Guest Post: Human First, Latter-day Saint Second

by Candice Wendt

I used to have walls of superiority and certainty built up around me. I believed I performed better in the premortal life than most other people around me. In exchange for my valiance, God granted me a life in the one true faith. My religion gave me access to mysteries of the universe that felt like a wonderful secret others didn’t know.

I brought proselytizing motives frequently into friendships and acquaintanceships. The desire to convince others of my worldview motivated a lot of my social behaviors. I saw non-LDS peoples’ lives as inadequate without the restored gospel.

Sad things were often not as troubling to me as they seemed to my non-member relations because I asserted that in the long run, everything was going to be okay. I didn’t know how to sit in questioning or mourning with others, even within my faith group.

I assumed my neighbor who lost his testimony must have fallen into sinful behavior. I blamed others’ personal faults for them leaving the faith. When I talked to these people, I secretly hoped I could do or say something to bring them back.

Across my walls, genuine sharing didn’t happen much because I assumed I knew better than others. When friends shared about spiritual searching, I looked down on them as one-down from me.

I showed up as a Latter-day Saint first. This layer of my identity dominated my intentions and responses. Sometimes friends became aware of this and withdrew. Others perhaps thought I was just more keen on social connection than I actually was.

I don’t think I was consistently a poor friend or that I didn’t care about other people. But as I look back, I was too interested in manipulating others’ beliefs to become more like my own. I wish I had learned at an earlier age to truly respect and love individuals who are religiously and spiritually different from me.

Teachings that my religion was superior and also a signal of God’s favor proved harmful; these things are what constructed my walls. I now see these ideas as contrary to Christ’s teachings, including his commandment to love our neighbors just as we love ourselves. I assume the people who taught me these things did so because they wanted me to feel special, empowered, and safe and confident in my faith. I don’t want to blame them, but now I can see the blind spots and hazards that come with such approaches. It’s something to move forward and away from.

Both spirituality and relationships are better without such walls.

A few years ago my walls started deteriorating. A few big changes in my life were instrumental in this. My kids started reaching adolescence and thinking more independently, LDS women in my life started sharing their experiences of faith perplexity, and I started doing interfaith work professionally in an urban center where Latter-day Saints are about one in a thousand.

At first it felt like my religious self was dying. It felt horrible to accept that church wasn’t striking much of a chord with my kids. As I supported a friend undergoing a faith crisis sparked by the details of Joseph Smith’s polygamy, it was awful to finally study this history at length myself. And it was difficult to start doing spiritual work in a place where my faith tradition was bizarre and obscure to most people.

Through all this, I didn’t lose my faith. In fact, I had powerful faith-based spiritual experiences during this period. My spiritual faculties expanded, both those related to pleasant emotions and more difficult ones. As Matthew Wickman describes in his spiritual memoir Life to the Whole Being, as we work to develop our spiritual sensibilities more, this not only increases our capacities for joy and fulfillment, but also enhances our capacities to connect with others and to care about them and their pain, as well as to better see our own limitations and other truths about ourselves (pgs. 66-68).

My fences of superiority falling down has let me love and support others in ways I could not envision or enact before. For the first time in my life, I have shown up as human first, everything else second. Just a fellow struggling person who cares about others’ inner lives and circumstances. Showing up this way has enabled moments of great care and connection.

An acquaintance told me about the day his dad told him that neither Santa Claus or God were real. We talked about the grief and existential fear he felt, and how since that day he hasn’t found a way to have faith. I felt love for him sitting with him in what he experienced spiritually.

A connection of mine flew across the continent to support her girlfriend while the girlfriend’s mother passed after her fight with cancer. The partner’s family treated them with disrespect and exclusion due to them being a same-sex couple. I felt love for her as I validated the complex emotions and situations she went through during that difficult time.

A Muslim man joined my team. I felt the strong spirit of kindness and intelligence he brought. We had wonderful conversations about life and faith and he taught me a little about Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam.

I started having thoughtful and sometimes humorous conversations with friends who have left the LDS faith community without needing to judge them and bring any ulterior motives. I started validating my kids’ concerns about religion and stopped having an agenda for their spiritual lives. This brought us closer together and they told me they felt more loved by me.

A Chinese student who was once converted to Christianity by American missionaries but then became critical of the faith due to blindspots and problems with colonialism wrote me a letter telling me how despite our different cultural backgrounds, our conversations made her feel tightly connected with me as two two people with similar personalities and hearts.

A young man came to the multi-faith space I work in and described how in-between spaces that affirm the value of spiritual searching are sacred to him. He said half of his family is atheist and the other half orthodox Jewish, he is the only one right in the middle of the two. The orthodox Jewish half rejected him because he is gay. The other half couldn’t understand why he spent time studying Jewish texts and symbols. As we shared experiences from our lives, I felt a strong spirit of understanding between us. He gifted me a watercolor painting of pine trees he painted himself that made me think of some of my first spiritual experiences as a young child playing in forests in the Pacific Northwest.

Never has being yoked with Christ been so light. Never before have I as meek, kind, or humble. My heart is no longer walled up; now it can stretch however widely may be needed to imagine and embrace the totality of human yearnings and spiritual experiences. None of this has required forfeiting or compromising my ongoing Latter-day Saint identity, faith, or spirituality– to the contrary, the transformation has expanded and refined my capacities to love and reach others as a follower of Jesus.

I can see my efforts to bridge ideological and other divides with love can do much more good to help the Church in its work to help God’s children through their mortal journeys than my old walled-up stance of superiority ever did.

Now that the walls have fallen, I love seeing that despite differences, we’re all in this experience of being human together. We are all facing comparable fascinating and rewarding questions about what it means to be alive, how to find meaning, and how to live and love. How joyful it is to come to truly believe and feel that God is just as loving toward and invested in people of all walks of life as God is toward me. How wonderful to finally find space to stretch out my hands to others.

Candice Wendt is a staff member of McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life and a contributing editor at Wayfare. She holds a Master’s degree from BYU in comparative humanities studies. She is an introvert who became friendly by speaking and performing music at church and doing missionary work :).