Healing the Wounds of My Cross

A note from the editor:

A couple of weeks ago I read a play called The Christians by Lucas Hnath. It’s about a pastor who, in accordance with his own changing beliefs, one day preaches to his congregation that there is no Hell, which ends up causing a big schism in his congregation as people try to grapple with what the universe would look like without the idea of Hell. He begins this initial sermon with his desire to talk with God, “I have a powerful urge to communicate with you, but I find the distance between us insurmountable.” He then later remarks, “We put the distance there. When we shun our neighbors, when we judge our friends, when we look down at people from other places and other religions, we create an insurmountable distance where there is no distance at all.”

I liked this play for many reasons. It felt complicated and sticky, not unlike my own self, and there was no clear resolution in the end. There was only distance. Distance that could continue to grow. Or stop. Or disappear.

I have a powerful urge to communicate with my Heavenly Parents, but sometimes I feel an insurmountable distance. I am sure that this distance is woman and man-made. Intentionally or not, we create distance between ourselves and strangers, ourselves and people we love, ourselves and God. Fortunately, we can close this distance through Christ, no matter how insurmountable or incomprehensive the distance may seem.

May we close the distance between God and ourselves. May we find healing from pain, from injury, from unfairness, from loneliness, from distance through both the suffering and grace of Christ.

Shorten the distance and between you and this individual and take a read.

story 13 of many.

Healing the Wounds of My Cross

The New Testament tells us repeatedly to take up our cross to follow Christ. The one time this is literally portrayed, on the Savior’s march to Calvary, it is a brutally painful experience; the Creator stumbled and fell three times. The cross is undoubtedly a symbol of suffering yet (while our church doesn’t embrace this aspect) also the symbol of Christianity. Indeed, carrying one’s cross is a scriptural metaphor for living the gospel—even when it’s hard.

​Unfortunately, for some—probably for many—the paradox of the cross representing both Christ’s church and suffering is reality. I was recently reflecting on the process of healing I’ve gone through since talking to my bishop a year ago about some of the painful complexities of my life. I don’t mean healing in the context of repentance; I mean healing in the context of being made whole, of undoing damage that has been inflicted. I’ve recognized this healing for some time now, but I only recently asked myself what it was that I was healing from. In doing so, I came to the (perhaps unsettling to some) conclusion that I was healing in large part from wounds inflicted on me both directly and indirectly by the church.

However, by continuing on the path of healing, I came to another realization: accepting this unfortunate fact is not only okay; for me, it’s necessary.

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I can see church-driven damage from early in my life. It was clear to me as a child that my mother placed a higher priority on fulfilling her church callings than caring for her children, whose needs frequently went unattended. She spent countless hours serving the Relief Society in various ways, and in doing so, she turned a blind eye to many of her maternal responsibilities. I’m sure she was doing good things, but she ultimately wasn’t doing the best, most important things. I still feel the repercussions of her and my equally emotionally absent father being unconcerned for me during my childhood.

Had a priesthood leader seen the toll my mother’s many years of service in her demanding callings were having on her children, I imagine he would have intervened and counseled her, “Sister, how are things at home? How are your children faring? Do you spend quality time with each of them?” but if any such dialogue took place, it didn’t lead to any increase in attention to her domestic responsibilities. This left me feeling unimportant to the person whose love I should have felt the most abundantly and had psychological consequences that last to this day. The rhetoric that the gospel should be the most important thing in our lives, that we should be completely devoted to it, failed to bring the Savior’s love into my childhood home. I’m sure that not a single church leader meant any harm by asking my mother to serve in the capacities she did for such a long time. Still, that doesn’t diminish the fact that church structures and rhetoric resulted in my personal pain.

The pain and damage I’ve felt in my adult years as a result of the church have at times felt much more intentional, especially as a gay member. I’ve heard so many members, young and old, talk about how gays are inherently sinful and will all be destroyed by God. Apostles are called of God, but that doesn’t mean they are perfect—and just as we’ve had racist apostles in the past, it doesn’t mean that some of them aren’t homophobic. Intentionally or not, they repeatedly say things that inflict harm on gay members and encourage straight members to do the same. The church’s days of condoning physically assaulting gay members during general conference have thankfully passed, but many of the church’s current “encouraged practices” do much more harm than good while inflicting gay members, even temple-worthy ones, with self-loathing and deep shame.

​What’s been even more damaging for me than the church’s overt statements against gays is the way that the church presents the doctrine of salvation. Exaltation requires you to make sacred covenants officiated by priesthood authority, including the sealing ordinance, which requires you to covenant not only with Heavenly Father but with a member of the opposite sex, and the church says that it is inappropriate for gay members to make that sacred covenant. The church’s current policies and teachings hold that you can’t receive all the saving ordinances if you’re homosexual: despite rhetoric to the contrary, the church teaches that gays can’t be exalted unless they somehow become straight while simultaneously acknowledging that this isn’t a choice they can actually make. Imagine the damage that does.

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Unpleasant though it may be, some of my deepest wounds have been caused by the church—yet with my bishop’s help, I’ve started to truly heal. He told me that being gay didn’t mean I was broken. It didn’t mean I was less. It didn’t mean that I needed fixing, that God wouldn’t accept me unless I were something I wasn’t. He spent time listening to what I was feeling. He expressed his encouragement, support, and sympathy. He showed love for me. He was there for me in ways neither of my parents ever was. Most importantly, my bishop has empowered me in ways that enabled me to feel my Heavenly Father’s love for me in ways I had been blocked from feeling it before. He has assisted me in transforming Christ’s love from an abstract ideal to a real thing I feel in my life. He wasn’t the only one who helped me with this, but he played a major role in helping me initiate my healing process.

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I consider myself lucky—and blessed—to have had a bishop who helped the church be more of a positive influence in my life. My bishop could have said so many things that would have caused further damage or pain. He could have said that recognizing the ways that the church has negatively impacted me is a fault, an indication that my testimony isn’t sufficiently strong. He could have dismissed the pain I’ve felt as trivial or exaggerated. He could have told me that my homosexuality is a problem that needs fixing or the consequence of my own sins. Thankfully, he didn’t say any of these things. His only interest was in helping me forward, in helping me to heal, in bringing the Savior more into my life. And the Savior, He is the ultimate source of healing. Christ is intimately familiar with the cross I carry: He has carried it, too. I was recently discussing with a friend the struggle I face trying to reconcile the church with my sexuality, and she bore a beautiful testimony—despite her lack of understanding how homosexuality works within the Plan of Salvation—of how the Savior understands how I feel, how He knows all my struggles and fears and pains. He walks with me as I chart this difficult path, and I know that so long as I remain close to Him, I will not wander astray, whatever path I take.

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Carrying my own cross has caused immense suffering in my life, and a good deal of it has been caused by the church. None of that should have happened. But dealing with things that shouldn’t have happened is part of life; it’s part of the adversity we came here to face. And accepting that the church is responsible for some of the pain I’ve been caused allows me to let go, to move on, and to heal. I wouldn’t be who I am today without the church in some wonderful ways. I love the church for that. So while my cross makes living the Gospel harder, it also reminds me why it’s worth it: it brings me closer to Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the Redeemer of all mankind. It helps me to be more like Him, and that is who I want to be. It transforms the broken into the whole.