Episode 53: We're Good at Showing People the Door
Episode Transcript
Cynthia: Hello friends. I'm Cynthia Winward. Welcome to this episode of At Last She Said It. I'm here with Susan. How's your day going, Susan?
Susan: It's going great, Cynthia. It's going better now because we're going to record a podcast.
C: Let's just jump right in. We're calling this episode, We're Good at Showing People the Door. And you and I have talked about this topic quite a bit. I think one of our concerns is we don't want to sound overly negative. We want to talk about difficult things, ways that we show people the door, but hopefully, Susan, we come across with better ways that we can minister to our fellow saints in the pews. And maybe even share this episode with friends or family, if maybe they don't quite understand why you're having a difficult time staying in the pews. So hopefully that's our goal today, even though we're going to talk about maybe some things that people might perceive as negative. How's that sound?
S: Yeah, I think that sounds great because I maintain that when you're pointing out problems, you have to do that in order to talk about solutions, which is the hopeful part, right? That's the moving forward part. And so, sure you have to talk about negative things sometimes, but you have to do that in order to solve them. So yeah, we're going to do that today. And I don't think that the overall tone of the show is going to be negative, but I do love the idea that we're good at showing people the door because you know what? We are. We are.
C: Sadly, we are. So there's a photo that I'm going to describe for our listeners that you and I had seen on social media. And it's an old painting, a picture of Jesus, kind of like the Sermon on the Mount, and there're people, all his disciples surrounding him, and Jesus has his hand in the air and he says, "Love everyone." And people are like, "But hate the sin." And he says, "No!" "Don't. accept them!" "What?!" The people keep going on, "Judge them, fight them!" "No, no, stop!" "Tell them they're going to hell!" "No!"
S: Poor Jesus. No one gets it.
C: Poor Jesus. Now when you and I saw this, we were like, Hmm. Yeah, that kind of goes right along with the episode that you and I had been talking about for months. That sadly. yeah, sometimes we don't really do the "Jesus work" when we're, uh, sitting in the pews. We really need to get better at not judging or hating sin or, you know, all those other things. So why don't you kick us off and go ahead and give us a little deeper dive into our topic.
S: Well, you know, maybe I love this topic because it's no mystery that I've sort of been a misfit in the church, all the, you know, my whole life, despite sitting on a mountain of privilege and having Hinckley as a last name. I have struggled to fit. And that comes along with this feeling, this sneaking suspicion that nobody would really care whether I was there or not. Honestly, that's how it's sometimes felt. I'm sure that that's more about me than about anything that anyone around me has done to cause me to feel that way. I think that that's just, you know—I struggle with social things. What can I say? Church is hard for an introvert, Cynthia, for the thousandth time, but I think that that's why this topic sits kind of close to my heart. And I'm excited to have an opportunity to talk about it, actually. It was a little more than 20 years ago that I first heard the line, "When those on the edges leave, the boundary shrinks toward the middle." I remember where I was standing when I heard it. I remember who I was talking to that said it, uh, it really just hit me. And I mean, it sounds like such an obvious thing. Of course it does. It's obvious, but it had never occurred to me. And the implications of it, in a church context, just sort of stopped me in my tracks. Because, you know, I could suddenly see really clearly in that line how my inability, and that of many other people that I know, to fit in at church could actually become worse and not better.
S: Like if more of the people who don't fit would leave the boundary would shrink toward the center and then there's even less room for me. And it's like, I just sort of could see the diagram in my head: This is your future in the church. And, uh, you know, I chewed really hard on that sentence for about a year. I thought about it a lot and kind of what would need to be done to change that, and what I might be able to do. As I thought about it, it sort of crystallized for me over that year that I was receiving a calling. That's what it felt like to me. I can't really think of another way to describe it. It wasn't a calling that anyone gave me, but maybe the spirit was giving me a calling. I think sometimes we feel called to do things and I felt called to do this. And the best way I can describe it would be to ride the fences and round up strays in the church. And maybe it's because I'd always kind of been a stray, but, I just wanted to patrol that boundary hard. Really hard, with the intention of keeping it from closing in any further. And since then, I've really tried with a great deal of intention, to do that in my teaching, in my speaking at church—I'm always trying to signal that I'm a safe person. I'm always trying to lead with vulnerability. And it's kind of changed for me now to become as much about pastoral care for the people around me, and offering kind of a safe space for people, as about trying to affect change in the organization or the makeup of the organization. But that sense of having received a calling has remained stable for me over those 20 years. I really think it's what I'm supposed to be doing. It's a good part of why I have a podcast. I think I've gotten better at the job though, as my focus has kind of shifted more to the individual, kind of more tackling the problem at a micro level. Because the only way I've been able to think of really, to do it in any kind of meaningful way—to fill that calling—is to love people while allowing them to be right where they are. There are a lot of people who might live right up against that fence and they might live there for a long time.
