Welcome and Conference Introduction

John Dehlin [00:00:00] The following episode was recorded as part of the January 2012 Mormon Stories Regional Conference held in Houston, Texas. To join or form a regional Mormon Stories community, or to organize a conference like this in your neck of the woods, please check out the Support communities tab@mormonstories.org and thank you for listening. Mormon Stories Podcast is a production of the Open Stories Foundation. All donations to Mormon Stories are fully tax deductible and go directly towards keeping the podcast alive and towards building a community of support for Mormons like you. To support the podcast or to join the community, please become a monthly subscriber today@mormonstories.org okay, good morning I guess.

Guest [00:00:53] Good afternoon technically everyone welcome. It is. It is so fun to be here today. You know, this has been a culminating effort for the past several months on the part of so many of us and I just wanted to thank all of you who found the time to help and those of you that didn't find the time but wished us well because you didn't have the time on your hands and made it here today. Thank you so much. It's just like a breath of fresh air, you know, being with all of you and speaking with so many of you personally, individually that we've had contact only via the Internet for so long.

Guest [00:01:30] It was said by John o', Donoghue, an Irish poet and spiritualist, that where you are understood, you are at home. And so I greet you today as my brothers and my sisters. It's this feeling of being understood, I believe, that drove so many of us, or some of us hundreds of miles to get here.

Guest [00:01:48] It's also the reason why many of us still attend our LDS wards and the reason why many of us no longer attend. Be you atheist, agnostic, traditional homosexual, feminist, practicing fundamentalist, non practicing apologist. The list is long. But we're all here, I can promise you.

Guest [00:02:08] We all seek spaces where we can feel safe to be true to all of the good that is within us. And that is exactly what we are trying to create here today within our Mormon Stories communities, tradition and wisdom Would have me share with you the Mormon Stories Shared Value Statement. There's six specific points that have been carefully put together by a great team of people that we love and admire.

Mormon Stories Values and Mission

Guest [00:02:32] So I'll start by reading those to you. We acknowledge the richness of Mormon heritage, teachings and community in all of its diversity. We believe that one can self identify as Mormon based on one's genealogy, upbringing, beliefs, relationships and other life experiences regardless of one's adherence or non adherence to the teachings or doctrines of any religious organization.

Guest [00:02:55] We seek spaces where we as Mormons can live lives of intellectual and spiritual integrity, individual conscience and personal dignity. We acknowledge and honor different spiritual paths and modes of religious or non religious truth seeking. We respect the convictions of those who subscribe to ideas and beliefs that differ from our own.

Guest [00:03:14] We recognize the confusion, distress, emotional trauma and social ostracism that people on faith journeys often experience. We seek constructive ways of helping and supporting people regardless of their ultimate decisions regarding church affiliation or activity. We affirm the inherent and equal worth of all human beings. We seek spaces where Mormons and all people can interact as equals, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation.

Guest [00:03:40] In this spirit of egalitarianism, we prefer non authoritarian and non hierarchical means of organization and affiliation. I like those. I believe in those values and I appreciate them influencing my life. So I've spoken with quite a few personally about your being a little bit nervous about being here this weekend. Some of you wonder if you might be reprimanded by your local leaders, possibly ostracized by people within your ward, if you were to tell them where you were this weekend.

Guest [00:04:12] And history gives you reason to be concerned about that situation because it is in our past and still that situation exists today. One of the objectives of this organization is to make it so that fears such as this no longer exist. Many of us have faced disappointment, even conflict with our parents, spouses, children and friends over differences in belief.

Guest [00:04:34] We declare this conflict is unnecessary and that it is time for us as a community to put aside the cultural notion that we must all agree on belief and practice in order to enjoy a common, safe space. One of the greatest skills that I'm learning on my faith journey is simply to agree to disagree, and to do that not just with tolerance, but with compassion. And there is a difference. I realize that most acutely when I fail.

Guest [00:05:02] But I've been asked to point out that any one community member's expression of a belief or practice does not necessarily indicate that other community members share that same belief or endorse that practice. But we do support each other in responsible and individual searches for the divine, both within and outside of us.

Guest [00:05:21] So, in short, if you are weary, we invite you to be with us today in this space. We've all taken at some point in our lives the road less traveled, and it has made all the difference. And sometimes that difference has been loneliness.

Guest [00:05:40] Excuse me, this is where I make the joke about the bladder behind my eyes. Right, dad? We have with us a host of wise speakers that I, for one, am very excited about hearing from and following our theme of maintaining positive relationships. I hope that each of us will go home with a renewed sense, an ingrained resolve to respectfully communicate, and most importantly, to genuinely listen.

Guest [00:06:06] But new lifelong friends wouldn't be all that bad either. So may you feel at home today, and God bless you. I'd like to invite Debbie Perez to come up and give our opening prayer. And then after her, we'll hear from Kate Rawson and her own arrangement of Near My God to Thee.

Debbie Perez [00:06:29] My name is Debbie Perez and I attend a For the last 20 years, I've been in a Spanish ward, so if you I'm going to do my prayer in Spanish because that's become my language of my religion, so I hope you'll forgive me. Nuesto PA de celestial. Compartemos el mismo religion y las mismas experiencias en la vida de una Persona en la iglesia Mormona estamustana gradecidos porto del trabajo Queace el hermano John de Lin itambien el hermano don Witherspoon Ilo's podcast ques no sandado tanta consolacion y solaci felicidad tepedimos que tur spiritu puedesotro soy que amor el uno allotro y po demos hacer lasos fuertes de amistad. Amen.

John Dehlin [00:08:09] Sa. Ashley, thank you for all your work in planning this event. I want to thank everyone of you who's come from in Houston. Everything's far away, right? But some of you are here from Louisiana and some the of San Antonio and Dallas and far away. Thank you for coming. I'm very excited to be here.

John Dehlin [00:10:53] Catherine, thank you for that beautiful musical number. And Debbie, I think you're the first person ever to include the word podcast in a prayer. That's like a first in the history of mankind. That's awesome. Today I chose the topic having the tough conversations with family and friends or coming out of our closets. And as I was preparing it, I realized that many of you are the ones who really are the pioneers in this regard. Last night we had just the most beautiful interview and discussion with the Prince family that that I knew growing up here in Houston. And as those of you who were there last night know, Bill Prince and his wife Julie and their daughter Christina left the church while, you know, pretty much while he was serving as second counselor in the Stake Presidency back before leaving the church.

Why These Difficult Conversations Matter

John Dehlin [00:11:52] You know, I don't want to say was cool, but was Kind of more of a trend, it seems like it might be today. And I know many of you have already had these difficult conversations, but. So maybe I'm giving this more for myself because sometimes I need to remind myself I'm not always as courageous as I should be. But also maybe our listening audience, there's some people out there who need some encouragement.

What It Meant to Grow Up Mormon

John Dehlin [00:12:18] I want to start by talking about for me what it was like to grow up Mormon. For me, being Mormon meant two things. It meant living high standards and having kind of a different set of beliefs than everybody else.

John Dehlin [00:12:33] Growing up in Katy, Texas, you know, just, you know, I don't know, 45 minutes away from here. Is that right? West? You know, being Mormon meant, you know, you don't swear, you dress conservatively, you have short, you know, short hair, clean cut, you don't drink or smoke, you obey the word of wisdom, you keep yourself morally clean.

John Dehlin [00:12:53] As a high schooler, you know, you wake up at 5 5:30 and you attend seminary at 6am you excel in school and academics and athletics. You attend church weekly, you get your Eagle Scout if you're a boy, you pay a full tithe, you serve a mission, you marry in the temple, get a good job, have lots of kids, and then your children repeat the process.

John Dehlin [00:13:16] That was Mormonism for me. And in that you're always striving to be Christlike, you know, you do it from a sense of wanting to be good. You're not, you know, just being lemmings. You, you really want to be good.

John Dehlin [00:13:31] It is kind of ironic though that some of this stuff is what it means to be Mormon. You know, short hair and not drinking wine, you know, when Jesus we know, had long hair and a beard and you know, in some ways that really wasn't what it meant to be Christ, like at least back in his day. But this is. I guess I digress a little bit.

John Dehlin [00:13:54] I believe that these behaviors engender and help encourage Mormons to become just excellent people. The Mormons that I know, and I don't mean to be biased towards my own, but I just find Mormons to be good, honest, hard working, successful, family oriented people.

John Dehlin [00:14:14] I'm proud of my heritage, I'm proud of my upbringing, and I'm proud to call you brothers and sisters. I remember a friend of mine named Todd who I grew up with, who used to be able to say that he had never tried a caffeinated beverage. You know, it was just something that he was really proud of. Never tasted Coke or Dr. Pepper. You know, I remember just really admiring that I'm like, oh, my gosh, you know, I did have that coke that one time.

