So, I have to admit, I listened to this interview with Mormon author Joanna Brooks because I wanted the dirt! I wanted the juicy insider-info about the Mormon church! I wanted the gossip-monger satisfaction of secrets revealed! I wanted to dish about weird underwear and weirder customs!
But that is not what I got...
Joanna Brooks is, according to her website, an "award winning writer and scholar of religion and spirituality"...and also, a Mormon. She is a Mormon who grew up in a conservative Mormon household, but as an adult sort of accidentally turned into a feminist. And then not-so-accidentally married a Jewish man. Whoops! She is a Mormon who struggled and volleyed with her faith, but who ended up making a decision that so many people, on so many spiritual paths, have made before her--which is to not abandon the religion to which she was born, even though at moments, it might have felt like she should. And, because of this, she is a Mormon who has found a way to expand enough to hold all the nuances and contradictions within a faith that she obviously loves very deeply. And I will tell you, Joanna Brooks may be a Mormon, but as far as I'm concerned...this chick is a yogi.
I loved her so much, I wrote her a fan letter (email) immediately upon the conclusion of the interview. She and Ira Glass are now the only two people I have written fan letters to. (As an adult.)
(And for those of you who know my deep love for/borderline obsession with Ira Glass...that is saying something.)
Joanna Brooks wrote me back. Ira Glass did not. Point, Joanna.
Okay, so full disclosure--I don't know a lot about Mormonism. I had a good friend when I was growing up who was Mormon, but we were young, and all I knew was that her family had a big store room full of food and supplies (the encouraged "years worth of food"), and that she, my friend, was constantly in pre-teen agony about the boy she loved not being a Mormon. When I was graduating from high school, years after she and I had grown apart, I got an announcement for her wedding. Not, of course, to the not-Mormon boy she was in love with. To some other boy, someone I'd never met. At only 16 myself, and just beginning to discover the world, I remember feeling so...disappointed. How could she get married? She wasn't much older than me, maybe two years at most, and at the time I thought, well, that's it for her. She's done. She would get married and then there would be babies and babies and more babies, and that would be it.
So this, until today, was my basic understanding of Mormonism--it was strict, you couldn't marry who you wanted, and if you were a woman, your job--your life--was going to be about having babies and being a wife.
And then there's the, ahem, politics of the Mormon Church, which are unquestionably ultra-conservative slash deeply disturbing. And though it's not really integral to this post, I do feel like it's important to mention that I do not agree with the stance of the Mormon Church on gay rights or women's rights--or on social issues in general, it's probably safe to say--and no interview, no matter how lovely, is going to change that. Though of course, the same could be said for the Catholic Church, and the Evangelical Church, and for countless others. I just want that on the record.
But, it's not the Mormon Church that I found so moving, it's not the history and ritual of the Mormon faith--though it was beautifully rendered by Ms. Brooks in her interview--which inspired me to first write to her, and now to write this. It was, instead, the power of her flexible, and sane way of speaking about her faith, that moved me.
I have realized, since writing this blog these last few years, that if I have any goal in mind...if there's anything that I really WANT from all this writing and interviewing and talking and teaching and practicing, it is to seek out and nurture spiritual sanity. To figure out how it is that those of us who are on fire with God in some form or another (whether your God is one God or many Gods or whether your God is Art or Breath or Movement or just the sacred stuff of your Life)--how is it that we can bring this God into our lives in a way that is real, and meaningful and leaves room for the very necessary doubt and constant change that is so much a part of our world. Is there a way to be a person of faith and have a dialogue about it that doesn't include dogma but DOES include divinity? And love. And compassion.
And people like Joanna Brooks make me feel like that goal is accomplishable.
Because, without question, she and I are very different. We have very different backgrounds, and very different conceptions, maybe, of the practicals of God--what that looks like, how it came to be, and how to call it by name--but I would imagine, though I can't speak for her, that our ideas about the essence, the heart, of God...are probably very much the same. The easy road, of course, is to retreat to opposite corners, to claim lack of understanding and to grudgingly go on our ways. The difficult thing, and the thing that Joanna Brooks is trying to do, that all of the teachers and speakers I respect most are trying to do, is to stretch the walls of her understanding of God so that it becomes more inclusive.
I was reading something the other day by Thomas Traherne, a "metaphysical poet" (thank you, Wikipedia) from the 17th Century, and he was talking about how we all, as children, are born with a divine knowledge of presence--the world is new to us, and everything is one unfolding mystery. But, he writes, the real work, the real trick of divinity, is not to somehow go back to before we knew anything, it is, instead, this process of "unlearning" everything that has darkened our view thus far. This is the more miraculous thing, he says: to travel from corruption back to innocence.
And I couldn't help but think of Joanna Brooks, and how devoted she is to this work, not of abandoning her faith, but of instead, stripping away the layers of corruption, to get back to the sweet center.
Check out the interview, if you have a chance, or Joanna Brooks' blog: Ask Mormon Girl. And then let me know what you think of her and the work she's doing...yay or nay?
