My son, husband, and I traveled through Switzerland last month. From the 72 waterfalls in the Lauterbrunnen Valley to the piercing blue lakes and rivers to the Coca-Cola bottles filled with fresh milk for sale at Honesty Shops, Switzerland awed and delighted us again and again. But for me, it was the churches that wouldn’t leave me alone.
In every Swiss town we explored, there was at least one church, the steeples rising high above the tiled roofs and the bells tolling every fifteen minutes, gently pulling my attention and my feet to the disparate doors of the stucco or stone churches, some of them over 1,000 years old.
The church doors were always unlocked, anyone could enter. I am unfamiliar with the Protestant religion, having been LDS my whole life, and was amazed to find a small candle station within each church where small votive candles sat next to a box of matches and a tin holding a few Swiss francs. Sometimes a candle or two flickered, but usually, the candle wicks were white with wax and waiting.
My son and husband acquiesced, sat in the pews, and made faces at the stained glass windows that depicted skeletons and death while I lit candles and placed one Swiss Franc per candle in the tin. I didn’t pray but liked leaving a flame and a franc wherever I went in Switzerland. The whole country looks like a fairy tale and I started to imagine I was in one.
We often stumbled into a church just as the rain started pouring down the cobblestone streets and I couldn’t help but feel embraced by the high-ceilinged architecture. The Swiss churches in my fairy tale started calling to me, saying, “Find shelter here.” Each chapel held history written in the colorful windows, benches, statues, and wood carvings and many surprised me with depictions of ancient women. I felt like the churches were saying, “You belong here. Place your grief here. Light this candle. There is comfort here.”
I constantly searched for the spires that reached up in the air, waving at weary women searching for a home, history, and hope. It became my ritual to open the heavy doors and light a candle as we waited out the rain; The spires symbolized a place that would hold me as I am, leading me to the doors that were always open to the rich, the poor, the sinners, the women – all, come. Take a seat. Light a candle in the still silence. Rest.
But then I went to a service and I wish I hadn’t.
I wish I could have lived in the fairy tale that I designed to include me, but I stumbled into a service where for the first time the doors were locked and a man stood at a pulpit in his vestments chanting Latin with his congregants. It was fascinating but the literal image at the pulpit landed like a stone in my imagination, halting all creativity and belonging. The organized chanting of men’s words made me remember it wasn’t for me.
The scene forced me back to reality – a reality where Christian clothes and rules and rituals and buildings and language and beliefs aren’t mine. I don’t belong. I didn’t know the language or when to stand or sit or leave. I was a thief in the night, stealing beauty and meaning and shelter that didn’t belong to me.
I’d created these stories for myself and maybe they are as true as any other story and maybe that sermon was transcendent and all I needed to know was Latin, but I did this with Mormonism, too. I told myself stories about what I saw – and it was so beautiful. I made God look like me. However, when I spoke, or taught, or wrote letters, or shared my stories, bishops, counselors, and prophets corrected me, told me that the church is not what I pretend it to be. “We are the fairy tale makers,” they said. Not me.
I’d created a world where I belonged in Mormonism, where scriptures are literature and people create meaning and Heavenly Mother is who I want her to be. But then I walked in and found a man at the pulpit and people chanting in another language that I didn’t understand and I realized that I am a stranger here.
No wonder I was searching for another home, any place that wanted me. But perhaps the only place where I belong is the place I create myself.
*Featured image by Daniel Cox on Unsplash. All other photos were taken by the author.
9 Responses
We a need a cultural shift that equally values the “Liahona Path” (where God leads individuals in small groups) and the “Iron Rod Path” aka the “Covenant Path” (where people lead in the direction they perceive is God).
The newly discovered irony in Nephi’s words is that the “Liahona Path” is what Nephi concretely says happened. Nephi and family found an item they attributed to be from God specifically to direct them day-by-day. The “Iron Rod Path” is specifically found in a meaning-saturated dream. So we are focused in a sense on “chasing a dream” when we “hold to the iron rod”.
But I hadn’t heard heard of the “Liahona Path” until well into my faith transition – well past the point where it would have been useful to have that understanding, and to have that aspiration validated culturally.
This is beautiful. Thank you. I am a “Liahona path” person who found the LDS doors to meaning constantly locked. Thank you for sharing.
I think that my “Liahona Path” paralleled the “Covenant Path” for a very long time. Our paths diverged slowly as my lived experience didn’t fit the “Covenant Path” properly.
I was one of thousands of women who “presided and provided in their home” because I wanted to do so, someone needed to do so, and because my husband does not know how to preside properly, has limited capacity to do so, and has no desire to do so.
It isn’t my place into shaming my husband into being someone he is not.
It isn’t my place to let others shame my husband indirectly by focusing on what he “isn’t doing” or “isn’t being” to me and to members of my family. This matters to me to the point where I got a counselor instead of using my female friends or family members when I needed to process and brainstorm what I do because “he isn’t because he can’t” as a basic courtesy to my husband and to those loved ones.
It is my place to preside proactively so that his attempts to preside do not threaten our family’s mental or emotional safety. It is my place to contribute to “turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers” as we recover from common traumas that were hand-waved over in the handbook.
There is no wording that I can see in our church culture and family constructs (and to a degree in our doctrine) that explicitly validates our lived experience in this area – and that matters to me.
Lived experience is usually the catalyst for divergence in a rigid, fundamental religion. Thanks for sharing about your lived experience with your husband and family.
It deeply matters that your experience is not voiced or validated in your church and culture. Sending love.
I also did a church tour (but in Utah, so not as exotic for me), trying to find places that I’d magically for into – but in the end I never found that perfect place. I think you’re right, and it has to be a place we create for ourselves. (Let’s build our own Lady Village of Spiritually and we can hang out together there all the time!)
And we’ll build it too look exactly like a fairy tale village, too!
Let’s do it! Thanks, Abby Hansen.
It sounds lovely.
However, we’d need a garden part that shifts into a more modern/simplistic aesthetic that drifts into looking like that air chapel in the desert in San Diego:)
Completely agree. You perfectly surmised what I felt all my life, even when I stumbled upon an LDS church.