Choosing the right
This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Recovery. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
Author’s note: My plan was to take today off, because I’ve been getting strong “not checking email” vibes this week (and rightly so!). But I wrote and posted this to social media this morning, and although it relates only glancingly to the creative body, I decided to share it here too. Hope you’ll indulge.
Love,
M
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This ring—a reminder to “Choose the right” (as in the right thing)—is a relic returned from my childhood.
When you renounce Mormonism, they reply with a letter telling you that your priesthood (which all adult men receive) is taken from you and ordinances like baptism are canceled. Not only are you leaving the church; the substance of your ties to God is erased.
For a long time after I came out as gay, I was so angry at the church—over its homophobia, misogyny, and racism, which have not improved—that I thought I could just excise it from my own history.
This was silly of me. I grew up in a Mormon family in a Mormon neighborhood in a heavily Mormon state. My relatives were Mormon; my teachers; many of my friends. I was indoctrinated starting as an infant in “nursery,” where you start singing songs, reading scriptures, and learning lessons that are “correlated,” precisely, across a global church. This stuff is in the oldest reaches of my brainstem.
What I have come to understand in my 30s is that Mormonism is as much mine as it is anyone else’s—particularly given how much it has departed from the imagination and expansiveness of Joseph Smith, whom the historian Harold Bloom called “a charismatic unmatched in our history.” (Also, sadly, a sexual predator.)
So back to the ring. We got these as little kids—a reminder to make good choices. There was a big emphasis on obedience.
I think a lot about what “choose the right” means to me today. Certainly I inherited a desire to be good—kind, patient, generous, forgiving—from my faith. And yet my essential morality has also shifted: respecting the dignity of other people, especially if we differ. Acknowledging and acting against my biases. Withholding judgment. Seeing incarnation itself as a supreme miracle worthy of constant and joyful celebration, not confinement in an 1830s-vintage cage.
Last summer, I came to the realization that I had retained the power—a privilege and function of the priesthood—to confer blessings on other people. That power is what we make it, and it extends so far as we say. So if you’re reading this, I want you to know that I bless you. And I thank you for witnessing my life and helping me to choose the right.
Coming Tuesday (for real): Revelation.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.