I came to the church by very non-conventional means so this isn’t meant to offend anyone and I hope it doesn’t. This is just my story, my testimony of how I came to love the Church.
I was baptized Episcopal but after the age of eight my family didn’t attend church. Where I grew up there were a lot of people who lived in my community but whom my biological mother (Debi) would not let me hang out with. They were called Mormons and if I made a Mormon friend I knew to keep my mouth shut about it.
Debi told me all kinds of tales about them. She said they wanted to convert everyone and that they thought the end of the world was coming and that only Mormons would be saved. She told me to stay away from them.
Then the Mormon Temple was built in Las Vegas and before they used it for services they had one night were it was open to all the Bishops and their families and they got to invite one non-Mormon family to come with them to see some of the inside. My father got the “golden ticket” in the form of a friend from work who really wanted to invite my dad.
For some reason Debi let us go, I still don’t know why. She told us however to only look at all the pretty things but not to listen to what the people said. We had to wear scrub covers over our shoes and stay in a single line as we walked through, careful not to go past the roped off areas.
For years that was pretty much my only Mormon experience. I had a few Mormon friends but I wasn’t allowed to get too close to them and all my other friends seemed to think that Mormons were weird and believed strange things. When I questioned my Mormon friends about some of their beliefs their answers always seemed sane and rational but I figured, as my brother in laws put it, they had had two hundred years to think them up.
Looking back he’s a Catholic priest now….hummmm….
But I continue…
I was very religious all through childhood, trying out Judaism, Native American spirituality and finally settling on Goddess worship for a long time. I grew a strong testimony of a Celestial Mother who loved us, cared for us and brought us great comfort.
When I was 18 I moved to Cedar City, UT with my first husband to go to college at Southern Utah University (SUU). Again, so many of my friends and family panicked about us “getting converted” that I steered clear of many people in the town – keeping to myself and feeling like an outcast.
I began to believe the “hype” about the Mormon community when my then husband lost his job for not being Mormon. We moved away soon thereafter and as I practiced my pagan ways I never much thought of Mormonism.
I went on to study home birth and felt a strong calling to be an activist for home birth, midwifery, unassisted home birth, breastfeeding and attachment parenting. I attended the Ancient Art Midwifery Institute and trained with local midwives – who were mostly, curiously enough, Mormon women.
Years later, after I had been a pagan/Goddess worshiper for about 7 years or so, I began to go through a healing reconnection with Christianity. I read the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (LeLoup) and meditated on an image of Yesau (Jesus) that appealed to me. I felt a deep stirring and reconnection with the balance of the Divine Masculine.
This reconnection began in December of 2003, shortly after the home birth of my son. In March my first husband and I divorced and I found myself moving to Cedar City, UT again for many reasons. First, it was only two hours from Vegas but felt like a world away, and second, the prices there had me renting a studio apartment for only $275 per month.
My intention was to live on my child support and stay at home with my son.
When the child support never materialized and things got really bad between my ex and I, I found myself very grounded and centered by the earth in Cedar City. I felt a deep connection with the land, the people, and even with their God. I never went to the LDS church while living there but I spent many days reading Mormon history books under trees on Cedar Mountain that I had found at the SUU library.
I felt like my soul had been detoxified while living in Cedar. Las Vegas is very hard on a person physically, emotionally and spiritually, and I have lived there for nearly 25 years. In Cedar however I ate fresh peaches, hiked the mountains, swam in the rivers and felt the best I had ever felt in my life. While sitting on the bank of the Cedar River one day I looked up at a red rock cliff and thought to myself – the Mormons are right – this is where God lives.
I was dating a man in Cedar who was what I would call a New Age Mormon. He would read me passage of the D and C, and show me pictures of the Jupiter Talisman Joseph use to where.
The first experience I had with Joseph Smith came in the form of reading a Freudian deconstruction of Joseph Smith. It was very well written and researched but its basic premise just didn’t sit well with me. It basically reviewed Joseph’s life and concluded that he was a classic narcissist with a mild Oedipus complex steaming from and overly attached mother and an old childhood injury. I didn’t at all agree with the author’s conclusion.
What I liked about the book was that it told very detailed stories of the life of Joseph Smith and I found myself very drawn to this man and his wife Emma. Once while reading the book at the park, my son sleeping in his stroller next to me, I felt someone standing in front of me. I looked up and saw two feet and a pair of trousers, as I shaded my eyes to look higher at this very tall figure it faded away.
A few nights later I found myself up all hours of the night throwing up regularly. I was extremely ill and as a single mother I was very worried about not being able to care for my very young son. In the middle of the night while lying in the bed soaked with fever I had an experience of praying to Joseph and asking for help.
I saw a burst of light and what I knowwhere healing Angels because I was cured right then and there. Previously I had viewed Joseph Smith as I had been taught to, as an ego driven co-artist, but I now knew him to be, to me, holding a quality and connection with the divine.
