Sunday, March 11, 2012

MONOMO

Read Joanna Brooks' new book yesterday, and in the evening followed Stirling Adams' invitation to meet "The Scholar of Moab" at a cabin up the south fork of the Provo River.

The big gibbous moon just past its prime winked in and out from behind the mountains as I drove home in the dark. My thoughts were gibbous as well.

Brooks writes about growing up Mormon, fiercely and tenderly Mormon. There's a chapter about her awakening as a feminist while at BYU, years I was there as well, exciting but ultimately disappointing years during which a good university lost its nerve.

Proposition 8 invades California at the precise moment when Brooks is trying to introduce her daughters to the religion of her grandmothers. She recreates the pioneer day celebration she knew as the girl in the book's cover photo and volunteers for the No-on-8 campaign.

Mormon, so Mormon that it hurts to be Mormon. That's her dilemma.

It's my dilemma too. The password I chose when I got a new computer five years ago, MONOMO, was a declaration of independence from the religion that shaped me. There are a host of reasons for officially leaving the church, including disgust at the campaign against people like my brother John. If they officially attack homosexuals, if they elbow good people out of the church because they speak their minds, if there's a single mold for being a Mormon, then count me out.

MONOMO.

But it's not that easy. The photo of me with four siblings and a cousin takes me back to a childhood like the one Brooks describes, a couple of decades earlier, to be sure, but likewise marked by racism and fear of the communist civil rights movement and a generous determination to build the Kingdom of God and the wonder of BYU with its concentration of other Mormons and the erotically spiritual uplift of youth conferences and a two-year mission in Germany and on and on and on. Beliefs and practices and ideas (the glory of God is intelligence, there should be no poor among you, the natural man is an enemy to god, shall the youth of Zion falter?, keep the Sabbath day holy, come unto Christ and be perfected in him, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them, and by the power of the Holy Ghost you may know the truth of all things) work in me still, leavened (that too!) by Nietzsche and Thomas Merton and Goethe and Adrienne Rich and all the rest, but still fermenting, for better and worse, in my subterranean self.

And then the evening, dozens of people gathered in the canyon to hear Steve Peck read from his fine satire of Mormons. Old friends from BYU, lively younger BYU people, just the kind of gathering of earnest and smart and curious and talented Mormon human beings I left Vanderbilt for. (Why are you leaving? the Dean of Arts and Sciences asked me, we just awarded you tenure. I miss the scent of sage, I told him, and I'm going back to the university that educates my fellow Mormons.)

Here they were again, my fellow Mormons, in a cabin next door to Gene and Charlotte England's cabin where I spent many such thoughtful evenings in similar groups. But even given the liveliness of the good book and the good food and the good company, I was conflicted—oddly and gratefully conflicted.

Conversations felt constricted. And there were conversations I could have nowhere else.

Friends talked of the church retirement system that kept them from leaving. They lamented that their schools and departments could not hire non-Mormons. They mentioned restrictions on inviting speakers. They spoke of battles they chose not to fight so they could fight others. They lamented conservative politics. They feared a growing fundamentalism among Mormon leaders. They mentioned Gene England and Sam Rushforth and Steven Epperson and Dan Fairbanks and Joanna Brooks.

I couldn't help thinking that a few bottles of good wine would have loosened things up. And they needed loosening up.

Leaving the constraints of BYU, leaving a church that demanded unhealthy sacrifices and imposed immoral beliefs, was, in retrospect, lifesaving for me.

And yesterday, in Brooks' book and in Stirling's and Kiff's cabin, I understood again the pleasures of being inside while outside.

8 comments:

* said...

see scott, i am not even sure whether i can say i sympathize, because i am so unreligious and such a gentile, i have not the faintest clue how these difficulties must feel. but i do sympathize as much as i can. in my jugendlichen leichtsinn i always thought quakers and mormons are probably ok and they aren't allowed any alcohol and that's all i know. yet then it's a whole view of life connected to all tat makes it all much more complicated and allencompassing and probably damaging. but the one thing i know is that is always good to abandon somehting that demands unhealthy sacrifices.

Scott Abbott said...

we've each got things that restrict us and that we've got to get away from (you've been reminding me of the way academic writing can create unhealthy limits).

i'd say that you're lucky not to have religious baggage (and perhaps just a touch unlucky as well).

and you remind me of the easy pleasures of jugendlicher leichtsinn.

* said...

yeah i agree, everybody has something i might have not the problem with religion but instead i have certainly others. jeder hat sein paeckchen zu tragen, but for good measure there is also always jugendlicher leichtsinn.
re unlucky about not having the religious baggage, yeah maybe,. maybe i don't know what i might have missed but then again you never know anyway of what would o could have happened....

Scott Abbott said...

on the other hand, i wish i could see the world through the eyes of someone raised without religion.

michael morrow said...

your posts often touch very sensitive nerves for me, scott...as you know, religion has become sand in my craw.... I depended on organized religion to guide and inform life for 60 years. I finally had to acknowledge bloody chaffing, especially in very important relationships, mostly the result of anger, fear and self-righteous beliefs festering since childhood ...I have come to see and feel that pithy "faith" has been refined into strong feelings that "other" exists in the universe...although I "believe" very little...I am convinced there is life beyond the end of my nose.... relationships are a most vital element of life.....and organized religion went a long way to NOT demonstrate the process of cultivating healthy relationships.

I feel.... perhaps I'm an excellent example of blind romantic....but I feel none the less, I have found that treating others..people, environment, other animals..etc...with LOVE is the universal adhesive...congealing society into a place where life lives... I refer to love as light..after all, plants and animals depend on light in order to photosynthesize and digest life sustaining "energy".....I consider life giving light to be synonymous with love....

Somehow deep inside, in spite of war and crime and bigoted religious murderers of non-agreer's ideas, somehow I feel cohesive, reassuring feelings I call mmmmm...I will name the feelings... love, compassion, gratitude,...interestingly enough... words I learned as a sincere participant in organized religion...but sadly...I compassionately must acknowledge those organizations know only the spelling of those terms...and nothing of the process for implementing them on an individual, personal level....many, many people I know who do not participate in organized religion....embody compassion and gratitude....sincerely, really...

Scott Abbott said...

Michael, thanks for your personal and heartfelt and searching response.

I can only say: me too.

* said...

i agree with mr morrow.

michael morrow said...

let me say...I know many,,,some of the finest people I have ever known, are intensely committed to organized religions...of many diverse stripes...lovely people....seems to me that its the culture that muddies the waters...ie...i do not need a set of stone tablets to tell me to honor my parents..or not to abuse others...not commit murder...orrrrr...wear special clothing on any given day....

I do not know of any writings directly attributable to christ, or budda or others revered as savior...but there are mountains of writings of the experience others have had with such notable individuals....I do not give a shit about other people's religious experiences if their main motivation for sharing is to convince me that... "Michael,,,you have to get this important life saving point...If there were a better idea FOR YOUR LIFE, I would have it"...I care only for how their experiences cause THEM to show-up in my life.....less information is more when it comes to personal religious/spiritual experiences...