Yesterday I visited Manhattan’s combined LDS Temple and Morningside Heights Ward service with IkonNYC’s Evangelism Project. The Evangelism Project is a year long experiment where members of the group will visit one different religious tradition each month. The goal of the group is simple: “Instead of attempting to domesticate the other, The Evangelism Project seeks to allow the other to speak into and disturb our beliefs and practices.”
This visit to a Mormon sacrament meeting reminded me so much of home. As I’ve written about before in “Seagulls and Syncretism: My Life in Mormon Mecca,” I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah and am very familiar with the LDS church. However, this visit reminded me of unhappy memories, as well; memories of times when I was warned, cautioned, and commanded to keep Mormons at a distance.
The predominant memory of my childhood is fear. Fear that “the world” would somehow taint my “Christian-ness” and impart some stain upon my holy bubble. Fear that I would fail to dot all my I’s and cross all my T’s and thereby miss God’s gift of heaven. God knows how many times as a child I felt the fear of being “left behind” when I couldn’t find my parents or sister (if you don’t understand this rapture reference, count yourself lucky!).
The funny thing is that living with that fear was actually easier than intentionally plunging into unknown waters. Attempting to live my life according to “God’s Holy Book” was simple and straight forward, a divine check list I could use as a guide.
But as Robert Orsi writes, “The world of the text is really not the world” (Between Heaven and Earth, 164).
The world I live in is complex, messy, and multidimensional, filled with Mormons, Muslims and everyone in between. And rather than follow a divine check list, I must engage an imperfect text and imperfect story, all the while pursuing a connection with the divine. And lately it seems that everyone, to some degree or another, draws the theological line in the sand, demarcating some level of certainty that you must believe X, but Y & Z are subject to interpretation. In my own life, Mormons were categorically “off-limits,” believing just enough “heresy” to justify their status as “cult” in my denomination’s eyes. But the funny thing with lines drawn on sand is that there are always waves quick to roll in and wash them away.
If there is anything I have learned from the Mormons, it is that my clench on “truth” is simply the consumption of denominational power, not truth at all. Because truth is not restricted to a political party, or denomination, or even a religion. When the gospel author writes, “I am the way, the truth, and the life, nobody comes to the father except through me,” Jesus here is not synonymous with my church or your church, as Rob Bell writes, “As obvious as it is, then, Jesus is bigger than any one religion. He didn’t come to start a new religion, and he continually disrupted whatever conventions or systems or establishments that existed in his day. He will always transcend whatever cages and labels are created to contain him, especially the one called ‘Christianity’” (Love Wins, 150).
And following a Jesus like this is hard. It is a Jesus who declares that he alone is the Savior, and I cannot dictate nor define how that salvation happens. It involves a daily struggle of allowing Jesus to break my hold on truth and allow his grasp to replace mine because, in the words of H.G. Wells, “The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.”
This is what listening to the “other” taught me. A lesson only learned by first listening to the voice of Christ in those different from myself. And allowing myself to love them without attempting to impose my structure of the world upon them, loving them because it is their very difference that reveals my own struggles, doubts, and humanity. I think this is the first step we must take in order to follow Christ. Because before Jesus ever died on the Cross, he drank and dined with “others,” and allowed that relationship to define his humanity to the point of death, even death on a cross.
“The Evangelism Project” photo courtesy Nicole Marie Edine.
