by Candice Wendt
I used to have walls of superiority and certainty built up around me. I believed I performed better in the premortal life than most other people around me. In exchange for my valiance, God granted me a life in the one true faith. My religion gave me access to mysteries of the universe that felt like a wonderful secret others didn’t know.
I brought proselytizing motives frequently into friendships and acquaintanceships. The desire to convince others of my worldview motivated a lot of my social behaviors. I saw non-LDS peoples’ lives as inadequate without the restored gospel.
Sad things were often not as troubling to me as they seemed to my non-member relations because I asserted that in the long run, everything was going to be okay. I didn’t know how to sit in questioning or mourning with others, even within my faith group.
I assumed my neighbor who lost his testimony must have fallen into sinful behavior. I blamed others’ personal faults for them leaving the faith. When I talked to these people, I secretly hoped I could do or say something to bring them back.
Across my walls, genuine sharing didn’t happen much because I assumed I knew better than others. When friends shared about spiritual searching, I looked down on them as one-down from me.
I showed up as a Latter-day Saint first. This layer of my identity dominated my intentions and responses. Sometimes friends became aware of this and withdrew. Others perhaps thought I was just more keen on social connection than I actually was.
I don’t think I was consistently a poor friend or that I didn’t care about other people. But as I look back, I was too interested in manipulating others’ beliefs to become more like my own. I wish I had learned at an earlier age to truly respect and love individuals who are religiously and spiritually different from me.
Teachings that my religion was superior and also a signal of God’s favor proved harmful; these things are what constructed my walls. I now see these ideas as contrary to Christ’s teachings, including his commandment to love our neighbors just as we love ourselves. I assume the people who taught me these things did so because they wanted me to feel special, empowered, and safe and confident in my faith. I don’t want to blame them, but now I can see the blind spots and hazards that come with such approaches. It’s something to move forward and away from.
Both spirituality and relationships are better without such walls.
A few years ago my walls started deteriorating. A few big changes in my life were instrumental in this. My kids started reaching adolescence and thinking more independently, LDS women in my life started sharing their experiences of faith perplexity, and I started doing interfaith work professionally in an urban center where Latter-day Saints are about one in a thousand.
At first it felt like my religious self was dying. It felt horrible to accept that church wasn’t striking much of a chord with my kids. As I supported a friend undergoing a faith crisis sparked by the details of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, it was awful to finally study this history at length myself. And it was difficult to start doing spiritual work in a place where my faith tradition was bizarre and obscure to most people.
Through all this, I didn’t lose my faith. In fact, I had powerful faith-based spiritual experiences during this period. My spiritual faculties expanded, both those related to pleasant emotions and more difficult ones. As Matthew Wickman describes in his spiritual memoir Life to the Whole Being, as we work to develop our spiritual sensibilities more, this not only increases our capacities for joy and fulfillment, but also enhances our capacities to connect with others and to care about them and their pain, as well as to better see our own limitations and other truths about ourselves (pgs. 66-68).
My fences of superiority falling down has let me love and support others in ways I could not envision or enact before. For the first time in my life, I have shown up as human first, everything else second. Just a fellow struggling person who cares about others’ inner lives and circumstances. Showing up this way has enabled moments of great care and connection.
An acquaintance told me about the day his dad told him that neither Santa Claus or God were real. We talked about the grief and existential fear he felt, and how since that day he hasn’t found a way to have faith. I felt love for him sitting with him in what he experienced spiritually.
A connection of mine flew across the continent to support her girlfriend while the girlfriend’s mother passed after her fight with cancer. The partner’s family treated them with disrespect and exclusion due to them being a same-sex couple. I felt love for her as I validated the complex emotions and situations she went through during that difficult time.
A Muslim man joined my team. I felt the strong spirit of kindness and intelligence he brought. We had wonderful conversations about life and faith and he taught me a little about Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam.
I started having thoughtful and sometimes humorous conversations with friends who have left the LDS faith community without needing to judge them and bring any ulterior motives. I started validating my kids’ concerns about religion and stopped having an agenda for their spiritual lives. This brought us closer together and they told me they felt more loved by me.
