Leaning toward a Healthier but Imperfect Self...

I come from a family of saints, who are nonetheless unrepentant sinners. My saintly ancestors were also Mormon pioneers who risked life and limb to follow their faith, worship without persecution, and settle northern Utah and Southern Idaho in the mid 1800’s. They yearned to create beloved community.

One of these, George Washington Hill, is described as athletic, handsome, and ambitious. 

From a family genealogy book

Although his wife, Cynthia Uttley Stuart, held the indigenous people, the Shoshone, with great disdain, George quickly sought them out. He learned the Shoshone language, all four dialects, and created a Shoshone-English dictionary to help others communicate. Family lore and Mormon history leads one to think that he was beloved by all, including the Shoshone. As the story goes, the chief had a dream about Inkapompy, as George was called, which means red hair, and invited George to come and meet with him. While there George baptized 102 Shoshone. My family thinks of George as a saint. I have found no record of him in Shoshone history that concurs. He settled on land that historically belonged to the Shoshone and thought of it as his for the taking. All of my ancestors did likewise. 

Joanna Mills Chatterton left Liverpool and sailed to the United States in 1860. 

Also from a family genealogy book

With her was a young son and daughter and she was pregnant with her third child. Her husband, Jonathan Chatterton stayed in England to make money to support her and her trip to Salt Lake City, joining them a year later. Along the way Joanna’s daughter died. She travelled across the Atlantic, across the Great Lakes to St. Louis, Missouri, and then in her last trimester of pregnancy, walked 1300 miles from St. Louis to Salt Lake City. She gave birth to Jacob, my great, great, great grandfather two weeks later. A year later Jonathon joined her. A few years after he took a second wife, as was the custom for Mormon men. Jonathan was jailed for polygamy, there’s a photo of him in the Mormon History Museum in Salt Lake. He’s heralded as a saint. I can only imagine the difficult life Joanna lived. She died of septicemia after giving birth to 13 child.  

And so it went through the generations.  My family, of saints and unrepentant sinners who believe they were and are entitled to the land they live on. 

By the time I was born half of my family were practicing Mormons and half were not. Half of my family drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and enjoyed alcohol, and half ate a lot of jello and other sugary foods baked by my grandmother, at least that was my experience of my family.

In the Mormon church children are baptized at the age of 8, which is considered the age of accountability. I was nine and had not yet been baptized. My parents did not go to church, but I did. I walked myself to church on Sunday mornings  and Tuesday evenings. I knew I needed to be baptized to be a full member, to really belong to the church. So I begged my parents to arrange for my baptism. Finally in June of my 9th year I was baptized in the huge font at Temple Square.

 I have no memory of any baptismal preparation, no catechumenal preparation. I do remember two men instructing me on what the age of accountability means. What I heard was: Sin no more. Every sin is strike against me and God is keeping count. 

So. I spent the next twenty years, give or take, trying to be perfect. This, even though my family left the Mormon Church when I was fifteen, and it was sixteen years before I stepped foot into a church again. When my husband, Dan and I were married, the woman UCC pastor who married us recommended to us the Episcopal Church. And few years after we were married we wandered into a nearby Episcopal Church. 

Dan, a former Roman Catholic, never opened the prayer book, and knew the entire service by heart, essentially. I was completely lost. I was especially lost with the confession. What was this? Had I sinned that week? What was sin? How would I know? 

It took me awhile to realize that I had no idea what sin was at all. I mean the goal of my life was perfection, sin was not an option. I’ll tell you about therapy later.

So I realized that I had this uncomfortable relationship with confession. As I tried to sort it out, if I thought I had done something wrong, I either minimized it and reduced it to no big, everyone does that. Or, I beat myself up with guilt and shame…horrible, horrible me. 

These two extremes gave me absolutely no way to manage a healthy understanding of accountability. Which is ironic, since I was told that my ability to recognize accountability happened at age 8. Well, in the years since this awakening, I have done a lot of work.

Curiously enough, when I was ordained and began to prepare couples to baptize their children, or even to prepare adults for baptism, I discovered that they too had a distorted understanding of sin, grace, mercy, and justice. 

Barbara Brown Taylor talks about the impact of a lost language for sin in her book, “Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation.” She claims that the traditional language for sin and salvation has been secularized and replaced with a language of medicine and law. Our actions become criminalized and medicated. Of course laws are needed and medication important.  But many of our experiences of brokenness need their own language that is not measured by laws or medicine. I need a way to say I am broken. I have hurt someone else. I have broken relationships that need mending, I need to make amends and reconcile my life with God, with others, and with myself. It took awhile for me to figure some of this out. 

So now, when I prepare adults who wish to  be baptized, or have their baby or child  baptized, I am very careful to walk them through a discussion in the baptismal liturgy where they are going to renounce three things and affirm three things.