John Dehlin [00:14:38] But I'm gonna. But I'm gonna. I'm gonna be strong in other ways, you know? And that was an inspiration to me. And that is such a Mormon thing, right? I remember how much pride I had going to seminary. You know, a lot of people thought I was a drag. I was like, how cool is it that we get up and study the gospel at 6am before everybody else is even awake? And I just took so much pride in, you know, driving to seminary every morning. I just loved it. I remember, you know, when I had my first real girlfriend and she was ready to take our relationship to its ultimate conclusion.

John Dehlin [00:15:14] And I said, you know, I don't do that. Sorry. You know, I'm Mormon. And, you know, that would have been any other guy in my high school's dream. But for, you know, for me, I was like, don't even go there.

Dan Witherspoon [00:15:25] That's just.

John Dehlin [00:15:26] Sorry, you know? And I think. I think one of the most poignant moments for me growing up was I was a freshman, and I was attending this party, and there was this girl that I had a huge crush on in Christian. Christiana at the time.

John Dehlin [00:15:42] And she really wasn't into me. She was older than me, and I liked her, but she really liked me, and she liked this guy named David. And so I get to the party and I show up and I look around and Christiana's not there. And I'm really distressed because I was hoping that she'd be there and I could talk to her. And instead, I had heard that she was out with David out there somewhere, not at the party. And I just remember, like, looking around and saying to everyone at the party, and these were all non members, we've got to go find Christiana. She's with David, and he's got a bad reputation, and they might do something that they shouldn't do, you know, and everybody at the party just kind of.

John Dehlin [00:16:19] Kind of looked around and looked at me, and I just realized, oh, my gosh, I really am different. You know, I'm, like, fundamentally different than these people. It was troubling, but it made me feel good. You know, other kids dressed funny. You know, this was in the 80s. You know, they'd have mullets or they'd have parachute pants or earrings, you know, and that was all so rebellious. And I remember speaking at seminary graduation here in Houston, and my talk was on how, as Mormons, we have the privilege of being different without having to deface our bodies or without having to look weird or do funky things with our hair, you know, we get to be different by being righteous, you know, And I was just, I was just into it, you know, I loved it.

John Dehlin [00:17:06] I had a friend come up to me at a skating rink once and he said, dude, you know what? What's the type of stuff you Mormons not allowed to do? And I was like, well, we can't drink, we can't smoke, we can't have sex. He's like, dude, you're going to the wrong church, man. In my church, my pastor lets us do whatever we want, you know, and he thought we were being ripped off. But I looked at him and I said, dude, it's you who's losing out. You know, we've got the cool things, you know, I didn't feel gypped at all. I felt a sense of superiority.

John Dehlin [00:17:35] I felt a sense of pride in who I was. It was almost like we are, you know, we are to be the light on the hill for everybody else in the world, not just in our community, you know, we are the chosen people. We are God's chosen people to be a light. This gave me confidence. It made me feel unique, it made me feel special, it made me want to excel. And I feel like if I've done anything good, I have to attribute that at least in large part to the, to the faith that raised me. I was, my parents were divorced when I was young and the church kind of raised me.

John Dehlin [00:18:09] The second thing that kind of sets us apart as Mormons is what we believe. You know, I'll never forget the way I was taught in seminary. You know, those other religions believe in this trinity concept. That's really confusing. You know, God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost are all separate but one. How confusing is that? But we know that God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost are separate beings. And of course there's mother in heaven and you know, it's so obvious and it's so clear. Too bad all those other people have to have this really convoluted notion of God of all people. You know, we have the proper baptism, right?

John Dehlin [00:18:44] Those people baptize with sprinkling and they baptize babies and babies don't even know what they're doing, doing. But eight year olds absolutely know exactly what they're committing to. And immersion is the only, you know, only way to go.

John Dehlin [00:19:01] And of course, a Bible. A Bible. They have a Bible, right? But we have the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants and the pull of great Price, we have four times the scriptures that they do. And of course, we have Joseph Smith exclusive authority. And unfortunately, all these other religions are doing these wonderful ordinances, but they don't really count. You know, their marriages dissolve, their baptisms illegitimate, their priesthood in authority corrupt.

John Dehlin [00:19:33] We have the priesthood. We have the authority. It felt really good. I felt like I was in the raw. I was in the right organization, the right club. And of course, since their ordinances didn't count, we had to pick up the slack and do all the temple work for them so that they could have a chance to ultimately go to heaven. And of course, we knew that there were three levels of heaven instead of just one. And we knew which level we were going to, and we knew which level they were most likely going to as well. And in the end, these were the Latter Days, right?

John Dehlin [00:20:04] Jesus Christ, Latter Day Saints. We are Saturday's warriors. We're literally saved. Were any of you told this? Raise your hand if you were told this. You're literally saved. The chosen people to come in the last generation before Christ returns.

John Dehlin [00:20:19] You know, these are the few the warriors saved for Saturday. My patriarchal blessing that I received here in Houston assured me that I would be rising in the morning of the first resurrection, unlike the other unwashed masses that I guess had to resurrect in the afternoon or the evening of the second, third, or fourth resurrection, right? I got to be in the morning of the first resurrection.

John Dehlin [00:20:42] Now, I'm making this sound really prideful and judgmental than it probably really was. And I'm sure you didn't internalize Mormonism the way that I did, But I think subconsciously and sometimes consciously, this is how I felt, and it made me feel good. It didn't make me feel bad at first.

John Dehlin [00:21:05] So I don't believe that Mormons live their religion in arrogant or prideful ways. I believe that Mormons are generally good natured, humble people. I experience Mormons to be sweet and, like I said, humble. And I want to say that I'm grateful for these standards. Again, they give us a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging. They help us to behave well. Well, to ourselves, to our family members and to others.

John Dehlin [00:21:36] And at the risk of being exclusive, because there are people from many good families here. When I think about the Prince family, the Moore family, the Murbach family, the Olson family, you know, these are families that, in some degree, I've gotten to know them relatively well. And these are some of my favorite people in the world. Even though I'm not Always, you know, close to them or seeing them all the time. I just, my heart fills with how impressed I am with the people that we can produce. But there's a downside to these behavioral standards and there's a downside to these beliefs, obviously.

John Dehlin [00:22:11] And most obviously the downside to these behavioral standards, these very high standards, is that when you break these standards, it can be devastating. Right. I remember the guy in our ward who smoked, you know, and there was always this whispering, you know, brother so and so smokes, you know, and gotta be careful with him. And you know, when I caught, when I found alcohol in my house that a member of family, member of my family had been drinking, I remember how I felt like this person was lost and fallen. You know, my sister had a time where she fell away from the church and heaven forbid she marries a non member.

John Dehlin [00:22:44] I felt sorry for her that she had to marry a non member. I felt sorry for her. And I wonder how she felt knowing that everybody looked down on her for who her choice of spouse was. And I wonder how he felt as an in law, knowing that his in laws saw him as a disappointment and as a bit of a, you know, someone who comes from a bit of a lower echelon.

John Dehlin [00:23:08] A really wonderful, beautiful young lady who is, you know, as Molly Mormon as you could get in our ward in Houston, got pregnant. And I remember what it was like when this girl got pregnant. It was terrible. At Utah State University, I'm in the counseling center there as a practice aspiring psychologist. His return missionaries who are not able to stop masturbating and they come to get psychological counseling. We're not talking STDs, we're not talking about drug addiction.

John Dehlin [00:23:35] What they come to get psychological help on is because they can't stop masturbating and they're scared to tell their prospective spouse that they do this. They feel dirty and shameful and they're caught in the shame spiral that takes them right down to really dark places.

John Dehlin [00:23:51] Heaven forbid, not marrying the temple or not going on a mission or coming home from your mission. The level of shame and disappointment that we heap on ourselves and that sometimes our community unintentionally, perhaps heaps upon us can be devastating to those who can't meet the behavioral standards.

John Dehlin [00:24:08] And of course, the two unforgivable things, being gay and leaving the church, those things within Mormonism are just, you know, terrible and deadly. The truth is, is that these standards, when they don't work out and the pain that's caused affects everybody.

John Dehlin [00:24:32] The parents who have raised These children become severely disappointed and depressed when their children don't meet the mark of what they had hoped for. They held family home evening. They were promised that if they said their prayers, read their scriptures, had family prayer. They were promised that their children would never go astray. And yet the children sometimes do go astray. And what are they going to tell their family and friends when their children become a disappointment?