C: That just doesn't sound too hard, Susan, but—it is hard. It seems like that should be easy.
S: It is hard! It does. It does seem like it should be easy. It does seem like, but it isn't, and it doesn't come naturally, I think, to us as Latter-day Saints, because as Latter-day Saints, the narrative is that we're always supposed to be about trying to move people kind of onto and along a specific path, right?
C: Yes!
S: There's this designated path that we want people on. It's leading toward a center. It's not an edge thing, right? Don't be in the overflow.!And so we're not comfortable with the people who are hanging around the edges, and we want them to be on our path.
C: Well, speaking of shrinking toward the middle, this reminds me of a documentary I had seen about the Galapagos islands. And, you know, we probably all learned about Charles Darwin and natural selection in school. And, you know, natural selection, that's, that's our phrase, the survival of the fittest, right? That's what natural selection is. And one example they spotlighted on one of the islands, you know—they have finches on all different islands—and on one of the islands, they had found out that the birds with longer beaks can get more food when it's scarce. Because they can shove them, they can shove those longer beaks into like rocks or crevices where seeds have fallen. And that kind of left those with the shorter beaks to kind of die out when they couldn't get the food. So, I mean, having a longer beak isn't, I don't think, better than having a shorter one, it's just —
S: Unless you're trying to stay alive in that particular environment.
C: Right. But there are repercussions to being different. And when I saw this documentary, I immediately thought about our church and how we cater extremely well, I think, to a certain population. And some people thrive in the church, no matter what, feast or famine. Their beaks are long enough that they just kind of always find what they need. And yeah, they're in the middle, right? That the middle speaks to them. But for many, as this kind of natural selection occurred, that boundary does shrink toward the middle. And I think that's one way that we do show people the door. I think we make it difficult for all to thrive so that eventually, I think sometimes people just eventually seek nourishment elsewhere.
S: Yes, yes. Allowing this kind of natural selection that you're describing at church—even encouraging it sometimes, because I sort of think we do—it seems like the very opposite of what Jesus might be expecting, you know, of the church that bears his name. Really. It makes me think of a passage from Barbara Brown Taylor's book, Always a Guest: Speaking of Faith Far From Home, where she's talking about the story of the good Samaritan and she says this about it: "This is not a story meant to help us feel better about ourselves. This is a story designed to do brain surgery on us, opening up the possibility that we have our good guys and our bad guys all mixed up. None of us really knows what is inside another person. [...] We are all capable of surprising each other every single day. And a single act of kindness has the power to call a whole history of against-ness into question. By inventing a story in which that happened, Jesus put good and Samaritan together in his hearers minds for the first time. He knew that sometimes you have to start telling a different kind of story before a different kind of future can unfold."
S: I just love that. We are so used to telling one story with one cast at church. That's all we do, but you know, maybe Jesus was actually calling us to start telling a different kind of story. Just like in the photo that you were describing, he was really trying to have a different conversation than the multitude was insisting on having. I think Jesus is calling us to tell a story with a more diverse cast.
C: I think he is. And I think that's what being a follower of Jesus—why that still speaks to me is because that's what speaks to me now. I need to do what was in the quote—a little bit of brain surgery. Maybe we need to open up our brains. And so to me that feels very educational, enlightening. I'm being stretched, I'm growing. So, um, I'm behind that.
S: Yeah, me too. I love the idea that just putting Samaritan and good in one story in the hearer's minds was kind of a radical, a radical act.
C: Of course.!
S: And so we're going to try and do that with edge people. Cynthia. We're going to try and put edge people in the cast of characters on Sunday—in the permanent cast of characters—and see what we can do to keep people feeling welcome at church regardless of where they sit. But you know, I have to ask a bottom line question and this might sound incredibly cynical to our listeners. I'm sorry if it does, but I have to ask—it's an honest question, Cynthia. Is pastoral care really our focus as a church? Is pastoral care really our focus? You know, I mean, in Jesus' church, how could it not be about the people? But, you know, I feel like when you get right down to the nuts and bolts of attending church and having our callings and all the things that we talk about and do and emphasize, before pastoral care comes a focus on pretty much everything else. Right? All kinds of checklists, programs, rules, you know, protecting the organization of the church. I just feel like there are all kinds of things that we lead with in our interactions and in our church participation. We lead with all these other things. And in my observation, that's a really good way to invite vulnerable members to leave. Because they don't feel seen.
