A Voice From The Other Side

If you’re LDS and someone tells you they’ve left the church, one of the best ways you could respond to them is with the words,

“I’m sorry.”

Not as an apology, and not as a statement of your possible disappointment, but as a move toward empathy. An acknowledgement that the person in front of you has very likely been through a lot of pain in this transition, and they have, without exception, lost a lot.

It is very possible they are grieving. And that shouldn’t be difficult to imagine, except that it is, I know.

Try, though.

Imagine your God had died.

Imagine that everything he did for you, everything he felt for you, everything you felt for him, everything that he was in your life and meant is now gone.

Imagine mourning the God that you, today, love so dearly. Imagine loving him as much as you love him and then losing him, entirely.

It’s true that not all of us lose him entirely. Some can adapt to loving a God in a slightly different image, or, for some, a very different one. There are many who find spiritual homes elsewhere, but the God we worshipped as Mormons is still gone.

For those of us who find ourselves in a universe that hasn’t changed and is yet wholly different from the one we knew, the one we grew up in, the one we counted on for eternity — there is a lot to grieve.

So please. We know you’re probably grieving, too (or we should). We know you didn’t expect this, and even if you did, you hoped things would be different. We know you probably still hope we’ll come back. Some do. But please don’t pretend that our pain now isn’t real, that it isn’t important, or that somehow everything will work out and none of us will have to worry about it anymore.

Please don’t act like our stories don’t matter. Please don’t insist that we silence ourselves for the sake of perpetuating denial or, worse, for maintaining relationships with family and friends — relationships that might suddenly seem conditional on our being the “good” (silent) kind of ex-Mormon.

I do not mean you should be forced to sit and listen to someone degrade your life, your choices, your upbringing, your heritage, your ancestry, your story, your most cherished beliefs, or your God.

Yes, some of us are angry — probably all of us are, at some point, for some span of time or other.

But please don’t alienate us. Please don’t expect us to pretend to be LDS. Please don’t cut us out. Remember it was our life too, our choices, our upbringing, our heritage, our ancestry, our story, our most cherished beliefs.

And our God.

And now he is gone.

Everything about this is hard — leaving and, on both sides, feeling like you’ve been left.

But all I think I really want to ask is that you please — please remember we are mourning.

And please, if you can, mourn with us.