What keeps me warmly Mormon through the long nights of cold, cutting dogma and bad faith and that nasty, Christian urge to turn from the stranger and to call the hungry to repent? It’s nonsense, of course. When, with increasing frequency and vehemence, my spiritual home bares its teeth at good, gentle things, it’s the nonsense that keeps me unmoved where I am.
I’m tethered to some ideas, certainly. However one chooses to read it, or any of the few versions of it, Joseph Smith’s brash first vision casts the idea that god is not apart and other, but in creation, with us, like us, immanent and material. It’s a gasping heresy, I know, and superlatively kooky, but so, so lovely. Work matters, and learning, too. That’s an idea with radiance. And we’re all divine and saved, because no suffering is forever. Some Mormon ideas have given such audacious, graceful form to madness that I can’t take my eyes off them.
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