C: Just hearing you say in your list there, "protecting the organization of the church," that's a phrase that I have never understood and I've heard people use it for years. When they talk about excommunicating a person, "Well, this person needed to, you know, we have to protect the church, so we have to cut people off ." And I'm just sitting there going that doesn't make any sense to me! We don't protect organizations. We protect people! We should be protecting people. And so is pastoral care really our focus? I think sometimes we get it wrong, I'm sad to say.
S: I think sometimes we get it wrong too, and I think there are a lot of ways that manifests and a lot of reasons it happens. But one of the things that I always think about in this is when people bear their testimony, sometimes—well, no, so not sometimes very often—I will hear people testify that the Church is true. And I think that's a really interesting catch phrase that means a lot of different things to different people. But it feels true to me that a lot of people believe the Church is true and that somehow the Church comes in above a lot of other things, including people. I know that the people saying, "I know the Church is true" don't mean it that way. But the shorthand feels true to me, the way that it comes out that way feels true sometimes. And that's sad. That's hard when you're a person who struggles to fit in that organization as presently constituted, right? Who's not comfortable there. And when you're not comfortable, the people around you are not comfortable with you, very often, in my experience. People who in some way don't fit, they make us uncomfortable. And one of the other interesting things that we have kind of culturally in church is that we have this sort of conviction that discomfort comes from Satan, right? That discomfort is a bad thing. It's something that we need to move away from, not into—not work through. So it's really easier for us to have people leave than it is to do what's required to keep them sometimes because a lot of times that might involve putting ourselves in an uncomfortable position, embracing that discomfort and, kind of following that discomfort to work through it.
C: I would love to do a deep dive and figure out where did that come from? The idea that being uncomfortable comes from Satan. I mean, I remember being taught that since Primary, that that's how the Holy Ghost whispers to you—
S: Is speaking to you, right.
C: Yeah. And so I think we take that and we run with it to the Nth degree. And so anytime we feel uncomfortable, oh well, I can easily dismiss this because that means this is of Satan. Anyway, I know we've talked about that before, but obviously it's a pet peeve of mine, that discomfort means I don't have to give any credence to something. But I also think it's easier to blame people when they leave the church than it is to look inward as individual members and ask ourselves that hard question, Lord, is it I? I have never once heard of someone in the church speaking about someone who no longer attends the church and says, "I wonder what we did?" I've never heard that. It's always, "They were deceived. They're lazy. They wanted to sin." Like I've never—just once, just once I want to hear someone say, "We failed them."
S: No, it's never, in my experience—I've never had that conversation. Hm, I have to just sit with that for a minute. I have to just think about that. Wow. That's so telling, that's so telling about kind of our whole approach. I think the fact that we've never heard that is a symptom of exactly what we're talking about here.
S: But you know, I think Jesus tried specifically to introduce us to this discomfort, which is just like what she was talking about Him doing with the story of the good Samaritan. He is trying to make them uncomfortable to encourage us to be able to work through it, right? And we know that Jesus was about this because in just about every story He's teaching us through marginalized people in some way, right? I mean, He uses that a lot—He uses that technique a lot. He's pretty heavy handed with that. And so he's, He's approaching us through marginalized people and then asking questions to help us reevaluate our relationships with, and to, those people. It seems like we're missing,—we're missing the point if we're not willing to be uncomfortable with the uncomfortable people in our midst.
C: I feel like every time we talk about being uncomfortable on this podcast, Susan, we immediately read a Richard Rohr quote because he always has something to say about that growth zone and the uncomfortableness of it. And so of course, I had to find Richard work quote, and he said, "If your prayer is not enticing you outside your comfort zones, if your Christ is not an occasional threat, you probably need to do some growing in the ways of love." Hmm.
S: Hmm. It's hard to see this modeled in the church though, Cynthia, where everybody is trying so hard to look and act the same.
C: I think so.
S: It's pretty hard to feel threatened in that kind of environment. Uh, even though I think that Jesus' work definitely goes on in the Church, and I want to be very clear about that. I'm not saying that pastoral care doesn't happen in the Church. I think it does happen, but I just sometimes wonder does it happen almost, uh, incidentally—incidental to these other things, or by a few specific people who are gifted in that way, while the rest of us are kind of focused elsewhere. Because I feel like from the outside, the Church really can look more like a club than like outstretched arms, and from the inside, it can feel that way. It doesn't feel like outstretched arms very often in my experience.
