On The Recent Changes to Handbook 1...

...of which we scarcely need to even name now, do we.

A personal response in 9 movements:

1. I have had far too many intimate experiences with the Church and the Holy Spirit--too personal to detail here--to ever abandon them now. These include the many manifold times I have felt guided, protected, preserved, encouraged, discouraged, moved with and against the Spirit, moved with and against myself. My parents named me for the Biblical Patriarch who wrestled with God, and I have continued that wrestle throughout my own life.   I stay in the Church not because it's comfortable, no; it is precisely the discomfort that has kept me wrestling, kept me staying, and why I continue to stay.

2. But the sheer fact that I have feel like I have to reaffirm my commitment still demonstrates how upsetting the recent changes to Handbook 1 have been.  Even the most faithful have been troubled, caught off guard by its sheer viciousness, which scarcely needs to be recounted here. It lacks charity, without which "ye are nothing." I am saddened when people leave the Church, but I am even more saddened when they are given good reason to.

3. The many well-intentioned people who have struggled to defend the change have done so with the tacit acknowledgment that it is indeed a vicious one, that they so desperately wish it wasn't.  They've tried every Orwellian rewording in the book to make it look like a mercy, not punitive--and understandably so, because they love the Church, and so want the Church to be good. Yet their own shaky "I don't fully understand this but" belies their own insecurity, how hollow they know their words sounds.  I'm sadly reminded of an old Steven Weinberg quote: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things.  But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." 

Meanwhile, in the most laughingly ironic twist of all, the most full-throated, sanctimonious defenders of the change have only outed themselves as lacking in charity themselves, neither "mourning with those who mourn," nor "standing with those who stand in need of comfort"--that is, in their defense of the Church, they have failed to behave like disciples of Christ, but rather like the Pharisees who crucified him.

4.  Also part of why the changes are so galling is just how uncharacteristic this all seems of the Church!  Did the Church not just give their unqualified support for anti-discrimination housing legislation in Utah less than a year ago?  Did not Elder Christofferson open up about his own gay brother and his husband a few months ago?  Did not Elder Oaks condemn Kim Davis just a couple weeks ago?  Has not President Uchtdorf repeatedly reached out to those who've felt unwelcome over the past several conferences?  Has not the Church extended repeated olive branches to the LGBTQ community over the past 7 years since the blowback over Prop. 8?  Have they not unrolled their massive "And I'm a Mormon" ad campaign with great PR savvy to promulgate a more inclusive image?  And in one fall swoop they dessimate all that hard work. They struggled to build up all this public goodwill, and then promptly handed the anti-Mormons all the ammunition they needed. This pain was entirely self-inflicted.

5.  What's more, they seemed to be genuinely surprised by the reaction they should've known they'd get--rushing Elder Christofferson to film a quick video with Deseret News that very evening and such--there appears to have been an utter bungling of not only the changes, but of the announcement itself. They were caught flat-footed with their hand in the cookie jar.  To quote Napoleon, it's worse than a crime, it's a blunder.

6. The only defense that has even remotely resonated is the reminder that God has often tried his people; "they must be tried even as Abraham" the Almighty told Joseph Smith--yet remember that what God asked Abraham to do was explicitly wrong!  Human sacrifice went against everything Abraham had ever preached throughout his century-long life, and Isaac was the Covenant child he had been promised throughout decades-long waiting that would try even the severest patience.  Yet when the moment came for Abraham to violate everything he had ever taught or believed as he raised his blade into the air, God sent his angel down to stop him at the last possible second, and provided a ram in the thicket.  The Lord needed Abraham to learn something about himself, but still stopped Abraham short of actually going through with it.  (Kierkegaard has a wonderful book on this topic, Fear and Trembling).  That is, maybe you're right and the changes to Handbook 1 are an Abrahamic test--yet that just underscores that it is so trying precisely because we rightfully feel in our bones that it is so wrong.  "Being in the Church isn't supposed to hurt this much" some critics have said; but maybe it is.

