I’m done with your broken promises.

Not once

Or twice or three times

You lied continuously, and I stayed, holding onto hope.

And for that, I’m sorry.

I’m sorry to myself

Sorry for putting myself through that for months

​

I’m getting better at loving myself.

You've helped with that.

So thank you

Thank you for allowing me to realize

I’m better than that.

I’m stronger than I know.

​

You aren’t needed

Honeyed words and Honeyed lies

were all you were good for

​

You never got me anything for Christmas.

You never got me flowers.

You refused to meet my parents for months.

You never came over

​

You stopped calling

caring

​

I no longer worry about

If your mood is going to affect my day.

How much are you going to drink?

​

It’s so nice to have my life back.

To not choke on someone's faults.

​

You will never control my emotions again.

Meekness is comprised of, praying peacefully and honestly for an irritating neighbor.

Meekness is a rock looking over the sea of annoyances, which breaks all the waves that come upon it, yet stays entirely unmoved.

Meekness is the support of long-suffering, the gateway, or indeed the mother of love, and the strength of discernment, for it was said, "The Lord will instruct the meek in His way." It readies us for the forgiveness of sins. It is courage in prayer, a dwelling of the Holy Spirit. To whom should I look? To him who is meek and silent.

I felt this today.

the dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, of God's immeasurable love and mercy come to intercede for us. is the same bird as the common "flying rat" of the cities, the slums, the poor, dilapidated areas that most folk would never willingly go.

There are so many parallels between Mormon spiritual conception and foundational Buddhist tenants.

Which kind of connects Mormonism and Christian Gnosticism, because the Gnostic schools were also similarly Buddhist in their view that the goal of all this is to evolve through or emerge from a state of ignorance / sin to a "natural" state of Oneness with Divinity / the Source of Life / the Universal Soul.

I think some mainline Christians still talk about Mormons being revived Gnostics (those of them who have any idea what Gnostics actually believed, of course. It's also just an old slur for so-called heretics).

What's interesting is that mainline Christianity - with it's militant focus on inherent human failure, Jesus's special-case divinity, and the absolute spiritual need for Jesus's "permission" through his sacrifice for us to interface with God at all - is the new kid on the block, with the weird ideas. Especially since all that wasn't even a part of the Jewish Jesus movement until like 100 years or more after it started. Like Paul and whoever wrote Mark were not interested in Jesus's origins outside of "God chose him and sent him to suffer the blood-price for all sin, so we can nod in the direction of that and be good in God's eyes now." They didn't care how that worked or what it really meant, because they were laser-focused on Jesus coming back immediately to be King of Earth. It's only when he didn't that later generations had to explain why that wasn't anything to worry about, he fixed it all for us before he left, just tell God you're with him and try to follow these rules and you're covered.

That really removes any personal responsibility for spiritual growth from everyone. You can't do anything anyway, just accept the Jesus Insurance Policy, and yell at the Devil if he messes with you.

That's a cheat code to what was clearly supposed to be more of a "follow Jesus's example of how to be of God" thing. Because why else did he have to live here in the first place? God could have just killed him in Heaven and shrugged (or not bothered with this odd demand for the death of himself to "cure" sin, which we did to him...?).

Buddhism says seek inner connections to the Divine through spiritual purification / maturation. Gnosticism says learn the true nature of what sin is and what the rules of the universe are, and you can overcome all obstacles to "plug back in" to God. Mormonism says godhood itself is just the final form human souls attain, by a similar process of learning complex truths about reality, like namely who Heavenly Father and Jesus and Lucifer actually are. All of these don't offer cheat codes (or at least aren't supposed to), it's each individual person's choice to work on themselves to attain a restoration to an "original" spiritual state (following certain revealed methods / rituals, of course).

I need to understand more about how specifically Mormons conceive of 'sin' and how it relates to who and where we are in our lives on Earth. I'm also not terribly clear how they think of Lucifer's role, because isn't rebellion against the Divine Source more of a PART of its plan to raise us up, than an inherent evil or filthy thing? Like it seems a little muddled. Sin is still bad but also maybe just a test you pass to get to the next level? It seems kind of both and I'm not sure what they're really doing with it.