C: No, I agree. And definitely there is a lot of pastoral care that goes on inside our church. But I mean, if we had to choose obviously between pastoral care and, uh, being more organized and "with it" and efficient, I would hope that we would fail at those things instead. Instead of failing at our pastoral care. And so often it's the other way around.
S: It does seem that way.
C: Yeah. We're super organized.
S: I think that our leaders, to give them some credit, are well aware of these issues, of course. And I think that, like the change to ministering over visiting teaching and home teaching was this kind of shift designed to fight against our tendency to descend into programs over people. But I think the members—these things get so ingrained, I think it's pretty hard to move the members in that kind of way. So I don't know that the leaders aren't aware that, uh, many people feel like we're more devoted to programs and checklists than we should be. I think they're probably aware of that and trying to do what they can, but gosh darn it, it's really hard to change, isn't it?
C: Yes, it is.
S: So, why does it seem that for members and leaders, almost everything speaks louder than love? I know that I've told you before about the Relief Society lesson, where the teacher stood up and said, "Okay, we all know love is important, but—"...right? And then the whole rest of the lesson was after the "but." But you know, in my church life, if you were going to ask me, like, "What are the words that come to your mind as a result of a lifetime as a Latter-day Saint woman?" it would be things like culture, conformity, judgment, rules, rigidity, corporation. I mean, you put all the leaders in suits and ties. It's a very—this is a very business-looking group of people that we're looking at. And I don't think I'm necessarily skewed in my perception of it feeling that way sometimes, but those are all things that I feel very often speak more loudly than our love does. We lead with those things.
C: Yeah, I've experienced that too. And I think of, uh, ad-ministering—we're really good at administering—
S: So good!
C: —rules and programs, but are we as good at ministering? And so that's kinda my contention here is, you know, administering versus ministering. And like I was just saying a minute ago, we're very well-organized. We know how to administer. I was just listening to an interview earlier today where there was a professor—a professor of religion at, I can't remember what college somewhere—but he's not of our faith. And he teaches religion courses and he flat out said that the LDS Church probably has the most comprehensive and useful website for its members. And I hadn't really thought about that. I thought, yeah, that's true! You can almost get any talk by anyone ever delivered at least back to the seventies or sixties, I think. I mean, it's a pretty comprehensive website! Yeah. I mean, we know how to get things done. We know how to implement, we know how to be efficient, but administering doesn't save souls and ministering does. And several years ago, One of my children wanted a temple recommend to do baptisms. She didn't have a recommend at the time, and her brother had just come home from his mission. And she said—you know, someone in the family had given us some female names and, and said, you know, can you get the baptisms done for these? And so I asked my daughter, "Would you like to get a recommend and go do go do these?" And she said, "I'll do it if Nathan can baptize me." And I said, "Okay, well then here we are, this is what we're going to do." But for various reasons, she couldn't sit for an interview and I don't want to go into all of that—you know, honor her privacy—but it was just too much to ask her to sit alone with a man and to be interviewed. And so I made an appointment and I went to one of my leaders and I asked him if he could make an exception to let a little girl have a temple recommend for baptisms. And I gave him all these different options. Could we do this? Could the Young Women's president interview her, and then she could, you know, pass that along? Could we do this? And when it was all said and done, he just looked at me and he said, "No." And I didn't know what to do. I thought, I mean, what it came down to was I felt—I felt that he chose the rule over a little girl.
S: Of course you did.
C: I don't know that I've ever gotten over that. Instead of ministering to a little girl, we put the rules first. I know people can hear this story and be critical of my experience. You know, we have to have order, that's something we hear a lot in the church. You know, "God's house is a house of order." But I need someone to explain to me how a little girl in the temple would create disorder. And no one's been able to do that.
And it's a really, really tender spot for me. And we could go on and on, you and I, back and forth, experience after experience. But that was just one that I wanted to share from my own life where I saw administering came first and ministering came second. And it broke my heart.
S: I once came to a place after a particularly painful experience with, uh, well, with a church leader. But with, as it was a series of long painful experiences. We won't mention the ward, but anyone who listens to this podcast is going to know immediately, which ward it was because—where does Susan always talk about having trouble? Yes, that one ward. It was in that one ward. But I came to a place, kind of at the end of our time in that ward, where I suddenly could see how people leave. I like had this moment of clarity where I thought, "This is how it happens." You know, I'd never been able to really conceive before of leaving the Church. But—in that moment I could see it.
