If I Were Prophet

I do not envy the LDS General Authorities their position in society, at all.  But that doesn't mean that I have no interest in what they do.  As someone who grew up Mormon and still sees much to admire (and learn from) in the body of culture we point to with words like Mormonism, I cannot help having my own ideas of what the LDS church should (or perhaps better could) do to improve its positive impact on the world.

My ideas here are not a serious call to repentance, a demand that the church offer reparations for whatever ill I have seen it causing myself or other people.  This post is not the place for that, and to be honest, I see the utility of that kind of rhetorical posture as fundamentally limited.  I have probably already gotten all the rise I am going to get out of the church with my personal angst (expressed elsewhere on this blog).  I am utterly at peace with that.

This post is a free gift from me to the Mormonism I loved (and to some degree still love and will always love).  You don't demand that someone accept such a gift.  You offer it on her doorstep and let her do whatever she wants with it.  I will not be offended if this gift is wholly ignored.  But I could not rest easy until I put it out there, available to my Mormonism, even if she never has time or interest to look at it.  I love the LDS church, even if she no longer loves me (as a heretic who drinks coffee and doubts the truth of many assertions emanating from modern prophets, seers, and revelators--not because they are terrible monsters, but because my experience reveals them to be wrong).  So, with that prelude out of the way, let's get down to business.

(1) Theology and Teaching.  I put these issues front and center here because they have become the heart and soul of modern institutional Mormonism.  We meet on Sundays to learn and discuss theology.  We attend seminary for the same reason.  We go on missions to preach it to the world.  We search the scriptures to find it there.  We go to General Conference to get it from General Authorities, including our own modern Moses--the man who wears the mantle of authority that once graced the shoulders of Brigham Young.  When people want to know what Mormons are all about, we immediately start talking theology (eternal families, love, service, Christ as a redeemer making these things continually possible in a world that seems to obstruct or prevent their appearance in particular instances).

Like many believers in many historical religions, we Mormons are obsessed with theology.  This does not mean that we have coherent theology.  In fact, my experience with Mormonism and other theological religions (e.g. other forms of Protestantism, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism) leads me to conclude that Mormons are definitely more lax about theology than many (even most) other people.  For us, "official doctrine" is whatever Moses or any of his myriad representatives happens to be saying at the moment--with the caveat that future events might prove this doctrine to be fallacious (and thus no longer true or official, at least not in an absolute sense).  We don't have strict schools of thought who develop rigorous, logical systems shoe-horning the world into a series of rational categories to which reason and faith together demand absolute adherence.  There are no Mormon Thomists--no Mormon theologians in the tradition of medieval scholastic Catholicism (to cite one example).  This does not mean that individual Mormon authorities don't try to affect strict theological rhetoric (speaking Mormon with a kind of scholastic Catholic accent): the late Bruce R. McConkie is a notable example of this; the incoherence of his work speaks for itself, I think--and good Mormon that he was, he completely reversed his positions when unforeseen historical developments made them patently untenable (viz. his about-face on the Mormon doctrine of Cain's curse).  

Right now, LDS Mormonism struggles to pull theological coherence from an historical tradition founded on incoherence.  Early Mormons disagreed on theology all the time.  Joseph Smith contradicted himself repeatedly and significantly throughout his career as prophet--embracing Trinitarianism in the Book of Mormon, throwing it away in Nauvoo; rejecting polygamy in the Book of Mormon, embracing it in Nauvoo; affirming individual liberty in his campaign for president of the USA, denying it to the editors of the Expositor as mayor of Nauvoo; etc.  Brigham Young and Orson Pratt disagreed profoundly on serious doctrinal matters (e.g. what is the Holy Ghost?).  They aired their disagreements publicly, in speeches and publications, without killing Mormonism as something vital (to both of them and to the communities where they participated).  In our own time, prominent Mormons continue to disagree profoundly (though they have become less willing to let us see that disagreement, preferring to hide behind a facade of unity for reasons that I find misguided).

In our day, Mormonism is largely a matter of doctrine.  The doctrine taught is incoherent, especially for those with any experience doing rigorous theology outside Mormonism (e.g. converts with a serious background in the intellectual traditions that exist in faiths like Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, or Buddhism).  The current regime demands that we sweep this incoherence under the rug, "putting it on the shelf" for solution in the next life (or whatever).  I think this approach is fundamentally self-defeating.  I think it impoverishes Mormonism unnecessarily, stifling our ability to relate meaningfully to fellow Saints and the world outside our culture.  Instead of hiding our theological incoherence as some kind of sin to be ashamed of, we should embrace it in the tradition of our Mormon ancestors.  We should admit out loud, in public, that there is no such thing as official Mormon doctrine, that individual Mormons are responsible to learn and articulate for themselves the messages that the Spirit of God may communicate to them.  This does not have to destroy the ability of our communities to function usefully.  It will require us to change the way we do some things, however.  I have some suggestions.

In a world where there exists no fixed doctrine, order in the community has to be founded on something other than the Spirit (which can move your neighbor to inveigh against homosexuals while it moves you to do the opposite).  People have to develop their own ideas about morality, and then they have to learn how to share those ideas respectfully with other people--even when other people disagree with them profoundly (as Brigham Young disagreed with Orson Pratt).  How do we train that?  How do we make that happen in a way that enriches everyone?  I think Mormons could do this very well, in a way that would enrich all our experience (though it might cause us some discomfort sometimes, too: that is the price of dealing honestly with other people; sometimes, one feels "offended").  My suggestion is that we replace the three-hour block of Sunday meetings with a single, one-hour sacrament meeting.  After the sacrament, an ordinance that I am not interested in changing (except to put a word in to support finding roles for young women to play alongside young men--note that this does not necessarily require granting women the priesthood), the ward will hear two talks.  One talk will be offered as a positive discussion of some virtue or ordinance or aspect of the Mormon gospel, and the other will be offered--as a matter of course--as a rebuttal (a refutation or correction or caveat directed at the talk that preceded it).  Ideally, the rebuttal will be polite (avoiding insult and/or the temptation to call the first speaker out as some kind of deviant: the assumption should be that we are all friends, and that friends disagree sometimes in ways that it is useful to explore through discourse).  While this approach will definitely make many people uncomfortable at times, I think it will offer more positive results than negative.  I think it will teach Mormons to value their incoherence (a trait that is not going away any time soon) as something useful (as I think it is).  At the very least, it will definitely make sacrament meetings more interesting.

Note that I don't think anyone's personal testimony should be denied expression in this venue.  People should feel free to get up in front of the congregation and say, for example, that they believe homosexuality to be a sin.  All I am requiring is that every such assertion find a counterpoint.  This needn't require people to adopt positions they don't hold: if I personally feel that homosexuality is a sin but circumstances require me to stand up and "refute" a brother who has just articulated my view, then I will talk about how someone faithful might disagree with both of us--or I will look for ways in which I think the first speaker spoke too harshly; maybe I will end up saying that while I agree with his feeling, I think there are better ways of making peace with people who feel differently than what my brother recommended in his talk.  I offer this purely by way of example, for the record.  I personally have no problem with homosexuality.  But I also have no problem with people who disagree with me outspokenly--until they think that their opinion should be spoken and mine silenced.

(2) Priesthood and/or Authority.  Reframing the way Mormons talk about their theological incoherence necessarily raises the question of authority in the community.  What standing does authority have in Mormonism as I imagine it?  What is priesthood?  Some people think of these things (authority, priesthood) as static, eternal realities that never change.  While that is a perfectly fine theological notion for you to hold and me to disagree with, I don't think it can be used to create a good community.  A good community requires honesty and openness.  It also requires a degree of parity between participants.  People need to have their innate abilities and contributions validated in meaningful ways (ways that are not obviously artificial).

Right now, LDS General Authorities find themselves out of their depth (it seems to me).  They are not theologians.  They don't see angels (any more).  They don't agree with one another about what the church is or what it should do.  And the church has outgrown their ability to direct it, whether individually or collectively (it seems to me).  Recent events (e.g. the construction of the City Creek Mall, the mass apostasies in the Philippines and South America) demonstrate that the LDS church is a strong regional organization (centered in the Old West, i.e. Brigham Young's state of Deseret) and a weak international one.  My own experience confirms that Mormon culture is markedly different in Deseret than outside it.  I grew up in "the mission field" (i.e. outside Deseret) and then served a mission with Deseretians and lived in Utah for four years while attending BYU.  Before my sojourn among the Deseret Mormons, there were things about Mormon culture I was completely unaware of (e.g. the fact that there is no such thing as "thoughtful dissent" in Deseret; in my "mission-field" Mormonism was a lot more about being a responsible free agent and a lot less about following the prophet, whose words often didn't say much to us outsiders that wasn't harmlessly generic--e.g. "stand for something you believe in").

