What I Still Believe

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1.       God does not change the course of human events. No amount of twisting ourselves into shapes or trying to figure out how God wants us to worship will protect us from bad things happening. Anyone who tells you differently is selling you something.
2.       God loves. That’s it. If you want to say that God is really just a metaphor for human love, I’m good with that. My personal experience has led me lately to experience God as outside of myself. Most of the time. But I can certainly see why people want to see the divine within themselves, especially after spiritual abuse has occurred.
3.       Paying money to a church isn’t what “tithing” was ever meant to be. It takes your own choice away from you and your own ability to see pain and try to help with it. I don’t think that’s right.
4.       Leadership worship is toxic. It covers up so many sins and leads people to give up themselves. No one mortal is God. No one mortal has exclusive access to God. No one mortal can tell you what is right for you in your life.
5.       Scriptures are stories. Stories can be scriptures. What counts as scripture to you will change as you have different experiences and find different stories to be sacred. You will also be writing your own scripture every day of your life.
6.       The universe is not totally explicable through science. I’ve had too many scientists tell me that we know 99% of what there is to know in the universe. I don’t buy it. Science is always going through revolutions that show us how stupid we were in the past. I suspect we have a new one coming just ahead of us now. We’re never, ever going to understand the universe fully. And that’s a wonderful thing, at least for me. I love the mystery of life.
7.       There are moments in my life where I have felt something holy, something outside of myself, reaching to touch me. These moments usually happen when I have given up the need to control everything, a need that I cling to despite my recognition it isn’t a good trait. I want safety so much, but now and again, my desire for beauty overcomes that desire for safety.
8.       I know a lot of people love community and they look for that in a religion. Right now, that’s not what I’m seeking. I sometimes love people IRL and sometimes hate them. Maybe I’m allergic to community for a bit, because it can be manipulative, too.
9.       Journeys are sacred. We need to listen to and respect other people’s journeys especially when they are not like our own. This is how we learn, friends. This is what spiritual growth looks like. Seeing beyond what’s in your own house.
10.   Family is sacred. But family isn’t necessarily what is given to you by blood. We also make our own families, and those are just as sacred.
11.   Feminine character traits are just as holy as masculine ones. But maybe we can also take a look at nonbinary people and see God in them, as well?
12.   Heaven needs an overhaul. Seriously. Reconsider what you think is good for people. Maybe ask the disabled what their heaven would be. Ask LGBT people. Ask women. Whether heaven is more than a story isn’t an argument I’m interested in right now. But we need to reconsider what we think of as “good” because so far we’re excluding people.
13.   Suffering can teach us to be more compassionate, but we too easily tell people who are suffering to learn lessons when sometimes the lessons are for those of us who aren’t suffering in the moment. Not all my suffering made me a better person. Sometimes suffering breaks us, and not always in the way that invites divinity.
14.   I’m not convinced that we need to be striving to improve ourselves at every moment. Sometimes we need to learn to embrace our flaws so that we can more fully love and embrace others in their flaws.
15.   Making rules and checklists of worthiness is exactly the opposite of what The Book of Mormon teaches about being part of Christ’s church. The Rameumptom anyone?
16.   I don’t know if Christ was a real person, but I love many of the teachings I read in The New Testament. I likewise don’t think that the ancient Nephites and Lamanites in The Book of Mormon were real people, but there are stories in there that I find very meaningful, including the anti-Nephi-Lehies, Christ visiting all His people, and Abish.
17.   I love music. I’m not particularly musically talented, but I often feel as if music is pure emotion, and when that is shared, it can be holy.
18.   I love the idea of looking to the future and trying to stop holding so tightly to the present moment. I also love letting go of the future and the past and only living in the present. To me, this is a holy contradiction, and one I’m not interested in undoing.
19.   Learning to see the mote in my own eyes and to repent and ask for forgiveness from others for the ways in which I have hurt them is one of my current holy works.
20.   I believe every single human life matters, and we do not serve the divine by looking away from the faces of others, however convenient it may be to tell ourselves that they are not “like us” or that we can’t do anything to help them.
21.   Power is not always bad, but it almost always corrupts. This is a fact of being mortal, but it shouldn’t be overlooked in religion.

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