A Chinese student who was once converted to Christianity by American missionaries but then became critical of the faith due to blindspots and problems with colonialism wrote me a letter telling me how despite our different cultural backgrounds, our conversations made her feel tightly connected with me as two two people with similar personalities and hearts.
A young man came to the multi-faith space I work in and described how in-between spaces that affirm the value of spiritual searching are sacred to him. He said half of his family is atheist and the other half orthodox Jewish, he is the only one right in the middle of the two. The orthodox Jewish half rejected him because he is gay. The other half couldn’t understand why he spent time studying Jewish texts and symbols. As we shared experiences from our lives, I felt a strong spirit of understanding between us. He gifted me a watercolor painting of pine trees he painted himself that made me think of some of my first spiritual experiences as a young child playing in forests in the Pacific Northwest.
Never has being yoked with Christ been so light. Never before have I as meek, kind, or humble. My heart is no longer walled up; now it can stretch however widely may be needed to imagine and embrace the totality of human yearnings and spiritual experiences. None of this has required forfeiting or compromising my ongoing Latter-day Saint identity, faith, or spirituality– to the contrary, the transformation has expanded and refined my capacities to love and reach others as a follower of Jesus.
I can see my efforts to bridge ideological and other divides with love can do much more good to help the Church in its work to help God’s children through their mortal journeys than my old walled-up stance of superiority ever did.
Now that the walls have fallen, I love seeing that despite differences, we’re all in this experience of being human together. We are all facing comparable fascinating and rewarding questions about what it means to be alive, how to find meaning, and how to live and love. How joyful it is to come to truly believe and feel that God is just as loving toward and invested in people of all walks of life as God is toward me. How wonderful to finally find space to stretch out my hands to others.
Candice Wendt is a staff member of McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and a contributing https://exponentii.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/IMG_5173-scaled-1.jpg at Wayfare. She holds a Master’s degree from BYU in comparative humanities studies. She is an introvert who became friendly by speaking and performing music at church and doing missionary work :).
11 Responses
This brought to mind a moment in high school when I was talking about church with a non-religious friend and I very proudly said, “We have the nicest church in town.” And she responded something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t that money be better spent doing things like helping people?” Yeah, I shut up very quickly. Because the church’s money could be better spent. And more importantly, why did I feel the need to brag about my superiority? I don’t think I was actively thinking, “I am better than you because of my church,” but there must have been something going on that made me feel the need to flex like that. When it just could not have mattered less.
Since I’ve become more open-minded, I’ve found it’s easy to find spirituality everywhere. I had a moment in the Parthenon once; I was so moved by the devotion to their goddess that led the ancient Athenians to build this beautiful temple that has stood now for a few thousand years. Recognizing that people find spirituality or connection through so many avenues has enabled me to find spirituality in so many ways.
Yes, this kind of thing! One of my LDS connections had an awkward conversation with someone at work. She was trying to convince a colleague that she knew the God lived and she knew what would happen after we die. The colleague kept saying, well that’s nice, but we’re going to just have to wait and see until we die. The LDS lady had trouble understanding why the other lady couldn’t validate her world view or take her sense of certainty seriously. Church culture and teachings had prepared her poorly to have these kinds of interfaith exchanges!
I love how you articulate how as our definitions of spirituality and beauty expand, this expands our spiritual sensibilities and sensitivity and we can find beauty, goodness, and truth in things that are outside religion and our personal faith traditions. I have a lot of spiritual insights while reading literature. I just read Middlemarch by George Elliot. It’s by someone who had lost all faith and who is criticizing rigid patriarchal religion. I consider a very spiritual book with beautiful insights into women’s spiritual desires (in Dorothea’s character).
I used to think that everyone I met probably just knew there was something special about me (the gospel!), and that’s why people thought I was nice. (Turns out, I’m just nice! 😅) I wonder now how many times I was just annoying to people when I thought I was going to be part of their conversion story.
I remember taking the YM and YW on a service scavenger hunt where we were supposed to also give out a Book of Mormon. I tried so, so hard to get an inactive neighbor to take it, and he was trying so, so hard to be nice to me while telling me to take my teenagers and get the heck off of his porch. I’ve always wanted to go back on time and apologize for that moment.
I think we all have those moments that play on repeat in our brains!
