Diamonds in a Crown

I have been feeling lately how diminished the Church is when people are missing. And I mean properly missing, not just buried in some worthy work or other. It began with the thought of how the priesthood ban for members of African heritage had directly victimized black members and members of color all over the world, but that it had also damaged white members too, because while members of color were innocent victims, white members and leaders were guilty of the sin of racism (and sometimes still are, if we're honest).

So today I participated in a conversation about church retention, especially for young people, and the conversation briefly drifted into how our friends and family who have left our congregations lose some kind of light, and lose the peace that the Gospel offers us, and I squirmed just a little. It's not false: if we live up to our covenants and privilege, we have huge emotional and mental advantages. And sometimes physical advantages. That's why we evangelize: this isn't a skin-color, gender, or sexual orientation privilege: this privilege is totally voluntary, and shareable.

But I feel like that paradigm can lead to inferior ways of thinking about our brothers and sisters. Rather than thinking, "Come! Let us fix you!" shouldn't we rather be thinking, "Come! We NEED you! Let us be broken together." I have strong and bitter memories of well-meaning sisters who wanted to fix what was wrong with me, and I did not feel loved, and I did not feel wanted, and it ultimately did neither of us good, but only harm. But how easy it is to fit into a place where we are wanted!

I was a librarian's aide off and on for fifteen years, and library shelves make a great analogy for this. When a book was returned and needed to be shelved, everything went smoother when that book's place was still open for it, when there was room on the shelf. It was even more obvious in my personal library, where seven bookcases worth of books were stuffed into four bookcases.

It's cool to think of ourselves as books in God's personal library.

Today, the analogy that came into my head was diamonds. As I sat, I tried to think about what exactly is diminished when strangers leave the church. I know what I lost personally when my siblings and close friends told me that they had no more desire to walk with me. That is simple, and selfish. But what about all the youth who despair because the church doesn't conform to their politics? Or what about the young married couples who just want to spend their energies on more secular concerns, or on their families more directly? Or the thousands of other reasons a person loosens their grasp of the things I have come to love more deeply?

And I thought of a tiara that my friend Jenny gave me more than a decade ago. She was getting married, and she had been given the tiara for her wedding but had chosen an heirloom veil instead, and passed the tiara to me, to give me hope that I would also someday be married. I'm not. But that's not the point. The tiara sat in a small drawer in my jewelry box for years and years, and eventually it started losing its paste gems. It was unsightly to see the empty settings and I couldn't fix it, so I threw it away.

We're not paste. We are diamonds. I need to be clear about that.

Each of us is a priceless jewel, wherever our setting. And we are being cut and polished to fit into God's infinite crown as His children. There is already and always a place where we were meant to fit. We are divine in nature.

In this life, maybe the Church is the earthly and imperfect manifestation of that crown, and when someone declines baptism, leaves the church, or is denied their privilege to serve, the crown looks dingier, and if you look with the right eyes, it is obvious that a piece is missing.

It's not a perfect analogy. I'm not a perfect writer. But I do feel that we need us, and if we can't say it better, someone might misunderstand.