C: You knew.
S: I knew! I thought, "This is how it happens. This is how people leave." It's like, I could just see it clearly that I had this choice and it was really scary to me. It was frightening. It was destabilizing, because I had never entertained those thoughts before, right? And the other part of that is that I honestly felt like the people in question wouldn't care at all if I did.
C: That's the saddest part.
S: Right? Well, like, I don't know whether that's true or not, and I hope that it wasn't true, but does it matter? Does it matter if that's true or not? If that's the way I felt, right? What mattered in that situation was that I felt like they honestly didn't care if I did or not, just like you felt as a mother that they honestly didn't care if your little girl went to the temple or not, because they had a rule to keep and so that was going to come in first. And so I think you know what that feeling is like, but the whole thing gave me a lot of empathy for people who leave, because I understand it now. I didn't before, and now I do because I've been in that place. And I know that it can feel like some church members would actually be happier if you did leave. I know that feeling.
C: They would feel less uncomfortable.
S: They would feel less uncomfortable and, you know, it just, uh,—the problem goes away, right? Whatever the problem is, it goes away.
C: I have a good friend right now who is halfway around the world, and she listens to all our podcasts because she's my bestie. And so we were talking on Zoom the other day and she said this phrase to me. She said, "I think we can all agree that church should be a balm. B A L M. But how often is it a bomb? B O M B? And I just had to stop and I thought, "Dang it, that's true!" Jesus talks a lot about being a balm, right? The Balm of Gilliad. And yet, sometimes it's something explosive and painful that happens to us. And did Jesus ever, ever—did He ever choose the law over a person? I mean I can think of, you know, a favorite scripture of mine: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." We're supposed to find rest with Jesus and in Jesus' church. And sometimes it feels like anything but restful—anything but that balm that is soothing us. Sometimes it does feel destabilizing.
S: No, it can be the thing causing the pain.
C: I know!
S: Not soothing the pain, causing the pain. I know that Colette talked in our last episode about LGBTQ individuals suffering trauma as a result of their experiences in the church and it's not just them. There are a lot of members who actually suffered trauma as a result of experiences that they have in the church, because it is supposed to be a place of—you know, we show up needy and expecting this balm. And when we get something very different from what we need, that causes very real pain.
C: A priesthood leader once said to me, he said, "We can't force people into this church, but we sure force them out." And I think our rigidity with our policies and rules show people the door and he understood that. This person was pretty high in the church, and yeah, we were having a conversation where he was trying to apologize on behalf of a priesthood leader who had hurt me. And that's what he said to me.
He said, "You know, we don't force anyone in, but we sure force them out." And I thought, "Dang, he, understands. He gets this."
S: I'm sure he's seen it.
C: I think so.
S: I guess that's my question then. Cynthia, do we mean to be door openers or door closers? What are we trying to do here? Because it seems like we're kind of better at one thing than the other, but I don't think it's our intention. I don't think it's intentional.
C: Oh, I don't think it's our intentional at all!
S: So like that's when something gets tricky, when you're doing it without really knowing it. And you know, how can you flip your thinking or your behavior in a way that makes it so that your outcome matches your intentions better? And that's really kind of what we're up against here. I have been chewing on this for a long time, like I said, years and years. But I was working on an essay about this—"door closers or door openers?" idea. And I'm just going to share a little excerpt of that, right here.
C: Okay.
S: The essay is:
The Virtues of Being a Doorstop—Why Holding the Church Door Open Requires that We Use so Many More Good Muscles than Closing the Door Does
Of course I'm referencing that old bit of lore about the fact that it takes many more muscles to frown than it does to smile. I have no idea whether it's true, but it got me thinking about how many muscles we use at church, and how we might use them better.
This is a metaphor, of course, and I mean something larger than the actual door. I mean holding the Church itself open. And holding our hearts open. I mean holding Mormon-ness open and expanding the ways in which we think about ourselves and our relationship and responsibilities to each other as members of Christ's church. We have covenanted to stand as witnesses and mourn and comfort and invite and forgive and love and love again. In other words, to be doorstops.
That baptismal covenant puts us at the door of the church, holding it wide enough for any who happen by to come inside. To hear, feel, and taste the beautiful things the gospel has to offer, the good news that brought us through the doors in the first place, and keeps us coming back. We want the same gifts for all that we claim for ourselves.
