Last week junnnglecat asked me,How is it that you can be so satyrically brilliant and yet claim such a religion? I dont mean that as a bashing comment, because like I said, I once loved a Mormon, more than my family or friends or life itself, but we were extreme opposites. How is it that you seem so completely 'normal' to my world and yet still live in yours? I, in all honesty, do not understand. If you have any grasp on what this entails, please clue me in.

Junnnglecat, I appreciate that you asked this question, and I hope you don't mind me answering it in this forum.  The answer was important enough to me that I couldn't contain it in one concise comment.  For those of you who aren't interested in a long, boring post about my religion, I give you one of my dreams to analyze:

Last night I dreamed that I was on one of those dating reality shows wherein I was selected among dozens of bachelorettes by this super-hunky guy named Astroturf.  (No kidding.  It may have been a nickname or his last name, but that's what everyone called him.)  Anyway, he was one handsome devil.  Not at all the kind of cat who would normally be attracted to a gal like me.  Turns out he picked me because we just had so much in common.  For one thing, we worked in the same factory, manufacturing who knows what, but we did have to wear those crazy bunny suits with the hoods.  Also, we were both Wiccans.  Discuss.

I will now answer Junnnglecat's question.

First, a story.

My mother was a convert to the LDS church.  When she was baptized, she was estranged from her alcoholic, abusive husband and pregnant with my older sister.  For her first few years as a Mormon, she had a lot of reasons to feel like she didn't fit in.  She was divorced.  She was a single mother.  She was a working mother.  That would have been enough, but there was still one more thing. 

Back in the day, Mormon women used to get together once a month for what was called "Homemaking Meeting."  Ostensibly it was an opportunity for women to improve their household management skills; in practice, it was often an excuse to get together and gossip while making useless crap–er, crafts.  (Technically we still have this meeting, only now it's called "Home, Family, and Personal Enrichment"–the Church's little way of saying that there's more to womanhood than glue guns and raffia.)  Certain craft fads spread like wildfire throughout the church.  Someone's cousin in Utah would fashion a decorative pillow out of old flour sacks and macaroni or something, and before you knew it, every Mormon woman west of the Mississippi (and probably a few east) had one gracing her sofa.  It was just what the ladies did.

When my mother was a new Mormon, the craft du jour was this decorative bowl of white plastic grapes.  Maybe they weren't plastic.  Maybe they were fabric.  Who really cares?  That's not the point.  It seemed like every woman in the church had a set living on her end table.  Everyone, that is, except for my mother.  It was a source of great humiliation for her.  To make matters worse, when she married my dad, she discovered that her mother-in-law had two sets (one for the living room and another for the den).  Needless to say, my mother was in quite a state over her lack of phony white grapes.  She was sure she could not be fully accepted into the community without them.

Well, what's the point of that story, other than the fact that my mother was a little bit cuckoo?  The first point is that it doesn't take much to feel like you don't belong in the Mormon world.  The other point is that at some point my mother came to the conclusion that her personal faith was greater than the Church or the Mormon community at large.  Some people never learn this lesson, to the detriment not only of their own souls but to others' souls as well.

I won't try to tell you that the joke about cookie cutter Mormons is not rooted in some truth.  The Church and its people tend to value conformity.  This doesn't mean that they don't value individuals, but that their desire to show their collective "best face" to the rest of the world (I call it the "wouldn't you like to be a Pepper too?" missionary strategy) sometimes has unintended consequences.  As my mother's story illustrates, the Mormon world can be unintentionally insular to the point of absurdity, and the reasons for not fitting in range from the trivial to the substantial.

When I was growing up, I often felt like I didn't belong in the Church.  I was not, and am not, a particularly "spiritual" person, whatever that means.  I was a cerebral, skeptical, cynical person.  I had some "liberal views," as they say.  It wasn't just the "culture" of Mormonism that rubbed me the wrong way; I found some of its theological elements troubling as well.  I still do.  Really, my personality has not changed so much over the years.  I continue to struggle with my faith on a daily basis.  Some days I just feel like giving it up altogether.

So what on earth am I still doing here?  Living with my religion requires me to accept some things that don't make sense to me, even a couple things that I'm just downright uncomfortable believing.  But I've seen what else is out there, and there isn't any theology–or non-theology–that strikes me as altogether logical.  Certain other religions are appealing in some ways (the ways my own is not), but to embrace any of them wholesale would require me to give up other beliefs that are important to me.  My religion contains a lot of wisdom that I am unwilling to reject.  My religious heritage–the incredible faith and strength of my Mormon forebears–is something that I am also unwilling to discount.  I am willing to accept the possibility that they knew something that I don't know; in fact, I hope it is more than a possibility and that someday I will know it too.

I am not the only Mormon in the world who takes this approach to religious life, though I may be one of the few who are willing to admit as much in public.  My best friend, who is also a Mormon and has endured similar crises of faith as I have, says that when she goes to church, her brain has a "Truth" file and a "Bull" file, and everything she hears there gets filed in its appropriate place.  (As I've said before, compartmentalization is a useful skill.)  I would, however, differentiate myself from those Mormons who call themselves "intellectuals," meaning that they justify their dissent from traditional or orthodox teachings because they're just so darn much smarter than the rest of us.  I find their attitudes arrogant and elitist.  I don't believe for a minute that God gave some people brains enough to discern Truth and that all the people with the lower SAT scores are just destined to be sheep.  I think there are as many paths to God as there are people.  Some of us have longer, windier roads than others.  It doesn't make us better or worse.  It just makes us individuals.

I go to church with a woman who considers herself the "black sheep" of the ward.  She's outspoken and often irreverent.  She teaches sex education in high schools.  She evens wears a bikini to ward swim parties.  (Yikes!)  In other words, she has a lot of nerve.  She's also one of our most beloved sisters because she is so generous, honest and funny.  People are often surprised to learn that she's a Mormon.  "You know, you don't act like a normal Mormon," they say.  She says there's no such thing as a normal Mormon.  To which I reply, You can say that again.  Heh.  But seriously, folks, what she means is that image isn't everything.  This sister may not fit the "typical Mormon" jell-o mold, but make no mistake, people, she is Mormon through and through.  And so, for better or worse, am I. 

Except I have better taste in food.