John Dehlin [00:24:58] How do ward members and friends and family feel when you've let them down? And of course they're frustrated because you're setting a bad example to all the non Mormons out in the world. And of course this theory of the Godhead works against us because instead of just God being disappointed with this, God is disappointed, Jesus is disappointed, Mother in heaven is disappointed, the Holy Ghost is disappointed. That just heaps on the guilt.

John Dehlin [00:25:25] And of course, within Mormonism, the most wicked people of all are who those who had the truth and then turned away from it. And so this sets up an environment that can just be so terrible to so many people. We disappoint others, they disappoint us, we disappoint ourselves, and it causes severe pain.

John Dehlin [00:25:47] And even if you can't live up to the behavioral aspects, many of you here are the ones who have struggled living. Even if you can live up to the behavioral aspects, many of you here have found that some of the belief aspects were not tenable for you at some point. What happens if you read the Book of Mormon as I did as a 16 year old, and you don't get the witness and you were living every commandment that you felt you knew as hard as you could, and you kneel down by that bed and you say that prayer and you say, heavenly Father, please, you know Brother Jones was able to find his keys last week.

John Dehlin [00:26:20] Can you please help me? Just tell me that this book is true. And then you wait and you're like, maybe I'll ask again. And you kneel down and you ask again and day after day you wait for that answer that your seminary teacher promises you and it doesn't come.

John Dehlin [00:26:36] What if you stumble upon accidentally the wrong books or the wrong Internet website and all of a sudden you find that what you were taught doesn't match reality and you find that it's harder and harder to find the church's narrative credible.

John Dehlin [00:26:52] So what happens when this happens? When we can't live the way we should or we can't believe the way that we should? Anxiety, depression, shame and guilt. We're judged, we feel isolated, we're often ostracized we worry that we'll lose the love of our parents, our siblings, our brothers and sisters, our spouse, our children, our friends in our ward community.

John Dehlin [00:27:16] And so what do we do? Oftentimes, instead of being open about our sins or our lack of belief, we pack it down. We say, I can't come out. I can't tell anybody. I've got to pack it down, because they wouldn't understand, or they'd be hurt, or I'd be admitting that I'm a bad person.

John Dehlin [00:27:38] And so we hide our beliefs and we hide our behaviors sometimes, and we're ashamed, and we end up wearing these masks for people where we present ourselves as one thing, but in our private life, we're something very different. And we live these double lives. And most often in those moments of isolation because we don't have anyone else to talk to, we don't even know that other people out there are like us, we blame ourselves. We don't blame others. We blame ourselves.

John Dehlin [00:28:10] Why wasn't I worthy enough to get that witness? Why aren't I strong enough to maintain my belief? Why did I fall prey to that sin? And the shame cycle, I've just seen it in thousands of people that I've talked to. Just drags you down and down and down into the gutter.

John Dehlin [00:28:27] I had a friend come to visit me last week in Logan. He was a friend of mine right when I started Mormon Stories. And I told him all about it, and I could just see him go, yeah. And then he just stopped and he said, I can't go there. And I knew that he had sympathies, but he said my wife and my parents wouldn't understand. And he just packed it down. And last week he came to see me, and I was really busy. So he calls me and I'm like, hey, man, I don't know if I can meet today.

John Dehlin [00:28:54] And this sweet, brilliant, sensitive young man, full grown man, broke into tears on the phone and said, it's okay, John. If you're too busy, I'll figure out what I can do. And he's weeping, and so I'm like, no, I'll meet with you. So I met with him, and what he said to me is, he said, john, I've been living this life for six years. My wife has no idea how I feel. I could never tell my mom because she'll be so heartbroken.

John Dehlin [00:29:22] But he was thin, he was dark. He was a shell of a man. You could tell that living this life wearing this mask day after day took him to the point where he felt like he couldn't taste his food. I mean, I'm giving that as an analogy. But life was dark and flat and a little bit meaningless to him.

John Dehlin [00:29:44] And it was terrible. He was in a terrible place. And this is what happens when we pack it down and when we live in that closet. I had another friend who came to me last week. The only way that she could deal with going to church every Sunday was to take out a razor blade and to cut little gashes into her skin when she got home because the pain of the razor blade was preferable to the pain that she was experiencing at church. And I'm not making this up, I even had a really close friend whose son was gay. And I asked the friend if I could talk to the son.

John Dehlin [00:30:21] And I ended up talking to the, the son for a long time. And the son, you know, the friend of mine, the father, very progressive, very liberal, very forward thinking, dialogue and sunstone. But for some reason his son felt I can't come out to my parents because they love the church and they won't understand and they won't accept me. And so I called my friend back after I talked to his son and I said, I talked to your son, he's not doing very well. He's depressed, he's overweight, he's miserable and he's scared that if he tells you how he feels and if he decides that the church isn't going to work for him right now, he's scared that you guys won't love and accept him.

John Dehlin [00:31:00] I'll never forget this enlightened, brilliant friend's answer. It was, will you please tell my son? It wasn't, I'm going to go talk to my son. It was, will you please tell my son that we will love and accept him if he comes out?

John Dehlin [00:31:17] I thought, oh, you know, you tell him, you know, but that's what he said. So my message today is that sometimes you can endure it, but sometimes the costs and the risks of having the conversation of coming out of your closet becomes too high again. The guilt, the shame, the self loathing, the wedges that are driven between parent, you know, the wedges that are driven between parent and child as you, you don't feel like you can be honest is too great.

John Dehlin [00:31:48] Becoming emotionally isolated from those we love most is a cost that's too great. We can't afford to rely on superficial relationships, especially those that are closest to us. And we can't afford to let this guilt and the shame drive us to the point of despair.

John Dehlin [00:32:04] And so at Some point when it's right. I just want to. I want to ask you to consider when it's right, when you have a social support system that can back you and sustain you, when you're scared to talk to family or friends, I hope that you'll consider taking that pioneering hero's journey to have these difficult conversations with your family and your friends and your community members. As hard as it might be sometimes now, there are right and there are wrong ways of having these conversations. And today that's what we're going to be talking about. And there are probably a few really simple guidelines.

John Dehlin [00:32:39] Try to keep in mind the perspective, as Ashley said, of the people that you're speaking with. Try and look at them with empathy, not just sympathy. Be sincere. Speak from the heart. One of the benefits of one of the blessings of Mormon stories is you're just telling your story. How can someone argue with that and always try and communicate from the place of love instead of a place of anger or resentment or frustration if you can. And there will be costs.

John Dehlin [00:33:08] You know, tears will be shed. Family members and friends will be disappointed in you, and they may not look at you with that twinkle in their eye like they used to. And you may lose friends and you may lose family members along the way. But what I want to testify to all of you is that there are benefits.

John Dehlin [00:33:27] And these benefits can be profound. You no longer have to live in the closet. Closets are dark and they're cold and they're lonely. And you can go crazy living in a closet. Literally crazy. You no longer have to pack down what you think and you feel and hide it. You no longer have to hide who you are.

John Dehlin [00:33:48] You may end up losing relationships, but you will also develop a new set of more meaningful relationships than you ever imagined was possible before. And that's something that I feel like I have with many of you here today.

John Dehlin [00:34:03] You get to start living an authentic life, not the life that someone else designed for you, not the life that you were told that you should live. But you get to tap into what you feel is right and start living that life. And in some sense, that's what the battle in heaven was all about, right?

John Dehlin [00:34:22] Maybe there are some people who are living in ignorance, and I don't mean that in a condescending way, but there are historical facts that are just reality within the Mormon Church. There's a biological component to homosexuality that people just need to know about.

John Dehlin [00:34:34] And so in some sense, when you come out of the closet and share things, you help people dispel myths and rid themselves sometimes of ignorance and to live more in reality. And you no longer have to carry on the burden of feeling like this is one of the most beautiful things that came out in the McClay interview, if any of you heard it from a few weeks back. You no longer have to carry around the burden of feeling like you're better than everybody and that you know everything.

John Dehlin [00:35:04] You actually get to open up and rejoice in inactive members or non members, because it turns out that they have a lot to teach us and they have a lot of blessings that we can receive. As Brooke Maclay said in her podcast, for her, stepping away from orthodox belief was about increasing the love that she has for others.

John Dehlin [00:35:26] It was about seeing the world as a bigger, more beautiful place, that there were more good people in the world and that she had more to learn and more to experience. And it's almost like that movie Pleasantville, if any of you have seen it, where everybody starts out in black and white, and then one person becomes awakened and turns color, and then that person starts sharing it with somebody else. And soon it's infectious and people start living these authentic lives. Now, I'm not saying that means leaving the church or staying in the church. I'm just saying that there's an element of living an authentic life, becoming an enlightened or trying to become an enlightened soul that's inspiring and uplifting to everyone who participates in it.