Mormonism raised me to be independent, to seek personal revelation, to doubt creeds (my own and everybody else's), to pursue knowledge but never to find it.  She raised me this way, then sent me on a mission where she demanded the complete opposite: I put on the missionary badge and suddenly Mormonism was all about conformity, passing every meaningful decision to some external authority, accepting creeds from priesthood leaders without question, and recognizing that all meaningful knowledge was restored by Joseph Smith (not the Joseph Smith I was encountering in my own study of history--a crazy maverick who couldn't hold a thought without contradicting it--but a cardboard model of moral perfection whose ideas were reduced to safe moral platitudes from self-help books written by American salesmen in love with the 1950s).  My mission presidents weren't bad guys, at all, and they did their best to run my (now-defunct) European mission following the program given to them by their priesthood leaders.  Unfortunately, those leaders were completely out of touch with reality--their own history as Mormons and the history of the people I was supposed to convert to the Mormon gospel.

The out-of-touchness that emanates from the high places of Deseret is not really a moral failing.  It makes perfect sense to me that a bunch of well-meaning businessmen with a very inward-looking culture should be out of touch with ideological reality on the street in northern Spain.  I would expect them to be out of touch.  Solving this "problem" is not a matter of getting i-Pads for the brethren or broadcasting their talks to chapels via the latest communications technology.  The LDS church is really good at technical solutions to cultural distance, in my experience--and conversely awful at human solutions.  My mission was a long series of bungling failures to connect.  The few times I made real human connections, I did so by explicitly ignoring my instructions from church leaders and simply "following my gut" (i.e. the Spirit) wherever it led.  I opened myself up to people, inviting them to share a bit of their story with me in exchange for a bit of mine.  And we connected.  We didn't convert on the spot.  I didn't walk away Catholic or Pentecostal or atheist, and they didn't walk away Mormon.  But we talked.  We shared something.  We saw each other as human beings, human beings with dignity and mutual respect and ideas about life whose utility didn't depend on adherence to any particular creed.

My good mission experiences were not about proselytizing (which in my experience is a colossal waste of time and resources, even if your goal is explicitly to get as many committed converts as possible--which mine isn't, just to tip my hand).  In my experience, proselytizing is junk (a bad approach to building meaningful human relationships), and it produces junk (dysfunctional relationships).  Real mission work is about doing what Ammon does in the Book of Mormon--making yourself available to people as a friend, a peer, and a servant.  "What do you care about?" the real missionary asks.  "What do you love?  Show me, so that I can help you tend it.  I care about your little garden of moral goodness.  I want to help you make it a better place--not by rearranging it to look just like mine, but by putting into it the things you want to put in.  You can come look at my life for ideas, if you like, but don't see it as a model for yours.  We are all different, and I respect your difference.  I love it."  If I were prophet, no member of the LDS church would ever serve a proselytizing mission ever again.  Missions would be all about offering service and/or doing real work (for compensation: maybe some missionaries could put in voluntary hours with local or church-owned businesses learning and practicing trades for the benefit of surrounding communities?).  Multi-level marketing sucks, even when you use it to offer people the gospel of Christ.  Pimping Mormonism in this fashion just makes the body of Christ into a harlot (and breaks my heart, honestly: I get really sad when I think about all the time I spent tracting in northern Spain).

But I keep on getting distracted from the real question: what are we to do with priesthood and authority in a Mormonism where anybody can be inspired to do or say anything?  To me it seems that we need to move toward a place where individual members of the church take more responsibility for their own moral agency (where it is good and where it is bad) and give less deference to authorities (thereby relieving the latter of an all-but-unbearable burden).  We cannot expect the Apostles to resign all at once or deny their calling--nor would I advocate for that happening ever, at all.  But it would be good if members stopped having unreal expectations of General Authorities, including Apostles.  It would be good if the Apostles could publicly renounce the lie that they are all agreed about Mormon doctrine, and then go even farther and renounce any pretense to define doctrine for the church (ever).  Ideally, in my mind, the Apostles should retreat from the position of "spokesmen to the entire world" which history has thrust upon them.  Instead, they should be spokesmen for Deseret (as they already are--that is where they do the most good, in terms of creating opportunities for individuals to better themselves freely).  They should make their financial stake in Deseret explicit (opening the books so that tithe-payers see precisely where their contributions go), and exercise their authority most only as CEOs of Deseret's financial empire--rather than pretending to have insight into humanity where they simply don't have it.  They should publicly renounce the expectation that they speak for the entire church on any matter.  They should publicly affirm that the lowliest member of the church has access to as much spiritual truth as they have, from the same sources, and say that they do not aim to shape Mormon belief except by their own example of love--as manifest in their providing various goods and services through the financial empire that they control as heirs to Brigham Young.  Every time a Bruce R. McConkie wants to go after a Eugene England, he should always tell everyone that he is "speaking only as a man" rather than as God's mouthpiece (a role which I think would be best left to all church members, as part of the covenant that we make with the Lord without any ecclesiastical intermediaries).  People should always feel free to disagree, to criticize, and to abstain from behaviors that they find counter-productive (without incurring the charge of heresy and being ridden out of town on a rail).

What about women and the priesthood?  While I admit it might be nice to give women the priesthood, I have too much experience to make this part of my platform for church reform here.  I think there are alternatives available less likely to alienate significant portions of the current church membership (including many women who adamantly refuse priesthood in its current form, for reasons that I cannot fault: I too would not wish to be bishop or anything like it under the current regime).  My initial idea would be to make the Relief Society a lot more prominent.  Balance the Quorum of 12 Apostles with a Quorum of 12 Sisters (not necessarily under that title) holding equal stakes in the financial empire of Deseret.  Make those women talk as much as the men (in General Conference and whatnot).  Make the local Relief Societies functional equivalents to bishoprics (with the same authority, the same budget, and the same local presence: e.g. if the bishop has to sit up on the stand during the sacrament meeting, then the Relief Society president must sit up there too).  But there is no need to change traditional terminology, referring to women in power as priesthood-holders and/or making them officiate in ordinances that they don't necessarily wish to participate in.  I would like the church to come up with ordinances for them to perform (looking to the 19th century for examples of how Mormon women traditionally gave blessings and administrations and explicitly making these part of the Relief Society's mandate).  And I would change the temple ceremonies to make women theologically equivalent to men (i.e. subject only to God and their own conscience, not to any husband).

In sum, my views on how authority should evolve in contemporary Mormonism look something like this.  (1) The current authorities should explicitly refuse to be doctrinal authorities.  They should refuse to dictate morality to Church members.  They should make finances transparent and provide avenues encouraging thoughtful dissent (and proliferations of Mormon ideologies that they need not endorse in any way, shape, or form: by their fruits ye shall know them, not by the endorsement of some Apostle).  (2) Women should become equal partners with men, exercising the same authority in practice even if they use different language and/or ritual to express it.  Make the General Relief Society equal to the Quorum of the 12 (in number and in real power to move resources).  Make the local Relief Society equivalent to the local bishopric.  While I see no need to give women the priesthood explicitly (particularly if/when many of them expressly refuse it), I would like them to have more "ritual duties" in the community (comparable to priesthood duties for men--e.g. give the young women something to do as part of administering the sacrament; make it expressly normal/proper for females to give blessings as they used to, and so forth).  (3) Missions should be service projects (which need not be a net drain on church resources: many of the youth of Deseret, especially, might benefit from working inside the financial empire of the church, ranching or farming or even helping out at City Creek).  If I were in charge of church missions, I would give individual members a greater say in determining their own mission, inviting them to apply to serve in capacities that appeal to them and then reviewing applications (the way real businesses do things).

(3) Community Service.  I put this here because I see this as something that Mormons historically do rather well, even though we talk about it really badly.  We do get things done.  We don't tell people clearly what we are doing (e.g. where their contributions to our enterprises go).  We should change that.  Publish the church books (as soon as possible: I recognize that it might require some time and effort to make them presentable).  Make church businesses something the church talks about (at conferences, in meetings where young men and women decide where and how they might like to serve missions for the church, etc.).  Talk about how the hunting preserves and cattle ranches are beneficial, preserving ecologies that keep humanity alive and well (not just Mormon humanity).  Talk about how valuable cheap education from highly qualified professors is: BYU is a really great place to go to school, even better if its Board of Trustees explicitly renounces any pretense of controlling what students and faculty there think or say in public.  Show the world that Mormons let people do things that matter and speak their minds, even when they say things that strike some authorities as ridiculous and/or awful.  Real faith is robust enough (or perhaps better, antifragile enough) to endure dissent.  Real religion embraces atheism (which it creates: Martin Luther may be accurately characterized as one of the first great modern atheists, who rejected the religion of his day as hopelessly inhumane; Joseph Smith is very similar--embrace this reality rather than fight it).

