Fleeting Moments at 40

I can hear the popular parts of the lyrics to that song, 🎵losing my religion!🎵 It's been playing over and over in my mind as I experience what feels like a peak in my decades of deconstructing and constructing and deconstructing my beliefs. Well, I looked up the song, and it's  Losing My Religion  by R.E.M., but apparently it's not about religion at all; it's about an obsession and losing one's cool or patience or temper due to the deep reading and rumination involved in obsession. Maybe it still applies in my case, actually. I'm losing my literal religion and my patience and I am done overanalyzing my faith. My two decade search for a true church—and not so much a true God—was like an obsession. And I'm letting it go. It's been an interesting past year or so.  My dad's funeral in April of 2024 was a beautiful home going that left me feeling light and inspired by how humbly and boldly he lived his deep faith in Jesus (even while not always enjoying...

I dive deeply and then deconstruct, only to dive deeply again, only to deconstruct again. And it’s finally hit me: deconstruction may just be a lifelong process once you’ve been part of a conservative religion, especially during your formative years. As a Mormon teen, I was steeped in purity culture, perfectionism, and a fear of not making it to be with God in heaven, left instead to one of the lower rungs of heaven, or even worse, hell. The strong sense of community couldn’t override the fear-based realities of the church. And so I started deconstructing back then, at 16. I remember the first time being right before my patriarchal blessing, which is when a man of the church with the priesthood places his hands on your head and prophesies your future. I felt uneasy going into it and uneasy coming out. I spent the hours between the church service and the start of the patriarchal blessing skimming books about Christianity, agnosticism, and atheism in the Barnes & Noble down the stree...

I can't start this by saying "I think" because the reality is that I know. I have always found beauty and God everywhere regardless of how much my upbringing told me that it was only in certain spaces and that only certain people would earn the divine prize in heaven at the end of it all.  I know that I am interspiritual or a mystic. That has been hard for me to say. I wish I did not need labels, but I’ve come to realize that the box a label creates often helps me understand myself and others better. And once I understand it, I can work on freeing myself from it, or at least hold it more loosely. One of my first boxes was given to me. I was raised in strict, dogmatic religions, born and raised Catholic until age 13, and then Mormon from 13 to 19. In my 20s, I was agnostic and mostly followed the New Age and New Thought spirituality. I also explored Buddhism and Hinduism, and practiced yoga. By my 30s, I had incorporated African spirituality into that mix, and eventually, ...