. . . and i’m a mormon

“So I have a question for you,” my good friend and neighbor said to me.  She’d come up the hill to help me plant a box of baby fir trees on the steep slope of pasture we were trying to reclaim as forest.

“Okay?” I grin up at her as she puts into my muddy hand the next little tree, my other hand holding open the hole in the dirt I’d just dug.

“Well, I don’t know how to say this,” she begins and then all in a rush, “why don’t you choose a religion that fits you better?”

Though I’m taken aback, her question is not entirely out of the blue.  Among every other topic under the sun, we’ve also talked religion — or rather spirituality, because she isn’t much  for organized religion.  But faith we both know.  And the inner quietness that brings clarity.  We both know what it means to try and try to treat others with the respect and kindness we both hope to receive — even when we don’t receive it.  And how easy it is to stumble and do what we wish we wouldn’t and not do what we wish we would.

So how do I answer her?

“What do you mean?” I ask, thinking what am I but bred in the bone, sinew upon sinew shaped by a lifetime of belief?

“I mean,” she explains, “if you want a church, why not choose one a little more . . . progressive?”

She has told me I am the only Mormon she has ever actually known.

Where has she gotten her idea of what Mormons are if not from what I am?

I don’t think there is a single aspect she’d identify as progressive that I wouldn’t trace back to the core beliefs that shape me.

What could be more revolutionary — honestly? — than Turn the other cheek? or This is pure religion and undefiled, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction? 

I’ve lived my life within congregations that I did not shop for, congregations that are geographically set, that purposely pull from both sides of the track in the towns I’ve lived in. I’ve visited monthly in homes of real want and real wealth, talking in both places of some of the same kinds of struggles and small joys — but seeing the differences, too, and understanding some of those struggles on a more personal level because the people suffering are friends I respect and love.

In my congregation, English is not the only language spoken and our skin tones are more varied than proportionally dictated by my town’s  given variety.  I’ve sat under the lessons and sermons of people with no education beyond high school and they’ve sat under my lessons and sermons.  I’ve served side by side with PhDs teaching three-year olds. I’ve set up tables and served punch and cookies with hairstylists, social workers, and physicians.  I’ve served on committees with nurses and lumbermen and truckers, with soldiers and accountants and a former night club dancer, with farmers and special ed teachers and the perpetually underemployed. What’s more, the accountant was not male, the nurse was not female — neither was the special ed teacher, and the trucker was the head of the committee. What could be a more radical turning on its head of our social divisions and the caste system we have turned our careers into?

It is in this environment that I’ve learned more than anywhere else to see my town as a unit, a whole organism, whose least members matter as much as any other and whose needs and dreams need to be part of the real solution to the problems we all face.  That is the real root of my progressive-ness.

Because what idea has as much power to change our relation to one another as the knowledge that every human body who walks the earth is God’s dear child — every human body — that whatever you do to any other body — even the most different, the most lowly, the most arrogant, the least admirable, the least likable, the least in agreement with you — you are doing to God?

Do I tell her my involvement with causes she calls progressive is the natural outgrowth of my belief that Jesus will most certainly return to this world He made and loves with a love deeper than I can comprehend?  That  I am only responding to His call to prepare the way?

That I believe in the deepest core of my soul that He is the one who sets us all — believers and as-yet-unbelievers — on this path, calling each of us inwardly in words only we can hear and understand — no matter what groups we belong to, no matter whether we acknowledge it or not — to build His everlasting kingdom of peace and balance and thrifty abundance and worldwide equality?  That He is forever taking up in His mighty hand all our best (though puny) efforts at peace and abundance and turning them truer than we knew.

Would she understand that I want to be found by Him standing among those who helped the good work forward, rather than those who stood in the way?

How can I tell her that I am every day re-encouraged when I remember that I am living within the triumphant arc of a story that ends with vileness failing and goodness prevailing.  That I am enheartened to keep doing the small good things I know to do socially, environmentally, politically, because I wholeheartedly believe that by small and simple things are great things brought to pass?

What she has called a quiet embracing of others is what I have seen as the example of Christ, the path He beckons us all to walk with Him.

And the fact that not all Mormons see things exactly the way I do is just one of the things I love about my religion.  I love that I have to gather every week with people from whom I would be too completely divided (by politics, by interests, by education, by socioeconomics, by so many things) if we didn’t share the same hope in Christ.

I love it that I am called each week to come sit beside them, among them, sharing the hymnbook between us, clasping hands, listening to each other’s struggles and woes of the week, the small celebrations.

I cannot imagine a world at peace that does not begin with me building peace with the closest neighbors I disagree with.  That they can love me and I can love them is for me a small and recurrent gift of grace.

