I\u2019ve been thinking recently of people I met in my twenties. Where we are now\u2014that memory thing. A post a few weeks back by your own Jim Faulconer sent me on this most recent tour down memory lane. Jim was a person I met in my twenties\u2014in the honors program reading room at BYU. At BYU I also met Mike Quinn, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Janice and David Allred. . . . . We were all idealistic, faithful, bookish Mormons, beginning our adult lives. From what I know, I believe that we\u2019ve all \u201ckept\u201d the faith.
\n
\nBy that I mean, it\u2019s still with us all, held very close. Mormonism matters to us in a way that has structured the plot of our lives. We\u2019ve all expended a prolifigate cache of psychic energy on Joseph Smith and Mormonism, on The Church. We\u2019ve all striven to keep our intellectual lives (remember we\u2019re all bookish) in synch with our moral lives, with our religious inclinations. We love our familiest (etc. etc.) And I suspect we\u2019d all say we\u2019ve won a certain congruence in our lives that keeps us striving after truth, good, life\u2014God?<\/p>\n
And of course we\u2019ve ended up (variously) on either side of what is easily imagined as a gaping divide. In the fold. Without. Faithful, lapsed. Members, excommunicants. Increasingly, I find that relying on this self-evident gap to tell me anything very important about people\u2014and faith–is quite simply lazy, obtuse. <\/p>\n
Jim talked in his blog about how he used to struggle more. How he now finds peace at where he\u2019s landed. It feels congruent, peaceful. I can identify with that feeling. You take it a day at a time. Confront what you see. Check deep inside. And go where your heart, your integrity, your life, your past, leads you. You keep the faith. There is something so very mysterious about this to me. . . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019ve been thinking recently of people I met in my twenties. Where we are now\u2014that memory thing. A post a few weeks back by your own Jim Faulconer sent me on this most recent tour down memory lane. Jim was a person I met in my twenties\u2014in the honors program reading room at BYU. At BYU I also met Mike Quinn, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Janice and David Allred. . . . . We were all idealistic, faithful, bookish Mormons, beginning our adult lives. From what I know, I believe that we\u2019ve all \u201ckept\u201d the faith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mormon-life"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5897,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590\/revisions\/5897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}