But it's amazing, once we’re inside, how much more our metaphorical doors can weigh than our real doors do. Holding them open can require so much spiritual muscle, so much love and understanding of our true purpose and our true covenant that it's much easier to just come in, take the sacrament, do our calling, and leave someone else with door duty. Because bringing people in, really loving them all the way in at church, no matter how they look or live—then doing it the next week and the next week too—requires a lot of effort. I don't mean to preach. I'm as likely to let the door bang shut as the next person. Or maybe worse, to help it close quietly behind me, so as not to disrupt our singing and praying and speaking about God.
But in my heart, I yearn to be an immovable, untiring church doorstop, using my muscles to hold the whole place open for you, and me, and anyone who might wish to join us, and allowing a fresh breeze to come in too, and relieve a little of the stuffiness in the room.
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C: Hm, maybe that's what we should have called this episode instead— Let's Be a Doorstop—because that's a great metaphor. Yeah. It's a really great metaphor, Susan. Thank you.
C: So is there room to think differently in the Church? I mean, we say there is, but do we embrace diversity of thought, diversity of lives?
Why not—let's go ahead and talk about that.
S: I think it varies widely, you know, I think there's ward roulette, right? And so people's experiences vary widely in this area. Some places it might feel like there's a lot of room. Many places it feels like there's very, very little room. But the important part of this, to me, is that—you know, the truth of it is that—the diversity of thought and of our lives exists among the members. Whether or not, we're willing to make space, you know, or acknowledge it. It still exists. So our inability to make that space or to embrace the diversity can make church a really hard place to be for some people.
C: Why can't we just hear other people's experiences and honor, and sit, and maybe be a little uncomfortable with maybe their perspective on the gospel? I mean recently I was teaching a Sunday school lesson. I teach the 11-year-olds and we were focusing on the scripture in Doctrine and Covenants 43 about spiritual gifts. And this is probably one of my favorite sections in the Doctrine and Covenants. So good. And I was trying to point out to the students that the gift of believing is a spiritual gift, just like the gift of knowing. Both are equal gifts. And I mentioned that I was a person who thinks about things very deeply and like an onion, you know, I want to peel back layer after layer so that if I'm honest—and I said this to my little 12 twelve-year-olds—I said, "If I'm honest, it's difficult for me to know things because I can't stop digging and peeling back those layers of the onion." And I had a guest in my class that day. And as soon as I said that, as soon as I talked about these spiritual gifts, he had to chime in and he said, "Well, sometimes we believe, you know, in our parents' words, but that belief can grow into knowing. And it's not wrong to seek after more spiritual gifts, like knowing." And I felt like belief was ranked in his comment. I was trying to de-rank it. I was trying to put it on equal footing, because I think the scripture—Section 43—is quite specific about, you know, "to some it is given to [believe or to] know the words of Christ and to others, it is given to believe." And I was trying to emphasize to my students, these are both amazing gifts. Both gifts! And that was just too uncomfortable for this person in my class. And he had to make it known that it's okay, it can start out as belief, but you know, hopefully it ends up at knowledge. And I'm not sure if we're ever going to learn to celebrate belief.
And yet, I mean, one of our most, I think famous scriptures, "faith is like a seed"—Alma 32:27, right? "But behold, if ye will awake and arouse your faculties, even to an experiment upon my words, and exercise a particle of faith, yea, even if ye can no more than desire to believe, let this desire work in you, even until ye believe in a manner that ye can give place for a portion of my word."
C: Isn't that beautiful?
S: It is beautiful, but it's a little—it's a little like when Jesus said, "Love everyone!" and the multitude started throwing back, "But—knowing is better than belief!" Oh, it's almost like a knee jerk reaction, I think sometimes, for people.
C: I think so. And like we said, I know that wasn't his intention to shoot me down and say, "Well, you believe, but you really should be trying harder to know." We are a church of people who know. We know things. And just that experience in my little Sunday school class reminded me of the book Planted, by Patrick Mason. And he has—right on the very, I think, second page of the book—he talks about members who feel "shut off or squeezed out." And we don't have time to talk about the "shut off" part, but, but the "squeezed out" part, I found really interesting. He said, "Oftentimes our squeezed out sisters and brothers fully embrace the basic principles and ordinances of the gospel. But sometimes they feel alienated by things like the dominant political conservatism among the members., or the sense that church membership is an all-or-nothing proposition…..Some people who can bear testimony of all the basic principles of the restored gospel but who disagree with certain aspects of the dominant social,cultural, economic, political, or ideological viewsheld by most other members sometimes feel that their presence is unwelcome, or that the things that they feel strongly about are not only dismissed but in some ways held in suspicion by fellow members. Feeling isolated, alienated, and sometimes pressured they sense that there is simply no place for them in the church in spite of their core commitments. And they leave us.”