John Dehlin [00:36:08] And you move from living in this really small, isolated, somewhat provincial religious community, and you step into becoming a proud, full fledged member of the human race. If any of you have seen the movie Harvey Milk, there's this point in the movie where they're about to lose this really important election.

John Dehlin [00:36:31] And Harvey Milk is with all these group, this big, huge group of gay men and women, and he realizes that they need to do something drastic to be able to win this election. And if any of you remember what happens, he picks up this telephone and he holds it up and he says, how many of you have come out to your family and friends?

John Dehlin [00:36:51] And a lot hadn't? And he gave them the simple statistic. He said, when they know one of us, they vote for us two to one. You know, when you know someone who's gay or lesbian, when you know someone who has struggled with the church, when you know someone who has a mental illness or something, it changes how you view and stigmatize those types of people, because now you can look them in the eye and see that there are people just like you.

John Dehlin [00:37:20] And so when you do decide to come out. What you end up doing is you create this safe space so that other people can be authentic too. And in some ways, that's a pioneering effort, and I'm really proud of our pioneer heritage. And one of the things that I love is the fact that we have a chance to be pioneers today. Maybe it's a pioneer in a different type of way, but the truth is it's every much a battle. It may be more of an emotional and a psychological and interpersonal battle than it is a physical battle, but it's a battle nonetheless. And we are warriors in some sense in this battle.

Finding a Path Forward for Doubters

John Dehlin [00:38:02] Actually, war metaphors are terrible. So let's go back to the pioneering metaphor. We can break new ground. We can make the path easier for others who follow us by coming out of our closets and by having that conversation. And the truth is, this is a truly Mormon act.

John Dehlin [00:38:22] It's purely Mormon to say what is truth? Tis the fairest gem. It's a purely Mormon thing. Not a purely Mormon thing, but it's definitely a Mormon thing. To do what is right, let the consequence follow. And it's a Mormon thing to love one another as he has loved us.

John Dehlin [00:38:42] We get to blaze these new trails as pioneers. I often think about the example of Jesus Christ. Who was he most critical of? It was the people who were strict and obsessive about rules and beliefs. By far, who was he most compassionate for? It's the people who were different, the people who were downtrodden, the people who were sinners or who were struggling.

John Dehlin [00:39:12] And perhaps most of all, Jesus Christ was a revolutionary. He was a lover of having tough conversations. And in some sense, that's what led to his death, was the tough conversations he was willing to have with the people who didn't want to hear what he had to say now that got him killed. Fortunately, he died so that we don't have to.

John Dehlin [00:39:34] We don't have to pay that price. But in some sense, what a friend we have in Jesus to help guide us through these waters of pioneering in the 21st century. So when it's right, I just want to encourage you, if you haven't already, to stop living in shame, to stop living in guilt, to stop suffering in silence, to take the plunge and to have the difficult conversations. It will be hard and painful, but I can testify that it is almost always worth it in the end.

John Dehlin [00:40:05] To close. I want to share with you a poem that I draw much inspiration from, and I'm sure it's a poem that many of you have heard, but I've never. I don't believe I've ever read it myself, and I want to read it at least one time.

John Dehlin [00:40:18] It's a poem by Carolyn Pearson called Pioneers My people were Mormon Pioneers. Is the blood still good? Truth flew by like a dove and dropped a feather in the west where truth flies, you follow if you are a pioneer.

John Dehlin [00:40:40] I have searched the skies and now and then another feather has fallen. I have packed the handcart again, packed it with the precious things and thrown away the rest. I will sing by the fires out there on that unchartered ground Where I am my own captain of tens, Where I blow the bugle, bring myself to morning prayer, Map out the miles and never know where or when or if at all. I will finally say this is the place I face the plains on a good day for walking. The sun rises and the mist clears. I will be all right. My people were Mormon pioneers Thank you.

Guest [00:41:54] Thank you John. As always, a pleasure. Love that poem too. It's really great. Next we will be privileged to hear from Dan Witherspoon, our own Dan from Mormon Matters, as we came together for our first Skype call to plan and decide what the theme of our conference would be, and we settled on this theme of maintaining relationships. Dan was the first one that came to my mind because he's always respectful of everyone that sits at the table and so validating of everyone, and I really, really appreciate that about him.

Guest [00:42:24] He is also a very accomplished person. He's a freelance writer and editor. He's about to write a biography of Eugene England. You can check out his website that he's been working on about Eugene England as well. He's been the host of Mormon Matters since March of 2011. He was the head of the Sunstone Education foundation and editor of Sunstone magazine from 2001 and 2008. He's currently a board member of Sunstone, the Society for Mormon Philosophy and Theology, and the foundation for Religious Diplomacy, where he also worked a bit for over a year and co authored a book with Randy Paul called Fighting about why Do We do it and how to Do It Better.

Guest [00:43:02] He has a doctorate in religion from Claremont, a master's in Religious Studies from Arizona State University, a BA In Philosophy from byu. He grew up in Sacramento and San Diego, California. Some of you might have connections with him there. He served in a mission in Washington, Seattle, from 1983 to 1984, and taught at the MTC for a long time after that.

Guest [00:43:24] He's been married for nearly 26 years. He says it celebrates his Anniversary this march to Laurie Hubbard Witherspoon. They have two children, Alex, age 24, and Hope, age 18, and they live in Tooele, Utah. Turn the time over to you, Dan. Thank you for being with us.

Dan Witherspoon [00:43:48] Thank you for inviting me. It's a shock. I thought there was going to be more table space here, but I'm actually glad I'm here because I tend to be this kind of guy all over the place, and so this will keep me a little bit under control. I catch myself every once in a while, you know, I'm sitting there with my headset doing the blog or doing the podcast, and I'm gesturing wildly, and all this stuff, I'm like, this is who I am. So we'll see if I can keep it under control. I'm excited for this, but thank you for having me.

Dan Witherspoon [00:44:23] I gotta thank John. John is deep in my heart. We met in the middle of the 2000s, the aughts, and John was the idea guy, the idealist, the zealot. You know, he had kind of been struggling with his faith and had reconnected with Sunstone and Lowell Bennion and Eugene England had been important to him. And he was. I don't know if he was studying quite yet instructional technology at the time, but he was. He was all into podcasts and those slide presentations that you could do. And he said, why isn't Sunstone doing this?

Dan Witherspoon [00:44:58] Well, John, why don't you come and teach us about that stuff? And so he came and he presented to our board of directors, and we immediately asked him to be on the board. And a year or so later, we hired him as executive director for a while, and different things happened that it didn't work out that he could stay in that position. But.

Dan Witherspoon [00:45:19] And some of it was differences of viewpoint, but there's such a purity about John, and he doesn't quite get that he's unusual. He doesn't quite get that everybody just doesn't feel something and then launch into action. And I guess the reason I'm saying that is as much as I am so grateful to do Mormon matters, kicking and screaming, maybe a little bit, it took John, and it took John saying, dan, you've got something to say.

Dan Witherspoon [00:45:54] And you know, you know how, like, you have a bishop gives you a calling. There's also this vocation. There's also, like, a spiritual calling. There's also kind of what you're on the earth to do. So in some ways, I just wanted to thank John for kind of giving voice that says, this is it. Because now, as I work on Mormon stories, it's probably 10, 12 hours a week, but it's all I want to think about. I have to think about other things, but this is home for me. So thank you, John.

Dan Witherspoon [00:46:27] Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Heather Ann. Thank you, Heather. Brent Knucklebeat, Manda and Matt, Bill and Lynn, love being in your house, love being around your family. You've modeled, you're modeling. What I want to talk about. And it's weird, I don't know why this came to me a couple days ago, but I want to invoke the name of Jeralee Renshaw here at the beginning of this. Does anyone recognize her name? A little bit from some of the Facebook conversation stuff. Jeralee wrote me last February.

A Mother's Letter and Wrestling with Faith

Dan Witherspoon [00:47:00] And I just, I'm just. She isn't scholar, but she's a mom. And she's a mom of a son named Tyler who she wrote. Well, I have a little bit of her original note to me. She says, he was our bright, shining star. He was the happy one. He was the magnet, the people magnet, stuff says. But now, from the outside looking in, it appears that he's having a painful, depressing experience.

Dan Witherspoon [00:47:24] We've watched him noticeably change. He talks about how on his mission he fell in love with the church, but now he's experiencing it all crumble around him. He's always been stalwart in the gospel. He's honestly been put on a pedestal by his siblings and us.

