Checked Boxes, Empty Seats
“Say what you want about their marriage, but their kids toe the line.”
I was mindlessly chatting — well, gossiping — with my mom when that sentence left her lips.
“What does that mean?” I asked, already guessing.
“Well, just that her kids have done what they were supposed to do.”
“Do you mean they’ve gone on missions and got married in the temple?” I asked, defensiveness creeping into my tone.
She paused momentarily before confirming. And then immediately realized how that statement might’ve landed for her daughter — me — whose oldest child was most definitely not serving a mission or getting married in the temple. Because he is gay and no longer a member of the Church.
There is a world in which I might have shrunk from speaking up. My mom and I live hundreds of miles apart, and this conversation occurred during a rare in-person visit. But I no longer agree with this line of reasoning — the one that says parental success equals mission equals marriage equals happily ever after. I’ve had enough of checklists over character, of procedures over people.
As I (gently) challenged her assumptions, my mom assured me that she thought my children were lovely, that she knew serving a mission or marrying in the temple was not a guarantee of anything, including a testimony, and certainly not the road to bliss. She apologized, and we moved on.
Except I can’t quite move on. She’d said the quiet thing out loud, and I can’t forget it. The thing I steel myself against every time someone in my ward or neighborhood asks what my smart and personable 19-year-old is doing now that he’s graduated. I steel myself not because I’m worried about disappointing them. I am thrilled that my son is pursuing his dream major in one of the best programs in the country. I celebrate his bright future, his sense of self, his comfort with who he is.
I steel myself because I don’t want this person to disappoint me with their obvious fluster. Their incomprehension that he’s deviated from the covenant path they imagined for him. The one hammered into their brains, and his, from a very young age. Seminary, mission, marriage. This is the way.
Except when it’s not.
Except when your high school senior is curled up on your bed crying after an ecclesiastical endorsement gone wrong. The boxes were checked and my son was set to turn in his BYU application when the bishop posed one last question.
“Have you thought about serving a mission?” the bishop asked.
“Well, maybe, but it’s complicated,” my son replied.
“How so?” the bishop pressed.
“I’m gay,” my son confidently stated.
“Oh.”
The next Sunday, my son no longer wanted to go to church. He teared up when I asked why, and revealed the entire deflating exchange — told me how the bishop metaphorically threw the (hand)book at him.
“It’s okay to be gay, just not to act on it.” The bishop suggested praying the gay away, then rattled off all the things my son can and cannot do as a homosexual in the church: date, marry, be sealed in the temple, start a family. Gay members must be celibate to hold a calling and a temple recommend.
Don’t worry, he already knew. The Gospel Library app was the only one on his phone up to age 17. He read every Gospel Topics essay, listened to all the talks. He engaged in Sunday School and carried the seminary class with his commentary while everyone else stared at their smartphones. Right up until the day the bishop confirmed what my son already suspected: that who he is — the attraction that is as natural to him as his blue eyes — trumps any other contribution he might make.
* * *
Shortly after he graduated from high school, about six months after he stopped going to church, my son had his name removed from the official Church records. I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness. Not because I worried about his salvation or a missing ordinance on our family tree. I don’t believe God separates families.
I was devastated that what I once believed could only bring good into his life had brought so much sadness that he needed to purge himself of it. There is hurt in him I know nothing about, even with all the hurt I’ve witnessed. How devastating for him and every Godly child like him. And what a loss for our religious community.
* * *
Even with his records gone, I’m still navigating the religion my son left behind. I sat recently at a ward party. An elderly neighbor from across the street asked after him. When I explained he was attending university, she pointedly asked about a mission. I said he would not be serving a mission.
“No mission,” she clucked, totally dumbfounded by my unapologetic delivery. Another woman at the table came to the rescue: “That’s okay, lots of people don’t serve missions.” But the conversation ended there, in absence of familiar talking points.
At a mission farewell, I watched a chapel full of people celebrate an outgoing missionary in anticipation of accomplishment. I looked around the room at the other amazing young adults who we hadn’t yet celebrated and likely would not celebrate, and I felt deeply sad.
* * *
Let me be clear: I don’t think those ward members, my mom, or the bishop set out to cause harm. Many of the most Christlike people I know come from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I don’t even think the components of the covenant path — baptism, mission, marriage, family — are problematic, per se. It’s the one-size-fits-all approach that makes me weary.
Insisting that there is only one way to do church right marginalizes anyone who follows their inner knowing, even when it deviates from the covenant path. The one who feels called to a career over staying home with children, or who prioritizes an education over starting a family, or who waits to baptize a child until that child is truly ready. Or who feels like Jesus gets them, but maybe no one else.
I wish we could lead with curiosity, not confusion. If (insert checklist item here) works for you, great. If not, that’s good, too. No matter what, you’ll always have a spiritual home here — if you want it.
What would it look like to treat the covenant path as a scaffold rather than a cage? To be less concerned with the specific components of a journey and more invested in the heart of the traveler? Perhaps we could trade our handbooks for open arms, making room for those whose lives don’t follow the straightest line.
For her part, I know what bubbled out of my mom’s mouth that day was simply old programming. A story she’s heard so many times that it’s unconsciously embedded in her brain, like a song stuck on repeat. It’s an earworm we could all do without, frankly, to move beyond checklists and covenant paths and towards celebrating and accepting every member of our community, no matter what boxes they check or what lines they cross.
Natalie Hollingshead is a Canadian writer and editor living in Utah with her husband and four children. Book Rec: A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
Art by Alisha Anderson:
ARTIST STATEMENT
from my bones
Sun-faded text on fabric, 24 x 16 in.
Sunlight burns words into fabric.
Light burns truths into a soul.
Slow process takes slow time.
And it has been a slow process
of accepting myself, as a queer soul.
Along the way, I lost much of what I knew.
So if you ask me what I know,
I will tell you — it is little.
And that new uncertainty
often frightens me.
Yet I don’t wish to go back
to borrowed answers,
that rattle shallow from the tongue.
No.
I hope one day, when you ask me
those answers will instead rise,
from a well-lit place in the soul,
having been burnt into my bones.
Alisha Anderson
alishaanderson.org
@_a_anderson
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