Delusional Zion
This essay appeared in Wayfare issue 7.
I possess a delusional commitment to Zion-building. I carry a wild, fierce love for you, for this family, for this haphazard gathering of saints, sinners, and misfits. You’re the ones who keep me coming to church, week after week. I didn’t always have this adoration for our messy communities though. For a season, Zion felt secondary in my spiritual rebuilding, sometimes, I admit, a chore.
My spiritual life survived an intense renovation in recent years. After the dust settled and I felt more at home again in my own spirit, a pervasive thought haunted me: What do I do now? So began my rebuilding. While that’s a story all its own, the process of reconstructing a faith turned me deeply inward. This renovation included a reorientation to doctrine and dogma, but as with most faith journeys, I also had to confront the deep-set disillusionment I now felt toward the institution itself: Where I used to feel safe, I now felt wary. Where I used to feel protected, I now moved with caution and mistrust. I experienced the excruciating metamorphosis of disentangling my God from my church, and in a crucial moment of wrestle, vulnerability, and confrontation with the divine, I asked what my faith looked like without the scaffolding of the church institution.
I found myself there—Charlotte Jane, beloved daughter of Heavenly Parents. Stripped away from everything I was taught I should be, should want, should do, I found who God the Mother, God the Father, God the Son, made me. And I delighted in this woman. As I honed my relationship with the godhead, I discerned who I am to them and who they are to me. I tapped into their unlimited, cosmic vision and started to craft an intentional spiritual practice that relied on trusting them, trusting myself, and trusting my choices, even when those choices turned out to be mistakes. This process was personal, intimate, and solely mine. I brought few people into the depths of my spiritual excavation. From the outside, it may have looked like nothing changed, but I now moved as a new, more embodied woman.
My lifeline through this spiritual and religious crossroads was something my grandmother taught me, something she repeated to me so often it wove its way into my spiritual DNA: Anything you do has to be okay with only you and the Lord. The more I’ve connected with other Mormon pilgrims in the search for spiritual and religious congruence, the more I’ve realized how unusual and precious it was to have someone like my grandma influence my spiritual formation in this way. While I didn’t recognize it at the time, she was teaching me that I could trust my relationship with God, and now that I’ve passed through a variety of refining fires (undoubtedly with many more on the way), I’ve learned that God wants me to also trust myself.
All this time, I was still attending church, still fulfilling callings and speaking up in Sunday School. Yet I felt like I was performing Zion, unable to find in the pews that same sense of belonging that I was at long last finding with myself. Every week in sacrament meeting I continued to feel a disconnect between who I knew I was to God and who I felt I had to be at church.
Unlike many in a transformation of faith, I did not feel an aversion to the structures of religion, which surprised even me, considering my complete loss of trust in the institution itself. I didn’t experience a crumbling or a proverbial broken shelf. Perhaps that makes me lucky; this brand of faith is more of a gift than I had prepared for. Regardless, I stood with God as we surveyed together what I might be able to salvage between me and the capital-C Church.
The going was slow. I remember coming home from church many Sundays and needing to cry in my room. The camaraderie I used to feel in the hallways and in the pews had vanished. My ward members had known me for a decade, but they didn’t know this newer, renovated version, and I didn’t know how to bridge the gap. My entire faith paradigm had shifted, and I didn’t know how to communicate that where I once agreed, I now disagreed, or vice versa. So much had happened from both internal and external forces to determine my faith trajectory, my spiritual trust having shifted from being centered in an organized religion to reflecting an inner locus of control, and I wasn’t sure how to share myself now or how I would be received if I did. Yes, my altered set of beliefs wasn’t wholly different from what I’d learned in Sunday School, but it was transformed enough to be divergent. Could I still belong while not conforming to a correlated curriculum?
My ley line that had kept me connected to you for a lifetime had fractured under the pressure of my spiritual reconfiguration, and I felt lesser for it. Instead of coming into the building eager to worship in community as I once had, I now attended each week inwardly braced for a fight. Who would I need to challenge? What twisted principles and cultural interpretations would I need to call out? Sundays became exhausting, and the gap between us continued to widen. So here I stood, more than a little weary and a bit worse for wear, looking out at the pews and the buildings and the manuals, asking Jesus what was still here for me.
He showed me you.
He showed me how you brought me flowers because you were thinking of me even though you didn’t know that my day was a hard one.
He showed me how you loved my children and made sure they had a Primary teacher they could feel comfortable with.
He showed me how you now thought a little differently because in Sunday School I advocated for a marginalized group and how I was softened by your reply.
He reminded me that my thoughts and responses and beliefs would be incomplete without you, you who might disagree, contradict, or live your covenants differently from how I live mine.
Like the Spirit of the Lord showing Nephi his father’s dream, Jesus showed me his, person by person, all of us found in the overlapping circles of my Portland suburb ward. The Healer, as is his way, mended that ley line tying me to Zion, and I saw the path reforge in such a way that who I am with myself and with my God is not incongruent with who I can be with you.
While once I felt like I was too Mormon for some people and not Mormon enough for everyone else, I now feel like I am just the right kind of Mormon for what I like to call a delusional Zion. And I mean delusional in the most creative and expansive way. When I think of my biggest, most fanciful dreams for heaven, I see a home for everyone together. God wants to create with us, and why not create heaven here, right now? That’s what Zion is supposed to be: heaven. What if heaven could be even better than we’ve imagined? And what if we tried to make it so here? Where once I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere, now I see that I could actually belong anywhere I choose.
And I want to belong with you.
My vision of Zion goes beyond church membership records. I see a future where anyone who wants to belong to each other can, if we desire it and choose it and work for it. I want to belong with my ward members and my ex-Mormon friends and my friends who don’t go to church for myriad and valid reasons. I want to belong with my neighbors and my family and my in-laws and my kids’ friends and all the people I disagree with, because you—all of you, irrespective of membership or belief or creed or voting record—make me want to love more fully.