Dan Witherspoon [00:47:39] He's opened up to us about his parents, about his feelings and struggles. But then here's the key, and here's where we began our conversation. And we've talked with email and things throughout the year. So that's a glimpse of what brought me to a place like Mormon Stories to Mormon Matters, to Stay, LDS to Sunstone.

Dan Witherspoon [00:47:57] Here's a mom who said, this is my son. And instead of. And she had no intellectual interests at all. There was no, you know, stirrings afoot in her own life. But she says, I just, I need to investigate where he's coming from, what questions he's wrestling with. And so she grew from all of you and all of us to understand him. And anyway, so, you know, we invoke the spirit.

Dan Witherspoon [00:48:39] You know, we invoke the spirit of the Holy Ghost to be in our meetings. I'd like to invoke the spirit of Jerrolee Renshaw and all the parents and all the brothers and all the brothers and sisters who say, you, I understand and I love you and are willing to go on a journey to at least do that. So that's who I wanted to start off with.

Dan Witherspoon [00:49:01] As I understand the goal of a keynote lecture, it's to always sort of do a broad framing. And as soon as I really didn't realize I was the keynote for a few weeks. Right, Ash. But as soon as it sunk on me, I kind of tried to move into my get out of my head space. And very strongly an experience from the middle of 2005 came to me.

Dan Witherspoon [00:49:26] And it's at Sunstone. And a few months earlier, a fellow named Rick Jepson had written me a letter saying, I've got this idea for article. I've been putting these things together. He's a wrestler, high school wrestling. Into college. He just would go around to freelance wrestling tournaments and stuff like this. It was a big part of his life.

Dan Witherspoon [00:49:46] And yet he recognized that in the battle of the wrestling match, he grows as a person. So he started doing spiritual things. And he got that idea that Joseph Smith was a wrestler. We got a cartoon in the magazine. When we find a photo, it was like this preacher coming up and saying, I'm looking for Joseph Smith, that prophet, steer and famous stick puller because of all that. And so if he got into physicality and spirituality and the mix and stuff like that, it was just really wonderful. But he was like this, lost. He didn't quite know if Sunstone would be interested or whatever. So I said, come to Sunstone this summer and speak.

Dan Witherspoon [00:50:21] Try out your ideas. See each one, you know how to articulate them best and see what happens. And he did. And here's what happened. Somewhere in, I think in the first 10 or 15 minutes of his presentation, he invited a friend up. And it may have been his brother, but I think it was a friend.

Dan Witherspoon [00:50:42] And they started wrestling and they did, you know, it was just sort of the whole, you know, really. Probably, I guess you'd say Greco Roma, Greco Roman. They weren't going for leg takedowns and stuff, but they gave us a good minute and a half of that.

Dan Witherspoon [00:51:00] Oh, and did you pass those out? Okay, good. And so then he got into a position, and just to let you know, there on the left of your handout, if you have one, is Rick. He's the guy in the back. His head's kind of showing through, but wow. Wow. You know, around his friend, he said, this is one of the strongest. Let's just read it.

Dan Witherspoon [00:51:24] So this is what we wrote in the magazine when we eventually published it. But he says, as I face an opponent, one of the strongest positions I can obtain is wrapping both arms around his torso and hugging them in tightly.

Dan Witherspoon [00:51:36] Then I can bump him, I can trip him or throw him, but will remain in that embrace. And regardless of whom or what I may be fighting, I can also choose that same approach. I gotta tell you, my very famous favorite last line of any article is also from this one. And so it's in the same spirit of fighting wrestling while at the same time embracing. That's the spiritual frame I want to say. Here's his final final sentence. He says, I can struggle in this way with my wife or with a sibling. Oh, wait, oh, I'm actually reading from the left page instead of the right page.

Dan Witherspoon [00:52:16] But that's a beautiful part too. I'm gonna. Seriously, this might be a moment here. I can struggle that way with my wife or with a sibling. I know them. My love for them is never in doubt, even in the hottest argument. Maybe I should get to know the Lord well enough that I can wrestle when I pray. And if any of you listen to the Mormon Matters podcast, that was something that came up. But here's my favorite final sentence from any article I've ever written.

Dan Witherspoon [00:52:44] And he's talking about here we can. We can turn this into something beautiful. He says, I've done that by approaching the veil in the temple, being with my wife, reading to my kids, climbing mountains, and on a few occasions, by bearing down on an opponent and choking him till his face turned purple.

Dan Witherspoon [00:53:04] So I hope you will look at this article. I've given you the URL. There it is. I am going to do some things from it. You'll get a feel, but you'll only get a feel for about a third of even the amazing depth and insight there. So let me give you a poem that offers my other metaphor for today.

Dan Witherspoon [00:53:28] It's in this article. It's by a rabbi. It's a poem called God Wrestling. I wrestled again with my brother last week, first time since I was 12. And grandma stopped us. She won't even let us fight. We yelled. Embracing wrestling feels a lot like making love.

Dan Witherspoon [00:53:47] Why did Jacob wrestle with God? And why did the others talk? Surely God enjoyed that all night fling with Jacob. He told him he'd won, even left him with a limp to make sure he'd remember it all. But ever since we've only talked, we've only talked. Did something peculiar happen that night? Did something somebody say the next day that we shouldn't wrestle? Who we should wrestle again, Our companion sometime soon. Wrestling feels a lot like making love.

Dan Witherspoon [00:54:16] But Esau and this is back to the Jacob story. But Esau struggled to his own feet from his own wrestle and gasped across the river to his brother. It also feels a lot like making war. We'll come back to that in a minute. So. So that's the framing that I want to offer today. Struggle can be embraced. To go to battle is often an act of love and there are several.

Dan Witherspoon [00:54:43] At one point in my prep, I had these all mapped out into different sections, but I think they just all flow together. So I'm just going to kind of tell you the different battles that I want to at least highlight and let come out today. First of all, title of this article, God Wrestling.

Dan Witherspoon [00:54:59] The Wrestle with God. That's one that we should approach in that same way. That's the one. There's lots of religious traditions of engagement and that God is not offended. What is the whole purpose of life? To grow and to develop and to become.

Dan Witherspoon [00:55:15] And how do you test yourself? Unless it's in hand to hand combat. So you talked about not having war metaphors and here I'm up here going, so the wrestle with God and I'm not going to do a ton of much of that.

Dan Witherspoon [00:55:30] Family and loved ones is the port of the conference and this is the one that we'll talk about. But Wrestle with the Church caused me a problem. As I'm taking things out. I needed to take it out in order to get within a reasonable amount of time. I'm not going to talk a lot about it here, so let me just talk right now.

Dan Witherspoon [00:55:51] What I mean by fighting with the church is that it's a battle to find the right relationship with it. And even if this means that some of you will choose a path outside it, maybe that will be the right relationship for you.

Dan Witherspoon [00:56:06] But it's a battle to protect ourselves from being overwhelmed by it as an institution, from letting its story and its energy overpower and tell our lives rather than we tell our lives. We experience our truth and we intersect with that. We use it as an energy supplement. We use it as a reminder to that there's other things going on than just our own little world. So the intersection with the church and having that right relationship, that's what I mean by fighting for that. He says the church will tell you when it's at its best that it is just a tool. It's a scaffolding. We talked.

Dan Witherspoon [00:56:48] I gotta introduce my friend Kent. Kent Nuttall and I were best friends from 8th grade on this big 6 foot 6 guy on through high school. And we've maintained A great relationship. But Kent and I had lunch yesterday and we were talking about this idea of.

Dan Witherspoon [00:57:03] It recognizes that it's just the finger pointing towards where you're supposed to go. It's not there. But sometimes we lose that perspective. And it loses it, too, with some of its different things. But James Fowler, a lot of you who will know me know that he wrote about stages of faith. And that's been an important model for me along with some other theorists. But he talks about how every single religious tradition, and from my study of religions, it's true. They're all pointing us to something really, really deep and profound. His language. They're all pointing us to stage six. They're all pointing us to this universalizing meshing of our life and our spirit with the divine will, the universal will, whatever it is.

Dan Witherspoon [00:57:49] You don't need to believe in God in order to kind of get what that feeling of peace means when you're in complete alignment with forces of the universe. He says every one of the religions is pointing that way. But guess what? Every institution does.

Dan Witherspoon [00:58:04] It centers you out at stage three, which is the stage of other people's authority for you. You trust your parents, you trust your teachers, you trust your church, you trust those prophets. And so here it is. It brings you up. John talked lots of good ways about it, makes wonderful moral people. You know, you avoid different things and whatnot. But because it's such a powerful thing in our lives, hard for us to then say, ooh, what's all this here in the scriptures about having that experience for myself?