This brings me to the image Mormonism cultivates with the outside world.  Instead of dancing on a wire all the time between non-Mormon "liberals" (who hate it as a backward, inward-looking community uninterested in the shiny things they value as high culture) and non-Mormon "conservatives" (who hate it as a reminder that their own historical tradition is less coherent than they would like), the LDS church should just be itself.  It should actively, explicitly embrace its entire history: "Yes, Joseph Smith was a crazy idiot.  He was also a prophet of God, kind of like all those other prophets out there--all of whom are more or less insane and dangerous.  Use your own relationship with the Holy Spirit to determine when it is not safe for you associate with them.  The church is here to help you where you may find it useful.  Please ignore it or speak out against it, as the Spirit may move you, where you find it harmful."  It should encourage multiple versions of Mormonism (in Deseret and outside it).  Let BYU professors teach whatever they want, publish or perish on their own terms--as people see the fruits of their Mormonism and embrace or reject it on its own merits rather going off of the opinion of an "authority" whose outlook on humanity and Mormonism is inherently limited, so limited that he cannot see the glaring differences that separate Mark Hoffman from D. Michael Quinn.  Not all "heretics" are the same: don't tar decent human beings like Quinn with the same brush you use to paint thugs like Hoffman.  Quinn belongs at BYU.  Hoffman belongs in jail.  Any power of discernment that fails to notice this cannot be trusted to govern people without explicit limits on its authority, limits that recognize and advertise its very human imperfection.  (If we look into the historical record honestly, we see that speaking as a man means speaking as a total moron on more than one occasion.  Nobody should give any Moses the kind of abject submission that many Mormons want to give theirs.)

Eliminating the three-hour Sunday block frees up a lot of time (not just the time in classes but also a lot of the preparation time that goes into creating the lesson-plans and whatnot for those endless classes that no longer have to happen: they could continue on a voluntary basis as options for people who want them, of course; I certainly wouldn't ban people from spending their entire Sabbath at church).  I would like to make regular service something the individual LDS community does more, as a matter of course.  Instead of making people come in on Saturday to clean bathrooms (and then three hours on Sunday!), have them make a regular service meeting part of the weekly routine.  If you live in Deseret, this might involve doing something for a church business (e.g. some of the welfare farms or canneries, assuming the feds haven't shut those down completely).  If you live outside Deseret, then local bishoprics and Relief Societies can be creative (coming up with opportunities to serve the local communities in ways that are meaningful to Mormons and to the external community). 

Deeds speak much more effectively than words.  Do things that matter, and people will "magically" become more interested in what you have to say (even if they don't believe it for a moment: don't expect them to).  My single biggest problem with institutional Mormonism as it exists currently is that it seems like a giant exercise in talking (not because no action occurs but because it all goes on behind the scenes, as something ancillary and almost unimportant).  And I am pointedly excluded from the talk, as somebody whose discursive perspective lies irretrievably outside the narrow spectrum of doctrinal orthodoxy imagined by the powers-that-be (a spectrum that is entirely artificial and plastic, changing dramatically at the drop of a hat--if we look at its historical evolution).  Let the morons (like me) talk.  And make it obvious that the church is about more than just talk.  Serve people.  Love them enough to let them fail (and even go to hell) on their own terms, learning from their own mistakes (rather than the ones you forced them to make in a fit of well-meaning charity).

There.  Probably nobody will read all of this, but I feel much better having written it down.  I love Mormonism.  But I think she hates me, and I don't see us getting together again any time soon.  So I wish her the best as she moves on to lovers less obnoxious than I am.

Unrighteous Dominion

Every time I think I might make it back to activity as a Mormon, something like this happens, and I realize that I cannot run the priesthood gauntlet.  I cannot live at peace in a community where my standing is constantly hostage to the whims of another man who thinks he speaks for God more than I do.  I can be respectful and even politely deferent to peers, people whom I can respect without obeying subserviently, but I cannot submit my moral autonomy unilaterally to another person, no matter what calling he claims.

I cannot refuse to express my perspective on reality honestly and openly when people ask for it.  I cannot pretend that I think it evil and wrong where I do not.  To do so appears to me profoundly immoral, and such abject obeisance was never part of Mormonism as I aspired to practice it before realizing that my ideas of the religion were impossibly naive--and unpopular with the current crop of LDS Mormon leaders.  Judging from the experience of Tom Kimball linked above, they have it in for people like me; if we come back into the fold and try to participate honestly, then they will run us out as wolves in sheep's clothing.  I don't have the stomach to play Bruno to their Inquisition.

Forced to choose between speaking my truth (which I do not aim to speak to exclusion of other viewpoints) and participating in the church, I pick the former.  I cannot lie about myself, about my life, about reality as I live and breathe it.  I cannot let people assume I endorse ideas that I do not endorse, that I see myself as evil or degenerate for standing apart from practices or preachments that my experience finds more harmful than not.  I am not anti-Mormon, but neither am I anti-me, and I will not be so.  I do not believe that goodness or God demands such self-loathing.  My life teaches me the opposite.  Learning to love others non-pathologically requires learning to treat yourself with respect, too.  I cannot extend to you the trust I refuse to have in myself, ever.  I cannot submit to your judgement usefully if I have no opinion of my own, if you own my integrity more than I do always and without question.  I am the only one responsible for me.  I answer for my sins.  Not you.  And I answer to my conscience, to God, and to the community where my actions have meaning.  Not to you.  I need good counselors, not dictators or tyrants (like Tom Kimball's priesthood leaders).  Leadership is no excuse for bullies to run roughshod over the lives of people just as human as they are.

Brujo Encadenado

Robert M. Pirsig. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. New York: Bantam, 1992.  ISBN: 0553299611.

This book is as interesting (to me) as Pirsig's other one, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  Where the earlier book sees reality existing outside our ability to understand it, this one talks about different ways that we respond to our historical inability to grasp reality wholly.  The earlier book sees an indefinite (and humanly undefinable) quality as the foundation of reality: the word quality points toward the reality that is too big to understand, too irregular and dynamic to be contained by our limited intelligence.  The second book talks about different manifestations of this quality in human life.

According to Pirsig, quality as we experience it comes in two kinds: (1) static quality and (2) dynamic quality.  Lila is an extended portrait of these two different kinds of quality. 

(1) Static quality comes in four kinds: (i) inorganic static quality; (ii) biological static quality; (iii) social quality; (iv) intellectual quality.  Life exists as different patterns of these kinds of quality that are related.  Inorganic molecules exist in static patterns that enable static patterns of biological life, which rely on them without being determined by them (the same way computer languages rely on electronic circuits: the circuits make the languages possible, but you could not predict the particular historical development of the languages from the existence of the circuits).  Biological patterns exist in static patterns that enable static patterns of social life, which rely on biology without being determined by it (the same way computer software applications rely on programming languages: the languages make the applications possible, but you could not predict the particular historical developments of the applications from the languages).  Finally, social patterns exist in static patterns that enable static intellectual patterns, which rely on society without being determined by it (the same way a novel in a word-processing application relies on that software to exist without being deducible from it: my knowledge that OpenOffice exists does not tell me what novel you may be using it to write right now).

(2) Dynamic quality is the wildcard, the irregularity that makes quality impossible for us to understand (i.e. the simple quality that Pirsig talks about in his first book).  Dynamic quality is rebellious: for some reason, inorganic molecules decide to work against forces of natural decay in the universe; they join together in ways that allow biological life to exist (against expectations).  Then, for some reason, biological life works against the restrictions of physical reality, fighting against forces of decay to create more and more complex organisms that challenge physical laws (like gravity: all organisms move--crawling, walking, or flying in defiance of the forces pulling them down).  On top of this, organisms come together (for some unknown reason) and create social conventions, taking the biological value known as sex (for example) and overlaying it with rules known as marriage.  Finally, human beings (and maybe other living things too) reflect rationally on the existence of social norms (like marriage) and try to make these rational (e.g. extending the benefits of marriage to different kinds of people who merit them, say homosexuals or people of a different race or creed than the dominant one in a particular culture).  Dynamic quality always bucks the regular systems of static quality, challenging the norms that hold these systems together.  It occasions the transformation of static order, altering the nature of a static system radically and unpredictably.

At one point in the book, the author recounts an anecdote from the modern history of the Zuni people in North America.  In a particular Zuni community, there was an odd man who flouted social norms, peeping in windows without talking to his fellow tribesmen.  The Zuni call such people witches (brujos in Spanish: Pirsig prefers the Spanish term because it carries less problematic baggage than the English witch).  One day, he got drunk and told the local authorities (priests) that they would never control him.  They arrested him and hung him up by his thumbs.  He sent for local Western authorities (off the reservation), who rescued him (and took him to the hospital).  Afterwards, the priests who had disciplined him resigned their authority in the community, and the witch became the community leader.  He ended up leading the Zuni into a new kind of social order, one in which relations with the Westerners was more cordial and open (in part because he made a point of meeting regularly with outsiders and sharing Zuni stories with them).  Western anthropologists had a hard time explaining this event because they wanted to make the brujo a conventional leader in his society.  They tried to understand his rise to prominence in Zuni terms, seeing it as a natural event inside the traditional Zuni culture.  From Pirsig's point of view, this is the wrong approach, precisely because the brujo's power came from outside the Zuni.  He was not traditional.  He was dynamic, innovative, a wild card.  This is why the priests, guardians of traditional Zuni culture, attempted to suppress him.  He represented a dynamic threat to the static quality of their society.