S: A-men!
C: Squeezed out. That's what he calls "squeezing out."
S: Squeezed out, yeah. And when we blame people for whom church is difficult, we're showing them the door, right? No matter what it is, whether it's doubt, or life circumstances, or a shift in belief, or they're struggling with, you know, some of the aspects of the social, cultural, political—all of those kinds of things—whether it's that, whether people are in challenging family situations...there are a million reasons that people are in the struggle. Whatever it is that comes up that might put space between someone and the church, when we continually insist that, "If you're doing it right then, you know, ________ will happen for you," then the subtext really is, "It works for me! So, it should work for you."
C: Absolutely.
S: And that's the end of the conversation, unfortunately.
C: It really is! There's no room on the bench. You know, I kind of have this visual of, if there's room for all of us in the pews, we just kind of keep squeezing these people until they fall off the end of the bench.
S: Exactly. And I just want to know why can't we just bring more benches? Could somebody please bring more chairs? Is there a limit then the number of people that we can sit in this meeting? Because I think that there's not meant to be that limit, but it does feel very much like we place it sometimes. And it can be as simple as, you know, shutting down a comment that someone makes, that shows that they see something just a little bit differently. Closing the windows to avoid any of that fresh air getting in.
C: Here are some beautiful words by Joseph Smith. And he said, "If I esteem mankind to be an error, shall I bear them down? No, I will lift them up and in their own way too, if I can not persuade them that my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way."
S: I absolutely love that. And you know, the thing that I love the most in it—he words that I love the most? "I will lift them up and in their own way, too." I think that's amazing! I'm not going to lift them up in my way. I'm happy enough to lift them up in their way. Lifting! You know, that's what I believe, bottom line, we're meant to do as disciples. It's what I believe church exists for, is so that we have a specific time and place every week that we can be dedicated lifters, and lift everyone who's in that building. We lift each other. And that is a different thing from, you know, reminding someone that there's a height requirement, and then expecting them to somehow get themselves up to meet it.
C: Right.
S: But that's more like what our Sunday meetings can feel like sometimes. "Here's the line! Get yourself there." A height requirement that feels impossible from where someone is sitting, you know, can really lead to hopelessness. And that is the opposite —the opposite of what we're going for. That does not lead to faith—to the development of faith—which is the other thing that we're meeting together to accomplish. And, you know, when it comes to our church experience, in my opinion, no lift = feeling like there is no love. If we receive no lift on Sunday, we don't go away feeling loved.
S: So how, in Jesus' church—it's a supreme irony to me that this is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—how do we fail to meet people where they are, at His church? How do we fail to lift them or show love? It's crazy when you kind of step back and consider it that way. We have talked about on the podcast before the research that shows that judgment—feeling judged—is a huge reason, the number one reason I believe, that women are leaving the Church. And that is telling!
C: It's sad! It's so sad because it is so telling!
S: It's incredibly sad, yes. Because it tells something about us, Cynthia.
C: Right! That's about right.
S: That we're not doing so well at our job. We're failing.
C: That's on my shoulders.
S: It's on my shoulders as well. It's absolutely on mine as well.
And there are probably a million sneaky and subtle ways that we do it—that we make people feel judged. Because I don't think it's that—okay, I'm not gonna say that, there probably are times where people are explicit in their judgments. Where someone says, "Why are you wearing that? You shouldn't be doing this or that." You know, I think that that definitely happens, but I think that the kind of, sort of creeping, sneaky, seeping judgment that eventually builds up and encourages someone to choose being out of the church as the easier option than being in it and facing those feelings every week, I think that it's a lot more subtle things than that.
C: Oh, I totally agree.
S: Yeah. And those are the things that we're probably all participating in, you know, without really meaning to, or even realizing that we're doing it.
C: Well we don't mean to...we're nice people, Susan!
S: We are nice people, Cynthia, but we need to make our outcomes fit our intentions better. I am convinced, because we are the world's nicest—I'm going to use air quotes on that, can I use air quotes?—we're the "nicest" people! And I mean, I really think we are also generally nice people without the air quotes, but there is something about the air quotes "nice" that has an insidious side to it. And that's where the judgment comes in.
