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Please forgive a self-indulgent post.

I have been one of the people who has thought and said that it’s unreasonable for members of the Church to feel betrayed when they discover facts about Church history that they hadn’t encountered in the official curriculum. I’ve thought that such ignorance reflected intellectual laziness for not having done a little bit of homework to learn about our history, and/or emotional immaturity for “flying off the handle” in the face of the belated discovery.

I was wrong and I am sorry.

Having (for once) been smart enough to sit back and watch the reactions to the new essays on polygamy rather than diving into the discussion right away, I think I may have finally understood something that I had managed to miss for a few decades. Despite the Church’s monumental effort and achievement of Correlation, lived Mormonism is largely undomesticated. It changes in both temporal and geographical iteration. The freedom to be “untrammeled” in belief that Mormon liberals like to claim they are being deprived of actually does exist and flourish in Primary, Sunday School, and seminary classes. The gospel I learned in Primary in Los Alamos, New Mexico, with scientists and assorted eggheads as my teachers is related to, but not even close to identical to the one my younger sister learned in a small town outside of Nashville. This is as it should be. The tension between the gorgeous anarchy of personal revelation and the necessary stability of institutional authority gives life to Mormonism–holds it in vividly unstable equilibrium. But it also requires a degree of self-awareness and charity that we are (or at least I am!) hard-pressed to achieve on anything like a regular basis. We all assume that our experience is normal, and since we so often hear “the Church is the same everywhere you go,” we are quick to generalize from our experience of “normal” to a prescription for what should be normative for everyone. When we are wounded by a policy or its ham-handed implementation, we extrapolate the certain wrongness of the policy for all times and all places. When, on the other hand, the Church has helped us to flourish, we readily believe that all good-hearted and right-thinking Saints will flourish similarly.

I was lucky, undeservedly blessed to land in a family and in wards where intellectual inquiry was encouraged and taught and praised. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to have good and wise women and men as Relief Society presidents and bishops and teachers. And because of those gracious gifts, I have not experienced the pain or confusion of others whose experience was different than mine. There’s lots of research to suggest that birth order, family stresses and life events, etc., combine to render the experience of every child in a family unique. Healthy families, it seems to me, find the threads of happy experience that connect them, and celebrate and magnify those joys to create a sense of family identity. And when they hurt each other by misunderstanding, they apologize and try harder to remember the things that they love and can share.

I have misunderstood and judged my sisters and brothers unkindly. Please forgive me. I will try to do better, for Jesus’ sake. If you are wondering how to work your way through whatever you are learning, I will share my story with you and listen to yours. I trust that we will find things to laugh and cry about together, and that laughter and tears can bind us in joy to one another and to God.