Every social order produces outcasts, people on the fringes who don't exactly belong.  These people can be dangerous.  They represent a challenge to the stability of static quality (which provides some benefits: order, predictability, regularity).  But they are not always dangerous.  No static state is ever perfect.  Each lacks something.  Each is maladapted in some respect.  The outsiders can help here.  Given the chance, they can transform the static quality of an established community so that it survives as circumstances around it alter.  The old Zuni priests were less adept in preserving their society from outside influence.  The brujo became a leader because he was better at dealing with people and culture outside Zuni.  He used his position as an outsider to make the position of the Zuni people safer than it was, insuring the survival of Zuni better than the priests could by changing the nature of the community (in ways that the priests found utterly abhorrent).

I confess I sometimes feel like a Mormon brujo.  While I have no intention of being a leader, I do value certain things in Mormon culture (the focus on friends and family, the commandment that every man seek his or her own divine revelation, the drive for a community that is something more than just abstract economics seeking to amass the most material wealth possible).  I have always valued these things.  I thought the institutional church valued them the same way I did.  Even when my personal position on certain matters differed from positions held by institutional leaders, I thought we were on the same team, interested in pursuing the same overarching goals.  To some extent, I think we still are.  But I think that many Mormon priesthood leaders have much less sympathy for me than I once believed.  I think they are barely willing that people such as I exist, provided we keep our mouths shut and defer to their judgment without protest (however rational or respectful).  I don't think they should give in to us.  I don't think the church would be better led if they all abdicated and handed power over to folk of the fringe, such as I have been most of my life.  But I wish there was a place for us in Mormon culture, a place for modern backsliders like Sterling McMurrin, who believe in the gospel even if they insist on misunderstanding it (from the point of view of someone like Joseph Fielding Smith or Bruce R. McConkie).  If that place had existed, then I might still be an active Mormon today.  But I am not really the Zuni brujo.  I am not willing to be hung by the thumbs to save the community.  Forced to choose between saving myself and saving Mormonism, I admit I picked me.  No hard feelings, I hope.

In Pirsig's book, he talks about the twentieth century as a war between social quality (the Victorianism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West, especially the USA) and intellectual quality (the drive to make society rational).  He takes the side of intellectual quality against social, arguing that it is more moral for an idea to destroy society than for society to destroy an idea.  I confess I am not convinced he is right.  To me, it seems that ideas are too unpredictable and dangerous to merit that kind of respect.  But I do wish that we could find better ways in the USA of accommodating outsiders (including intellectuals) who want to participate in society in a positive way without crucifying themselves in the process.  While I do not fight with Pirsig in the war, I do think that the war is there, and I do not think we are fighting it in the best manner possible.  There are better ways to deal with me than forcing me to become a liar (heretic) or an apostate (outcast).  Or maybe I just wish there were.  Sometimes, life is just really tough (a problem without happy solution). 

Ronin

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.  

Since my disaffection, several people have expressed concern to me about "the leaders I choose to follow" since turning my back on Mormon prophets.  This concern is profoundly troubling to me, mostly because I don't believe in following leaders.  I am my own person.  If I do something, then I am the one doing it: I have reasons of my own for doing it, and I am personally answerable for any consequences that result.  I don't do anything merely because someone else told me to.  Even when I act under duress, I am doing the best I can for myself, from my own personal perspective.  For me, that is what being a moral person is.  I cultivate my own spirit, and scrupulously respect the right of other people to do likewise -- even when the spirit that they cultivate is very different from my own.

Just as I don't take unilateral dictation from someone else, I refuse to impose it.  I even give my baby sons choices: there are some things that they cannot do because they are not capable (like use the oven), but among the things that they can do, they have freedom.  I am not going to force them to play cars when they would rather be reading about Calvin and Hobbs.  Respect doesn't mean that they never disagree or talk back to me.  (My wife and I actually like to get them talking, since that often distracts them from acting out in ways that might be dangerous or bothersome.)  Moral education, in my view, is learning to behave oneself without external control: the perfect man is the one who makes and is answerable for his own decisions.  He doesn't hurt other people and then tell them they get no apology because he was simply "doing God's will." 

To my mind, it is acceptable to invoke the will of God as your reason for personal decisions, but it is no excuse for imposing yourself on other people.  I can choose to wear a burkha because I feel that is the will of God for me, but I have no right to make you wear one because of my feeling (which you may not even share!).  People who go around complaining that society is going to hell in a handbasket because we don't all wear burkhas with them (or shop at Whole Foods or vote Republican or Democrat or whatever) get on my nerves.  If you believe in burkhas (or Whole Foods, or the GOP, or the Democratic Party, or Scientology, or Mormonism, or atheism, or socialism, or anything similar), then by all means live your beliefs.  As long as you respect my right to live my beliefs (which are different!), then we are cool.  We can even be friends.  But I have a hard time being friends with people who think that friendship means one of us forcing the other to change his habits for no other reason than "God told me so" (so you think God never talks to me, is that it? you get to speak with God for everyone, and I cannot even get him to talk to me for myself? forget it, kid: I'm a grown man, and I don't need you to change my diapers).

There is a great passage in Blevins' account of Crazy Horse that captures the contrast between moral autonomy (freedom) and moral dependence (slavery).  Crazy Horse's uncle Spotted Tail is describing how the whites (wasicu) see the world (pp. 124-125, 126-127):

"The worst is, they have a terrible blindness, these wasicu.  They do not understand choice."

He was referring to a most sacred subject, and none of his hearers needed any explanation -- no Lakota who had even started on the path to adulthood did.  A human being had skan, something-that-moves, spiritual vitality.  The force of life itself [God?] gave the person skan [agency?] when he or she was born.  It also gave him choice, and through choice he or she grew into the man or woman he or she became.  Skan was the motive power, choice of direction.

A Lakota had a choice between good and evil, the red road and the black road, between what made life beautiful and what made it ugly.  He or she had help in making choices -- the quiet voice that is in everyone, the spirit helper (usually in the form of an animal), what he or she saw when crying for a vision, personal medicine, prayer, ceremonies performed alone or with others.  Still, choice remained, inviolate.

Whether your way was to paint yourself in a certain manner, to wear something of iron or never touch iron, or whether you should charge the enemy first or simply swell the ranks, that was your nature, your vision, the route of your spirit on the earth.  Other Lakota would respect it.  None would try to coerce it or even influence it.  None would mock it.  Your understanding was the essence of you, and to follow it was your sacred choice.

All this was so fundamental as to not need saying.  So what could it mean that an entire people did not understand choice?  It was almost unthinkable.  Were they human beings?

"Among the whites some think they can see and choose for others."  It was so stunning that Spotted Tail just let the words hang in the lodge, heavy and oppressive.  "Then comes what you would expect.  They quarrel with one another not only about small things, but about the biggest.  They fight and kill each other.  Instead of respecting another man's way, they stop at nothing to get him to adopt their way.  Like the Mormons [!]."

The Lakota knew the U.S. government this very summer was sending an army against the Mormons at the big salty lake to make the Mormons live like other wasicu, especially not to take more than one wife.  Incomprehensible.

"They hate our way," said Spotted Tail.  His voice was weary now and faint.  "Their deepest desire -- believe me about this -- is to change our way of living.  Their deepest desire is to make us like them.  I swear it" ...

A-i-i-i, surely they were impossible to understand.  You might fight your enemy -- that had respect in it.  You might even kill him -- respect again.  But to do what the wasicu did: afflict your enemy with disease, pen him up, starve him, and then rescue his body on the condition that he surrender his spirit ... Incomprehensible.  Not the way of men.

But he [Crazy Horse's father] believed Spotted Tail.  Everything about his brother-in-law sang conviction.

What a peculiar people, the wasicu.  They had a certain genius.  They could make things -- wagons, wheels, guns, knives, watches, far-seeing glasses, and much more.  But these were only things.  In return for them ["Let's go shopping!"] the wasicu wanted you to relinquish your own genius, which was not of things but of the spirit.

From the beginning, said the oldest men, what the wasicu wanted was your spirit.  From the beginning, their real desire was for the blackrobes [mantles of authority!] to gouge spirit out of you, like a man scraping seeds out of a gourd.  Then they would fill the empty gourd with their religion.  [Religious freedom means you shut up and wear my burkha!] 

