Wait, You Can Do That?
I continued studying, wondering, questioning and occasionally freaking out over my spiritual shake up.
Seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.
Doctrine & Covenants 88:118
I continued studying, wondering, questioning and occasionally freaking out over my spiritual shake up. In addition to reading the scriptures, I read several very impactful books that spring and summer. There are dozens of dog-eared pages, highlighted and underlined passages in each book, marking words that touched me or taught me something new. Here are my thoughts and insights from each book.
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
I learned about the book Me and White Supremacy1 sometime in 2020, when many people were talking about how white people really needed to get educated about systemic racism, white supremacy and violence towards people of color. I wanted to learn. I wanted to learn with other white people, to discuss the issues and topics together. In spring of 2021, I gathered about a dozen friends and family members to meet once a week over Zoom, to discuss the book, chapter by chapter.
Saad wrote with a direct, clear voice, explaining terms and history, and always pushing the reader towards action. I love the subtitle of the book: “Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor. “This book is part education, part activation.”
Saad asked some very important questions right off the bat:
In what ways do I hold white privilege?
What negative experiences has your white privilege protected you from throughout your life?
What positive experiences has your white privilege granted you throughout your life (that BIPOC generally don’t have)?
In what ways have you wielded your white privilege over BIPOC that have done them harm (whether intentional or not)?
What have you learned about your white privilege that makes you uncomfortable?
Let me tell you, it was uncomfortable, as is any work when you have to take a close look at your own behaviors, biases and actions.
It brought back a memory of something that happened in May 2020.
Josh and I and the kids were driving up I-5 to visit family in Vancouver. At one point, a car just ahead of us veered sharply to the right and hit the concrete barrier, and stopped on the side of the freeway. We immediately pulled over to see if we could help. Josh and I walked over and talked to the four young black people in the car, who were ok, but a little rattled. They were on their way to their aunt’s house in Vancouver and then something weird happened with the car. The car was obviously damaged and they wouldn’t be able to keep driving it.
Josh pulled out his phone to call 911, telling the driver that he was going to report the accident and get the kids medical help. Just as he told the driver this, she got really stressed and begged him not to call the cops. Josh assured her that he wanted to make sure they got the help they needed.
The driver and her passengers were adamant. “Please don’t call the cops.” It was like an automatic fear came into their bodies. A fear that Josh and I could not comprehend. After talking about it some more, Josh put his phone away and we offered to drive them to their aunt’s house and that’s what we did.
As privileged white people, we didn’t see at the time what the big deal was about calling the cops.
Those kids just wanted to avoid further trouble and go visit their aunt.
Now you may think, what if they were real criminals and that’s why they were afraid of the police. I highly doubt it. But even when a black person gets pulled over for something minor like expired car insurance or a fender bender, it can still be terrifying when they are approached by the police.
As I read the book, I reflected on that experience with those young black people and how my white privilege shields me from the fear they likely experience on a regular basis.
I have been so clueless about white supremacy and institutional racism. Learning from Me and White Supremacy and discussing topics with the group was very eye opening.
One of the most important things I learned: Being nice isn’t enough. I need to be anti-racist.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
I read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.2 It is a beautiful and powerful book. I find it hard to describe the book in a way that matches its impact. The author just has this way… of writing about the interconnectedness of nature, animals, humans, indigenous wisdom and science.
In the preface it reads:
So I offer…a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world. This braid is woven from three strands: Indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabek scientist trying to bring them together in service to what matters most.
The chapter Asters and Goldenrod really struck me, and not just because my oldest child is named Aster. Kimmerer writes about the yearly pattern of the Canada Goldenrod and New England Asters. “The daisy like fringe of purple petals surround a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod….The visual effect is stunning.”
She wondered why they always grew together. You’ll have to read the book to find out.
I read about her connection and kinship with the natural world. And kinship it is, as indigenous people use the “grammar of animacy”: referring to plants and animals with the same grammar they would with human family.
She wrote about sweetgrass being both a healer of broken land and a spiritual healer, about reciprocity, a gift economy, gratitude for the Earth and our need for connection with the earth.
As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.
Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.
The thought that Mother Earth loves me back and can heal me touched me deeply. I felt a renewed desire to connect with her and ask her to heal me. I began the occasional practice of lying in the cool grass in the front yard whenever I felt really anxious or on the verge of a panic attack. It calms and centers me. Even just taking my shoes off, standing in the grass for a few moments and taking deep breaths is helpful. I just gotta be careful where I step. Because, you know, dog poop.
Sister Outsider; Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
I created a protest sign for the Women’s March in January 2017 using one of Audre Lorde’s most popular quotes: “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.”
But I hadn’t actually read any of her writings. So I bought Sister Outsider3.