But LDS God / Jesus are simultaneously far larger and intimately smaller than in mainline Christianity, at any rate, because they are both demonstrations that humans are just an extension of universal life and power. The divine in Mormonism isn't an alien force that blames you for being a screw-up that owes it for taking pity on you. It knows what you are because it was and IS you, over and over again. The connection isn't ever broken, so much as forgotten about, the rediscovered and revitalized. It gives us greater spiritual agency. It makes us more responsible and therefore we can feel like we really have a project to work on. It's not just being the lucky peasant who was born into the kingdom with the mightiest / nicest king, which is what all mainline Christianity basically does with it now (with Protestant Jesus being the prince who is your VIP wizard buddy who tells his dad you're cool / Catholic Jesus being the prince who got his dad to adopt you by making you of one flesh with him via the Crucifixion / Eucharist). Because the whole point of all that is that I didn't and can't do anything about it, besides say "yeah okay."

And what kind of cheap-ass spiritual journey is that? I am literally just hanging out, waiting to get invited in. Which is supposed to be soothing. But it kind of just makes it all feel goofy and random and pointless.

Mormon God / Jesus is the fountain. But you gotta drink from it. That looks more like the Primitive Christianity of the Jewish Jesus Movement that is in the actual Bible than whatever Evangelicals and Catholics plucked out of wherever Christianity ended up as in the 400s AD.

And the Book of Mormon would seem an unnecessary addition to all this on the face of it, given what the New Testament already has. But by the 1830s, the American Protestant thing about "well some people are in, some aren't, there's no way to know, just hope you are because God likes you" was in full force. They had cheapened the spiritual walk to what amounted to an exclusive club you had to act like you were a part of, even if hey, maybe you're just not. God / Jesus was the distant, petty owner of that club, throwing fits about how gross you were. That's not timeless or majestic or joyful or worth pursuing.

The BoM tells the story of a God who arranged a very big and complicated adventure for a group of people, and then stuck with them, no matter what they did, for like 500 years or whatever. On a totally different continent. Yes, that mirrors the Old Testament story of his relationship with the Jews. But by adding to it, it "proves" his power over the whole Earth, and history, and how he still cares about our tiny little lives. It tries to reinvigorate the concept of God as both an enormous, and delicately small and knowable, thing.

Now how effectively it does that is up for debate. But that was the objective. Or, at least, that's what Smith and others seem to have taken from it, along with other, perhaps less savory, things. But that new old concept of God and how we connect to him comes out of that second testament. Mormon Jesus steps out of that, free from all the centuries of trinitarian baggage weighing down the New Testament (even though NONE OF THAT is actually in those books. But that didn't stop anyone).

Mormonism reconnects Christianity to an older and more globally popular version of spirituality that Christianity lost along the way. A lot of Christians think that's a feature, but that 'feature' also means they are off the hook for their own spiritual walk. And letting people come to that conclusion isn't helping them do anything, whether that was the intention or not.

She challenged us to become more like the Savior by picking a Christ-like attribute and working to make it part of our character. Even if we just picked one, our efforts would make us a better person. One student noted that while it might take 10,000 hours to master something, it takes far less time to learn to do a thing well. At the start of the lesson, the class came up with numerous characteristics and attributes of the Savior, including:

Mercy, Faith, Patience, Forgiveness, Passion, Knowledge, Generosity, Kindness, Understanding, Long-suffering, Equitable, Obedience, Humility, Diligence, Empathy, Hope, Service, Considerate, Supportive, Inclusive, Confident, Forgiving, Loyalty, Mediator, Creative, Perseverance, Healer, Joy!, Charity, Hope, Just, Integrity, Service, Meek, Virtue, Love, Courage, Compassionate, Self-love

A bit later, the teacher directed us to Moroni 10:32 which says “Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness…” and asked us how we could go about denying ourselves of all ungodliness. As several students offered their responses, something occurred to me.

When I was young, if someone had asked me about my ungodliness, I would have immediately turned to all the things about me that are LGBTQ. As I held that thought in my mind, the attributes and characteristics of godliness we had just written on the board seemed to reach out to me with particular force. I raised my hand.

“To me, denying myself of all ungodliness means giving up the opposite of everything on the board. And I want every bit of that of that - for myself and for everyone else!”

I want to be someone who is Kind, Merciful, Joyful, Empathetic, Faithful. I want to be a Healer. I want to be full of Charity. I want to be Compassionate. I don’t want to be Unkind, Unmerciful, Miserable, Uncaring or Inconstant or Hurtful. I want Love, not Hate, in this world. If I can be all those good things, and give up all those bad things, I will be more like my Savior. Working toward that end for myself and those around me is a good life’s legacy.

And nothing on the board was about being LGBTQ.

a compilation of posts that contributed to my conversion