There is such irony in this passage when you consider that so many Mormons today are eager to impose on others the same way other Americans imposed on us back in the day.  Even in the nineteenth century, Mormonism puts a high rhetorical value on agency, the ability of individual people to make choices without coercion.  The only problem is that we also put a high rhetorical value on following the prophet: historically, following the prophet is more important to Mormons than being true to oneself.  For me, this is pure bullcrap.  There is no moral problem I can think of that would not become easier to solve if people took more responsibility for themselves and gave less to leaders.  Grow up and go your own way.  Leaders are for babies.  Grown-ups have friends, associates, people they respect (and even look up to), but they don't have leaders.  Thomas S. Monson is not my leader.  Barack Obama is not my leader.  Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche is not my leader.  Christopher Hitchens is not my leader.  This does not mean that I hate these gentlemen (or all the good that they may stand for: quite the contrary!), but I am long past offering them the total devotion of a helpless little boy desperate for a superhero.  For years, I did my very best to believe in superheroes.  It didn't work very well for me, and I am very grateful to have outgrown it (finally!).

I do not adopt a fixed posture toward life anymore.  I don't have final answers.  I don't speak for other people (until they say I do, and even then I do not answer for their behavior: they are responsible for themselves).  And on the other side of the coin, no one else speaks for me (until I claim their words for myself: even then, I am still answerable for my behavior, for my reception and interpretation of the words that someone else has uttered).  I am not standing firm with this band or that one -- with this religion or that one, with this university or that one, with this company or that one, with this philosophy or that one.  I don't believe in leaders.  I am a ronin -- a wolf who goes his own way.  I am all done playing the sheep, no matter who the shepherd is.  God himself cannot separate me from mine integrity (unless he kills me, which is what it would take -- for me as for Crazy Horse: even so, I will die true to myself and to the truth I believe in).

Taming the Beast Within: Aftermath

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690. 

After Little Big Horn, Crazy Horse surrenders to the United States (whose representatives consistently lie to him and his people, not because they themselves are malicious or incapable of truth-telling, but because they are answerable to politicians in Washington who don't care about native Americans enough to treat them like human beings).  Crazy Horse goes off alone whenever he can, holding small fossils (inyan) and "listening" to them (i.e. counting his breath and being very still, as though he were trying to hear the stone creatures speak).  He makes peace with himself, with the world (his white enemies and native "friends"), and with Hawk.  Then he is betrayed by his friends, and killed.

I'll be honest: beating God and his self-proclaimed spokesmen at their own game felt great.  But the joy was not unmixed: it never is.  I lost a lot of things, a lot of possibilities and hopes that I had cherished for a long time.  Innocence.  Trust.  The ability to take people around me at their word, especially people I don't know personally -- people who work for faceless bureaucracies who pretend to have my best interest at heart while they do whatever they do (which may or may not end up hurting me badly).  I was hurt inside, and I still carry some of that hurt today: it comes out whenever I listen to politicians or church leaders (in any church), whenever people want me to sign on the dotted line for something too good to be true (a job, an apartment, health insurance, etc.).  I don't trust people (in general: it is easy to make exceptions for friends and family whom I deal with personally and have a history with).  I feel like the world is out to seduce me (all institutional friendship is fake) and rape me (we own you; you owe us; shut up and take it).  That is the price I paid for learning to trust myself.

Another hard thing has been explaining myself to other people, particularly other Mormons whom I respect and love, without coming across as hostile or deranged.  While I might be slightly crazy, I hope people (especially my Mormon friends) believe me when I tell them that I really don't judge them for being different from me -- for staying in the church as I leave, or loving it unreservedly as I manifestly cannot.  My journey belongs to me, not to anyone else.  Hawk speaks to me, not to you: you have a different animal spirit, and the counsel it gives you will not be the counsel that Hawk gives me.

The way I see things now, speaking still in the language Blevins uses to talk about the old Lakota, each one of us grows up with a different spirit, a different animal inside.  It is our inalienable, personal responsibility to cultivate that spirit, to tame that animal.  Other people can help us (the way the medicine men help Crazy Horse), but they cannot tell us who we are or what we have to do with ourselves.  They can teach good principles (respect for others and for oneself), but they cannot tell us how to implement them in every situation that we will be in.  That kind of specific guidance comes from looking inward: no outside force (whether man or nature or God) can give it to us.  This insight, which comes across strong throughout Blevins' account of Crazy Horse, resonates well with Mormonism (as I experienced it outside of church, in my own religious conversion, for example): I still believe in personal revelation.  (I just don't believe in institutional revelation: while churches may be people legally, on paper, they are not intelligent the way you or I or the man across the street is.  Every man must be his own prophet: I cannot speak to his spirit animal for him.  I cannot absolve him of responsibility for whatever he does to quiet that animal: he is answerable for himself, no matter who tells him otherwise.)

When the young spirit is struggling to be born in a person, he naturally needs something different.  He needs to go out into the wilderness.  He needs to cry for visions.  He needs to feel the universe talking to him, to find a path that his feet can walk without stumbling into chaos.  Since my showdown with God, it seems to me that how we walk matters more than the particular path.  Let me illustrate with a personal example.  My father grew up outside of Mormonism.  By his own confession, he arrived on the doorstep on manhood an atheist, and he emphatically didn't like where he saw that road leading him.  Something in his spirit cried out against that path, so he turned from it, and became a Mormon.  He could have gone back to the faith of his father (Methodism, Presbyterianism), but he didn't.  He needed something different.  He listened to his spirit, followed where it led him, and has been happy as a Mormon ever since.  There is nothing wrong with that, in my view.  Indeed, my own experience mirrors his rather exactly: I took the same road out of (institutional) Mormonism that he took out of (institutional) Protestantism (which for him had come to mean atheism: the religion of his fathers left him cold, uninspired, dead).  Some people look at our stories and marvel at how different we are, but to me what is more striking is how we are the same.  Confronted with the same problem (growing up in a world full of danger and uncertainty), we came up with the same solution (follow the spirit!) and left the religion of our fathers -- not necessarily because we despise it utterly (my dad recognizes good things in Protestantism as I recognize good things in Mormonism, and Protestantism too, for that matter), but because it did not speak to us.  At the end of the day, what makes us good or bad men is not what path we choose (whether Mormonism, Protestantism, or some other -ism), but how we walk it.  My dad has walked the Mormon path well, I think: when I think of what he has done, how he has managed his personal life and his interaction with the larger community (Mormon and not), I am proud.  He is a good man.  He treats other people fairly.  He takes care of himself: he listens to his spirit, and is very careful not to hurt it -- or impose it unduly on other people.  I still want to be like my dad, even if my path through life is not the Mormon one (or at least, not the same Mormon path that he took).

As a result of my experiences, life for me is more about process than results.  The story of Crazy Horse is a story of triumph, on my reading, not because of its result (Crazy Horse is betrayed and dies murdered), but because of the way that Crazy Horse conducts himself (the greatest heroes know that they cannot guarantee success: the most they can do is live with dignity, no matter what happens to them; if that means dying at the hands of murderers, then they die with dignity).  I spent years sacrificing my dignity in an attempt to get better results -- results that were always put off to some indefinite future (in the eternities, after this life), while I remained hurt and humiliated in the present, lacking even a shred of self-respect to shield me from the all-seeing eye of God (who is emphatically "not a tame lion").  Distancing myself from the LDS church is about reclaiming that dignity, which I need in order to survive, from leaders (whose counsel has hurt me more than it has helped me) and God (who has been content to let me fend for myself, caring for me individually the same way the wakinyan care for Crazy Horse).

For me, researching Buddhism and practicing meditation have been functional equivalents to Crazy Horse's inyan.  When I chant Tibetan prayers and sit still in shamatha, I feel the peace I first encountered reading the scriptures on my own as a young boy.  I let go of the angst and the anger of my adolescence.  I forget that I am angry with the world -- with myself, with other people (including LDS church leaders), with God.  I forget my obsession with finding "the one truth" about everything, resting secure in the perception that reality is beyond concepts: the universe is bigger than my ability to understand it, bigger than any theological or scientific model I could come up with to illustrate its infinity.  For a few moments, I stop trying to understand the world.  I just sit with it, looking at it, marveling at it, noticing my emotional reaction to it, and letting it go its own way (as it always has: the wakinyan wait for no man, and God's ways are not our ways, pace all the prophets who have claimed otherwise since the dawn of history).  I am still a very religious person.  If anything, I am actually more religious since I became what some would call an atheist.  I am also more rational (that may not be saying too much), and (as my wife tells me) calmer and easier to get along with.  Some of my Mormon friends have a hard time believing this, but it is really true: my path is not your path, and the medicine that makes you feel better may make me feel worse.  This doesn't mean that we cannot be friends: we just cannot live vicariously through each other; when I am sick, I cannot expect you to take my medicine, and vice versa.