Audre was a black lesbian feminist, poet, teacher and activist during the 1970s and 1980s. Sister Outsider is a collection of fifteen essays and speeches, about sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, oppression, growth and more.
Her words impacted me, in the way I think about racism, sexism, anger and the erotic.
The chapter named “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” is powerful.
She starts the chapter talking about her own anger towards racism.
Women responding to racism means women responding to anger; the anger of exclusion, of unquestioned privilege, of racial distortions, of silence, ill-use, stereotyping, defensiveness, misnaming, betrayal, and co-optation.
She also writes about how infuriating it is that black women are often told that their expressions of rage are “useless and disruptive” and if they just calmed down then maybe white folks would listen.
She then speaks about her anger and what she has learned from it:
Anger is loaded with information and energy.
We cannot allow our fear of anger to deflect us nor seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty.
Hatred and anger are different.
I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.
For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth.
Lorde’s insights really struck me, because frankly, I have avoided anger my whole life. Anger is not Christlike. You can’t solve problems if you have anger. Contention is of the devil. Anger causes you to commit other horrible sins, like Cain killing Abel. Anger makes other people uncomfortable. It’s better to be meek and turn the other cheek. Angry women are not attractive.
I didn’t like feeling anger towards the church because well, I’m taught not to. They all mean well. But here I was, in the midst of a spiritual storm, full of anger towards the church. I was scared of it at first. I was ashamed of it. I hid my anger from most everyone because no one else around me seemed as upset as I was. I was being too sensitive.
It would take a while for me to learn not to be afraid or ashamed of my anger towards the church.
Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.
I was intrigued by the chapter Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, as I had been unraveling my sexual shame and body shame for several years. Lorde writes about the erotic as power. Erotic is not the same as pornographic. Erotic is creativity, life-force, power, satisfaction. Sharing joy with another person. It flows through us and colors our life.
She writes:
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world…
When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
Eroticsm is connection to our souls and bodies:
In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace by Katie Langston
Reading Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace4 was one of the first times I read about another Mormon’s daily spiritual practice, thoughts and habits that looked like mine. But then it was also the first time that I realized that those fell under the umbrella of religious scrupulosity.
Langston describes how The Questions arrived for her at age 9, along with constant guilt for things she wasn’t sure she’d done, near daily confessions, fear-filled prayers and constant reassurance seeking.
She dealt with her religious scrupulosity as a youth, college student, missionary and young married mother. She carried constant feelings of unworthiness, but didn’t want to bring it up because she thought she was the only one feeling that way.
Me: I thought that everyone was feeling that way.
As I read this book, I remember thinking, “you mean that this isn’t what everyone else is doing? Isn’t every church member obsessively ruminating about their sins and unworthiness, stressed about being perfect, expecting God to punish them? Aren’t we supposed to be worrying about all this?”
As I was telling Josh about Sealed on the way to a chiropractor appointment, I broke down in tears. The tears were partly because I related so much to Langston’s scrupulosity, the obsession with salvation and her unworthiness, her pain. But the tears were also because I felt like a fool- that I had been doing this Mormon religious practice thing wrong all this time. That my obsessiveness about being obedient and my salvation never needed to happen in the first place. It really made me wonder, “Why did I internalize the church teachings this way?” I have a lifetime history of mental illness, so maybe that’s why. Langston thought at first that her OCD was what caused her spiritual torment. So she searched for “truer, grace-filled strains of Mormon thought,” only to be consistently disappointed in the lists of duties and emphasis on worthiness and obedience.
I had no idea that there were Mormons who feel at peace with themselves and their progress and their trials and are sure of God’s love all the time. I mean, with all the church’s emphasis on becoming like Jesus and being obedient and doing everything on the worthiness checklist, how do they get to that place?
I’ll have what they’re having. Which it turns out, is grace.
At one point Langston began having panic attacks and an increased hostility towards God. Then a miracle happened.
What was the miracle? Quite simply, I encountered the grace of God.
She began to gain an understanding of God’s grace by noticing those around her who didn’t struggle with constant feelings of unworthiness, including her husband.
He had an ease about him, a flexibility that I eyed with both envy and judgment. As I began to open my mind to the notion of grace, I began to see what he was on to. I found myself becoming more supple and elastic, as if I no longer needed to hold on quite so tight to convince myself I was okay.
I had spent my life pushing my pain away, swallowing my fears, dissociating from my body to serve what I thought was God, and all I had to show for it were alternating swells of numbness and anguish. This can’t be God.
Man, I could absolutely relate to this.
Learning about forgiveness and the love of God and it is that simple.