Dan Witherspoon [00:58:40] You know, it's you to pray about from your parents, testimony. You know, get your own testimony. And so you do it and you think you've wrestled it and you think you're on. You know, you owned it for yourself, but you really. But we haven't. And so I just wanted to kind of say that in this church section that I'm totally skipping over is every great person in religious worlds. I don't know even if this would hold true in others.

Dan Witherspoon [00:59:09] You know, you're centered in something. Jesus was centered in Judaism, but what did he have to do? He had to transcend it. Mother Teresa, Catholicism, right? If anybody read her story, she had to step out on her own. Martin Luther King letter from Birmingham jail. What's that all about? He is stepping away from the center of gravity of the black church and prominent leaders and whatnot. And yet he didn't. None of these people rejected it. They just transcended it. They got that relationship with it, that proper relationship. Between them and the other them in the institution. And there's so much good energy and there's so much neat things that happen.

Dan Witherspoon [00:59:54] If you can accomplish that, I think it's something to strive for. The other main one I will talk about today is that the battle is with ourselves. I think more than anything else, every single one of these other ones, if we go into battle and know that this is the battle for ourselves, we're going to be in good shape. And then the final thing I'm going to mention, I'm going to give you in a minute after we do this little cave bit that I've got on that handout for you, the final one is to embrace the battle itself, that you are in a good spot, you are doing the human journey.

Dan Witherspoon [01:00:37] That what's going on with your lives when you're feeling all topsy turvy and stuff like that is growth. And that's a framing that I think will come out throughout what I'm saying. So who here has taken a philosophy class or has heard of Plato's analogy of the cave?

Navigating the Transition Out of Certainty

Dan Witherspoon [01:00:53] Okay, enough of you. I'm not going to do the whole thing and I'm actually for sure not going to tie it to Plato's philosophy. But I do think there's something very, very important in that. So if you guys look at the bottom of your hand out there, this isn't my favorite illustration of the analogy, but it was the one with the biggest file size that I could print, could blow up good without getting too pixelated. So this is famous stuff. It's from book seven of the Republic.

Dan Witherspoon [01:01:23] And Plato is telling about prisoners in a cave. And you can see them there in front, and they're bound in such a way that they can't look left and right, they can't see each other, and they can only look forward, straight ahead.

Dan Witherspoon [01:01:40] And they're not showing people here, but you can kind of see that little. What looks like a bridge and a hole there. He says their life is basically looking straight ahead and there's a fire behind this bridge. And what happens is people come across and they're holding objects up or they're little puppets or whatever. And sometimes they talk and sometimes they don't. And the people are basically looking at shadows, shadows all day long.

Dan Witherspoon [01:02:08] Okay, but if you can't look and see a three dimensional person here, you know, you have to just look straight ahead and stuff like that. Plato and, you know, anybody seen his dialogues?

John Dehlin [01:02:19] Right?

Dan Witherspoon [01:02:19] Wouldn't that be a strange thing? What do you think that, you know you get the whole thing like that. So what would basically reality be to that person, to any of these people in that condition? It would be the shadows. And, you know, you would get to be good at identifying it. And there's a part later that we'll come back to, but, you know, you would, you know, I'm the best at predicting what's going to happen next because I've studied the patterns of these shadows and I sort of, you know, I'm preeminent among my peers. We can talk to each other, we can't see each other, but I'm, you know, I've got status and things like that from looking at these, at these shadows.

Dan Witherspoon [01:02:59] So then the analogy goes, what happens if this prisoner is released? What happens if one of them is released? Either forcibly or pretty soon you kind of learn. It's not in the analogy, but I think a lot of people say you release yourself. You know, we're imprisoning ourselves there. But in the analogy, what happens when the person is forced out and they turn around and they begin to see the people holding the puppets and they begin to see that the fire is the light that has cast the shadows on the wall? At first, what's going to happen?

Dan Witherspoon [01:03:32] That's not going to feel real. That's reality stuff on the wall. This is crazy. You're forcing me to look at this and you're going to be all disappointed and you're going to be all rejecting of that initial move.

Dan Witherspoon [01:03:45] But slowly, what's going to happen? They'll prove to you that there's something going on here. Hey, this is how we make that exact shape that you could still see over there. And then you start to say, okay, this is okay, I'm getting it. Here's the reality. But then think about Plato's cave. You kind of see down here in the bottom, there's the opening out into the sunlight. So what happens on this prisoner's journey would. Eventually they'll go out into the sunlight. And how's your eyes going to feel?

Dan Witherspoon [01:04:14] First you're going to be so disoriented. But slowly but surely you begin to be oriented. And he talks about. At first, you might only be able to see things in reflection off a lake or this or something. But eventually you'll be able to see things in and he doesn't. Again, you have to be careful because you want to just take it all these ways, but trying to stick to the book, you'll be able to see the light which lights all things. You'll be able to have full reality.

Dan Witherspoon [01:04:44] Okay, Nephi vision of the Tree of life. What do you want to do when you've got something great and important? You want to share it just naturally. These were my friends. I was talking to them stuff. So you go back in and you start talking to your friends there.

Dan Witherspoon [01:05:03] And guess what? How's your eyes now? They're accustomed to something brand new. And you go back in and how are your friends going to react when you start to tell them this is so great, and they're going, what are you talking about? And stuff like that. And somehow in conversation, it's clear that you can no longer articulate.

Dan Witherspoon [01:05:22] You were the preeminent one among them. You can no longer articulate the shadows because your eyes are now so accustomed to light that you can't get into that. You know your eyes will slowly get close to the dark again. But you've lost that ability to say this or to predict this or to do those things. And the shadow world is no longer your world of experience. It's no longer the experience that you're able to articulate. You have so much more, but you can't do it. And so Plato says, and those prisoners, what's their deal?

Dan Witherspoon [01:05:56] You came back without your eyes. We're not going to believe you at all. You who were the best is now. It's loss is all that they can see there. And so it's a predicament.

Guest [01:06:08] So.

Dan Witherspoon [01:06:08] So that's something we'll talk about a little bit here. I'm going to offer a little bit probably later. I don't know that this is the great analogy to share this analogy for us. This is an analogy for those of us who are on a journey.

Dan Witherspoon [01:06:26] I'll just say more there, but let's do it. So here's now back to the real talk. This has happened. What do you do? First of all, be patient. You're in a very early stage at first, like the guy who turns around and sees the people who are the puppet masters, and he sees the fire and how it all does. We're mostly going to say no to what it is that we're seeing. We're going to say no to the complicated history. We're going to say no. We're going to say no.

Dan Witherspoon [01:07:04] But eventually we'll begin to see that it is inadequate. And like Plato's escaped prisoner, we're very confused at first and we won't be effective at sharing our new vision. Ritual theorist Victor Turner and Stages of Faith author James Fowler. I'm just going to grab some random Language from them were cut loose from our previous moorings.

Dan Witherspoon [01:07:24] We experience disintegrated, dis ease disease, dis ease disequilibrium. We're painfully aware that the existing structures are no longer sufficient for deciding for dealing with the shape and the content currently coming to us from our experience world. We're in the midst of constructing a new reality.

Dan Witherspoon [01:07:45] For a time, we feel that we've lost our developmental or, excuse me, our mental and our emotional maps, charts, plans, sense of direction. We spend a lot of emotional energy diffusely. It's diffusely expended in trying to grasp what's happened to us.

Dan Witherspoon [01:08:02] Chaotic, right? One day up, one day, you're just all over the map. This is what you're doing. Referring to the work of Jean Piaget. We need to accommodate these challenges by constructing new patterns of knowing and valuing. If we're to ever successfully meet those challenges, it forces us to disengage the context of relationships and shared meaning that have constituted our sense of self. And when it comes to group affiliation, we need to learn new ways to self identify. And I love the statements that Ashley read and stuff like that. I remember for a time, I'm guessing my main stuff kind of started about 1989 and you know, a couple years into it, I'm just so lost.

Dan Witherspoon [01:08:48] And it was. I just didn't even want to call myself Mormon. You know, I couldn't use we language because it was always them because I was pushing away. That was them. And they were trying to get ahold of me and they were trying to. I love the Maclay's line. They were trying to correlate us, you know, again in that section.

Dan Witherspoon [01:09:06] And then all of this, we're in what's called like a neutral zone or liminal space or time that seems like a time that's out of time. It's not normal time and space. We'll have heard of St. John of the Cross, the dark night of the soul, but guess what? It doesn't feel like a night. It feels like an endless night. We don't know that we'll ever get out of it. But and here's the kicker, and this is that we must embrace this time.

