Leaving the Saints Quotes

“Silence comes in two varieties: One that nourishes and comforts; another that chokes, smothers, and isolates. Solitary confinement is the worst kind of imprisonment we can inflict on fellow humans, and if you are forced to keep silent about some dark secret, you live in solitary confinement. Without the bridge of communication connecting you to other human beings, you can’t share your burdens, can’t receive comfort, can’t confirm that you still belong. Silence is the abyss that separates you from hope.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“There's more God in one hurt child than in all the religions humans ever created.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“Memory…is not the mechanical recording device people often think it is. Memory is anything but constant, anything but indubitable. It shifts and fades, blooms and dies, steps out for a cigarette and blows tendrils of information and emotion back under the door.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“The only thing scarier than telling my secrets would be keeping them. When the “sensitive information” you carry is your own history, going mute to protect the system doesn’t keep you from being destroyed; it just means that you destroy yourself.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“Finally, Karen Gerdes is the gentle force that put me back together after the events of my life tore me apart, and the one that has kept me whole. Whenever I slip back into the world of shadows, she is the one who leads me back into the light.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“I once read that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past…but forgiving is not the same as obliterating memory.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“I felt a familiar tingle rush over and through my body, a slight electrical buzz that made the hair stand up on my nape and arms. I didn’t hear or see anything, but suddenly my mind was filled with a thought that seemed to have come from somewhere both far beyond me and deep within me. I knew—I knew—that there was some infinite power whose relationship with me was being echoed by my relationship with Adam. It seemed to be telling me, without words but with perfect clarity, that my natural state was not hunger but fulfillment. More than that: this power yearned, longed, ached to nourish me, as intensely as I needed to feed my child. The only obstacle, for both Adam and me, was an impaired ability to receive.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“We all have our little sorrows...and the littler you are, the larger the sorrow.”
― Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