We need each other.  I need friends and family who take an interest in me -- and you need me to be there taking an interest in you, too.  But we cannot help each other if being together means poisoning one of us.  The good news is that it doesn't have to.  My dad gets along very well with his non-Mormon family, even though they don't take his Mormon medicine for themselves.  We can respect each other and love each other, even if we aren't all on the same medicine.  We agree on the important stuff (respect for others and for oneself): the rest of it -- the theology, the doctrine, the little rules and regulations guiding discretional behavior -- is just window-dressing.  I don't despise you, or the world, or God, merely because I have a cup of coffee every now and then.  And I don't feel threatened when you pray, or read scriptures, or hang pictures of Jesus on the walls of your home.  (It's your home!)  You can even quote leaders of the church approvingly without getting my goat, as long as you refrain from saying that I am evil for withholding allegiance from them (or quoting Christopher Hitchens approvingly when he says something I agree with).  We need each other, and we need each other to be honest.  I put my relationship with you above any institutional relationship I have (or will ever have), and I hope you can say the same for me (though I will do my best to be understanding if you can't).  As the Lakota would say, "Mitakuye oyasin" ("We are all related").

Taming the Beast Within: Showdown

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.

First, two interesting tidbits from Blevins' story of Crazy Horse.

(1) The supreme powers that rule the universe in Sioux mythology (e.g. the wakinyan) are not necessarily benevolent: they will crush you if you cross them, and they will not be sorry.  In the story, Hawk cares for Crazy Horse as a precious individual, a unique reality worth preserving; the wakinyan do not.  Crazy Horse does everything he can to nurture Hawk, who responds by helping him recognize how to respond appropriately (nobly, righteously, correctly) in difficult circumstances.  The wakinyan, on the other hand, make way for no man: you get on their good side (if you are wise); otherwise, they smash you -- ruthlessly.  When Crazy Horse ignores the warning of Hawk and rushes into battle unadvised, he invariably gets hurt, sometimes very seriously.  You don't love the wakinyan: you strive to avoid them.  You pray that your spirit animal gets to you in time to put you out of their way.

(2) The greatest problems that Crazy Horse faces throughout his life come from people close to him -- fellow tribesmen envious of his success or angered by his difference from them.  He expects (and receives) lies and bad treatment at the hands of white Americans (who come out of this story looking like tools, even though Blevins is careful not vilify them as individuals) -- but the worst things he suffers come from other Sioux (right up to the ultimate betrayal, the deliberate mistranslation of his words to Lieutenant William Philo Clark).  We expect our enemies to attack us and hate us.  We are not surprised when they are hostile or hurtful.  But friends who betray us are the worst: when they turn on us, unexpectedly, it really hurts, and it can severely shake our confidence and ability to form relationships of trust far into the future.  Crazy Horse hates the politics of the reservation for this reason, because it pits him against friends and family, making him complicit in plots and counterplots, attempts to control and manipulate others with a sly word here, a veiled gesture there -- and it ends with him being killed in cold blood, betrayed by his own people.

As a result of the personal experiences I have tried to describe briefly in this series of essays, I woke up one day in a very uncomfortable situation.  I realized that God was hurting me, viciously hurting me, and that I had been letting him get away with this for years out of a misplaced sense of duty and obligation.  Up to this point, I have followed Blevins in referring to my spirit as Hawk, but I want to change Hawk's identity here, for dramatic effect.  Imagine that my spirit animal is a bull, living in a pasture somewhere in northern Spain.  This bull grows up surrounded by other cattle, eating grass, enjoying the sunlight, napping, maybe fighting a bit with other members of the herd, but overall enjoying a rather nice life (maybe even having sex every now and then).  One day, men that the bull has learned to trust come and pack it into a cattle car.  They take it to a holding pen near a circular arena.  Then, unexpectedly, they turn the bull out and goad him into the arena.  He is confused.  He starts trotting around the arena nervously, uncertainly.  Suddenly, little men appear waving red flags at him: he is startled.  He charges the flags, trying to defend himself.  The men duck behind paddocks at the edges of the arena, letting the bull bang his head hard against the reinforced paddock doors before bobbing out to taunt him again.  After a few moments of this unpleasant game, a horse and rider appear, armed with padding to defeat the bull's horns, and they gore the frightened animal in the shoulder, so that his blood pours out and soils the dirt.  As he stumbles around the arena in terror, bleeding, another troop of clowns comes out, armed with sharp pins (banderillas) that they jab into his quivering shoulders over and over -- goading him to attack them and then dancing out of range at the last moment.  Finally, when he is sick with fear and woozy from loss of blood, a little man in a fancy suit comes out to taunt him one last time with a sword and a red cape.  Again and again, the bull charges the cape fruitlessly, struggling to fend off the "friends" who have suddenly turned against him, for reasons he cannot begin to fathom (any more than he knows why they were nice to him earlier, back when they used to bring him treats from the hacienda).

Throughout my apostasy, I have struggled to maintain a mask of dispassionate calm.  I have struggled not to appear as just another stereotypical apostate angry with the LDS church.  But if I am brutally honest (pun intended), I am angry.  I am offended.  You see, I woke up in that arena, wallowing in my own blood.  I saw that my spirit was just a frightened animal, struggling to survive, trying to find a way to exist away from the spears and goads -- away from the men in fancy red capes (mantles of authority, if you will indulge me a bit).  Of course I was angry: I was being murdered by inches, for no good reason that I could see.  I was told that it was to save me from myself, from Hawk, from the depravity of sex.  But when I finally found sex, it wasn't depraved.  When I connected with Hawk, she wasn't dangerous: just hurt and very scared (with good reason: I spent years beating the crap out of her).  I was never a sick soul in need of drastic measures for salvation.  I was just naive and weak, with no idea how to defend myself against the authority of the ruthless higher powers bent on breaking me to their will (which they sold to me as the will of God, waving those cursed red capes).  Maybe I should have just given up.  Maybe I should have deliberately broken myself even more -- committing spiritual suicide in the ring for the benefit of my benevolent tormentors and their precious priesthood.  But that didn't seem right.  It felt wrong, like a betrayal of my spirit.  You see, my spirit was not really weak: it was only vulnerable to priesthood holders because I thought that they were agents of God, an almighty Father knew my best interest better than I did and had entrusted it to his chosen servants (whose church I had covenanted to serve with everything that I might be or own, for my whole life).  I gave these men of God everything -- my trust, my faith, my hope, my dreams, my innocence -- and they smashed it all to bits, with me right there helping them, shouting "Deus vult!" at the top of my lungs.

And where was God, while all these shenanigans were going on?  Where was his inspiration?  Why did I get the same deafening silence from him that seems to be the lot of dying children in places like Syria and Sudan?  If he doesn't approve of all the sadism, masochism, and sado-masochism that goes on his name, then why doesn't he step in and do something about it?  I thought he did.  I thought his answer was to found the LDS church, the same church that took my spirit and tore it into little pieces for years while I watched (as helpless as Prometheus on the mountaintop with the eagle of Zeus).  Oops.  And I am not the only one that the Almighty has screwed over.  The more I look around, the more suffering believers I find: among Mormons, I have heard many stories worse than mine, and many faithful outside Mormonism have suffered worse still (much, much worse) while God sat by and did nothing.  For every story of car keys miraculously found, there at least twenty of people who died suffering in unnecessary agony, for lack of things as easy to come by as keys.  From all this, it seems to me that if God exists in personal form, then he is either a sadist (in which case I am not interested in worshipping him) or an absentee landlord (in which case there is little use looking to him for help).

When I became acutely aware that I had to choose between my spirit (which I think of now as more of a wolf than a hawk) and God, it was clear to me that I had to choose my spirit.  I gave God his chance: he got almost two decades of dedicated service from me, and I remain open if he wants to come around and bury the hatchet.  But I am done waiting on him idly, and I am most emphatically done trusting other people (no matter what mantle they wear) who claim to speak to him for me.  I have my own spirit.  I have my own integrity to look to, my own life to live, my own responsibilities that require my attention -- not yours (or God's, as long as he remains a stranger).  I don't go around dictating to other people based on what my animal spirit tells me, and I don't accept others' revelations as commandments for me.  If I am sick, then I will look to myself: I will not prescribe medicine for you.  All I ask, from everyone, is the same courtesy.  Leave me to tend my spirit, as I leave you to tend yours.  I admit that I am still angry with LDS leaders, but I endeavor not to let that make me blind to their good qualities.  Like the men who killed Crazy Horse, they are not utterly evil.  But that does not make them any less dangerous (or me any less angry, come to think on it).

Three hard lessons I took from the arena: (1) people who speak for God have the capacity to be really dangerous; (2) God doesn't seem to care very much about the danger: if you really want to save your soul, you might consider looking inward before you reach out; the remedy others give you is sometimes worse than the disease you already have; and (3) you make your own luck -- if you want God (or his mantled minions) to stop hurting you, you have to step out and throw down.  Put up or shut up.  Fight or flight.  I prefer flight as a general rule, but in my case there was nowhere to run.  So, like Jacob, I wrestled with the angel of God all night (what a long, dark night it was!), and woke up in the morning to an unexpected result: I beat him -- with the help of Hawk, or Wolf, or Bull, or whatever you want to call that animal spirit of mine.

When Crazy Horse and his animal spirit are reconciled to one another perfectly, what happens?  Little Big Horn.  Ironically, the LDS church really had nothing to fear from me (I loved church!) until they went and attacked my soul (with doctrines about sex and confession that didn't work as advertised for me).  What God already had through gentle persuasion (I liked scripture and religion -- still do, in fact), he lost through untimely violence (I don't like being cornered and beaten up -- absolute obedience to an omnipotent bully is not my idea of heaven).

Taming the Beast Within: Moment of Truth

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.

Part the third of my ongoing exploration of how I came of age.

When I finally came face to face with sex in real life, it was not what I thought it would be.  I was expecting something very profound and even solemn -- a serious ritual whose performance would naturally make or break the lives of those who dared to come forward and participate in it.  This fear of sex took a while to dissipate.  (My wife still teases me about our first year of marriage, "back when I had to pester you all the time for sex!")  But even if my deluded misperception of sex did not die all at once overnight, it did suffer a major setback when my wife and I finally made it to the country hotel where we celebrated our honeymoon.  That experience shattered a lot of barriers inside my soul: I went in expecting something like "The Phantom of the Opera" (a dark, tortured dance that would try my soul) -- instead, what I got was more like "The Producers" (a farce in which nothing comes off quite as planned, and the pervading atmosphere is one of irresistable, obscene hilarity).  It was really troubling to me to think that I put myself and Hawk through hell for that.  Very troubling.

The more I looked at history, my own and the LDS church's, the more troubling this experience became.  Even as my inner life settled down to a level of peace and contentment that I had scarcely enjoyed since childhood, something about my whole adolescent experience in the church rubbed me the wrong way, and the more I thought about it, the more wrong it appeared.  The more I looked at history, my own and that of other people, the more distant and impersonal God seemed.  Different people saw him differently, and fanatics of all stripes were equally convinced that they saw him rightly while others were wrong (or deceived by devils).  As I looked at my own experience with God, I identified more and more with the young Joseph Smith, who (in the canonical version of his First Vision narrative) goes into the Sacred Grove completely confused about the nature of deity.  The only difference was that God never manifested himself to me as clearly or directly as he was supposed to have done to Joseph Smith.  Did I matter less to him?  What about all the people suffering terrible things in foreign countries?  Why didn't he do something clear to end religious bickering (like a lot of the "proselytizing" I did as an LDS missionary) and get real aid to these people (basic food, medicine, hygiene, water)?  Why was he more concerned about my boners than about resolving conflicts in (say) the Middle East, where his name is invoked almost daily as justification for bad behavior (including some outright atrocities)?  These were tough questions for me to deal with, intellectually.  Even if I had not been weakened by my (misguided) emotional struggles to suppress my animal spirit, I would have been shaken by them (and my faith would have evolved to meet the challenge, as it has).

I made three important discoveries shortly after getting married.  (1) Hawk is not evil.  (2) Sex is not solemn or frightening (unless you go out of your way to make it so, as I did for more than a decade).  (3) God is a mystery: people who invoke him as though he speaks clearly and directly are usually trying to use him as a cover to manipulate other people.  That they do this with good intentions does not make their behavior ethically defensible (in my view), which brings me to a crucial turning point in my story. 

Taming the Beast Within: Approaching Manhood

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.
 
This is part two of an extended meditation in which I imagine my soul as a wild animal (the spirit Hawk of Crazy Horse as portrayed by Win Blevins) and talk about our relationship over the past twenty-odd years -- when Hawk was struggling to grow up and I was trying to keep her from killing me.

Serving a mission at age 19 was good.  The mission routine gave me something to focus on that was not my terrible, impossible sinfulness, and Hawk even came back sometimes without attacking me savagely -- though she was not happy when mission leaders told us that it was our lack of faith that kept the people of Spain from converting to Mormonism.  Hawk was just never good enough for God (or the other people that invariably end up speaking for him): he was always trying to break her, and because I thought that was for the best, I helped him do it, actively collaborating to humiliate and torture my soul (for its own good, of course).  But it was on the mission that I started to ask myself sometimes whether I were being too cruel to Hawk, whether there might be a better way to treat my animal spirit.  As a missionary, I learned that Hawk was not as lascivious or inherently unstable as I had been led to believe.  She had no problem being polite with Spanish women who walked around all but naked.  She only rebelled when I demanded that she refrain from thinking about sex, ever, or that I submit to the will of God without discussion, without argument, without complaint.  By the time I came home from the mission, we had a sort of awkward truce: I would do my best not to beat her up too much (when she failed to live up to God's impossible demands), and she would not torture me with impotent rage or impossible fear.

When I returned from my mission to pick my studies up at BYU, I was in a very vulnerable, uncomfortable place.  On the one hand, I knew that God expected me to get married, and I wanted that for myself (not only because God expected it: I believed the Mormon doctrine that family relationships are extremely important, and I was eager to enlarge my own family, which has always been a source of joy to me).  On the other hand, I had no idea how to approach women romantically.  From my training in church and my personal experience reacting to that training, I knew that romance was very close to murder, that it could call down great wrath from God, and that I did not know how to get remotely close to it without calling down that wrath.  Whenever I got close to a woman, Hawk would start tearing me to shreds inside, and I would flee away for safety, bleeding and weeping in the quiet recesses of my mind.  As a result of this situation, most of my time at BYU was devoted to study (not an entirely unprofitable outlet, though it backfired when I started getting really critically interested in Mormon history).  I did not date.  I did not make friends among girls.  I did not think actively about marriage (except to laugh nervously and cry out in pain to Hawk whenever well-meaning acquaintances -- usually older, married LDS men -- asked me, "So, when are you going to find a nice girl and settle down?  You don't want to wait too long!").  I was still trapped.

Then, I met the woman who would become my wife.  She saw past my broken psyche.  She did not judge Hawk.  She did not hate Hawk.  She was not jealous of Hawk.  She was nice to Hawk, much nicer than I had ever been, and for the first time, I felt safe with sex.  I could stop worrying.  I could stop fighting.  I could stop waiting for the world to end every time I had an erection (though it took me a long time to get that far: in the beginning, it was all I could do to let my new girlfriend touch my hand or shudder! kiss me goodnight).  I went into my new relationship full of the old dread -- sure that something awful would happen to overthrow the latest mirage of happiness being thrust upon me unexpectedly.  Right up until the last moment of our Mormon wedding, I expected some priesthood leader to have a moment of discernment and removed me -- firmly and permanently -- from the arm of the young woman I had somehow managed to seduce into loving me despite my obvious depravity.  Somehow, Hawk and I managed to sneak through the whole ceremony without setting off God's radar.

Taming the Beast Within: My Misspent Youth

Win Blevins.  Stone Song: A Novel About the Life of Crazy Horse.  New York: Forge, 1995.  ISBN: 0812533690.

The story of His Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko) is fascinating, and Blevins is a very good storyteller.  I recommend this book without reservation as one of the most thoughtful, interesting accounts of the old American West that I have read.  Like many good novels, it also offers a great window into the human soul, a window through which I would like to look at my own soul for a minute here.

Blevins does a very good job of portraying the Sioux religion: he is accurate, thorough without being overbearing, and compelling ("almost thou persuadest me to become a Lakota").  The Sioux believe that every human being is born with a special character (unique to them) that it is their personal duty to cultivate.  For Crazy Horse, this character takes the form of a spirit animal dwelling inside him: a hawk, whom he refers to simply as Hawk.  Hawk guides him toward the crucial decisions he must make in life, helping him cope with difficult circumstances and emotions. 

As a young man, Crazy Horse's most pressing task is becoming familiar with Hawk and the other, larger spiritual powers at work in the world: he does this by going out alone into the wilderness, where he fasts, prays, and meditates.  For a long time, he does this with no issue: he feels ashamed, rejected by the universe, worthless.  Then, when he is about to give up and return to his village empty-handed, he receives a waking vision that shows him his place in the world (a Rider with a Hawk going to war alone).  The rest of the book tells how he uses this vision as a tool for understanding and overcoming the challenges that life brings him.

I really like thinking of the individual human psyche as an animal.  We are all animals, in my view, and growing up is about coming to terms with that reality -- hopefully in a way that enriches us as individuals and communities.  In this essay, I want to talk about my personal experience growing up and dealing with the beast within (i.e. with my character, my habits and thoughts, my soul).  I am going to try to be very honest and straightforward, but this is a tough subject, so I apologize in advance if I appear unclear or untruthful.  One very important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that my journey is not someone else's journey.  I cannot talk about someone else the same way I talk about myself.  I do not know others the way I know myself.  I do not judge them the way I judge myself.  I do not expect from them the same things I expect from myself.  In other words, what follows is about me, not you (no matter who you are).  Another thing to remember is that our memories are constantly changing: the more we look at the past, the more it changes.  If you do not like the way I remember myself today, hang on: you may like my memories better tomorrow.