Dan Witherspoon [01:09:30] There are aspects of knowing and wisdom that can only come through these times. And we need to give ourselves to be prepared, permission to be confused and disoriented. There are gifts that can only be won or given to us in this time betwixt and between, the promise of it all. When our time in the liminal zone, the time out of time and space has done its work on us. We'll begin to find the clues or the signposts that point towards the shaping of new beginnings.

Dan Witherspoon [01:10:04] But Fowler cautions us not to rush, give ourselves permission to allow for that comprehensive and gradual reintegration of life and light in the newness that has come. And here's something neat and something that Christina last night brought to the fore with her saying that she longed for something like what Open Stories and its podcasts and events are creating.

Dan Witherspoon [01:10:29] Here's language from Fowler. We need holding environments sometimes it may come in therapy, spiritual direction or memberships and communities of support. And then back to Fowler that can help us pace our reentry or our reintegration into a new stage or place, protecting fragile beginnings against the power of old patterns. I think you all can get that and the premature form forging of new ones. Take your pace, take your time, take your space. Embrace the time of confusion that you're in.

Dan Witherspoon [01:11:05] We know that what has happened to us is a gain, or at least we know and we sense that we're on our way to a gain. But to them, this is now the freed prisoner coming back. To them, it will only look like loss. You've lost language you can no longer articulate, shadows you can no longer. Those don't feel real to you, but you haven't yet learned how to do it. It'll feel like loss. What happened to your testimony?

John Dehlin [01:11:33] You.

Dan Witherspoon [01:11:34] I saw you stand up there and testify with all that you had. And you're trying to tell me now and you can't even tell me what it is you're feeling. You can't convey it to me. There's a neat line I've used for years and it was just. I'd only learned about on the plane that I just noticed I that it's in the same issue of the magazine. But Stephen Carter talks about having he's the new editor of Sunstone, succeeded me.

Dan Witherspoon [01:11:56] He talks about having these talks with his mom. Stephen went to did his PhD up in Alaska. So the metaphor he uses, he says, I talk to her and all she wants to talk to her. All she can talk to is about the sun. But he goes, I've seen the aurora borealis.

Dan Witherspoon [01:12:14] We've had a different experience and I can no longer talk to her. They may even say in this sense of loss and who you were or something that you're now a cautionary tale. Has anyone had their parents say, don't be like your brother, don't be like your sister or something like that doing it. And we're going to get to some pieces in a minute of why they're probably saying those things.

Dan Witherspoon [01:12:41] But if someone has never had a crisis or a hint of a crisis that would lead to their transitioning, hallelujah for them. But we can't expect that they're going to understand what we're going through. And that's why I kind of say this cave thing. It's for our understanding right now. And eventually you might be able to share it out of frustration or something. You might want to share it, but I urge you only to do it carefully.

Dan Witherspoon [01:13:04] How many of you like to to be told that mom, I'm seeing something more than you are, or dad, I'm kind of what's that? Time ain't gonna happen. I can go faster though. I didn't know how long the cave thing would take for sure.

Dan Witherspoon [01:13:24] And none of us like to be told that we're less advanced than the other person, right? So live into it. Live into your new understanding and I'll get to that in a sec. Genuine relationships don't have pre described outcomes.

Having Genuine Conversations with Loved Ones

Dan Witherspoon [01:13:41] We should not have the end in the sight at the beginning. There are real risks in any relationship that we will be changed them as well as us. Phil McLemore anybody heard the podcast that Ann Rainsworth did for Mormon Stories?

Dan Witherspoon [01:13:57] Wrote in one piece for Sunstone, he goes Although I've always been committed to my children's healthy development, most of the parenting mistakes I made had to do with my need for them to act, to be and act in a certain way, and all of which stemmed from my attachment to the image of being seen as a good and successful parent.

Dan Witherspoon [01:14:14] That attachment only reflected a hole in me, one that often caused my children to feel unacceptable, as if they weren't meeting my needs. When that hole was filled with God's love presence, they became wonderful, whether they were currently meeting my needs or desires or not. Here's my favorite line. I became free from the burden of expectation, and as a result, they became free from the burden of judgment, making the pure love of Christ a more real possibility.

Dan Witherspoon [01:14:43] Wanting to be a good and successful parent is not a bad thing in itself, but attachment to that ideal or a rigid map for our children's life course can narrow our view of their needs or unique gifts. Real love detaches from preconceived notions and allows for endless wonderful possibilities.

Dan Witherspoon [01:14:59] It is the key for finding perfect love in imperfect relationships. I was sharing with Adam I can't remember your husband's name. Ashley? Joey? Phil Has a thing. And I think this might be the most important thing I'll share today.

Dan Witherspoon [01:15:20] He was an Air Force chaplain and lots of marriage struggles. And he said one of the things that came up over and over again was anger. Just, you know, life is hard, whatever, and angry. And so he began to say.

Dan Witherspoon [01:15:33] He began to really feel that any anger, any rejection, any acting out is always based in fear, right? Fear of pain. And he says, when somebody is normally fear or pain, what do you do? You nurture them. But when it's anger masking that, you forget that. And so he says, I began to develop a little mantra. And it says, I wrote it down here. There it is. Anger is a sign of fear or pain. Nurture him or her. And he said, with the couples in his office, he says, let's do it together. And you kind of just get this thing to where it sort of groove in your heart and in your mind and stuff like that.

Dan Witherspoon [01:16:14] And if that's the relationship of embracing, even when there might be a struggle. But then he tells the story. He says, a couple years after that, his son comes home from school. I guess he's had a bad day or whatever, and he snaps at his mother or was disrespectful to his mother. So what does a good dad do?

Dan Witherspoon [01:16:33] How dare you talk to your mother like that? You know, just like you. That's the reaction. I mean, I think that's sort of a natural thing. And he says, you know, by this time, my son had grown up to be 16, 17 years old.

Dan Witherspoon [01:16:46] He goes, he's right here. Now. It's one thing to. When you're that small. But he says, I looked in his eyes as we're. He says, we're fists ready. World War three is about to start, he says. And his son's eyes is sort of like a ticker tape. I think I can take him.

Dan Witherspoon [01:17:03] Their relationship had changed. But he says, all of a sudden, this mantra kicked in. And he was able to say, this isn't like you. Something terrible has got to be going on in your life right now for you to react that way to your mom.

Dan Witherspoon [01:17:23] What's going on? And his son just melted. And all the frustrations of moves and dislocations and whatever it is in his day had just melted away. So from World War three, nuclear winter could have been the result had they thrown down.

Dan Witherspoon [01:17:41] Because he was able to recognize that pain, rejection, whatever it is, is a symptom covering. Or it's a covering for the deeper stuff. We must be in good relationships with Ourselves. We often reject in others what we see in ourselves.

Dan Witherspoon [01:18:06] Carolyn Pearson, when she spoke with Sax Summer, says that we must be the models of the new life. We must model our shiniest, wonderful self. She uses words like we should go home. The most shining person that they can remember. We must stun them. Being the most beautiful person they can imagine. We must surprise them.

Dan Witherspoon [01:18:26] It may not feel fair that we who are in this topsy turvy, upside down thing are the ones that are called to now nurture them. Why aren't you there for me? But it's right that it would be. We're the ones taking the steps. We're the ones stepping out of them. We need to be responsible for that.

Dan Witherspoon [01:18:51] And again, as Phil's story, it's primary out of fear. I'll skip my great Nietzsche quote. Okay. Early on, the poem to Esau, it felt a lot like making war. What did happen? Does anyone remember? If you'll remember, Jacob's battle happens right as he's about to cross a river. He had fled from, from his father in law, Laban, who he had to serve for those 20 years, or he at least kept serving. And finally he was escaping and he's heading back to his homeland. And that's where Esau has lived. And Esau has become prosperous. Esau has done this. But Esau didn't know why Jacob's coming. He took an army of 400 guys and they're marching towards it.

Dan Witherspoon [01:19:37] And Jacob knows it. And so he sends cattle and goats and this and you know, tell of Esau, this is your brother Jacob, and these are all gifts of my esteem and whatnot to him. But here's Jacob, or here's Esau on the other side, having his own battle. And I'll read from Rick's article now the promised day had finally come. But Esau had to decide how to fulfill his own promise. And here he's referring to Jacob or Isaac. When Jacob stole the birthright, Esau eventually got a blessing of his own that said he would one day throw the yoke of his brother off his neck.

Dan Witherspoon [01:20:14] He had become a prosperous man, and he sat at the head of a large army. He could easily slay Jacob, as he had often wanted to, but he could also accept the peace offering, overcome his anger, and break free in the greatest and fullest sense.