“American Indian populations and discovering that they were of ancient Asian ancestry,”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Deborah Laake, the journalist whose book about the Mormon temple rituals was on the New York Times best-seller list, committed suicide in 1996. She was fighting cancer, which undoubtedly contributed to her decision to end her life, but a friend of Laake’s who knew her well told me that the ostracism from the community of Saints was the real reason she gave up on life.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“The more I tune in to the source of my own being (and every religion I’ve studied has helped me find ways), the more anger, sorrow, and fear seem confined to the shallows of my personality, while my true self—and yours, and that of every being—is like a sea whose depths are always tranquil, however troubled the surface may become. Pain reminds me to return to the deep, calm, gentle sea, so that I find myself crying because I’m happy, and because I’m sad, but never because I’m in despair. Once you’re sure that God is waiting in the acceptance of every true thing, even pain, I’m not sure despair is even possible.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“For example, I’ve learned that the worst pain, fear, and torment I’ve ever experienced has only deepened my ability to experience joy. I feel this even when I’m hurting, because while pain and pleasure are mutually exclusive, pain and joy are not.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Any spiritual practice is ultimately just a way of stripping off the illusions we have learned from other flawed mortals, letting go of whatever holds us back, opening ourselves completely to what comes next. It feels like a terrible risk, to be so vulnerable, to disobey the rules, to end up losing the things and people we love.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Mommy, for the first time, I’m crying because I’m happy.” That voice, soft and high-pitched though it was, didn’t sound like an untutored child contemplating a novel concept. It sounded like an ancient soul, groping along in an unfamiliar body, beginning to remember itself. And though Katie has already traveled a great distance along her own spiritual path, I still see in her this brave, inquisitive, perpetually awakening soul. I think that’s what she is, at the very center. I think that’s what we all are.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“she was born with a longing for spiritual communion in the marrow of her soul.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Hillel put it, “I walk, I fall down, I get up. Meanwhile, I keep dancing.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“All the great religions I have studied, including Mormonism, hold that this irrevocable soul-deep liberty is the key to the end of suffering and the beginning of joy. The Buddha said that just as you can recognize seawater because it always tastes of salt, you can recognize enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom. About a year after I discovered I’d become a life coach, I stumbled across a Buddhist prayer that felt so true to me it almost stopped my heart. The last section goes like this: As long as space endures,
And as long as sentient beings exist,
May I also abide,
That I may heal with my heart
The miseries of the world.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Even if I never know the explanation behind what happened to me as a child, I do know this for sure: Whether or not my father had the freedom to choose his thoughts and actions, I do. I am free, and always have been; free to accept my own reality, free to trust my perceptions, free to believe what makes me feel sane even if others call me crazy, free to disagree even if it means great loss, free to seek the way home until I find it.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“I’ve read research that indicates that people who hide a history of traumatic experience live shorter, less healthy, less happy lives than those who tell their stories. I know, at a much deeper level, what keeping secrets did to me, and even more, to my father. He did more than die for his religion; he gave it his life. He almost gave it mine.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“In my case, the inferno-road led through Provo, Utah, the well-meaning bureaucracy of Mormonism, the community of Saints. Yours probably passes through some other territory, but we all make the same trip. We believe without question almost everything we learn as children, stumble into the many potholes and pitfalls that mar any human endeavor, stagger around blindly in pain and outrage, then slowly remember to pay attention, to listen for the Silence, look for the Light, feel the tenderness that brings both vulnerability to wounds and communion with the force that heals them. Don’t worry about losing your way, I tell my clients. If you do, pain will remind you to find your path again. Joy will let you know when you are back on it.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“You’ll know when you’re in the wrong job interview,” I’d say during a lecture, “because the pit of your stomach will tell you to get out. Your first daily priority should be stillness, attention to what you really know and what you really feel. Don’t ‘network’ into meaningless relationships with colleagues who bore you; find the people who can make you laugh all night, who turn on the lights in your heart and mind. Do whatever work feeds your true self, even if it’s not a safe bet, even if it looks like a crazy risk, even if everyone in your life tells you you’re wrong or bad or crazy.” What I was really telling them was how to be a Leaf in the Stream, though of course I never called it that. Nor did I quote Jesus’ question, “What profiteth it a man if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” I rarely used Buddhist terms like awakening or right action. But all these concepts, all the things I’d learned in my search for God, drove every piece of advice I gave my students.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“It meant learning to go home and stay there, in that place where joy is not dependent on wealth or image, and even the deepest sorrow is a guide toward healing and happiness.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“I didn’t mention to the kids that the man they’d just seen was their grandfather, because I’m not sure it was. That figure was the marionette, the puppet owned and operated by a complex religious culture. Even if my children watched every speech my dad ever gave, even if they visited him every day of their lives, they wouldn’t have known their grandfather. I didn’t know him. I don’t think he ever did himself.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“connection, comfort, safety, belonging.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“My status as an untouchable feels so terrible that something deep inside me finally lets go of it, of all identity, of all attempts to prove or please or control anyone at all. At that moment, I rediscover the stillness in my own heart of hearts. Then I feel its connection to the Stillness all around me, the gorgeous, blissful Stillness that holds every heart, every mind, every tree and rock in its infinitely loving embrace. I am here. Always. I am always right here.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Love, I discovered, is the only thing human beings do that really matters a damn. Happiness, like beauty, is its own excuse for being.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“But I remember what Elizabeth Cady Stanton once said: “In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman’s heart until she bows down to it no longer.” My father had deepened my disappointment in life, in religion, in God, until I could bow down to it no longer. And that, paradoxically, was why I learned that I was free.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“I tried as hard as I could to stay in that moment when I had felt my father’s spirit shining, when I could see both my parents for the scared, confused, incorruptible souls they truly were. But by the time we said good-bye and my parents left, I could barely see them through the clanking and shuffling of their fear-shells, all the tin cans and aluminum foil.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Prospero forgives,” said my father. I nodded. “Have you ever heard that forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past?” I asked him.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

“Children who are hurt by their parents pay a terrible price, because they can’t help loving their tormenters. But I suddenly realized that this torment can also be a gift, because to know the shining soul hidden behind an enemy’s shell is to understand that we are all safe, all lovable, all loved. At that moment I could see—not by imagination but by simple observation—what the Buddha meant when he sat down to meditate and all his demons flew shrieking into his face. “You are illusion,” he’d told them. And the demons had turned into flowers, settling gently around his still, breathing form.”
― Martha N. Beck, Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith