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With the Vatican’s approval, I’m marrying my Catholic fiancé in St. Mary’s Basilica in Old Town Alexandria this Saturday. Yay! I’m so excited to celebrate true love, surrounded by my family and friends.

Some of those family and friends are a little befuddled. As a former hyper-devoted Mormon, I can see the confusion in their eyes, the unstated curiosity about why I’m not marrying in the temple. Only a few have ventured to ask the question directly.

I believe it is important to give an honest answer. This is my story.

* * *

I felt like the Spirit had fallen into a black hole.

That’s the only way I know how to describe the day I received the endowment.

For 25 years, I had enthusiastically sung “I Love to See the Temple.” I had installed temple screensavers on my laptops, and bought temple art to hang in my rooms. I had taken every opportunity to perform baptisms, to visit temple grounds, and to attend temple open houses and dedications. I had made moral, dating, education, career, and life decisions based entirely on what would lead me to the temple. I had fervently born my testimony to members and non-members alike of the importance of temple ordinances. I had been the rude interloper who interrogated friends and warned them of eternal unhappiness when it looked like their life decisions might lead them away from the temple and the blessings of the celestial kingdom.

By June 2012, my lifelong commitment to the highest ordinances the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offered seemed to be bearing fruit. In two back-to-back days in Chicago, I received the endowment and married an enthusiastic convert.

I knew the endowment would be a unique experience. Friends and family and leaders had described the process at a high level. Some alluded to being uncomfortable with certain rituals and symbolism, but they all assured me the temple was a powerful spiritual experience and I would get used to the oddness.

I also knew from Relief Society that temple worker women performed ordinances and exercised a form of priesthood authority. This excited me. I yearned to see what women in authority felt like, to learn more about God’s purpose for me. I hoped I would learn something about Heavenly Mother. On the day of my endowment, I fasted and prayed for spiritual understanding.

The initiatory felt like the start of something beautiful. The new name I received had profound personal meaning to me. But then I walked into the endowment room, and quickly felt enshrouded by darkness and confusion. There was no Heavenly Mother. Eve barely spoke. I made a covenant to my husband? But I didn’t have a husband yet – not until tomorrow – what did that mean for my single women friends? Then I gave my fiancé my name, but I wasn’t allowed to know his? Something felt seriously, spiritually wrong.

I had majored in religious studies in college so I retreated to a mental place of curious deconstruction. I noticed how many Masonic elements were in play, which troubled me. I pushed that aside and instead reflected on how Joseph Smith had a talent for imbuing the mundane with spiritual import. Even if the derivation was masonic, God could still teach me powerful lessons. I quickly self-minimized my uncomfortable feelings and committed myself to return to the temple often until I understood the depth of its beauty.

The session ended and I stood in the celestial room surrounded by family. There the Spirit finally returned. I remember my sister asking for my reaction. I told her I was confused. I spiritually felt that the covenants I had made to God were fine, but that the trappings of how the covenants were made felt weird.

My sealing the next day is a blur. A little odd, a little boring, nothing spiritually notable – except for the fact that as a convert, my husband’s non-member family had been excluded. I had spent our year-long engagement convinced of the righteousness of my refusal to compromise. Time and time again I had born heartfelt testimony of the spiritual importance of temple sealings to his hurt family. But on my wedding day, their exclusion felt deeply wrong. I realized that for a church focused on “Families are Forever,” excluding non-member families from celebrating key life milestones was our single most destructive missionary tool. I could not find Christ in it. In the ensuing months, I felt a persistent and piercing spiritual guilt that my dogmatic insistence on a temple wedding above all had been a self-righteous sin.

* * *

A week later, my new husband and I decided to visit the temple near our honeymoon city. We thought it would be powerful to experience the endowment and sealings again, just by ourselves, with more time to reflect on their spiritual import. Once again, a black hole descended during the endowment. This time I noticed that Eve never covenants to God, she only covenants to her husband – and then immediately shuts up. She never speaks again. Her silence bothered me. Where was my role model for the feminine divine?

After the session we knelt for some proxy sealings. As the sealer rattled off the script again and again, I noticed a disconnect. He was dropping a clause. I thought it was a fluke. I listened more carefully. Still, there was a mismatched phrase. The absence felt more jarring than when a teenage boy misses a line in the Sacrament prayer. On the fifth or sixth iteration, convinced I was not mishearing, I interrupted the sealer mid-sentence.

“You’re skipping a line,” I said. “You asked me to give myself to my husband. You only asked him to receive me.”

The sealer looked startled. “Yes, that’s right. That the way it’s supposed to be,” he said, resuming the recitation.

I kept protesting. “It’s not reciprocal! You’re missing a clause!”

The sealer flipped his ordinance script card around and showed it to me. He was right – the clauses weren’t reciprocal.

“It’s because of polygamy,” the sealer explained. “A woman can only give herself to one husband. But men have to be free to receive multiple wives.”

* * *

As an enthusiastic convert, my new husband had an admirable commitment to exceeding expectations. When he heard advice to attend the temple once a month, he promptly doubled it. For the first year and a half of our marriage we attended the temple together approximately twice a month. Each and every time, I prayed for clarity, peace, and deeper understanding.

The temple never got better, it got worse. The movie change helped a bit, but not much. My spiritual insights kept getting darker. I noticed more incidents of sexism, more absences of women, more vestiges of polygamy, more statements of theology that did not align with everything I held dear about Christ and grace.

The temple turned me into a Mormon feminist. Desperate to understand what was going on, I dove into Mormon academia and the Mormon bloggernacle. Feminist Mormon Housewives’s essay “The Mormon Priestess” remains the single most powerful post I have ever read. It dissected every linguistic problem with temple ordinances I was struggling with. For the first time I felt supported in my ever-growing conviction that perhaps the spiritual problem wasn’t me, it was the temple itself.

Another bloggernacle post linked to the just-published Joseph Smith Papers including the original D&C Section 101 on marriage.

“All marriages in this church of Christ of Latter Day Saints should be solemnized in a public meeting, or feast, prepared for that purpose.” …“Marriage should be celebrated with prayer and thanksgiving, and at the solemnization…[the officiant] shall say, calling each by their names: ‘You both mutually agree to be each other’s companion…keeping yourselves wholly for each other.”

This felt true. If the Church had followed its original practice, we would not have excluded my husband’s non-member family from our wedding. But public celebrations had been cancelled and this section of scripture removed after the publication of D&C 132 on polygamy.

Meanwhile, my marriage had descended into disarray. It was horrible by every definition of the word. Increasingly in response to my personal prayers, I received answers that did not match my husband’s will. I went to the temple, promised to “hearken” unto my husband, and then came home to a reality where his edicts caused enormous pain. The disconnect prompted a spiritual crisis – everything I knew about the gospel and priesthood in the home had convinced me such conflicts should never happen. My wrestling with that theology underpins my post on women’s ability to override bad priesthood leadership.

On one of my temple trips with my then-husband, I endured an endowment session just so I could enter the celestial room. “Dear Heavenly Father,” I prayed as I promptly descended into tears. “I don’t like this. I don’t have a testimony of this. Whenever I come here I find pain. I wish the way I felt inside the temple matched the way I feel outside, when I stand on its tranquil grounds. But it doesn’t. Nevertheless, I believe you answer prayers. I don’t know where else to turn. My entire life I have been taught that this is where I should go to have my most heartfelt prayers answered. And I desperately need your help.”

That day is when I first received powerful spiritual confirmation that I could seek divorce. But I wouldn’t follow through for another year. Because despite the unmistakable whisperings of the spirit, I convinced myself I was a sinner and my revelation was wrong. It took another year to scale the spiritual mountain of decades of teachings that nothing justified divorce, or ending a temple sealing, or disobeying a husband. My answers and my spiritual witnesses did not align with those teachings, so clearly the problem must be me, my selfishness, and my sins.

* * *

After my divorce, and after my sealing had been cancelled, I continued to attend the temple. I suspected my negative feelings about the ceremonies were all-to-likely bound up in my terrible marriage. I knew I needed to wrestle with the two problems separately. With distance from my ex, however, my spiritual concerns did not fade. Instead the sexism became even more glaring.

With a recommend about to expire, I went to the temple one more time. In the celestial room I prayed for an hour, cataloging all of the above once again for God. “I hope others find peace and refuge here,” I told Him, “but I don’t. Maybe someday in the future I can, but not now.”

Today I focus on serving Christ through the faith I know and love. I love the Book of Mormon. I love our emphasis on personal study and spiritual revelation. I love the tight-knit communities we foster. I love our sincere commitments to wholesome living. When I stopped attending the temple, I redoubled my commitment to my baptismal covenants. I vowed to mourn with those who mourn, to comfort those who stand in need of comfort. I vowed to use any talents or skills I might possess to be a voice for the voiceless.

* * *

How my Catholic fiancé and I chose to be together is a story for another day. But suffice it to say, in our relationship I have found nothing but joy, trust, respect, and spiritual peace.

A few months ago, while attending one of the mandatory Catholic pre-marital counseling programs, a Priest spoke on the sacrament of marriage. He expounded upon Catholic theology that “Marriage is based on the consent of the contracting parties, meaning their will to give themselves, each to the other, mutually and definitively, in order to live a covenant of faithful and fruitful love.” He spoke on the reciprocity of giving for more than ten minutes. It filled a void in my heart.

I’m not a Catholic, and I have no intention of ever becoming one. I recognize the Catholic Church’s own institutional problems and sexism. But in their doctrine of marriage they have tapped into something divine.

Starting November 3, I look forward to our equal partnership as husband and wife, based on our mutual gifts and abiding love.