Adolescence is a hard time: it is difficult being trapped between childhood -- with the freedom to learn and explore infinitely without much fear (if you have a good childhood as I did) -- and adulthood, with its larger responsibilities and dangers.  It strikes me, as I look back at my own experience, that I tried really hard to reject my spirit animal.  I did not want to grow up, mostly because this seemed to involve me falling into patterns of behavior that I could not avoid that were extremely evil.  When my inner Hawk began to wake up, I was not always happy with it.  I did not make it a personal guide for dealing effectively with moral crises.  There were times when I hated it and even tried to destroy it.  How did this happen?  How did I change from a happy kid into a brooding teenager?  How did I go from being relatively happy (as it seems now) to being depressed, scared, and paranoid?  Well, the matter is really complicated (resisting any easy understanding), but I think it began with sex. 

I remember when I first learned what sexual intercourse was: I was about eleven years old, and I thought that it was about the grossest thing imaginable.  People "urinate" into each other: how disgusting!  But this also made it paradoxically intriguing (like any weird fact about life).  My mom had the right response to my shock -- she said something like, "Oh, it's actually quite nice: don't give up on it just yet."  About the same time, I started having unexpected, unwanted thoughts about women.  I would be reading or playing the recorder or doing some routine task and BAM! the thought of some woman I had seen would appear in my mind's eye unbidden, unlooked for, and strangely attractive (at first, they were always older women: teachers, newly-weds in our church congregation).  Also, I would wake up every morning with a boner: my dad had already warned me about this, and to do him credit he never said anything about its being any kind of sin.  It was just another weird fact of life, something that adults had to deal with.  So far, so good.  But unfortunately, my parents were not the only people I turned to for help with sex (or life in general).

At the same time of my life, right on the threshold of puberty, I heard the call that drove young Crazy Horse into the wilderness to look for a vision.  For me, answering that call meant reading a lot of Mormon scripture (the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Bible, which I read many times in the King James Version), praying intensely, fasting, and looking for God in the world around me and inside me.  As a result of all this activity, I had a very intense religious experience (akin to the vision of Rider and Hawk that Crazy Horse received).  I was converted to Mormonism -- really converted, wholly convinced.  I went up to the pulpit several times as a youth with no prompting and bore my own testimony (no rote memorization required) that God had spoken to me.  As I look back, it seems to me that the reading, praying, fasting, meditating, and testifying were all important things: they represented a positive attempt on my part to contact and connect with the adult personality waking up inside me.  I was reaching out in a peaceful, nurturing way to my spirit animal, offering Hawk my arm and inviting her to tell me her secrets, secrets that I really needed if I was going to survive the process of growing up.  And then to my delight, she came and perched on my arm.  But success is never simple: every victory comes with a problematic aftermath.

In the story of Crazy Horse, the vision of Rider is a curse until young Crazy Horse goes to his father (the village medicine man) and confesses it as part of a special iniatiation ceremony.  Crazy Horse is initially on bad terms with his father, so he avoids speaking of his vision (and must wear shabby clothes to avoid angering the higher powers that the Sioux recognize behind lightning, thunder, and sudden turns of fortune -- powers that my background would lead me to name God).  Another medicine man from nearby notices Crazy Horse's unkempt attire, reads its significance correctly, and tells the young Lakota that he must confess to his father.  But no one forces him.  No one makes the decision for him: in the end, he goes to his father on his own, receives purification, and becomes integrated into the tribe as an adult.  But this process takes a long time, during which Crazy Horse wanders in the wilderness while his father remains available but aloof (respecting his son's privacy).  Here my story diverges from that of Crazy Horse.  After my epiphany, I wanted to talk.  I wanted to confess to a medicine man, have my dream interpreted, and improve my connection with Hawk.  But my Mormon priesthood leaders were not like the Lakota medicine men who helped Crazy Horse.  While I do not doubt that their intentions were just as good, they did not respect my privacy -- Hawk's privacy -- and I was too naive to defend myself -- to defend Hawk -- from their pointed inquiries about the state of my being, about the welfare of my soul.

I came back from the wilderness far too early.  I came back and walked directly into priesthood classes where my well-meaning leaders told me (1) that masturbation was a sin comparable to murder; (2) that women who didn't wear enough clothing were walking pornography; (3) that I could not participate or integrate with my community as long as I was sexually active (in any way) outside the boundaries of a heterosexual marriage; (4) that the only course for setting myself free from a lifetime of terrible depravity was confessing every sexual misstep I might make to my bishop.  I internalized this message with all the fervor of a medieval Catholic saint, and the results were not pretty.  (1) I became obsessed with making my boners go away, and I felt very bad (sometimes even physically ill) every time random thoughts of women invaded my mind.  (2)  I lost my ability to communicate freely with nubile women and girls my own age.  Since they were sexy and I couldn't have any sexy thoughts (let alone actions) outside of marriage, why bother talking to them?  The risk was greater than the reward (from my naive perspective).  Sometimes, I judged them when they wore clothing that I found provocative (though I am happy to say that I never let this attitude get out of hand: I always recognized that the fundamental moral problem was weakness in myself, not some gigantic flaw pervading almost the entire female gender living outside the burkha).  (3)  I worried all the time about my worthiness to participate in Mormon ceremonies (which I really loved: I relished getting to church early each Sunday to prepare sacrament; I loved saying the prayers; I loved passing the bread and water around the congregation; I loved attending the temple to do baptisms and confirmations).  It tore me up inside to think that something so wonderful might be taken away from me merely because I couldn't make a boner go away in time (e.g. before I had a bad thought or got too sexually excited).  It made me angry, at myself (for being so weak!) and the world (for being so mean!).  (4)  I became a regular visitor in my bishop's office, where I was constantly begging for forgiveness -- more and more wretchedly, as it became ever clearer to me that the only way to make the boners go away for good was to castrate myself (a solution to which I gave more than passing thought, though thankfully I never actually tried it).

Because I followed the well-meaning counsel of my Mormon leaders, the delicious taste of heaven that my religious conversion had brought quickly became as bitter as hell.  Hawk shredded my arm with her talons, gouged my face with her beak, and flew away screaming where I could not follow.  After she left, I would sit up late at night or rise early in the morning, sobbing -- longing for the peace, the happiness, the openness, the safety that I felt before sex came and destroyed everything good in my world.  In my head, I was wearing the rags that Crazy Horse wore.  I hated myself.  I despised my weakness -- my inability to follow simple instructions from God, who reached out to me through my priesthood leaders (generously, continuously, even though I kept letting him down over and over again).  I was the lowest form of life imaginable, worse than the most noxious animal anywhere: animals fulfilled the measure of their creation, whereas I couldn't follow simple instructions from a loving God who just wanted me to avoid things that were bad for me anyway.  Many times, more than I can count, I really wanted to die.  It was awful.

For many years, I lived in a kind of perpetual dark night of the soul: I would be happy momentarily, engaged in some worthwhile pursuit (like gardening or studying or working out), and then I would remember that Hawk was gone, that she was never coming back, that I had driven her away with my sinfulness.  And I would get angry -- at myself (at Hawk), at the world, at people who looked at me askance (or wore bikinis, or did anything to remind me of the gaping wound I carried around inside).  But the overarching emotion that defined my experience was despair, the black hopelessness that comes from being in a caught in a problem to which there is no solution.  The Pretty Reckless have a song that expresses my emotion(s) very well:

"Under the Water" (from Hit Me Like a Man, 2012)

Lay my head, under the water  

Lay my head, under the sea  

Excuse me sir, am I your daughter?  

Won't you take me back, take me back and see? 

There's not a time, for being younger 

And all my friends, are enemies  

And if I cried unto my mother 

No she wasn't there, she wasn't there for me 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Broken lines, across my mirror  

Show my face, all red and bruised  

And though I screamed and I screamed, well no one came running  

No I wasn't saved, I wasn't safe from you 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down 

Don't let the water drag you down  

Don't let me drown, don't let me drown in the waves, 

Oh I could be found, I could be what you had saved 

Saved, saved, saved!

 

Lay my head, under the water 

Aloud I pray, for calmer seas 

And when I wake from this dream, with chains all around me  

No, I've never been, I've never been free 

No, I've never been, I've never been free 

No, I've never been, I've never been free

It was remarkably like drowning all the time, loaded with chains that wouldn't come off, and other people just didn't understand: my parents didn't understand (though they really tried, I think), my church leaders didn't understand, and I was too ashamed and insecure to reach out to anyone else.  I should emphasize that it didn't overwhelm me utterly, at least not every moment: I enjoyed some very good times as an adolescent, times I remember fondly to this day -- but this mess was always in the back of it, like a monster lurking inside me, waiting for a lull in the action to emerge and eviscerate me.  Hawk felt betrayed, and she really took it out on me (over and over again: I sometimes wondered if we would ever be friends again, the way we were before sex came into the picture).