My faith has been slowly melting away since the day my brother was ripped from this life, a victim of depression's ravenous hunger. It isn't my faith in God that has been the problem--not entirely, at least. As people, we have given churches the power to dictate how we should feel, what we should believe. If we don't? An existential crisis settles into the limelight. It has nowhere to go, but only waits to be noticed. It's inevitable. After all, the only light on stage rests on unanswered questions, anger, frustration, grief, pain. One can only stare off into the void for so long before they must acknowledge what is glaringly obvious.
My whole life I've been told to put any questions I have on the shelf. You don't question. Ever. But if you do, those questions are only to be doubted, for they can never be explored and understood. Although, mine must have been provided by Ikea because it is incredibly rickety. When all those questions and doubts are messily stacked onto a cheap piece of material, it's bound to crumble.
I have tried for the last four years to be the person I was before my brother died--the spiritual giant returned missionary. But I can't. I can't accept the things I accepted before. I'm different. I think differently. I feel differently. I trust differently. I fear differently.
...and I feel wrong for it. But why should I when I have felt a more immense love for my neighbor? When I allow somebody the dignity to follow their own path? When I try to be a good person? When I consider that perhaps God would rather His child live happily outside the church than to yield to the mentally debilitating pressures mounting inside of it?
Yet, I feel wrong for asking questions--the same questions my brother asked before he died. I feel shame for wondering why my family is held spiritually hostage as a means to make me conform to a culture and theology I don't agree with. That same shame is found in my support for LGBTQ+ people and their love for any person. It's found in the disgust I feel when I look in the mirror while I'm wearing garments--not because of what they mean, but rather how I feel about myself. The shame accompanied with membership in the church is very real, and it's almost always served with a heaping side of mental illness.
[enter anxiety and depression, stage left]
The depression I have felt over the last few years has been immense, and its onset has ranged from my subsequent grief to years of suppressed questions to frustration with feeling something so far from the spirit when I hear what are supposed to be God's divinely appointed servants speak about things close to my heart.
I have thought much about my children and the way I want to raise them alongside my husband. I have heavily considered the ramifications of stepping away from the church and living more freely devoid of callings, assignments, expectations, and rules.
A few words my little brother said a few weeks before he died as he heard me judging another person who had left the church were these:
"Why does it matter?"
As I sit here typing these words, my heart is broken, my eyes are wet, and my soul is pained by the judgment I have previously passed on others for the way they chose to live. For some reason, I thought it was my place to think less of a person because I had the truth, and they were somehow lost. I would send conference talks, quotes, past posts they had made in an effort to get them to see what they were turning away from.
Ironically, and perhaps fatefully, I find myself in the same position: aching, yearning for the shame, depression, and anxiety to fall away so I can live my truth free from the painstaking judgment of others on the basis of a religion that taught to refrain from judging, to love God, and to love their neighbor.
As a mother, knowing what I have felt, knowing what my brother felt before he died, and knowing that my children will likely suffer from mental illness even without the church and its teachings, I just cannot subject them to the same shame I felt, that my husband felt as we were growing up, and especially what we are feeling now.
The pandemic has opened my eyes as I have seen Christian after Christian disavow peer-reviewed studies, claiming they will not live in fear, and yet, religion is just that--living in fear that if they don't live up to a certain expectation, they will be burned at the last day, thrust down to hell, ripped from their families.
If the Celestial kingdom is indeed a reality, and I could become a goddess, my husband a god, but the stipulation is that we have to turn the other way while our children take their lives, murderers and rapists run free, and I have to condemn those who love a person of the same gender, I don't want it. Any of it.
So the verdict has been given. I am forging a new path for me and my family, one out of necessity to mine and my family's mental health, conscience, and spirit.
I sincerely hope those who know me personally will continue to love me and refrain from silent and subtle, even loud judgments. For everyone is on their own journey.
This is mine.
