What Makes a Holy Land?

My grandfather was killed in a hit and run accident in 1978.

His mother and sister struggled with life after that. They decided to go on a trip across the United States together to get away from things for a while.

I discovered this trip when I was going through photo albums and suddenly saw a place I recognized.

 

Temple Square.

They went to many places during that trip. But there was something truly special to me that, in one of the worst seasons of their lives, they ended up at the temple.

I served part of my mission at Temple Square. I was waiting for a visa to Brazil that I began to think was never coming. I had a truly horrendous time in the MTC babysitting a district of Elders who spent weeks on end bullying me and tearing down my self-esteem. I was told directly by someone, I forget who now, that I was being sent there to recover. And when I realized that the mission had no young Elders in it at all, that it was only Sisters and senior couples, I came to appreciate what that meant.

I had so many wild interactions there with so many people. Some of them were strange, like the guy who viewed the Book of Mormon as proof of alien interactions with humans. There were moments of heartbreak, like the woman who was in tears at the Christus statue who attacked us when we checked in on her. There were moments of pure delight, like when an LDS family with two young daughters came to that same Christus statue. The oldest girl, no older than 4 or 5, squealed "JESUS" and ran to the Savior's feet, little sister in tow. Whenever I hear someone mention the teaching to become as a little child, she is exactly who I think of.

There were also moments that were meant solely for me, like when I met the first Sister to ever be called to the Boston mission I had hoped to go to to wait for my visa. Boston has a large Brazilian population, many of whom are members of the Church. I had begged in prayer to be sent there and was told by other people it wouldn't happen because "Sisters don't go there." I had an entire conversation with the woman who was going to be that change. It seemed cruel to me at the time, dangling the carrot of something I wanted right in front of my face. In time, I've realized it was so I would remember that God does miracles and is aware of the desires of my heart, even if it means I don't get what I want. Someone needed to exercise enough faith to push that door open for women. I put my full weight behind it, and I can be just as proud that it opened for someone else.

But some of my favorite people I met there were people who just made me laugh. I met a Jewish convert from New York who told us his conversion story, how what drew him in was the Plan of Salvation. He summarized it in a New York accent in a voice I can still hear in my mind: "So you're a god, eventually. But can you pay RENT?!"

One of my favorite people I met was a Scottish convert named Agnes who was doing the Mormon trail across the US, beginning in New England and ending in Utah. She was a much older woman and told us all about her pilgrimage, and how she had cuddled with the oxen at the baptismal font in the Manhattan New York Temple. (I've been there. You enter into the baptistry on face level with them, or did the last time I was there.) She shared her testimony with us, and I'll never forget what she said.

She explained that the story of Joseph Smith was really hard to get her mind around. It truly is an insane set of asks: angels, gold plates, polygamy, and all the rest. She talked about how she came to accept it—not through any kind of empirical evidence or proof, but through faith and what that looked like.

For her, it was the recognition that being LDS was the best way she had ever encountered to live an excellent life. She said that the worst case scenario she could imagine is one where God would say to her, "You know that whole business with Joseph Smith was a load of crock, right? But you lived such a good life, I have to let you in anyway."

That has always stayed with me. Agnes was one of many people who came to the Square looking for something. I saw people come there looking for faith, or a fight, and truly everything in between. And it's only now that I'm older and wiser that I see something clearly now that I couldn't see then.

Agnes didn't need to come to Temple Square to find faith. She already had a tremendous amount of faith. She, and many others, were looking for conviction. I was at Temple Square long enough to learn you don't get that from a place. While a place like Temple Square can illuminate the possibilities for conviction through the lens of history, it doesn't bestow that conviction through contact or proximity alone. Conviction is made from the materials of your own life and your own choices. Your will, how firmly you place yourself into an immovable and unyielding position, is the measure of your convictions. It comes from within.

Faith is the decision to believe in what you cannot see, and what cannot be proven objectively. That never goes away. Nothing we experience in life, no place we ever visit, will create a shortcut under, over, or around that decision to believe, to trust in God. Faith, at its core, is a decision. The ability to continue making that decision over and over again, under all species of hardship and opposition, is conviction.

Where Jesus walked is nowhere near as important as how Jesus walked, and with whom. The same is true for all of us. Our walk with God might never take us anywhere near a temple because of where God has called us to go. But we are the holiest dwelling places of God on earth—not any of the buildings we've made.

Being a holy place of living faith wherever I am, whatever my circumstances may be, is what it means to be the temple of God. Worshiping God, no matter what places I can or cannot enter. There is more than one way to access a temple. One way is to enter a place that people invite God to dwell. The other is to become that place. There can be no separation from God where communion never ceases. It is the refuge that is unassailable by others for as long as the person wills it so. The torch within will not go out.