Then we look at the Baptismal Covenant and I remind them that anytime they wonder what it means to live as a Christian, anytime they wonder how they are to behave when encountering challenges, these five sentences give us our guiding principles for living the Christian Faith. We are to keep learning about the teachings of Jesus, we are to share, pray, resist evil and make amends when we hurt someone else or ourselves, we are to live the Good News of God’s love in Jesus and spread that love into the world, we are to love God, love self, and love others in the kind of radical way that God loves - which is all about justice and mercy, and we are to respect the dignity of every human being. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry’s Way of Love provides us with guidelines that help us live the Baptismal Covenant: Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest.

I do this because I believe that people have the answers inside of them, and that with a little prompting they can move past superficial understanding, past what, Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama, calls lazy language that’s the damp blanket of story telling, and into vibrant, authentic, transformational stories. 

I continue to ponder the confession and its petition to confess things known and unknown, especially the unknown part. I often say, “I don’t know what I don’t know”…

A few years ago we offered a Lenten program built off of Liz Theoharris’ book, Always With Us, What Jesus Actually Said About the Poor. For five Sundays we reflected on global poverty and the factors that influence poverty like health care, food scarcity, and clean water. 

Since then I have been thinking deeper about the intersectionality of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and the enPatriarchy: a system in which men hold power and women are largely excluded from power. (also excluded from power in patriarchal ideology can be Black people, People of Color, LGBTQ+, and others deemed less than)

Colonialism: is the policy of a nation seeking to extend or retain its authority over other people or territories, generally with the aim of economic dominance. The colonising country seeks to benefit from the colonised country or land mass.

Racism: the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

Intersectionality: a term created by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to shed light on the ways in which experiences in both race and gender intertwine to uniquely impact the lives of Black women and women of color. It quickly expanded to include class, ability, sexuality, education, economic system, social system, and the environment. vironment. Here are a few definitions and a tiny piece of how this intersectionality plays out:

• Patriarchy: a system in which men hold power and women are largely excluded from power. (also excluded from power in patriarchal ideology can be Black people, People of Color, LGBTQ+, and others deemed less than)

• Colonialism: is the policy of a nation seeking to extend or retain its authority over other people or territories, generally with the aim of economic dominance. The colonising country seeks to benefit from the colonised country or land mass.

• Racism: the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

• Intersectionality: a term created by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 to shed light on the ways in which experiences in both race and gender intertwine to uniquely impact the lives of Black women and women of color. It quickly expanded to include class, ability, sexuality, education, economic system, social system, and the environment.

 My ancestors participated in this when they moved west and took over the land that belonged to the Shoshone people.

Colonialism and Patriarchy are at the heart of the Doctrine of Discovery, for example. This doctrine established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians. It has been invoked since Pope Alexander VI issued the Papal Bull “Inter Caetera” in 1493.

We’ve come to understand that none of these function in isolation, these systems are interconnected in ways known and unknown. The intersectionality between patriarchy, colonialism, and racism means that solving climate change will require a deep look into how these systems interact. 

There are many examples, but consider this from one of my favorite authors, Terry Tempest Williams, who writes in her book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, about prairie dogs. It is the practice of ranchers in the west to plug or blow up prairie dog dens, eliminating them from their property because their cattle fall in the holes and break their legs. However, what has been discovered is that prairie dogs are crucial to environment. Without them, without their dens and tunnels, the land is not aerated. Their tunnels enable and manage water flow providing for grasses to grow and therefore prevent erosion. 

Everyday I try to do what I can to contribute to a healthier environment. It is a daily practice, and I am better at it somedays than others.

I have found the traditions of the Episcopal Church have shaped and formed me in all the best of ways. I have been challenged to grow more fully into the stature of Christ, to become a more emotionally mature human being, and I’ve been supported in my growth efforts. I have also been willing to step into challenges and risks in part because, like all of us, I take my vows seriously. But also because a bit of my early childhood desire to be perfect still compels me to learn and grow in understanding. Of course, now my desire to be perfect points out to me just how imperfect I am, even as I keep trying to learn, grow, and to be better. 

But, I’m okay with the reality that I will never be finished and never perfect, because my identity is no longer determined by perfectionism. 

My identity is found in baptism, where I believe we are all made in God’s image. I also believe that in order for us to become the beloved community that God desires we must develop the capacity to be adaptive. To hear both the strength and the challenge in our stories, to hear both the grace and brokenness in our stories, to work for healing and reconciliation as a path to resurrection. And in doing so, to come a little closer to creating true beloved community. 

(Although this was not part of my initial reflection because I wrote it before the tragic murders of Mormon women and children in Mexico, I may have a distant DNA connection to some of them.  I grieve for these deaths and the families impacted.)