That was it. A simple reply, but I’d never known anyone to admit such a thing out loud. It was the cardinal rule of Mormon spirituality: Be ye therefore perfect, and if you couldn't be perfect, you must do all you can do to fix it. Try harder.
I had believed that I must choose God in order to be loved, but the reality was that God’s love chose me.
Even after her insight into grace, Langston still was trying to hang on to the words of the brethren. To make the church work for her. She continued to be in the church for several years.
In all this I experienced a new kind of fracturing, not the self eradication I’d attempted before, but the pull of two ways of being, both fundamental to who I was beginning to understand myself to be, both embedded so deeply in my heart I felt it would fail if I was forced to offer up one for the other: Mormon and Christian, staying and leaving, family and faith; on either side grief, so I chose not to choose - which was, of course, its own kind of choice, bringing its own kind of sorrow.
Fracturing. The pull of two ways of being, of believing. The grief. That was what I was experiencing.
For Langston, the Mormon “I know, certainty, turned into uncertainty.
I didn’t know. I knew nothing.
The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.
That is exactly the direction my beliefs, my faith, were moving in. I felt like I didn’t and now don’t know a damn thing.
Langston found herself being pulled away from her Mormon faith. She asked herself, “Why would you break with family tradition? Why would you break your parents’ hearts?”
The reply came from within, not without, an answer so simple I knew it was right: because God led me there.
…it’s not possible! God wouldn't lead you to the same place from which he has been leading me away!
God led Langston to studies at a Lutheran seminary, and eventually she became an ordained Lutheran pastor.
I have no idea where my path is leading me. But lately I have been asking myself, “Is it possible that God is the one who has directed me towards this path of spiritual deconstruction and rebuilding?” The church teaches that someone going through this painful journey is doing so because they are lazy, want to sin, criticize the church too much, are being led by the adversary, have forsaken their covenants, are rebelling against God and are in danger of not being with God and their loved ones in the eternities.
As excruciating as it is, I believe that it is God who has led me to this path.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
Untamed5 is a book about unleashing your true wild self. Stepping out of your cage and following your intuition. Being brave. Taking back your personal power. Tuning into your inner knowing. And so much more.
I swear it seems after every few paragraphs I was asking, “Wait. You can do that?”
We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves.
Wait, you can do that?
I thought I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that when life got hard, it was because I had gone wrong somewhere.
I had always assumed that my feelings were so big and powerful that they would stay forever and eventually kill me. But my hard feelings did not stay forever and they did not kill me. Instead, they came and went, and afterward I was left with something I didn’t have before. That something was self-knowledge.
Wait, you can do that? You can feel all the hard feelings and it won’t kill you?!!
Everybody owes it to herself, to her people, to the world, to examine what she’s been taught to believe, especially if she’s going to choose beliefs that condemn others. She has to ask herself questions like “Who benefits from me believing this?”
Let’s rethink the stories we’ve been telling about God. Let’s dare to imagine that God is less like the powerful men who run the world. Let's imagine God is actually like the person those rulers just killed.
Wait, you can do that?
When hate or division is being spread in our religious institutions, we have three choices:
Remain quiet, which means we agree.
Loudly challenge power, and work like hell to make change.
Take our families and leave.
Wait, should I leave?
For a while I felt scared because I thought the God conflict was me challenging God. Now I know that it was God in me, challenging religion. …Do I reject what I know from my roots or what I was taught to believe?
Wait, maybe God is leading me to this path of questioning, wondering, getting angry.
Some of the hardest and most important work of our lives is learning to separate the voices of teachers from wisdom, propaganda from truth, fear from love and in this case: the voices of God’s self-appointed representatives from the voice of God Herself.
Quote from Whitman: Re Examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.
Wait, you can do that?
Doyle’s book was empowering, challenging, enlightening and full of “Wait, I can do that?” Her podcast, We Can Do Hard Things6, started in May 2021, and is similar to her book. I love it.
Around this time, I reopened my Rituals for Transformation7 book, and the next chapters were:
Healing my wounds with Forgiveness
Resistance is the fundamental human pathology
I release any resistance to what I feel
Resistance will never improve my feelings or circumstances
Yeah, I was getting a really strong message from the universe that it was time for me to confront my traumas, and let myself feel all the feels.
Saad, Layla. Me and White Supremacy: How to Recognise Your Privilege, Combat Racism and Change the World. Quercus, 2020.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2015.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider : Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.
Langston, Katie. Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace. Thornbush Press, 2021.
Doyle, Glennon. Untamed. The Dial Press, 2020
Doyle, Glennon, host. We Can Do Hard Things. 2021.
Borten, Dr. Peter & Briana. Rituals for Transformation: 108 Day Journey to Your Sacred Life; The Dragontree 2017
Added a few books to my list Tysm 🫶🏻