The temple is not special because it has some holy essence that springs forth out of nothing, to passively be absorbed by others. The temple is special because it directs people to Jesus Christ, who is the giver of healing and peace. The temple is just a building. It's Jesus Christ that is the true power behind it all, whose objective is to make you, me, and every person you know the holiest creature you've ever beheld. 

We are the end goal. We always have been. We always will be.

Every time I see these pictures, it makes me realize that God saw my entire life from the beginning. He has always had a plan for me, my life, and the lives of my family. He knew at the time these pictures were taken, when my mother was still a child, that I would end up at Temple Square myself some day.

 

And bring others in my mother's family with me.

Things I'm Tired of Explaining about Infertility to Other Members of My Church

Infertility in the LDS Church is such a weird place to occupy because it's the place where so much of the Church's messaging on sex and gender, on Complementarianism and traditional divisions of labor within the community, completely fall apart.

Being a parent may be the most important thing some people will ever do. I have no issue at all with people saying this about themselves to describe their own journey through the world. But that's not universally true for everyone because of someone's gender or alleged propensity for reproduction. The fact that infertility exists at all is all the evidence you need of that. If it were somehow necessary for a person's salvation or exaltation for everyone to have children, it wouldn't be withheld from anyone.

Having children is not the most important thing I will ever do. For me, there are entire lists of priorities and experiences that are more important for me. The greatest happiness and joy I could ever know is not being withheld from me. My life is complete and joyful without children in it. It is not only possible to be happy without children, there are many aspects of happiness and self-fulfillment that I have access to that parents will never know. Those who have spent their entire adult lives as parents shouldn't pretend to know what my life is like, or expect me to be unhappy in it. It's far from the worst thing that could happen to someone. It's definitely nowhere near the top of the list of the worst things that have happened to me. Those who act as if it is are useless to and unprepared for ministering to infertile individuals and couples in any meaningful way. Especially when the most important message many of need to hear is "God has a plan for you that will ultimately be better for you than having children."

So why do people, including church leadership, continue to treat having children like it's essential to our salvation, when neither the gospel of Jesus Christ nor any of the covenants we've made present it that way?

Power consolidation. Boundary maintenance. Cultural curation for the kind of person who treats children as an identity marker and avatars for their own influence on the world.

It's how the Church is trying to ignore the problem of dwindling membership, which this exact messaging has caused, instead of addressing the problematic gender disparities reflected in this messaging.

No one is entitled to have children, then to use those children as a means of self-fulfillment, spiritual education, or approximations to the divine experience of being God. Even if you can have children, this is a harmful way of viewing children because it makes having children all about the parents and their needs.

You don't have children to meet your needs. You have children to meet their needs.

I didn't need to have children to learn that lesson, or many of the other lessons that people needed to become parents to learn. There is more than one way to approach that kind of selfless love, in all kinds of relationships. Parenting is one of many, not the only kind of selfless love, and certainly not the most important kind of selfless love for many people.

And what kills me in talking to members of the Church who try to push back against this perspective is this: they claim to be the arbiters of the ultimate form of selfless love because they are parents. But these are the same people who will pound on the single piano key about parenthood to such an extreme that it alienates other people. And when they do, and someone tells them it's harmful, they're the first ones to say that what they're doing is more important than anyone else's feelings. They talk of a selfless love they don't actually possess—not for people outside of their family and, I would argue, not for anyone inside of it either.

All this to say: the Venn Diagram overlap between people who don't respect or value people at church with infertility and the people who also enmesh themselves in disturbing ways with their own children is a circle.

Catch neither one of us wanting to be at church with them as adults.

What Relief Society Means to Me

I'm not one for making any statements that assert the Church is "true"—mostly because I think it's semi-nonsensical, poorly articulated phrasing best used by children and promptly abandoned when a person achieves the capacity for more nuanced thoughts.

However, to the extent that there is any part of the Church that is unquestionably, undeniably true to me, it's the divine calling of the Relief Society.

I deeply love Relief Society and everything it represents. It has kept my head above water so many times.

The women I've met through it have had such an important impact on my life and faith. They have been the hands of God in my life too many times to count.

When people talk about the ministry of Christ, the miracles he did and the ways he cared for people individually, I don't think of the prophets and apostles. 

I think of the Relief Society.

I think of the women who have been taking care of me since I joined the Church as a teenager.

Even when there were some truly obtuse people who turned out to be the exceptions, I cannot say that they weren't trying, in their own way, to be good in the only way they knew how.

All of the best impulses of the institutional Church are present in the Relief Society. 

I think the Church would be a better place if the men just came to Relief Society and got to enjoy real, organized, consistent practice in being effective and engaged.

You cannot change my mind.