7.  But then again, this Abrahamic discussion is all predicated upon the assumption that this change did come of the Lord God Almighty.  I am still not convinced of this; let me explain why.  First is the fact that, according to the Doctrine and Covenants, all new revelations must be brought before the Church for a sustaining vote made "by common consent."  This was never presented as a new revelation; this was only a bureaucratic change to a manual.  Some might here argue that the vote is but a sustaining vote, and they choose to sustain whatever the First Presidency chooses to do.  Balderdash.  Joseph Smith and Brigham Young both declared that their greatest fears were that the Latter-day Saints would only blindly obey whatever the Prophet said and thereby drag themselves down to darkness.  We are no more excused from seeking a spiritual confirmation on this change, as we from seeking it on the Book of Mormon, or on Joseph Smith, or on the Atonement of Christ, or on literally everything else.

And here I must say: I have received no such confirmation.  I have fasted, and I have prayed repeatedly; I have long paid the price to learn how to distinguish the still, small voice of the Spirit from the noise of the outside world and from the prejudices of my own soul, and I know I still have a long way to go. Nevertheless, I have asked, I have wrestled.  I can speak for no one but myself, but I have thus far received no impression that this change comes of God.  Quite the opposite in fact.

8.  And that is fine.  For the leaders of our Church, inspired and well-intentioned though they may be, are still fallible human beings, ones subject to the vicissitudes of the flesh and their own weaknesses and filtering their inspiration through their preconceived biases and in need of repentance and redemption and the Atoning Blood of Jesus Christ as desperately as literally everyone else. The Catholics are the ones with Papal infallibility, not us, yet even they know how to separate their leaders from their faith. "I do not want any of you to think I am a very righteous man because I am not" said Joseph Smith, and he was not just being modest--especially when you consider his polygamy.

And then there's Brigham Young with his bizarre Adam-God theory, and his starting the Priesthood ban on black people, and of Bruce R. McConkie claiming that the ban would never be lifted in this life, and Boyd K. Packer claiming that no one is born gay, and endless Seminary teachers claiming the Third World were fence-sitters in the pre-existence despite official disavowals from the Church, and etc and etc and etc.  When Wilford Woodruff said God would never allow any man to steer the Church astray, what he perhaps meant was God would allow no man to steer it into a ditch--it can still veer wildly across multiple lanes and clip the median and ride the rumble strip.  The War in Heaven was fought over Free Agency, and the Lord allows us an astonishing amount of it in making our own mistakes.  (That's why the Atonement was necessary in the first place).

9.  Because that's how I finally made peace with the pre-1978 Black Priesthood ban, and how I'll likely make peace with the changes to Handbook 1: not as some mysterious revelation beyond the understanding of man, but as egregious errors made by fallible men whom I need to love and forgive as much as they doubtless feel the same about me.

CS Lewis, in A Grief Observed (written on the occasion of the death of his wife), said that what he most feared from his experience was not that he would now lose his faith, but rather that he would learn that this is how God actually is, to "be no more deceived" about the loving deity he thought he worshiped.  These changes have similarly unsettled me.  But though I'm saddened to learn what these changes reveal about some of the men I revered, I am thankfully not similarly convinced that this is how God actually is.  To quote Joseph Smith one last time: "Our Heavenly Father is more liberal in His views and boundless in His mercies then we are ready to believe or receive."  I am convinced we still have not learned how to believe or receive such divine liberality--and Handbook 1 is but the latest evidence of that.  In the meantime, I will not be seeking to defend or excuse or justify the recent changes to Handbook 1; I will only seek to mourn those that are mourning, comfort those who stand in need of comfort, and love my neighbor as myself. 

This experience has indeed shifted my relationship to the institutional Church.  But it has not my relationship with God--and whatever else its gaping flaws, I remain convinced that this Church still does belong to him, so I will stay with it, and will ride the Good Ship Zion through all its torments, even (maybe especially) the self-inflicted ones.