By Linda Hamilton

(This was originally published on Linda’s personal Substack, and she is sharing it with the wider Exponent II audience.)

It’s a little too warm to be sitting on this bench at the park dressed in my Sunday best. At least I wore my pants and flats today. The long walk out of the stake center doors, around the building, and up to the park next door would’ve been harder in heels and a skirt.

Down the hill, church goes on for its second hour. The kids in primary, the youth in classes, the men in Elder’s Quorum and the women in Relief Society. But I’m at the park. Not to climb up the slides or relax for a picnic, but to get out. To cry without an audience or a request to talk about it.

Maybe to find God outside of the scratchy, carpeted walls that choke Her voice and demand Her silence.

My silence.

The silence of compliance. Of Sunday school answers and lesson manual responses. Of order and fear.

I’m messy. I sit on the margins of the Mormon existence. I’m forced to swallow my objections or questions because whenever I say them out loud I’m spoken over, corrected, or benevolently acknowledged then ignored.

Because Mormonism doesn’t like messiness, or gray areas, or diversity. When I speak aloud my hard-earned truths––lived experiences solidified by my flesh and blood––they quickly patch up the holes my reality tears into their flimsy walls. Walls that keep them safe because they don’t have to truly look outside them or question what’s within them. They may smile and agree that it’s hard or that there’s space for all of us, but then they slam the door on further thought or discussion. They push me further into the corner.

So today I’m sitting on a park bench instead of sitting in the slippery metal folding chairs. I know I could make my comments and they would “accept” them, but no one would truly hear them. No one would really want to acknowledge that something might not be picture perfect in the gospel for everyone. My chest ached before the lesson even started. As soon as the opening prayer finished, tears welled in my eyes, and for once, I just didn’t want to have to deal with it. Justify it. 

Talk about it with someone who fundamentally wouldn’t actually try to understand me because they start from the perspective that the church is unquestionably right no matter what.

And I’m just tired. Tired of forcing myself into boxes and prescribed roles. Tired of the lip service to diversity and inclusion. Tired of carrying the weight of my frustrations alone because the people who covenanted to mourn with me are scared on a cellular level of my faith expansion catching or revealing what they don’t want to know.

I can’t stop thinking, staring at the steeple of the hacienda-style stake center below, that there has to be a better way than this. How could God be so exclusive, demanding, and unwilling to bend? So patriarchal and hierarchical? So unwelcoming and uncaring? Where is Jesus in the idol worship of temples, of prophets, of covenants as the supreme pinnacles of religion instead of loving one another?

I can’t help but imagine Jesus would be sitting out here with me on a park bench instead of inside that beige building. That He too hates transactional worship and copy/paste answers. That He’s more concerned about the woman in the red shoes hiding in the park than He is about quotes from Russell Nelson about “thinking celestial.”

The breeze winds through my hair and across my wet cheeks. Maybe I’m sitting on this bench with my Mother—the One who also isn’t allowed to raise a comment or question that might break down a piece of the patriarchy infused into the cinder block walls and varnished pulpit. What if She hates the obsession with surface-level answers and male gods as much as I do, so now She sits on this park bench because the church down the hill is too suffocating?

Why have we cast our God out of our midst?

And why do I seem to be the only one who cares that She’s sitting on a park bench instead of in the pews?

I don’t want your platitudes, your lip service, your suggestions that I just actually don’t understand. Because I do. I do understand. I was raised in this water and even though it’s drowning me, I’m still here, clinging on. I’m trying so desperately to grow and become, but the swirling eddies want me to stay down, small and unquestioning.

I want to feast again, to delight in fatness. I want to feel that I belong even with my differences and be allowed to speak, teach, and pray just like everyone else. I want to know that I can share my messy thoughts without censure. I want to grow, stretch, and push without being labeled as a problem.

Church is over now and I must leave this bench. I walk back down the hill, hoping no one will see me or question why I’m walking into the parking lot instead of emerging from the double doors. Because I just don’t want to talk about it knowing no one will truly listen without trying to solve the problem or convert me to the “right” way of seeing things. I love my sisters and brothers in our ward, who I know mean well and want the best for me. But deep inside, I know they don’t want to face my ugly truths.

It’s easier to be small, to be quiet, to say the right answers that won’t raise an eyebrow or start a chain of responses that drown out the nuanced point I tried to make. But today I couldn’t go through the motions, couldn’t pretend that was enough to feed my soul. I couldn’t sit through another lesson on covenants and temples trying not to scream out loud.

And so I left. Crying and red-eyed. Praying no one would notice.

Somedays, maybe church on a park bench is better than the alternative.

Linda is a historical fiction writer and history grad student living in California. Her debut book, The Fourth Wife: A Mormon Gothic, comes out in 2026 from Kensington Books. She/Her. IG/Tiktok: @lindahamiltonwriter / Substack: lindahamiltonwriter.substack.com

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