Church leaders is sucking up (managing up or making the boss happy or working for the next promotion).

I observe that good intentions are not the same as decision by principle, or decision by consensus or vote, or decision by systematic observation and experiment.  Good intentions do not guarantee results.  I do not see evidence of unusual foresight in Church decision making.  I do not see a better than ordinary record of good decisions.  I do see some very bad decisions.

Finally, the Church has almost nothing to do with my lived and living experience with God (the real thing, not doctrine or description, philosophy or religion) or my personal devotional life including my prayers.  I consider them separate worlds.