Dan Witherspoon [01:20:29] As it happened, Esau chose the high road. He ran to meet his brother in a tearful embrace that ended the wrestling clinch that they had been in since before birth. If you remember, they were twins in the womb. And, you know, Rebecca's like, what the heck's going on? There was a prophecy that you have two great nations warring within you. So Jacob was so delighted that he compared the joy of seeing Esau to the divine visit from the night before. I've seen thy face as though I'd seen the face of God

John Dehlin [01:20:59] a little

Dan Witherspoon [01:20:59] bit more, and then I'm done. Rick tells the story. And this is about that part of rejecting our parts of ourselves. That's the stuff that drives us most crazy when we see it in others. Have you ever wondered why Esau was Jacob's favorite?

Dan Witherspoon [01:21:15] And how. Excuse me. How Esau was Isaac's favorite. Sorry. And how Jacob could never seem to please him. So he was mama's boy, the quiet, shy wind, whatever. And Esau was the hairy hunter, going out and doing left and right things. And guess what? It would be so easy for Isaac to favor him. Why he's so different from him.

Dan Witherspoon [01:21:39] Who is most like Isaac? It would have been Jacob. So Rick writes about his own experiences. He says, I have a brother who. And he makes much like Esau. He's so different. He was ready to fight anybody. He's in the military. He's doing all these things. And my dad just loves him. And his dad's so impatient with him because I'm the quiet one. I'm the one that's studious. I'm the one who writes. I'm the one that adopted my dad's love of wrestling.

Dan Witherspoon [01:22:06] But I could never win his esteem. So here's how he closes. Jacob's many grapples have become personally revealing to me. My brother and I still wrestle every time we see each other. And it's the same hugging while clinching that I see in Jacob and Esau. Yet I've become even more touched by the struggle I imagine Jacob had in trying to earn his father's esteem. He couldn't buy it or steal it despite his efforts, but I hope he ultimately gained it. Decades after the reunion, Jacob and Esau met again to bury their father. I like to imagine that by then all three had come to terms with themselves and with each other.

Staying Neutral on Destination, Not on Love

Dan Witherspoon [01:22:43] In open Stories world, we're absolutely destination neutral with guard to the church and the choices about whether to stay engaged or not. But we are not neutral about the goal of health. Emotional and spiritual health. That is the entire goal.

Dan Witherspoon [01:22:59] Love must be first, ideas must be second. Our health must be first. When we make love through war with others, we do it when we're ready. We do it when we truly know and love and have more peace with ourselves.

Dan Witherspoon [01:23:14] We recognize that it's far more important in this world to be good than to be right. And that's so deep in a lot of ways, it's hard to remember for those of us who have intellectual gifts that some of these people that we're struggling with don't. But are we truly ahead of them?

Dan Witherspoon [01:23:32] I'm convinced that we're not. And we must remember this finally. Never underestimate the possibility of a relationship breakthrough, a sudden shift in energy towards us. The Moors learned about that. Pretty sudden shift there, huh? All of a sudden, lots of times with my wife as I was, we'd struggle and stuff like that. Every once in a while, she's very uptight and kind of an anxiety person.

Dan Witherspoon [01:23:59] And yet every once in a while, we'd have that conversation and she'll ask me something, so you don't believe this? And she'd always put it in that negative way. And I'd kind of, yeah, I don't, and here's why. But every once in a while, once I learned to articulate and to no longer say no and to say yes, and here's what I affirm, I could just feel relaxing. And so we, of course, had that same thing happen a hundred times over 25 years of marriage, but it can't happen. Never underestimate that. As Carolyn says, they're never going to ultimately always be able to reject your shiniest self.

Dan Witherspoon [01:24:35] So I have no clue, Ann, what time it is. And I'm sorry, and I don't know if you were looking at the clock or actually how long I was here for the schedule, but. Mormonism, huh? I'm a mormon.

Dan Witherspoon [01:24:55] Why? I've had experiences. I don't think Mormonism has all the truths. I don't think it has necessarily even more truths, but it has some that it's gotten really well. Joseph Smith. I don't know. I'm as confused about you guys to see what seems like an amazing, great guy acting really crazy in ways that I would certainly want to reject in myself if I ever did it.

Dan Witherspoon [01:25:25] But he produced amazing scriptures. And that's where I guess I've grounded myself. Like Fowler says, every religion points to the deep stuff. Every religion, I mean, every religion, but every church sort of centers you here. There are invitations in those scriptures that I have taken, and not necessarily always when I was saying I want to take this invitation, but simply by pondering important or just interesting passages within those things that have sent me into amazing visions, amazing vistas, amazing views Amazing sensibilities. I've learned things about myself from it that feel good, that feel transformative, that have shaped my life and the direction I'm going. And so I don't know if you are willing to entertain that particular possibility for you.

Dan Witherspoon [01:26:23] For me, it has worked. It has. It's worked. But I've had to fight it. I've had to wrestle. I don't know that I'm through. I'd say for the last three or four years, I can go to church without having to psych myself up ahead of time, you know, without having to say, you know, if this happens, this happens.

John Dehlin [01:26:49] Stay calm.

Dan Witherspoon [01:26:51] Now I can go and I can just simply love the people and honor goodness instead of rightness. And it's worked out. And so I guess, do we want to cheapen Gets better, You know, like the video. I'll testify that it does, at least for me. And again, I don't know if it's a spiritual temperament. I don't know, seriously, if it was my academic training, I looked at all the religion. Joseph Smith stacks up exactly like all the leaders of all things Mormonism's history and development of, you know, like Moses, I wish everyone were a prophet. Guess what?

Dan Witherspoon [01:27:33] Commandments and a bunch of rigid rules and things like that. Joseph Smith, all he's doing is inviting you here, have this experience like I'm having, you know, and yet we end up with a structure and things like that. But he's no different than any other religious prophet out there. And I just guess I could say that whoever he is or whatever it is, I think he broke through somehow or other. There's those energies at the bottom of the universe that can do it. And there are sensibilities in Mormonism that I just love. I just love that God is the same spirit species as us. I love that God has committed us to live in space and time instead of to be this being who is outside of it.

Dan Witherspoon [01:28:11] I love the idea that we're not created from nothing. I love the idea that, you know, we're more like children than creatures. What is the whole thing? What's the gospel about joy? Have our experience. And I try as often as I can in church. This is gods. This isn't God. MALE this is God, the couple. And I'm God in relationship. And what's God doing? He's trying to invite us into relationship. So that's the entire gospel that speaks to me. I don't know that I believe anything literally, but I believe that there are powers there. And if you're called within Mormonism I'll honor.

Dan Witherspoon [01:28:53] I guess I'll just share with you that I think you can. I think, you know, maybe I know the church is true. Well, I know the church is home. I know the church is where I'm called. I know the church has things that it hasn't damaged me in a way that I can't still honor those. And so if that's something that you can do, I promise that you can dive deep and be well fed within Mormonism and people, if they knew that they were hurting you, if they knew that their narrowness, if they knew that something that they said that was so offensive was coming across that way, nine times out of 10, they would not want to stay in that space.

Dan Witherspoon [01:29:35] They'll hear you if you can do it. So what John says, say it out, say it loud, say it clear. You can listen as well as you hear, you know, going micro mechanics on you guys. But. Love you guys, love the struggle. Bless you in wrestling.

Dan Witherspoon [01:29:55] Embrace craziness, topsy turviness and you'll enter into equilibrium and it'll be richer and deeper. And I'll just offer that in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Closing Remarks and Credits

John Dehlin [01:30:10] To hear an expanded version of Dance Talk, check out episode 671 on MormonMatters.org thank you for joining us today on Mormon Stories. Music today was provided by the Saber Rattlers. Check them out at saber-rattlers.com the Mormon Stories logo was generously donated by StudioCase.com thanks for listening.

Guest 2 [01:30:34] Come, come ye saints no toil nor labor fear but with joy wend your way though hard to you this journey may appear Grace shall be as your day Tis better far for us to to strive our useless cares from us to drive to the endure your hearts will swell oh, all is well all is well.

Guest 2 [01:31:32] Why should we mourn? I think our lot is hard Tis not so all is right why should we think to earn a great reward if we now shine the fight Gird up your lo Fresh courage take Our God will never us for sake soon we'll have.

Guest 2 [01:32:18] Oh, all is away all is well oh, all is well all is well. Sam. And should we die before our journey is through Happy day All is away we that are free from toil and sorrow too with the just we shall dwell but if our lives are spared Again to see the the sa the rest obtain I will make this ch oh, all is well all is well all is well all is well all is well well oh, is well. All is well. Sa.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.