Red Rot ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A couple of messy thoughts on my experience with sorrow and Mormonism A friend said that she needed people who inhabit or have inhabited spaces of real suffering. I find myself cycling back to this idea over and over again. I think about people inhabiting spaces of sorrow and what that means and what that gives you, how heavy that feels, how conflicted that feels. I wonder if misery loves company or if empathy somehow sustains where all other support fails. I think about my life, my religion, and the way I was raised. I think about my past. I see things that I've done in memory, almost like I'm floating above myself wondering why I am the way I am. I remember praying once, really earnestly, for empathy with such a desire to personally know how to bear one another's burdens and comfort those in need of comfort. I wonder if I'm learning these things through loss. I made a friend in New Hampshire who said loss is the teacher. Love is the leader, but loss is the teacher, and I think of that when I can count the things I miss, when they feel fundamental and so much bigger than me. I don't know how to define myself anymore. I am living inside a pattern. I feel like an unorthodox Mormon who wants every good thing, who holds the grayness close, who wants to echo Walter Kirn with praise for communitarianism, with the idea that if the stories aren't working, you find new stories, somehow still recognizing that things can be hard, that life isn't always linear and that accomplishments don't always come out of checklists. I feel comfort and despair living inside the church with my broken narrative: comfort and strength in a professed reality of a higher understanding that comprehends brokenness; despair in the day-to-day, in the tenets of a faith that asks for everything, for constant searching, for unequivocal giving, and mortally impossible growth. All, everything. Maybe I feel both comfort and despair in the scope of a religion asking for everything. I feel tired. I remember him kissing my cheek, telling me that he loved the sweetness of my prayers (moments of openness I don't easily share) and the memory hurts me. I feel like what was sweet about me is bruised. I don't pray anymore. I can't get past tears and the question, Do you know me? 11:25 p.m. - 2012-10-05 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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