C: Well, one way I think we fail to meet people where they're at at church—and this is number one for me—I have felt often that my comments are policed at church. I just shared an example. Teaching my little Sunday school class, and I felt like I was policed a little bit. So we had a social media post where we had the Brene Brown quote that we love, and that we've read before on the podcast, about true belonging.
And we had a listener leave a comment, and she said this: "I've never really felt like I belonged at church. So when I was called to be Relief Society president several months ago, I made it a point to really be myself, to talk about the things I struggle with and about my very nuanced beliefs, hoping to make a space where everyone can feel they belong. Yesterday, I led a discussion in Relief Society about belonging and fitting in that came partly from this quote, and shared some of the ways that I had always felt that I didn't belong, including not being "a good Mormon woman" because my husband and I were sealed six years after we were married, rather than being married in the temple. Halfway through the lesson, following the discussion, a woman said, 'No offense to what you just said before, but I've been stewing about this. And I just have to say, I want my daughter to have role models that DO marry in the temple.' I just sat there and thought, 'Even as Relief Society president, it's still so hard to 'belong' at church.'"
S: Oh! if you could see my pained expression on my face right now, Cynthia!
C: It's the worst!
S: That story is the worst.
C: We were just talking a minute ago about how we're nice people and we don't intend to do things. And yet this one to me seems very intentional. To me there's really nothing subtle about that.
S: It is pretty hard to put a good spin on this one, I'm not gonna lie. But it's interesting to me as I just try to look at it from a bit more analytical perspective—I have to look at it and think, what is it in a culture that would cause a person to feel like this was an inappropriate response? Because if we can understand that, then we're getting it where the problem sits.
C: Fear.
S: We have this culture—we have something in our culture that made her think that was an okay response. And wow! We've got some work to do. Yeah, fear. It all comes down to fear, uh, self protection—of ourselves, the organization, all the things that we're on guard against for ourselves and our families, you know—it's definitely fear. Wow. That story is just amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that because when I read it online, I couldn't believe it. And so I'm really glad that you brought it to share because it needed a wider audience, I think.
C: Yeah, it's Exhibit A.
S: It is Exhibit A for this podcast.
C: Yeah, this is Exhibit A. This is how we show people the door—is cruelty. I'm just going to call that cruel. To already talk about something so vulnerable and maybe an area of her life where maybe—I don't want to put words in our listeners mouth, but a mistake, you know—maybe she felt like it was a mistake that they didn't get married in the temple?
S: Well, she obviously feels something about it, right? She felt, "not a good Mormon woman," because she was sealed six years after she was married. So, I mean, yeah, she didn't hit the ideal.
C: Right.
S: And uh, had feelings about that—
C: And then to be shamed for it right there—
S: Got shamed for it—
C: In Relief Society.
S: Ouch, ouch! But it's really valuable. I think, to see that last line there: "Even as a Relief Society president, it's still so hard to belong at church." I think there's great truth there. I think that it doesn't really matter necessarily what calling you have, or how popular you are—are you in the clique, are you out, whatever—
C: Good point.
S: I don't know that that always kind of determines how you feel personally about your experience at church, and do you receive the spiritual lift, really, that you're looking for there. I don't think that those things really determine that. So, you know, one of the things that, President Monson said that I love—and I don't hear him quoted very much, so I'm kind of glad to bring president Monson up, I don't think about him much anymore—but he said this: "Never let a problem to be solved, become more important than a person to be loved." He used that line in a talk and I just love it. I love that he said it, but I think we could substitute a whole lot of things for the word "problem" in that. Never let a program become more important. Never let a rule become more important. Never let a point of doctrine become more important. Never let an ideal that you're talking about in a Relief Society lesson become more important. Never let your own goal become more important. When our love speaks the loudest, that's what people will hear, but if they hear everything else first, then it doesn't matter how loud or how often we tell people we love them. They won't feel it. And in their hearts, they won't believe it.
C: I love those words by President Monson, and I love how you expanded them. And it makes me think of kind of a motto of mine that has been my motto for many years now. And it's that "Jesus only ever taught me to be a gatherer, never a sifter." So let's do that. Susan. Let's not be sifters. Let's be the doorstops. Let's—all of the great metaphors we used today. Let's do all those things to help everybody get the nourishment they need.
S: We can be better, Cynthia. We will be.
C: We can be. Thank you.
S: Thank you.