I am sympathy cringing for you both imagining that moment and reflecting on similar moments. It’s such a facepalm moment now, but at the time–totally normal! This is what we do!
When I think back on the really good conversations I’ve had about the gospel, they’ve been with real friends, not maybe-I-can-convert-you friends, and there has been no agenda. We were just talking about interesting things. I’ve actually invited a lot of people to church activities, talked with them about the church, answered questions, probably even given a Book of Mormon or two away, and they were excellent experiences. Not a single one of those people joined the church, I never invited them to, but I felt safe bringing them into that part of my life, and they felt safe accepting those invitations, because there was no undercurrent of “maybe this is the magical seventh contact with the church that will change everything!”
Yes, this story is a great example! I am facepalming thinking of how as a young adult, I was at a church history site and I wrote down the name of my best friend from high school on one of their missionary contact cards they pushed us to fill out. They called her and she was really offended. That was basically the end of our friendship. It sucks. I wish I had learned to be a more sensitive more differentiated friend. That’s not unreasonable for a young adult’s development. I wish church hadn’t encouraged me to be so self-righteous and obsessed with religious identity and beliefs.
Also, Abby I like how you bring up how we were taught this idea that because we were Mormon we radiated with some kind of magical spiritual light and goodness that was visible to others. They would be drawn to us and want to know why we’re different and then join the church. I like how you take credit for your own kindness! I agree. While I do think being a Latter-day Saint has helped me be a more other-oriented person, and I do think the holy ghost is a real spiritual gift, these narratives seem mostly delusional and manipulative to me now. All God’s children have light and goodness that radiates out. We’re not unique in that way. And the holy ghost is with other people too.
Oh I can relate. It’s funny/sad how much of my thinking was conditional. Like, “oh if I’m nice to this person it will change their life and they will want to join the church.” When really it should have just been, “I’m being nice to this person because they are a fellow human being.”
Yes! The ulterior motives. They taint the love. I think I used to (most unconsciously) really want my ego and worldview to be validated by others joining the church. If this happened with people I knew and invited, I would know it was really all true if others felt that way too without being raised in the church. Sometimes this actually happened. Sometimes I think God was involved. But I feel now that my motives distorted things for me. Things got complicated when a couple of my Buddhist friends joined the church after I invited them to hear the missionaries. I had felt inspired to do this. They had joyful experiences joining the church. But after that, they felt very conflicted between their new and old spiritual identities and values. They didn’t feel they could reconcile them or be both at once. They stopped being involved. And I saw that everything with spirituality and religious identity and beliefs and proselyting frameworks was so much more complicated than I had thought.
These sentences brought tears to my eyes: “Never has being yoked with Christ been so light. Never before have I as meek, kind, or humble. My heart is no longer walled up; now it can stretch however widely may be needed to imagine and embrace the totality of human yearnings and spiritual experiences.” Yes! Thank you.
Thank you for the feedback, Ruth! Freedom to love without restraint brings so much joy.
Fifty plus years ago, I was a group leader on a college-age youth exchange in Switzerland. I had several young women in the group who were curious about the LDS church. One of our group was an African-American young woman. Somehow the conversation got around to skin color and I gave a very naive, pat answer, about God cursing the descendants of one of Noah’s sons. The young African-American woman spoke up quietly and plainly said she did not believe in a God who would do that. I did not have an answer in return, but I have thought about that experience for much of my life forward and determined that I did not believe in a God who would do that either. I think this exchange helped me to begin to look at all people through a more welcoming, discovering lens and not one where being judgmental was my first measurement. I have not been perfect at it. But I have had some marvelous experiences with so many people — some of which I have no idea about their spiritual beliefs — finding that out was not the main value of our association. And the most spiritual experience I have ever had was at a conference honoring older or Crone women. We were in a session where two or three women were having major struggles and they had asked for us to listen and support them in working through these struggles. The exchanges were open, scary, heart-felt and the energy in that room was marvelous. I have felt some very spiritual moments in the temple, in sacrament meeting, the birth of my daughter, and in times with friends. But this one, where we were all open, all supportive, all vulnerable was by far the most spiritual and most enriching. Thank you, Candice, for your reflective blog.