Not the Same General Conference

In recent years, I have looked forward and loved General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The leaders gave messages of comfort, hope, counsel, and sometimes reprimand, which I sometimes processed in good mental health with optimism for the future, and sometimes they triggered spirals of self-recrimination. I don't take criticism well at this dose of Sertraline. But it was always a good experience, all-in-all. There was something I could take and run with. I felt supported by the Spirit.

The conference that concluded yesterday was not so smooth. And I want to blame Facebook, but really, making conference a shared experience was painful, problematic, and also really important for helping me to understand the variety of needs of the people around me.

The social media reactions to the conference generally fell into two extreme piles: those who in blissful cheer image-macro'd oversimplified quotations (or reposted them frequently and without comment, context, or qualification), and those who watched, already frustrated with the leadership, with an eye trained on every omission, sore and raw and tender, open to every possible and inevitable pain.

I watched hopefully, wondering if someone would shoot an arrow, friendly or otherwise, that would come anywhere near me, and the place I live. They did not. This conference seemed to miss me almost entirely. But it was a selfish hope, and I repent me of it. The worries in the world are not about me right now.

But I am left with this tear in my soul, this rift, this schism. It is good to feel bolstered by doctrine. It's a sign of confidence before God, and that you are right in His eyes. It's a necessary skill to take the words of good news and write them in our minds and hearts. But it is also a commandment to mourn with those that mourn. We must be genuine before God and before each other or we are hypocrites, even if being genuine means expressing our pain and our wrestles.

Although I did feel shoved about and disregarded frequently, I have confidence that the leaders are trying to do what they believe is right for the Church and for their own salvation, even if some of them express themselves in ways that seem pharisaical. I believe that commandments are like gravity, and we can't pick and choose. We are responsible for the instruction we have been given, even if it is given in a way that seems calculated to inflict pain and alienation.

But many of my dear friends did not have the luxury of that kind of stoicism. Some of them were wounded deeply by words that I am claiming that I believe were intended well. Some of my friends have been lacerated by life in ways that I can't even imagine, though I try, and they so desperately need hope. They need to see the Jesus of mercy and of power and love through the words of the prophets for themselves and their loved ones. And that mercy and power and love isn't always visible when good people are free-falling through gravity, unwilling to pull a parachute ripcord because somebody painted a swastika on it.

That's a pretty bizarrely mixed metaphor, but the emotion I'm trying to capture is that we live in a complex world where good people, and even good people who love God and follow Jesus, or young people with so much potential to be good people, have chosen to leave the church and its formal traditions and hard lines. Or choose never to join. Because the church has come to represent something that brings evil into the world in the form of hate or intolerance that can be life-threatening to people who have been made to feel cut off.

The glossing and sanitizing done narratively by church publications and these conference talks might be a conscious decision to help people aim for a higher ideal, but to me, it's just a miss. If a story doesn't grapple with the real, then how can it help those of us who live in it? (That's everybody, btw. Prophets live in the real too, even if their words don't always connect to it.)

So I spent most of this weekend in pain, because the people I care about were also in pain. Messages that usually buoy me baffled me. I felt spiritually starved, catching crumbs here and there and trying to fill my belly with them. And becoming frustrated with the memed snippets because they still failed to connect.

I don't have answers. My mental health is not good today, and my social debts weigh heavily. But I know some things. I know that I do not understand Jesus completely yet. He is a complex being, as complex as anyone you'll meet on the street. Even in his role as judge, I cannot anticipate him. But I know that He has a deep and unique love for each of us, even people who are fundamentally ideologically opposed. Jesus loved Hitler. Heavenly Father loved Lucifer. And these facts do not diminish the value of the love they have for me, too.

And I know, and have learned very painfully recently, that loving someone means allowing them agency, even when they use their ability to make decisions to decide things that cause us pain, or cause them pain, or are anywhere on the scale from trivial to evil. Jesus's love is not a trap, is not a scam, is not a fraudulent contract. Because he loves us, he allows us to turn away from him and hate him, if we really want to. That is one reason why we covenant. No binding is forced, but we are invited to come, and invited to stay, and invited to bind ourselves together, to qualify for more. His love is enough, but there is more that God can offer.

And I know that even as I believe that Jesus leads his church, and that I belong to his church, they are not the same. It's complicated. We're just people. All of us. Prophets, seers, revelators, dudes in suits. Jesus is the ONLY exception. And I don't always know where the line is. I resist certainty of where the line is. I just listen. I'm just winging it. One day at a time.

Uncertainty Can Be Beautiful.