Now, were did I go from there? I didn’t believe in the current LDS church but something had drawn me very strongly to its founder. So I began to study the alternative stories about Joseph, Emma, and the church in general, in particular the works of D. Michael Quinn and the Tuscanos. After moving to California I happened to meet and fall in love with my current partner, Seth, an inactive Mormon whose father had started an alternative Gnostic church twenty some years ago and had advanced many alternative theories surrounding the Mormon faith.
By the time I began my studies for my Master’s degree in women’s spirituality at New College of California, San Francisco, I had incorporated a belief in Yeshua (Jesus), Mariamne (Mary Magdalene), Joseph and Emma into my spirituality. I never thought I would meet someone with similar beliefs or interests at New College but my very first day I met a woman in my program who was Mormon and had done much research into the divine feminine - I knew that meant something.
I went on to write my thesis about Mormonism and homebirth. I explored many alternative stories and interpretations of the gospels and fell in love with them. I still didn’t think the LDS church was where I was suppose to be though because I didn’t fall totally in-line with their teachings. I had issues about women not being in the priesthood, issues with Brigham Young, etc. but what I liked and believed about the church far out weighed what I didn’t however I was unsure how to get over the “humps” mentally. I considered being RLDS but they no longer believed in Heavenly Mother and it was crucial for me to have Heavenly Mother.
I continued to practice my hybrid Mormon-paganism for years and then in spring of '08 I was driving home and I was thinking about the LDS temples. I thought about how the ceremonies there were handed down to Joseph Smith from our Heavenly Parents. I then had this image of me outside of a temple and everyone else was inside and I was lonely and not making any progress being on the “outside.” The message I got from the vision was that here was this church, the LDS Church, that I agreed with about 90%. It was probably the largest church on earth with the concept of Heavenly Mother. Wasn’t I just being picky and stubborn by not at least giving them a better chance?
So prayed about it. Should I join the LDS church I wondered, was there a place for me there? After I prayed I dreamed about the Las Vegas temple, that same night I also dreamed about the LDS actor Kirby Heyborne. In the dream he was a return missionary and I had been waiting for him and so much love and joy filled my heart to see him come home. I woke up from that dream at peace. I didn’t feel like I needed to fight the church or change the church I was simply and very clearly being led to the Church.
My son Nykki was really having a lot of fun at the UU church we had been attending so I was reluctant at first to leave. I wanted him to like church. I, however, wasn’t being spiritually fulfilled by the UU church, even if, as I had justified it, Joseph Smith Sr. was a UUer. One day while driving home from UU church I was looking at the rolling hillsides and valleys. I thought back to the book I was reading (Maeve Chronicles by Elizabeth Cunningham) I thought about how Jesus had taught that the feast was here, and I really believed this world was such a feast. Nykki then said out of nowhere form the back seat; “I want to go to Emily’s church.” Which meant the Mormon Church.
When I got home I saw that Thomas S. Monson had given a speech that day or the day before which essentially invited those astray to come to the church, that the feast was lain, and to taste the fruits of life with the Saints. It was an incredible sign especially since I wasn’t sure how I felt about the presidency of the church at the time. So I started to go to my local ward every week instead of sporadically as I had been.
I recognized that the leaders of the church, although all white men, were men called of God. All the priesthood holders in the church carried a lineage that was traceable back to Joseph Smith and even if in my ideal world the church would have taken a slightly different direction after Joseph’s death – that I had to be where the priesthood was because it was so important in my life and is such a blessed connection to our first prophet, our Lord and our Heavenly Father.
The signs just exploded from there. I would think about garments and my friend would mention she wears them and then another friend would mention she just started wearing them again (not friends from church either by the way), a woman mentioned Mother Gaia in GP class, I prayed to know how to help the people of Myanmar and then saw the church was on it helping them already. I would wonder about the church’s position on homosexuals and then hear that Elder D. Todd Christopherson (whom I was drawn to immediately) has a gay brother and he even chose the word “spouse” to describe his brother’s life partner. It just goes on and on.
I was baptized on July 5th of 2008 and confirmed on the 6th. I feel for the first time like I want to just *be* and not worry about some of the finer details that bother me but just learn and grown and teach my children because the LDS church is the truest church (to me) there is on earth so that’s where I need to be.
Update: 2009
I could no longer attend church after the LDS church's insane support of Prop 8 here in California. Getting involved in the politics of Babylon as well as raising church money to discriminate and historical resend rights for an entire group of people, was a direct violation of the D and C, of the commandments we have received from our Heavenly Parents. I am currently attending church on fast Sunday but that is all. I'm not sure where my Mormonism is headed but I am enjoying my local circle groups, and strive to live deep Mormonism in my home everyday with out all the gay bashing I find in the current church.