I sit back on my heels, hands on my hips.  The wind blows my friend’s hair around her head standing there above me.   What I have to say is so huge, how can I ever say it and be heard?

Thank You, Songs I Cannot Sing

I am grateful to you, Songs I Cannot Sing, Songs I Cannot Play, Songs I Cannot Lead.

First, that the world of music (which I love) is not limited only to what I can do.  What a sad-sounding world that would be.  I am glad you exist, that there are arias and cantatas I can only listen to with tears running down my face.

Second, and this has been the harder part, that I have been required over and over the past few years to sing anyway, play anyway, lead anyway.  That the Songs I Cannot have been the Songs I Still Have To Anyway.

“They sound so good,” I said to our choir’s accompanist this evening, a little sadly.

“So do we,” she said staunchly.

“I know,” and our tiny, scrabbled together choir hadn’t sounded too bad — though we had only one teenage tenor and our bass . . . well, our bass is my dear Fritz and I am simply glad he is willing to learn new things.

All five or six of our spirit-is-willing choir had dispersed after practicing the simple harmonies in the hymnbook to “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”  and now the pianist and I could hear from elsewhere in the building the soaring beauty of the other congregation’s choir practice.  It was beautiful.  Like angels singing.

O hark!

We share our building among three wards — one congregation that takes in everyone who lives in the town south of us and two congregations in our town.  We are the south and east sides of town, the other ward is the north and west sides. Unfortunately, the luck of the map has drawn what seems an unfair amount of phenomenal musical talent to the other congregation — while we have had to make do with a children’s pianist who had to learn how to play on the job and even now blanks out and stops playing when she gets nervous (uh, that would be me) and a choir leader who can’t quite sing the harmony line even when that’s all the accompanist is playing and often gets lost in the middle of the beat (uh, that would also be me).

I am willing, but not entirely able.

But I love music.  I love singing.  I come from a family of fine singers and good musicians. Pianists, organists, choir directors, soloists.  It has been such a shame to me to know how badly I am mangling a fine piece of music, but not to know how to get myself to do it any different.

Two or three weeks ago, our children performed their annual program for their parents in our main worship meeting.  That wasn’t too bad, I was telling myself, I don’t think the mistakes were all that obvious, while I played the postlude quietly waiting for the congregation to finish filing out so I could make my escape.  And a little redhead from the 7-8 year old class bounced up by my elbow, “Why did you mess up?  Did you know you had messed up?  But why did you?”

There are things I can do better than most people I know.  I could, I guess, have spent my life only doing those things I excel at.

But I am grateful to you, Songs I Cannot, for teaching me about trying and being willing to try, about failing and being willing to fail, about learning to laugh with tears in my eyes.

Our teenage tenor asked today at practice, “Where am I supposed to sing from?”

I described the vibrating column of air in a pipe organ, how when we sing we become that column of air — and having thus exhausted my musical knowledge, said, “I sing from the place I pray from — whole body like that, all open.”

And he nodded and the choir all together sang with something more beautiful than the notes that actually made it out of our mouths.

Perhaps not an unfitting way to praise a Creator who entered his own creation not as a prince in satin or a great scholar or a powerful temple singer, but to almost all appearances as a wandering carpenter’s son.

Third, that living with you, working with you, returning to you week after week, you Impossible Songs, keeps teaching me how Jesus, listening, can hear the Songs I Cannot Sing, how even my mistakes can become something harmonious in Him.

Thank You, Unseasonable Weather

My friends say you are bad news.  They say you will be nothing but trouble for me in the long run.

My friends call you hard names like Global Warming.

They cite scripture and meteorological computer modelling and predict a variety of apocalypses.

But I can’t keep my heart from rising when you shine your warm sunlight like a blessing on my head.

Thank you for holding on to the brilliant leaves as fiercely fondly as I always want to.  Thank you for dancing their warm colors before my eyes for two months longer than you should.

Thank you for the extra days of digging in the garden that you give me.  And the sense of spring you bring to bear on my present autumn.

Thank You, Imaginary Bicycle

Ah, my dear vehicle of the mind and megabyte, I never knew what you were doing for me when I first took you for a spin.

This past month, when asked quickly to email the adoption worker something about our family, where could I turn but to you?

You were just waiting all this time, weren’t you?

When together we went Cherry Picking or batted around reasons why we write or frivoled concerning The Cat Dad, when you heard me out trying to philosophize about the care and keeping of daughters or what it’s like being the mother one, how could I have known that all along you were midwifing me through what was to be part of the labor of another kind of childbirth?

And though I’d almost decided to stay away at least another month, dear Imaginary Bicycle, it seemed remiss of me not to come by and  say thank you.